Good bye

I started this blog in my own words "to blog primarily about thoughts about my work and life out here". Well, both work and here are changing. Today is my last day at my small northeast ohio medical school, and my last day as a trainee. As of next week I will be fully fledged tenure track junior faculty, and back on the east coast. And so I feel this is a good time to end this blog.
I have enjoyed writing it immensely. It has helped me think my way through the past five and a half years. But it was written for a time, a place, and a version of me. And all those things have changed.
I do not use the internet as I once did as a trainee scientist, as a place to learn more about my chosen field and my career path through it. And indeed, the world has changed, especially online, since the heady days when I joined twitter and later started blogging. As the great unpleasantness of 2016 wore on, I began to become exhausted by the endless hot takes and rapid fire opinions of the internet. And so I began to question my own role in it. Is what I have to write so essential?
When I retreated from the internet, a friend of mine commented that that was loss of a young queer academic voice on the internet. Perhaps. But quitting the internet meant recommitting to where I was physically. To become a young queer academic voice in rural northeast ohio. Which is no less valuable.
The tension here is one I have always felt. I call it the Bolkonsky Bezhoukov dichotomy, after two of the main characters from Tolstoi's war and peace. Prince Bolkonsky, a sceptical materialist, gives up the opportnity to be a camp aid, convinced that he can do more good, indeed only do good, as a sergeant to his unit. Peter Bezhoukov in contrast, believes in the paths of providence, the possibility of great change, and moves from secret society to secret society to be part of that great change. These days, I am a Bolkonsky, but unlike Tolstoi, I think a Bolkonsky can indeed do thing.
So I am ending this blog. Thank you for reading. And watch where else I will speak, in new ways, about new challenges.
Good luck to you all.
Paleogould

A scientist in four dimensions

The past five years have been a wild ride intellectually and professionally. When I started this postdoc I was a year out of completing a PhD in paleontology. Specifically, I'd been looking at the relationship between bone morphology and mammal ecology in the fossil record of the North American Paleocene-Eocene (roughly the first 20 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs) to see if it could tell us anything about the role of locomotor specialization in the success of certain groups of mammals. I came to this lab to learn the techniques necessary to do biomechanical work necessary for testing the functional aspects of the correlations between morphology and ecology I based my paleontological work on. I thought, if I thought anything (I wasn't seeing particularly far into the future at that time, for a number of reasons) that I would spend a couple of years learning the techniques in a different system, then go back to my comparative functional morphology work with a little bit of biomechanics thrown in.
Fast forward five years later, and I'm leaving this lab with a completely different research focus. I'm off to start my own lab studying swallowing in the context of neurological disorders. I'm a Co-I on an NIH funded R01 I helped write. I'm increasingly interested in incorporating more explicit neuroscience into my work. I'm still interested in comparative question, but completely different ones based on the ontogeny of musculoskeletal systems and behaviors in mammal feeding. I haven't worked on anything paleontological in 4 years. I haven't touched a fossil since I finished my PhD.
This transition, or, more accurately, this complete change of track, is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about and coming to terms with. I had wanted to be a paleontologist since I was nine. How was it that after having come close to that goal, I was willing to move away from it all of a sudden? Did I really want to give up evolutionary biology and comparative zoology? Was I selling out?
Initially, my worries about this problem were acute, until I began to realise they were based on a false story I had been telling myself about myself. Yes, I'd wanted to be a paleontologist since I was nine, but that wasn't all I'd wanted to be. I'd also wanted to be a librarian, a policeman, and a doctor. More relevantly, I remembered that in my last year at Cambridge the three subjects that had really gripped me were paleontology, physiology, and neural mechanisms of behavior. I had even considered continuing with neuroscience, until I balked at the amount of animal work required (another change I've gone through since that time). So in some ways, the things that were drawing me into my new research direction, the problems and questions, were things that had always interested me as much as paleontology. One of my frustrations as a mammal paleontologist in fact had always been how little we discussed in any detail the unique physiological adaptations of mammals. I am first and foremost a mammal biologist, and that means that their physiology and behavior are interesting to me.
Yet my thinking has now matured even past that recognition into the realisation that what I do now doesn't erase what I have done. My five years working in paleontology, the fossils I collected, the museum collections I measured, the methods I used, the papers I published, the conversations I had, haven't been erased by my years working in mammal feeding physiology. Collapse the time dimension, and I am still a paleontologist, and a physiologist, and a neuroethologist, and a comparative zoologist.
I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was nine, and I am one. That doesn't mean I cannot be anything else as well.

A portrait of a job search

As some you may know, I recently signed an offer letter for a tenure track job starting this July. My time as a postdoctoral researcher in northeast Ohio, the time in which I started this blog, is coming to an end. Through my time learning the ropes of scientific careers in the past few years, I've always found information on the job searches of others important and interesting. So I decided to add my own. What I present here is a case study, specific, idiosyncratic, uncontrolled. It cannot be generalized. It is however, data. Add it to your sample, and consider your sample critically.

About me:
I started my postdoc in autumn 2013 with 1 paper in press. By my time on the job market last autumn I had 13 papers published or in press, so a bit more than 2 papers a year as an average. About half of those are first or last author. All of them are in society journals. I have no glam or baby glam pubs. I had no major grants of my own, though I had applied both for a K99 and an R15 and listed both on my CV (the R15 was pending for part of the job search season, not discussed for the later part). My teaching was limited, largely to my gross anatomy lab instruction I did in graduate school with a smattering of lectures in allied health anatomy courses over the past five years, as I was in a 100% research position. Another characteristic of note of my CV was a complete change in career direction between my PhD (in paleontology) and my postdoc (experimental physiology in an animal model of disease). I have about three times as many publications in the latter field than the former at this point.

About the jobs I applied for:
I applied for 45 jobs. Geographically (for personal reasons) these were located almost entirely in the northern Midwest and rust belt (Illinois, Michigan, Ohio), and the mid Atlantic region (New York to North Carolina). I applied only to full time, tenure track jobs. In terms of universities I applied to everything from Ivy leagues, to R1s, to Medical schools (osteopathic and allopathic), to regional four year teaching intensive universities to liberal arts colleges. In terms of area of specialty, I applied to jobs focused in Anatomy, Physiology, Neuroscience, Evolutionary and Comparative Biology. I had three versions of my research statement targeted at different levels of research support, and three cover letter templates. My teaching statement and diversity statement were almost identical for all universities that required them.

Results:
I got five phone/skype interviews, exclusively from job searches looking at least in part for someone who could teach gross anatomy. From those, I got three on campus interviews. 2 of these were at four year colleges looking to expand undergraduate anatomy instruction for nursing and premedical students. These two institutions were eye openingly different, one being a regional state campus, one being a very small private liberal arts college. I learnt many things I didn't know about the diversity of undergraduate education in the US. At both interviews, incidentally, my lack of teaching experience, particularly with undergraduates, was brought up as a concern. The third interview was at an osteopathic medical school with a growing research focus. The initial interview was very focused on my ability to teach gross anatomy, but after my research seminar there was growing enthusiasm  for my capabilities as a researcher, and a second campus visit resulted in a offer that maintained my involvement in teaching gross anatomy while giving me significant research support and percent effort allocation. The result was a position pretty close to my ideal. Which was fortunate, as this was ultimately the only offer I received.


I am loathe to draw any conclusions from this, so the only remarks I will make are the ones that occurred to me comparing my experience to what I had maybe expected from my own data collecting. Applying broadly helped me, but not in the ways I thought it would. On the one hand, I could have only applied for anatomy jobs. On the other, it was not obvious from the job posting, or even from my first interview, that the job I eventually got would be what it was. A narrower set of job criteria might have made me miss it. Ultimately there were too many unknowns to really make a very good filter. The second is that different parts of my CV mattered in different ways at different times. My standout characteristic I thought would be my research productivity, except what got me through the door of interview in every case is my ability to teach a specific subject, even if my teaching experience might not be what the university ideally would want. And yet again, it was the specifics of my research agenda, and my grant writing experience, that led to the second visit at the job I took. As someone once told me, all job searches are a compromise. I turned out to be that compromise in ways I couldn't have known. Finally, getting the right feedback was essential. I asked teaching faculty to review my job talks for teaching positions. I asked neuroscience faculty to sit on my practice chalk talk for a neuroscience department (which wanted me to teach gross anatomy. Medical schools are odd beasts). Every time, the specific things they pointed out and suggested were brought up as positives by the places I visited.

And yet, for all this, I can't help but feel that I was lucky. How can you generalize, learn anything from 1 job offer in 45 applications? I know I did as much as I could, and it worked out for the best. But some of this, more perhaps than I am comfortable with, was good fortune. The right place, the right time. The opening seems so narrow that I feel I barely squeaked through. A relief, yet also sometimes an uncomfortable feeling.

Continental drift of the heart

The Mistress of the Animals has a new series of posts up, on dealing with less than ideal job situations. Go read them, they are useful, and make good points. And, as is Potnia's wont, a very important meta-point: what, at any given point in your life, is important to you, and what, at any point in your life, is worth putting up with?

The twist is that what matters, what is important, what you need, want and value, does not remain constant, nor is it always clear to oneself. Some of our values and priorities are like the Hawaiian volcanic hotspot, arising straight from our core and remaining fixed even as immense changes pass over our surface. Yet these hotspots are few. More often, things we think are massive and perennial are like the summit of Everest: superficially imposing, but in actuality a temporary wrinkle on the surface of our ever changing selves. We often change without knowing it, only recognising much later that things we once valued, were once utmost priorities, have shifted to peripheral importance and we are in fact organising our lives and decisions around new mountains.

Ten years ago this month, I moved to America for the first time. What did I want ten years ago? What was important? So important that to pursue a PhD I could have pursued at home in less time, I traveled to America, willingly moving to a city I had never even visited to start a PhD with an advisor I had never met? I remember why I did it: a desire for adventure, and a fear of getting bogged down. I lived in central London. I had good degrees and a good job and I could easily see myself never moving far from where I had grown up, devoting all my efforts to keeping a toe hold in the immensely comfortable, yet predictable life I had in London. I looked at the life my mother had led, which, while far from easy, had involved travels around the world by the time she was thirty, who had lived in three countries, and I balked at how stayed the profile of my own twenties was becoming. The furthest I had moved from home was Cambridge, a 45 minute train journey from King's Cross. In my master's degree, I met a diverse cohort of people from all over the United Kingdom and further, whose path to that masters, while more winding, and perhaps less easy than mine, still had given them a host of life experiences that made me stop and think. So, I resolved to have my own adventure, and to go pursue all my dreams at once: America, a fresh start, and a Ph.D. I applied to four programs, was interviewed at two, got into one, and with the blessings of my friends and family, boarded a plane and landed in Baltimore airport on August 20th 2007, with two suitcases, an address, and the name of a person I'd never met who was going to pick me up and take me to my first apartment I had rented without seeing.

And what a fresh start it was. For the first week I slept on an air mattress on the floor, and had only my laptop perched on my suitcase as furniture. The very first day I had my first encounter with how little London had prepared me for an American city. I left my apartment in Mount Vernon in search of food and some basic housewares. Despite walking from North Avenue, to Lexington Market, to the inner Harbour, I could not find a home ware store, and returned home with four cheap glasses, and a an overpriced saucepan from the convenience store down the road. It wasn't until the middle of the week when my new fellow graduate students took me to the Target on the outskirts of the city I was actually able to buy what I needed. The first five years I lived in America were the  adventure I hadwanted. I lived in and discovered a whole new city. I made many new friends. I did field work in India and Wyoming, and travelled all over the United States collecting data, spending weeks in San Francisco, Pittsburgh, New York city. And yet, by the time the adventure ended, already, subtly, the need for adventure had been replaced by other priorities. The desire for some stability, to be able to build a life with my partner, and the growing realisation that my increasing desire to be back home with my old friends and family was getting less and less likely to be easily combined with my desire for a fulfilling personal and professional life.

Ten years later, America is no longer an adventure, even though I have moved away once, and moved back to a new part of the country. America is a reality in my life, a part of it far more profoundly than I ever thought, at twenty three, it would be. It looms like mount Everest, or like the width of the Atlantic Ocean, in my decision making. My priorities now do not feature America, they must accommodate it. My desire to see my husband happy and fulfilled professionally means we are likely here at least another six year, probably more. My desire to be a good son, brother, and uncle, means I must continue to find ways to fly home often. My desire to have a successful career in academics mean I must continue to work hard, travel, be flexible and take opportunities. America is the geographic and political chess board on which I try to make my moves. And I know it now, I know it well. But whereas once, the fact I lived in America was a goal in itself, that time is long gone.

Why your society should have an LBGT+ science event

I don't normally blog in direct response to twitter, but this thread from the wonderful Alex Bond invites a response from personal experience.

I am Sick. And. Tired. Of writing letters to call out professional orgs who treat their LGBTQ+ members like nothing.

— Alex Bond (@TheLabAndField) August 22, 2017

Please read this thread to learn what not to do when approached by LBGT+ scientists asking for greater representation in the societies they are members of. Specifically, I want to address this point with a personal story to illustrate how wrong headed an attitude this is.

This tirade brought to you by an org who wrote “I don't think any of [our members] are LGBT so I don't see why we should put time into this”

— Alex Bond (@TheLabAndField) August 22, 2017

As I've mentioned elsewhere in this blog, I had only recently come out when I started graduate school. From the beginning, navigating outness in my career and navigating the world of science were intertwined. When I came to Johns Hopkins, the LBGT association at the school of medicine was more or less moribund (a good friend of mine who came along a few years later has since kickstarted it and then some). And my department, while I had an out colleague, did not really discuss these things. For my first year in graduate school, I was out to my fellow graduate students, and that was it.
So, when in the fall of my second year I went to my first meeting of my society, I associated being professional in science with being in the closet. But I was uncomfortable with this. Such feelings put a distance between you and fellow attendees, particularly at a conference where out of hours socialising is important (and enjoyable). Being professionally closeted involves eliding a lot of questions.
On the second night of the conference, I noticed a little sign on the noticeboard: "LBGT members dinner will be tomorrow evening at this location, at this time". And suddenly I knew I was not alone. I knew there were others like me in this place, in this society, and that they were welcome.
Ironically, I didn't go to the LBGT dinner that year. I wasn't ready for it. Wasn't ready to be identified as a gay scientist. But even without going, it mattered. And when I went back two years later, I definitely went, and have gone every year since. Each time, a new grad student, or indeed someone more senior, turns up slightly sheepishly, and they are welcome, and they are made a little more comfortable.
But even then, the LBGT dinner (which has been running for years) has always been held at a distance. It was the initiative of one or two people, who have organised it for over a decade, and maintain the mailing list. Getting it listed on the website as an official society event has been a struggle. And every so often you hear someone grumble when they notice the sign "why do they need one?". Which is really the answer to that question.
There is, among a certain generation of scientists, a belief that things were better when we didn't discuss these things. And they'll often say: "well everyone knew X was gay, he (it is invariably a he) just didn't make a fuss about it". If you believe this, I urge to ask X how they felt. You will probably hear a different story, of getting invited to considerably fewer social events, and never with a partner. Of being passed up for promotions and committees, of advisors suddenly becoming frosty and distant. Not talking about it was not about decorum, it was about protection, and being resigned to lesser treatment.
Every time an LBGT person enters a new space, they look for clues as to how out they can be. The older and more establishment a crowd (so most scientific conferences), the more they will assume they have to be reserved. This is difficult, isolating, and honestly just damned unpleasant. And all it takes to start to make it better is a sign on a noticeboard. Is that really so much?*

*No, it isn't and you should do more, but start with that.

Let's talk about my science

Let's talk about our lab's science. We're wrapping up experiments for the summer. Long, tiring experiments that have gone pretty well I think. I'm just finishing up the last part of the data collection which may form the preliminary data for a grant proposal.
(Good thing I have that spousal green card. Shit that's up for renewal this year. Didn't the DOJ just come out with a thing about federal protection for LBGT persons? I need to check up on that. Better get that re application started)
... Sorry got side tracked. As I was saying preliminary data for a grant
(Wait, what are NIH paylines now? And isn't the federal budget going to be slashed?)
... Which is good because scientifically I'm feeling ready to spread my wings as I've mentioned before. I have a couple of papers in review, two more about to be submitted and will probably get at least one more out to review by fall. One of the ones in review is entirely my side project, and the one I aim to submit is my own devising even if it's out of my PIs project. So I'm ready to start looking for paths out of the postdoc.
(In the context of a university sector in financial crisis and a flooded job market).
Of course, it's a bit tricky because the husband got into a pre med masters program locally
(So that's six years of education. What is tuition these days? How much do residents make? I wonder what medicine as a profession will look like in six years).
So I need to stay local for a bit longer
(All the local universities are in crisis because of a massively reduced state subsidy, a new funding formula, tuition caps, and debts accrued from unsustainable growth policies).
But I would like to remain professionally competitive enough to have the possibility of being back home in the UK with my family one day.
(I wonder where the UK will be in six years? OH GOD NO DO NOT THINK ABOUT THAT)
But yeah, I would really like to talk about my science.

Independence and maturity

I didn't get the job.

It wasn't quite the Dream Job, but it had many attributes of it. I thought I did well in the interview. In fact, based on feedback, I'm pretty sure I did do well in the interview. But someone else did better, or had funding, or was a better fit. I'm a postdoc for another year.

I was disappointed not to get the job, but not crushed. Even getting a drink to drown my sorrows felt perfunctory, unnecessary. I was OK. And I realised, that, more and more, when it comes to my career, that equanimity about where I've been, where I am, and where I'm going has come to dominate.

When I finished my PhD, then spent a year unemployed, and then started my postdoc, I was all Sturm und Drang about my career. I oscillated between being terrified I'd never make it, angry I hadn't published more, frustrated at people's failure to recognise my amazing capabilities, irritated at advice that seemed cruel, glib and out of touch. And while I still think there are problems for graduate students and postdocs, that internalization of the problems is gone. The clear, tangible work I have done over the past three and a half years in the wonderful lab I've had the good fortune to do my postdoc in has eliminated much of the bad feelings from the end of my PhD. What has replaced them is a certain degree of confidence I didn't have before, one that is rooted in a certain equanimity about my career and my future. I'm good at what I do, and I've had a blast doing it. I hope I'll get to do it for longer, but if I don't... Well it was a good innings.

Associated with this disappearance of the violent emotions with which I started this postdoc has been a quiet maturation of other skills. We recently had a change of staff in the lab which means I am now the second most senior person here. And, somewhat to my surprise, I found I've stepped up to the plate of managing people with more confidence and willingness then I thought I would. I don't have to remind myself to check in with the new trainees and discuss plans for data collection, I'm just ... doing it.

With my PI, we've reached a stage that is intellectually exciting. She's no longer primarily in the business of training me, we're now collaborators, bouncing ideas off each other about new analyses and projects. The projects are in some ways more collaborative, and yet in others I am more independent then ever: if we decide a certain paper is mine, then she trusts me to carry the project. I'm currently in charge of helping our graduate student write his first paper for publication. It's been a great learning experience, in part because I've discovered how much I now know about the arcana of publication and manuscript preparation.Of course, the independence isn't there in my own grants yet (but maybe, NIH gods permitting, by years end?), but I can feel a shift in how I approach my work, and in how other people in the lab and the university respond to me.  The trick here, one that she and I both acknowledge, is to recognize this dangerously fun dynamic is a sign I should plan to leave, not that I should stay.

Perhaps the word that best describes my mindset about what I do and why I do it now is maturity (yes, you can laugh. I'm 33, i have a lot more maturing to do I'm sure). Part of that is also the recognition that unlike my 20s, I cannot make my career the entire center of my being quite like I did in graduate school (even as I take on more responsibility). I have a husband who is making his own major career decisions. I have a mother who will not be young forever. I will not be young forever.

There will always be choices, there will always be jobs I do not get. But wherever I go from here, there are almost no regrets to be had about what I've done on the way here, either professionally, or personally. And that knowledge is I think the source of my current mindset. And it is a good place to be.

And with that, I am signing off for two weeks. My husband and I are taking our long delayed honeymoon to Spain. Some things should not be put off forever.

"We can live here"

We've been in Ohio nearly three years. Three years.
Neither my husband, who'd grown up in Orlando and DC, nor I, who'd grown up in a global city of 8 million people, had ever lived somewhere like North East Ohio. The closest I'd come were a couple of weeks spent with family friends in Western Michigan. The closest my husband had come was visiting his brother at university in Oklahoma.
Did we arrive with preconceptions? Yes, of course. He's east coast, big city. I'm a Londoner. There's a certain amount of unavoidable snobbery baked into both those world views. But there is also the very legitimate reality that the way one lives in big, metropolitan, cosmopolitan areas, the sources of pleasure, the expectations, the coping mechanisms, are very different to what one finds in the semi-rural rust belt. Putting aside judgments, it is simply true that, to an extent, a big city transplant out here is somewhat ill-prepared for this environment.
So there was some trepidation. Moving into the tiny town where the university I work at is based, just before the onset of one of the hardest winters in the region in years, did not help.
Perhaps the hardest thing to deal with initially was the isolation. In the winter especially, people don't leave their houses much. There are no pubs where one can find ersatz community as a newcomer. More subtly, people here are from here. Their families and friends from their whole lives are all nearby. Unlike in a largely transient city like DC or London, not everyone out here is desperate to make new friends. For newcomers, it takes a lot of work to build a social network, especially outside of work.
So it was hard initially. There were hard days, there were days when we both pined for our former lives in the big city. Yet also, from the beginning, there were good things: good jobs for both of us, good bosses who understood how hard life was sometimes, and, quicker perhaps than we thought, good friends. In this last regard, it helps that LBGT folk out here look after their own, once they find them.
And there are things to do. One has to drive more, and look harder, and develop new habits, but there are things to do. There are concerts and museums in Cleveland to explore. There are restaurants, ranging from country steakhouses unchanged since the '70s where you get an amazing steak dinner for 20 bucks, to fine dining restaurants. There are lakes and state parks aplenty. And there is space. And space means room to take up hobbies. I have my piano, my husband has a dark room in the basement and a painter's studio in the attic. We have two small yards, and for the first time in my life I can devote time to learning how to garden. There is cooking, and having friends over for dinner (as I say, our house is the best restaurant in our town, it's just hard to get a table).
For Easter, we had my husband's family over. Our large, old, slightly ramshackle, slightly run down but beautiful house has enough rooms that we had two couples over, each with their own room. On a beautiful, sunny Easter sunday, after service at the local episcopal church, I was finishing up supper in the kitchen. The family were out in the back yard, sitting around the table and drinking champagne. And it felt like home.
In the front yard, the daffodils and tulips I planted in the cold last days of fall have bloomed. When we moved to this house last October, I had also transferred to the soil a clematis and a rose bush I'd been keeping in pots on the balcony of our first place in Ohio. I trimmed them back at the end of winter, and they are growing like crazy. Soon the clematis will flower bright purple, and the rose bush will begin to put forth yellow flowers, as they will for years, even after we leave. We have left roots here now.
When I get up in the morning and look out on that front yard in the sun, like Tenar at the end of LeGuin's Tehanu, I know we can live here. I don't know that we will, but I know that we can, and that is an encouraging thought.

Learning Bach to play Beethoven

I'm back on a piano playing kick. The urge has taken me and I feel the need to do something productive, but non work related. So I've dusted off the ivories and am trying to get a good half hour to an hour's practice in a day.
My long term goal is, as it has been for the past decade, to play the entirety of Beethoven's Moonlight sonata. It's been some years now that I've been able to play the first two movements passably to well (depending on time of day, phase of the move, and state of my motor neurons). But the third movement is this:

Technically, it's a very different beast to the previous two. Rapid finger movements in both the right and left hands, and essentially a style that is more baroque (and reminiscent of the harpsichord) then the other two movements. From a simple physical performance stand point, my hands cannot yet handle that sort of athleticism.
A few years later my mother sent me some pieces to practice that her piano teacher had recommended for me. One was a book of basic exercises I was familiar with, and hated. The other was Bach prelude #2 in C minor from his Well Tempered Clavier series, which is a series of preludes and  fugues written, in part, as exercises for the harpsichord. Unlike the other book of exercises however, these pieces are actually fun and pretty on their own.

So I'm putting aside the Beethoven, and focusing on this prelude (at quarter tempo, let's be honest). And while my aim is to be able to play the whole prelude, I'm also using it as a learning tool. I'm focusing on my finger work, and practicing my sight reading (which is terrible). I'm working on strengthening the little finger on my left hand, and making my movements quick and precise. These are all skills that will be vital for eventually tackling the 3rd movement of the Moonlight, but I'm working on them in a context that brings more immediate rewards.
In many ways, much of what I'm doing as a postdoc (though not all), is playing Bach. I'm funded out of my PIs R01 for now, so that means I didn't design this project. And my long term goals (by definition, as a postdoc is a training position of determinate length), are not going to be realised here. So much of what I am doing here is learning skills that I will need to fulfill my long term goals. Yet, on the other hand, I am also doing something that is important and interesting in and of itself in the science I am doing here. If that were not the case I would be as bored and resentful as I was playing scales on the violin. Finding the balance here, between learning what is needed for the future, and doing what is needed for the project now, is key.
Ultimately, I will move on from the Bach when I feel there is nothing more for me to learn from it, and I will tackle what I planned. But I will enjoy learning to play Bach (and who knows, maybe I'll take another detour, and another). And ultimately, I will move on from this postdoc and do my own, other thing. But I will enjoy doing this science while I learn. 

Notes of a prodigal paleontologist

I am at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meetings in Dallas, Texas. I haven't been to this meeting in two years, during which I've done very little paleontology, and in fact rather little evolutionary work. The last time I came, I was presenting the final part of my dissertation work. That presentation was on the results of four years of solid, focused work. This year, I presented the results of a side project collaboration which I am not leading (I'm the methods guy). The feeling was very different.
SVP was my main professional academic meeting throughout grad school. It was the first meeting I attended, the first meeting I presented at. I have good friends, colleagues and mentors here. In many ways, it still feels like home. My dissertation project was inspired largely by a single talk I saw at SVP Cleveland seven years ago. By the end of my time in graduate school, I almost felt I was beginning to get a certain reputation as a methods person. At the very least, the other paleontologists in that sub community knew of me.
But for the past two years, I've been doing something completely different, and attending different meetings, where I know far fewer people, and am known by almost none. I'm somewhat out of the loop on the paleo literature, having had to devote my reading efforts to understanding the literature of swallowing physiology and dysphagia. The abstract I put together for the meeting was on a completely different paleontological problem to what my dissertation was on (using the same methods). My co-author was the dinosaur footprints expert. I would be presenting to his peers. And I also wondered (giving my growing interest in comparative physiology and neural mechanism of muscular function) whether I would still be interested and excited by the meeting. And whether people here would still be interested and excited by me.
SVP is a surprisingly eclectic meeting, certainly I think more so than people not in the society might think. As paleontology has become more and more focused on understanding the biology of extinct animals over the past half century, the amount of comparative functional morphology at the meetings has increased. The advent of tree based methods for reconstructing evolutionary history has meant that many questions that were once the purview of fossil analysis can now be approached by looking only, or mostly, at living animals. Thirty years ago, these innovations resulted in virulent fights in the paleo community. Now, a quiet synthesis has occurred, and no one is surprised to see a talk discussing comparative gestation times in extant mammals follow the description of a new fossil. The first day, I struggled a little to find my feet. Much like when I return to France after a long break, the thoughts and ideas seemed to come from far away, and I wasn't entirely sure I could engage with anything. As the week wore on however, the language came back, as did the excitement. What's more, my new research was causing me to look for new things in the meeting. The paleoneurology (yes, it's a thing) and ontogeny talks were now on my radar. And I found (always a good sign), that many abstracts had ideas that paralleled some of my thinking, both on the questions from my dissertation, and on my new questions.
On the very first day, I saw a talk by one of the big guys in understanding early mammalian evolution. He was discussing the evolution of the unique mammalian nasal respiratory tract, and talking about the complex integration of smell, taste, chewing and respiration in mammals. Immediately I began tying in what he was saying with my thoughts on the neurophysiology of swallowing, and in particular how the mammalian oropharynx goes through a major neurological, behavioral and anatomical transition at infant weaning. After, I went to talk to him, and he seemed interested enough in my ideas, that were not coming from the study of fossils, but from my experimental work, that he wanted to know more. It was a reminder that I still belong here.
This morning, the last day of the conference, there was an entire symposium dedicated to the methodology I became an expert in as a paleontologist (an aspect of which had formed the basis of my own talk). I watched as several people, whose work I had always admired as a graduate student, got up and gave more talks. Talks I found compelling, novel and exciting. I now have new ideas I'd like to explore in my old data, and I'm reminded why I did this thing in the first place.
I came to this meeting unsure of what I would find, and more out of a desire not to abandon my identity as a paleontologist. I'm leaving reinvigorated, my ideas about the evolution of mammalian oropharyngeal function clarified, and new ideas of how I could link what I do to the fossil record emerging.
As I work on my transition to independence as a researcher, I'm glad to find that I'm still energised by the work and ideas of my earliest mentors, and that I in turn can energise them with what I'm doing as an experimental biologist. My path to this point makes more sense to me now, and I'm glad to know I still belong at this meeting, even as I make a place for myself at others.

Return on investment, limited ressources and impossible hedges: the postdoc job search

I submitted my first job application for a faculty position last week. It's the first of around 30 opening I currently have listed. The application package (the American Standard: CV, cover letter, research statement, statement of teaching philosophy), took about a week or two to craft. I looked back over old letters I had written three years ago (for which I had already studied the internet intensely), judged them poor, rewrote them. I solicited, and got very good, feedback from my PI and two other professors in the department who know me. One is an associate professor, mid career, established in his field. The other is a pre-tenure, but very successful, assistant professor. The job itself was a neurophysiology position at a research school with a significant budget. And so all the materials will have to be recrafted for the more teaching focused schools, or the anatomy departments, or the more evolutionary and paleontological positions.
While I am working on these job packets, I am hard at work keeping the analysis and writing momentum we have developed in the group. I submitted my second first author paper from my postdoc for review last week, and next week I will take three days to finally revise and resubmit my third dissertation paper (which has been sitting on my hard drive for a year at this point). We have just finished a run of animal experiments, and there are at least two more first author papers (and several middle authors where I will be called upon for analysis) sketched out that could be ready by january.
My PI came and talked to me a couple of days ago. The R01 I'm on is in its final year, and we have not yet had a renewal. She informed me that my position is funded for certain until January 2017. If she gets refunded, the pressure is off. If not, I think that a few favours can be called in to complete that year, but no guarantees. To all intents and purposes, it is in my best interests to get a job this year, after two years in the postdoc.
Academic job applications are laborious, more so than private sector ones. More information is requested, the process is more drawn out, a greater research investment is expected at every stage of the process. And yet all that work is ancillary. Or, more specifically, it is icing. Grant, publications, research: those are the hard substrate you need for the crafting of the job documents to be even worth the effort. All these things take time, huge amounts of time. As a graduate student, or a postdoc, especially in a one grant lab like mine, time can suddenly become an exceptionally rare commodity. Like at the end of graduate school, I am on a timer if I don't want to face a serious gap in income. I have to maximize the ROI on the time I have. And knowing where to maximize that ROI is... non trivial. Obviously, more papers is better. But at this point, most papers I submit now will not be in press by the time applications close on most of the jobs I have lined up. Is a big list of in reviews worth it? How much is it worth relative to getting half a dozen more jobs applications out? After all, publication from the lab will help my PI's grant efforts, which also are of concern to me at this point.
I was in a similar bind at the end of grad school: I had no publications, my dissertation was unfinished, and I had no job lined up, a year away from cessation of funding and the end of my F1 visa. How to maximise my time? In the end, I wasted a few months on job applications: I got the very firm message that an ABD grad student with no pubs was not a hirable commodity. So I finished the dissertation, and headed back to the UK to live with my mother. I spent a year unemployed, applying for jobs and getting my first two papers out. It was not ideal, and owing to life circumstances not a scenario I can afford to repeat.
Which brings me to my next point in this rambling post. I have to prepare for the eventuality that I won't get a faculty position. With the current data on postdoc placement rates, all graduate students and postdocs need to hedge against not making it in academia. Yet what constitutes a good hedge? From my experience outside academia (which was before the recession), I know that field moves without experience are difficult. Again, you need to invest either capital (ie a nest egg to tide you over, difficult on a postdoc salary) or time to build useful contacts and experience. Time, which as I have mentioned, is a limited commodity when on a fixed term appointment.
I maintain that the challenges faced by people like me are not unique in kind to academia. Fixed term gigs, low starting salaries, competition for permanent positions, the open ended nature of projects that can expand to fill all available time, the constant need to re-invent yourself,  even the need to be highly mobile, can be found in so many other industries where young graduates now end up (law, medicine, consulting, finance, tech, game development). But the degree, and specific combinations of these factors, combined with an idiosyncratic job application process that is mostly useless for getting jobs outside of academia, do present unique challenges that can hamstring young people in academic science trying to keep their lives together. And the combination of lack of capital and lack of time means that efficiently hedging for the high likelihood of having to operate a career move is a unique challenge. On this, young academics are in need of mentoring.

Growth

I am currently writing a manuscript. It's the second first author manuscript to come from my postdoctoral work (a little under two years in), and hopefully it will be sent out for review in the next couple of weeks. Currently, my PI and I are sending it back and forth, querying the writing, clarifying the main points, realising (for me at least) some pretty large gaps in my knowledge of the litterature. But, at no point since I wrote the first draft have either my PI or I thought anything other than "this is a good manuscript, we just need to make it even better".
This is in many ways the paper I came here to write. It's the paper that shows that I understand how to do biological kinematics, that is how to study the movement of biological structures as organisms use them. As I've mentioned elsewhere, my background (which now seems quite far off) is in ecomorphology as applied to the fossil record. I correlated variation in mammalian bone morphology with known variation in broad categorical behavioral and ecological variables. But these broad classifications don't tell you about function, and so about the behavioral phenotype on which selection is acting. So I took this postdoc in part to learn how to ask those questions.
And here I am, writing a paper that does just that, yet also so much more than I had anticipated. The study we did was an experimental manipulation to see how a nerve lesion affected the movement of the tongue and oro-pharynx in our animal model. The work replicates a relatively frequent iatrogenic injury in premature human infants, and so it is clinically relevant. But the direction we have taken with this paper is so much more than that. We're using the changes we observe to make inference about the neurological control of these oro pharyngeal structures. My head has, for the past few weeks, been full of discussion of central pattern generators, afferent and efferent pathways.
With this paper, I feel like I have grown immensely as a scientist. I have become the integrative biologist I've always wanted to be. I'm not doing it in this paper yet, but I feel ready to connect my paleontological work and knowledge of mammalian evolution with my understanding of experimental organismal physiology.
I have an idea of the direction I want to head in as a paleontologist, as a evolutionary biologist, as a mammalian physiologist. And it's so much more than I thought it would be when I started this project hoping to learn about kinematics.
I'm heading out onto the job market this year. And my research statement will be nothing like the one I wrote three years ago when I was finishing my PhD. I think it will be so much more interesting. And I hope others will too.

When having enough is not enough: the financial challenges of being a postdoc

My job just before I started my PhD paid 19,500 British Pounds per annum (that's about 39,000 USD in 2007 dollars, which inflation adjusted would be about 44,150 USD in 2015 dollars). My graduate student stipend was 27,000 USD a year. And yet, I probably lived more comfortably, and certainly more independently in graduate school than I did back in London on that nominally higher salary (cost of living in the most expensive city on earth and all). My current salary still has not quite reached the inflation adjusted dollar value of my previous salary. Yet, day to day, in a two income household with no dependents in an inexpensive part of the country, I live well enough. Certainly it would be disingenuous of me to claim poverty when you look at some of the things I have spent money on in the past few months. As I write this, I should also add that I am pretty much in the Rolls-Royce of postdoc scenarios financially. I'm funded out of my PI's R01, with full staff benefits. Also, as result of having done my undergrad in Europe, I have almost no student debt. And, as a result of my mother's generosity, I have no structural debt at all and never have had. It would not take much (a kid, a more expensive part of the country, a large amount of debt to service) to shift me into a position that would be financially much harder.
Which leads me to my main point: I could probably live quite comfortably for a long time on this salary. I could build up a retirement, maybe make some investments. All good. But that is not a scenario I can contemplate. Because my employment is of fixed term, and I am always facing the knowledge of the imminent cessation of income. It is this combination of limited, low-ish income and limited term contracts that is the particular financial difficulty of the pre-faculty (and let's be honest, pre tenure) phase of academia.
I saved throughout graduate school, a fair amount. But those savings were devoured by the process of having to finish my dissertation after my funding ran out. Even had I secured a job, in all likelihood moving costs alone would have demolished my savings. And postdocs employers do not usually pay moving fees (for my current postdoc I was lucky: my PI paid for my flight from the UK, because she is wonderful). Further, had it not been for the opportunity to live back at home (which comes with its own personal costs), I'm not sure what I would have done financially. Certainly, I would have given up looking for a postdoc sooner than I did.
The problem is that grad school stipends and postdoc salaries are, quite simply, too low to put together a nest egg sufficiently large to insure against the periodic cessation of income, or to weather any prolonged period of unemployment.  Thus, for most of us, when our graduate stipends or our postdoc grant salaries are coming to an end, there is significant pressure to simply secure a source of income as soon as possible.
Which brings me to my next point: there's a lot of discussion about people taking postdocs who aren't committed to science. Or talking about how you should only do a postdoc if you really want to. It's bollocks. The main reason, when you reach the end of your phd and are staring at your paltry savings to have a postdoc lined up is so you can get paid. It pays more than grad school, and it buys you time.
Yes, career transitioning would be better for many. But career transition is a hedge, especially in this job market. It requires that you invest either time, or money, both things that are in short supply at the end of your PhD.
So if you need a postdoc to keep paying the bills, take it, it's a honorable thing to do for you. And try to build a nest egg big enough so that you can get out of there if that's what you decide to do.
As a postcript: this problem, the problem of the financial costs of fixed term entry level jobs, is one that is well documented in one of my home countries, France, where all entry level jobs are fixed term CDD and people coast from CDD to CDD until they land a CDI. This has huge financial consequences on young people, from the impossibility of getting a mortgage, to financial dependency on parents as garantors of all loans, to requirements to move around France, to inability to build up savings or retirement benefits. The precarity of fixed term employment is real.

Defying gravity, finding balance

I'm just done with a three day meeting in Chicago. It's been thought provoking, and has jump started my thinking about the next phase of my life and career. This postdoc, wonderful and intellectually enriching as it is, won't last forever. And if there's one thing my PhD taught me the hard way, it's that you can never start planning too early for the next move.
This conference was unlike any I've been to before. It was a clinical research conference at which Ph.D.s probably were a minority. Most of the paper presentations consisted of retrospective analysis of patient case studies, and one of the major keynotes was essentially grand rounds. The neurophysiology lectures were few, and only two labs presented work on animal models. My PI left frustrated at the state of the basic science in the field. I left... unenergised. I took notes on maybe three talks, and these are people whose work I'm already aware of. This meeting was also the first one I've ever been to where every session ended with several minutes of rambling interventions by questioners from the audience that added almost nothing to the presentation. In my own talk (generally well received) the dominant question was simply an attempt to invalidate the clinical relevance of the research based on something that, well (yes I'm biased) totally missed the forest for the trees.
I'm from a basic science background in a field with relatively little translational potential. Yes, people turn to paleo to understand the potential effects of climate change on faunal transitions, but the immediate applications of such knowledge are limited. And although I will defend with every inch of my being the notion that any useful knowledge on human biology cannot be derived without some understanding of mammalian evolution, again, there are several steps between this, and clinical research. I have, from the beginning, been somewhat apprehensive about working in a more clinical focus. At 18 and again at 21 I turned down the opportunity to become a physician to pursue science. I don't think like a physician. There is mutual frustration in the clinician/basic science researcher relationship, as there is between any two groups with a narrow area of collaborative interest but broadly different focuses and approaches. And I have a lot of sympathy for the clinical perspective. We may harp on about lack of mechanistic and physiological understanding of the symptoms we're studying, but clinicians still have patients that need care here and now and cannot wait for a new, physiology driven paradigm to emerge. Yet, to me, the frustration remains, and I have to decide if the potential benefits (increased opportunities for research and funding yes, but also the knowledge my research has a measurable impact on people's wellbeing) are worth coming to terms with that frustration, and learning to build a dialogue with the clinicians willing to take the field forward. Professionally, this postdoc is a crossroads with two very different paths out of it, and this meeting has re-emphasised that some commitment on my part will become necessary soon.
Related was my reaction to being back in a big city. I am a city boy at heart, and after over a year in rural North East Ohio the effect of being in Chicago was electric. Riding the blue line from O'Hare was exciting enough, but walking through downtown Chicago to the hotel, my heart rate doubled, my pace accelerated. For the next three days I was like a kid in a candy store. I went shopping with pleasure for the first time since I left London. We explored secret hipster bars and sang karaoke and went to wonderful, innovative restaurants. I miss that, so much. I miss there being a world of excitement and delight and pleasure on my doorstep. And so I am reminded that, next time I move, I don't want to end up at another great job in a place that bores me. And yes, I know that sounds snobbish and privileged. And I am aware that living in a place like Chicago is challenging on an academic salary (I turned down a postdoc there in part for that reason). But I am also now sure of what I want in terms of quality of life from where I live. It will be difficult to get a professor gig I enjoy. It will be harder still to get it in a place I enjoy. But for myself, I need to try and do both. And if I can't do both, I will have to choose (or, as my mother would put it, life is more likely to choose for me). On the one hand, compromise and choices from imperfect options are the essence of life. On the other, life is lived only once, and I intend to get as much out of it as I can. It's a dynamic, unstable equilibrium at best, but I am still young enough that I want to at least try to have it all.

Human assets

I have a lot a of friends who are academics, but I think that, on balance, most of my friends are not. I like this. It allows me to escape from the navel gazing that permeates many academic discussions. It allows me to put the problems of junior scientists in perspective, to learn that they are, in the words of Elrond to Gimli, "only part of the troubles of the world". This does not mean that I don't think that junior academics have problems, far from it. It merely reminds me that our problems are similar to those in other careers, and (more often than not) have similar root causes.
My brother recently got a new job. He works in strategic marketing, that is, the data driven part of marketing, not the shiny ads bit. He aggregates and crunches data concerning the products his company sells, and makes recommendation on where the company should be targeting its existing products, and where it should be focusing new product development.
For the past several years, he's worked for a major multinational whose entire product line exists in a mature market, that is a market where almost all possible consumers already buy either the company's product or a rival's similar one. In a mature market, growth is marginal, innovation is incremental, and strategy primarily trench warfare. My brother hated it. It played to none of his strengths, and the company had no interest in branching out into new markets. Thankfully, he recently switched to a company that is positioned in a non market leader position in a dynamic, changing market. A company that hired him precisely because he is excellent at 6,000 ft, broad picture of things strategy recommendations backed by a thorough understanding of the data.
A comment from my brother's exit interview with company number one struck me when talking about this. His soon to be ex-boss said to him "you've been under used and poorly used". To me, that seemed an explicit recognition that his talents were ill suited to the company yes, but also that the company had failed to find a way to make use of what it recognised as potential assets. What a waste. While we can probably justify this from an actuarial perspective, one cannot help but feel that, well, it is a sub-optimal way to deal with resources, and a pretty shitty way to deal with people.
This problem, "under used and poorly used" is surely one that affects academia. And there is no such thing as a mature market in academia. We should always be able to make use of the assets people bring to our labs. We can always develop our products into new markets. Heck, in the current funding environment, spinning out new products is all we do. What is more, academia, I think, has the potential to forge a different way of managing human assets because, historically, mentorship is built into the very structure of the profession. I know that it often, in this day and age, doesn't seem that way, and I know that many people fail to live up to that ideal.  But the American research university is based on the XIXth century German research university model. And mentorship, the nurturing and guiding of talented young scientists, was and remains a key ingredient in that vision.
That norm of mentoring is an important one, and one that can inject humanity and compassion in what can often be difficult times (especially for ECRs). But, I think that today, we need to reconsider what constitutes good mentoring. It is, I think, no longer merely about developing the student or postdoc as a scientist. It is about being honest with them about the job market and expectations. It is about guiding them, or pointing them towards others who may guide them, if they decide to transition out of academia. It is about using your status to advocate on their behalf. It is about supporting them when they advocate for themselves. If mentorship as a value in science as a social endeavor is to remain meaningful, then it requires that mentors engage at least somewhat with the reality of what their trainees face. A discussion about what mentorship means in this context is long overdue.
There has been much talk on the internet lately of the ubiquity and unavoidability of cost benefit analysis in life, particularly as they relate to the difficult choices of young scientists, and the older scientists who sometimes support them. My brother's situation at his old company may have been the result of such a cost benefit analysis: developing him as asset would have been too expensive to be worth it. In the midst of such discussions, it is worth remembering that cost benefit analysis is not the only decision making framework which exists. In fact, it has often been explicitly rejected in determining how we should interact with other people. Kant's categorical imperative (always treat another human as an end in itself, not as the means to an end), for example, argues that utilitarian analysis of human interactions is unethical. The 'golden rule' (treat others as you would they would treat you) similarly cannot be reduced to cost benefit analysis. In the tension between cost benefit analysis of human assets, and the necessary human interactions of work, lies the difficult path of academic mentorship.

Silent Ivories

My mother has always had a piano. Playing the piano is central to her idea of herself. The only thing other than a house she has ever taken a loan for is the upright Steinway in our living room. Having "time to play the piano" is a measure of how much control she has over her life. It is, to use modern parlance, her measure of self care. Yet, interestingly, the piano is not relaxing for her in the way that a movie or a book might be. She is always challenging herself to play harder pieces, to get better. It requires effort and energy: more of a discipline than a hobby. And when my mother does not have energy for the piano, then she knows that something else in her life is taking too much of her time.
My relationship to the piano is very different. Its presence and sound are comforting to me, yet I never really played. My instrument was the violin, and our relationship is estranged at best. I have dabbled in playing the piano (over the course of a decade I have taught myself the first two movements of the Moonlight sonata), and whenever I am back home I find time to refresh my memory.
During the year between ending my PhD and starting my postdoc, when I was unemployed and living back with my mother, I started playing the piano more seriously. At my mother's prompting, I took lessons with her piano teacher. I improved noticeably. I began to think of other pieces I would like to learn. And so, when I moved to Ohio, concerned I would be bored, I resolve to buy myself a piano.
I found a good electronic piano on Craigslist, one that was highly rated for its sound. In fact, it is based on sampling a Steinway concert grand. I set it up in our spare room, and got sheet music for the Moonlight (no point in losing the benefit of all that practice) and the next piece I'd resolved to learn, a piece of Tchaikovsky incidental music from his Seasons series. After almost a year, I can play 8 bars. I play the piano maybe a couple of times a month.
On occasion, I feel guilty about this. I enjoy the piano, and I want, on some level, to learn these pieces, and ultimately, one day, to master the third movement of the Moonlight sonata, which is currently far beyond my technical skill. And, of course, I compare myself with my mother, who throughout her always busy, sometimes hectic life has always been able to practice several hours a week. It would be easy to blame science, and its tendency to expand to fill all available space. It would be easy to argue that I could cut out more mindless pursuits (like twitter, or browsing the internet, or playing video games, or watching TV). Certainly, my upbringing was Protestant enough that I must always wonder if I am making the best use of the time allotted to me. And certainly the pressures of being an early career researcher don't help.
But I think also, part of the problem lies in being honest about what is important to us. As I was talking to colleagues over the weekend about the compatibility of science with time consuming hobbies, I came to a realisation. I have decided what matters to me: my work, my fiance, my friends and family, and exercising so that I can enjoy the outdoors in the summer. These are the things, when I look at how I spend my time, that I make time for. It is not worth feeling guilty that I do not play the piano enough. It is simply not important enough to me to make the cut. And conversely, it is clearly important enough to my mother that she will make time for it in the face of other pressures.
Life is difficult enough, and there are enough pressures and demands on our time as scientists, that we should not burden ourselves with feeling obligations towards activities that we do not in fact value that much. Embrace the things you care about, and make time for them. That choice is personal, and yours, and your choices are valid.
Maybe in ten years time I will have deciphered the Tchaikovsky piece. If that is the time it takes, then that is the time it takes. In the meantime, I will enjoy my fiance's company, invite my friends to dinner, and plan for a summer of camping trips in the Appalachian mountains.

We need to talk about the dissertation

It's been over two years since I picked up the 8 bound copies of my dissertation from the library of Johns Hopkins University. The box weighed a ton. The printing had cost me a fair amount of money I no longer had by that point. I confess that when, upon asking her if she wanted a bound copy, my mother said "yes", I was more than a little annoyed. That was another 400 sheets of acid free paper, another 40 dollar binding fee. I dutifully handed my advisor and my department a copy, posted two more to my US based committee members, and boarded the plane back to the UK with three hard copies, because they took up too much of my limited baggage allowance to be worth putting in the hold. Of those copies, I handed one to my committee member who was in Glasgow, one came back with me to the US when I started my postdoc. The third is on the table in my mother's office, more or less exactly where she put it two years ago, slowly getting covered by bills and newspaper clippings.
If you've read this post, you'll probably find the sentence above an apt metaphor for the fate of dissertations such as mine. My program still required dissertations to be written in the monographic format, and despite vague encouragement to publish during my PhD, my advisor never pushed me to realise that my focus on my dissertation as a monolithic project was a liability. Thus, none of that 400 page tome was published by the time I finished up my program. And to this date, all of it that is published is this (unless you count four conference abstracts, which no one does). Other than that, there's a revise and resubmit that's been in limbo for almost a year at this point. And when that gets published, that'll be it, I think.
Given the above, you'd probably think I'm kind of sour on monographic dissertations. And I won't deny that the CVs of graduate students from paper focused programs made me jealous when graduating. Certainly my affection for the object itself is limited. But I am still proud of what's within those pages. That project is solid, cohesive science I would (and have) stand up and take ownership of. It's grounded in a deep understanding of the issues that drove it, both methodological and theoretical. It leveraged under used ressources (museum collections). Moreoever, it is the brainchild of my own intellectual development. Thanks to my masters, I was already well versed in the techniques I applied in my PhD, and I knew the kinds of questions I wanted to ask. I chose to work with my advisor because he too was interested in those questions, and because he has access to the resources (fossils) i needed to do my project. So the intellectual process that lead to my dissertation I am proud of, and happy with. Like others, I defend the holistic, root and branch approach to science that a good monographic dissertation requires. But only up to a point. And the point at which I stop defending the monographic thesis is the point at which it hobbles the already dim career prospects of graduate students. More fundamentally, the point at which it perpetuates the lie that your research is valued irrespective of your productivity, which is publication. If graduate school is training for academia, then it must reflect the reality of academia. And that is both that your work must be thorough, rigorous, and yours, and that it must be published.
Instead of focusing on sterile arguments about whether or not three papers bound together counts as a dissertation, we need to work on developing a system of awarding graduate degrees that both encourages and develops thorough, original thinking and research in science, and which encourages regular, high quality publication of said research. Rather than end this post on my half baked ideas, I'd like to hear your thoughts on the topic.

Rekindling the fire

After I finished my master's degree, about nine years ago, I was at a loss as to what to do next. A Ph.D. seemed too much of a commitment at that age. I wanted to get a proper job, and see what the real world had to offer and if I could be content there. Problem was, I had no idea what one did in the real world.
I had almost no professional experience. I wrote amateurish, over eager cover letters and sent my woefully short CVs out to scientific publishing houses. I wrote clumsy mock articles for science journalist internships. I was basically directionless. I eventually took a job as a website content editor and translator for a half arsed start up animation and comic book company based in London county hall. I learnt a lot on that job, mostly that anything that looks too good to be true on paper probably is, and that throwing everything  at the wall to see what sticks can work great for management, but is a great way to fuck over enthusiastic young people.
The job offered no guidance. I had no idea what I was doing, how well I was doing, and what was expected of me. I felt out of my depth, frustrated, and unhappy. That's when I found the web forum fo a popular webcomic dedicated to graduate students. I leapt in. I checked threads at all hours of the day, and late into the night. Within a few months, my posting was through the roof. I have a lot to thank that forum for. It gave me a community when I felt isolated professionally, encouraged me to overcome my fear of graduate school, and taught me a lot about passionate and intelligent people. It was also an emotional minefield, that would at roughly three to six month interludes erupt into belligerent arguing. Those forum fights were emotionally exhausting to those involved, and seemed difficult to contextualise to those outside the forums. Sound familiar? The forum became a crutch to escape my dissatisfaction with my professional life. The six month I spent unemployed, and the nine months I spent in that job with no clear direction and no idea what was going to happen the next day, let alone in a month, destroyed what had up to then been a pretty solid work ethic and discipline that had successfully carried me through high school, college and my master's degree.
Eventually, I realised that the job was bad for me, so I didn't even wait to hear whether or not I got into graduate school. I found another job, one that was more focused and more serious, with a much better boss. I rediscovered some (though not all) my work ethic. And eventually, I was accepted into graduate school in the US and left. The forum faded and was eventually disbanded, though I found I had lost interest sometime shortly after starting my PhD. During my PhD, I was stressd, but overall happy. I almost never had trouble motivating myself to do what needed to be done. I was an independent adult for the first time, and it felt great. Seriously, balancing my own budget at the end of every month made me feel like a kid imagines being a grown up feels like.
Five years later, I was back where I had been after my masters. I had finished the PhD, and was looking into a gaping unknown. My visa had expired and in focusing on finishing my dissertation I found myself without publications and without a job. I had to move back to the UK, leaving behind a life I had spent five years building, including a four year relationship. My partner and I agreed to go long distance, but it was terrifying to do that with no set end date, and no idea under what circumstances we could be back together.
So, at 29, I moved back in to my mother's house in London. After five heavily goal directed years, in which I had grown as a person and a scientist, in which I had begun to achieve some degree of professional recognition, suddenly nothing. The result was a return to that feeling I had had in my first job of frustrated aimlessness, combined with a fair dose of humiliation. Amid that frustration and isolation, a good friend and fellow scientist introduced me to science twitter. It was great. I found colleagues and scientists I could chat to in almost real time. I kept abreast of developments in my field. I found out about job opportunities. I commiserated about the job market. And I got involved in many large twitter spats that were emotionally draining. I found a voice yes, but man I used it a lot.
That year of my life was not, in many ways, a good one for me. It contained many good things (the birth of my nephews and niece, time with my family, time to rediscover my home town), but professionally, despite submitting my first two papers (and getting one accepted), giving several invited seminars and getting four postdoc interviews, it felt like stagnation, if not regression. And, as before, my work ethic went to pot. I was listless and unmotivated. I drank too much. And I spent a lot of time on twitter. It was clear to me that I was angry, and burned out. Yet I couldn't muster the willpower to change my slew of bad behaviors. I was in licking my wounds mode. This scared me: I've always prided myself on my willpower. Yet suddenly, I couldn't stop myself from tweeting when I should be working, from not wasting my days playing Skyrim, and from not engaging in alarmingly regular drinking. Don't get me wrong, I love twitter, love video games and enjoy a good beer, but even I could tell this was no longer quite healthy.
Eventually, through networking, good luck and some people willing to go to bat for me in a big way, I landed my current postdoc. And as soon as I started, things started to change. The first three  months, I was in the office at 8 every day and staying til six. I probably achieved more in those first few months than I had in the entire previous year. In January, my now fiance came to join me out here. Suddenly we had our life back.
But my bad habits hadn't left. I had the energy for work again, but everything else was still off kilter. I'm one of those people who's always on top of his paper work (taxes filed a month before the deadline, paperwork submitted with weeks to spare), but things were still slipping through my fingers. I missed bills (something I NEVER do). I also had almost zero energy to do anything outside of work. I've always been a voracious reader, but I suspect this year I've read fewer books that at any other time in my life. And limiting my drinking has proved harder than I had wanted.
And then there's twitter. Its use as a crutch in that year in the wilderness made it difficult to shake the habit, but there's no denying that I tweet more than is sensible, given all the other things I need to do.
A year in I finally feel myself returning to a better version of me. As the winter is settling in, I'm looking forward to making my way through a backlog of books. I'm exercising regularly again. I'm making a concerted effort to be more disciplined about non work tasks, and the drinking is finally getting under control. And then last week, after the turmoil of shirstorm, and the wonderful response to my post, I realised I was also ready to reboot my relationship with twitter. So I'm taking a twitter break (I'm still lurking, so no saying mean things about me thinking I won't find out). I need to devote this new energy to tasks closer to hand: my research, my papers, my impending wedding.
A friend of mine told me, as I was entering my final year of graduate school, that six months to a year of unemployment was getting increasingly common between completing a PhD and starting a postdoc in palaeontology. Even if we disregard the economic lunacy and unsustainability of this arrangement, the psychological and emotional toll it takes on young researchers is huge. If you are in this situation, be honest with yourself about how exhausted you are, and be aware of any bad behaviors you may have accumulated as coping mechanism. Give yourself time, and be gentle, and you will find your way back to a version of you you prefer. It's taken me a year. And that means next year can only be better.

Spell. It. Out.

Last night, a twitter fight erupted on where one should encourage trainees to publish. Specifically, whether it was appropriate to encourage trainees to publish in a trendy but untested open access journal, given that publication venues counts in hiring and promotions. Proflikesubstance wrote a thoughtful response (read the comments, for once).
I am very invested in this conversation. I am a postdoc in neurophysiology with two publications. Not two publications from my postdoc. Two publications period. One is in PLoS ONE, one is a decent society journal from my old field, vertebrate palaeontology. Here's the thing, my old field doesn't have high impact journals. I'm trying to get a third paper in what vertebrate palaeontology considers a high impact journal. The IF is less than five. My decent society journal is less than 2. In my new field, that shit don't fly. Compared to the neuroscientist I share a department with, my publication record is a joke.
Now, here's where I get annoyed. There are people in my field who would, and have told me, that I am already at a huge disadvantage compared to my peers. People who would tell me to seriously look at alternative careers. People I respect who've tweeted such advice. I am aware of this. I am not playing games anymore. I need to know what I need to do to restack the deck in my favour. So I am tired of people, well intentioned people whose advice on many things I trust, pussy footing around the issue of where I should publish.
Whenever the topic of open access comes up, proponents argue that they have placed postdocs into faculty positions without glam pubs. Detractors then darkly mutter about the selection committees' expectations and promotions and tenure requirements. Yet when it comes to specifics, nada. No one is willing to say HOW they whittle down those three hundred applications to a shortlist of five. I've yet to see anyone go on the record and say "yup, I chucked everyone who didn't have a CNS paper" or conversely "I looked up the candidates' H index and ranked them that way". Or, "our process is opaque, and I'm not sure how I came up with shortlist, but looking back on it, yes most had a CNS paper". Or "actually, it was the K99/R00 that did it".
Our department has NSF type comparative primatology people as well as neuroscientists in it. Recently, we had a seminar speaker meet the postdocs. He was a neuroscientist. The anthropology postdocs on NSF money talked about how, after two years, they were heading onto the job market. The neuro postdocs, and the speaker, all did a double take, as for them, no one was job market ready with less than five years of postdoc and at least a dozen papers, not even considering journal impact. This is the complex quagmire of tacit expectations a postdoc is supposed to navigate as they gauge where to publish and how much.
I'm currently awkwardly straddling paleontology, physiology and neurology, and I'm competitive for anatomy teaching positions. I know what the standards in many different fields are, and they change a lot. As I mentioned, in my old field, it's almost impossible to reach the kind of impact that neuroscientists get. And NIH money is out of the question. So I know for a fact that paleontologists have very different publication profiles to neuroscientists. As a trainee, I need you, as senior people who have been on hiring committees and tenure and promotion committees to level with me. Tell me what I need, what you expect in terms of publication. Spell it out by field, by university, by department. Tell me how you deal with people from radically different background when you do broad searches (like a ecology and evolutionary biology position, for example). Stop it with the dark hints.

Scale, rotate, translate: on moving between fields of biology

I'm currently writing up abstracts for our lab to submit to a clinical meeting. Writing abstracts for a clinical meeting, especially as we work on an animal model, is a very different thing that writing abstracts for a basic science meeting. It's reminded me that my background is unusual compared to the people at this meeting (which I will be attending for the first time). As it turns out, the most active people I follow on twitter are also more clinically oriented, and in a discussion yesterday about animal models, the differences in our scientific backgrounds became stark. To put it simply, I think sea slugs are probably just as interesting and worth studying as humans. If you don't agree, go and read up on how they co-opt the poisonous organs of sea anemones for their own defence. Furthermore, as a evolutionary biologist, the answer to "does knowing about sea slugs help us understand humans" is "of course it does!"
In fact, until I started this postdoc, I'd never worked with live animals. My undergraduate research had involved a little collection of ecological field data (staring at birds through a telescope). My masters and PhD work, however, were all palaeontology. My research was collections based, meaning I spent my time in dusty museums rummaging through drawers pulling out fossilized bones and measuring them. The questions I was interested covered increasingly large time spans (several thousand years for my masters, several million for my PhD). Taxonomically, I looked at the European wide distribution of an entire species for my masters, and several entire orders of mammal for my PhD. It is big questions that excite me. Questions like: how do entire faunas respond to major episodes of environmental change? What is the role of functional specialization in the evolution of goups? How does variation in shape change through time? And, for me, the big one: how does variation in shape of body parts (mostly teeth and bones) relate to how animals function in their environments? I've spent a lot of the past five years thinking about these questions. They are, to me, fundamental to biology, and relevant to understanding organism function at any level. After all, every thing we observe in any organism (yeast, mouse, sea slug, hairless bipedal ape) is a product of evolution. Yet I now find myself writing for an audience that not only doesn't think about things this way, but actually views such thinking as suspect or frivolous. I am not saying they are wrong to think that way (I would only do that after a couple of pints). However, it does require that I learn a new way of talking and thinking about research, about organismal function, about biology, about science.
Given the above, you might reasonably ask what the hell I am doing in my current position. Well that brings us right back to the question of the relationship between organism shape and function. Most paleontological work doesn't test this relationship experimentally. Instead, we establish correlations between variations in shape and differences in ecology, often broadly categorized. A complex and elaborate suite of techniques for quantifying shape variation, correlating it with ecology, accounting for confounding variables such as shared evolutionary history and body size exist to look at this problem. Initially, this approach seemed very promising, allowing me to reconstruct functionally important behavior in fossils, and use it to understand evolutionary change on a macro (millions of years or more) scale.
Ultimately though, this approach became frustrating, because the fundamental premise remained untested. Specifically, I was looking at joints. Although I established that mammals that live in certain habitats have joints of a certain shape, I had no real data on why that might be. This is a major limitation of the comparative approach. And I realised that to fill that missing gap, I had to get data on how animals actually work. I would have to become an experimentalist. So, when through a stroke of luck, I was offered a postdoc in a lab that did just that, even though it was in a different system to what I was initially interested in, and was more clinically oriented than my previous research (admittedly, not difficult), I jumped at the chance.
The transition hasn't been hard, exactly, but it has been challenging. I have met people who are experimental biologists studying evolutionary questions who openly scoff at methods I have used and considered gold standard in my old field. Researchers who express serious misgivings about the validity of methods used to ask those big questions I was so interested in. I've had to learn that big questions can be different types of questions. Questions about complex systems, questions about organismal function, questions about disease etiology.
Ultimately, the research program I would like to pursue requires me to learn to think about questions at both these levels, and hopefully integrate them meaningfully. I've already lost my naivety with regard to many of the questions I wanted to ask about mammalian evolution. Answers will be partial, clues gleaned from the fossil record illuminating clues gleaned from detailed experimental work illuminating clues gleaned from broad comparative studies of living mammals. And many researchers are studying these systems with very different end goals in mind, to do with human health, that make them suspicious of my intentions and my seriousness if I harp on about the shared evolutionary history of all living mammals. It is a valuable experience I think to learn the complex languages of biological research, for all that it is uncomfortable at times.
But I assure you, as animals, humans are not special.