Duane Smith at Abnormal Interests tagged me, and I loves me some books, so who am I to refuse to be mimetic?
Friday Sprog Blogging: how the dinosaurs really went extinct.
On the eve of the elder Free-Ride offspring’s birthday, we ate at a restaurant where the kids’ entrees were served with Dino Tots. Hilarity ensued.
Elder offspring: Please pass the ketchup. I’m going to make a tar-pit on my plate.
How is your graduate education funded (or not)?
Bitch Ph.D. links an interesting op-ed piece in the Washington Post about the challenges of being a single parent and paying for grad school. Given the academia/parenting discussion we’ve been having here, I figured this was another relevant issue to consider.
I’ve mentioned before that the standard practice in science Ph.D. programs in the U.S. seems to be that students get tuition plus a stipend that, depending on the local cost of living, ranges from barely-adequate to almost-comfortable. There are also a good number of U.S. Ph.D. programs in the humanities and social sciences that offer the same deal to their students, although the stipends are frequently less than those offered by science programs and the number of students admitted to such Ph.D. programs is smaller. (At the same university, my Ph.D. program in chemistry enrolled 56 students the year I entered, while my Ph.D. program in philosophy enrolled 7 of us.)
But, some of the comments on the Bitch Ph.D. post make it look like there are a good number of students in Ph.D, programs who are not getting this kind of support — and thus, are either relying on parents or partners for financial assistance or are going into debt. Also, students in masters programs and professional degree programs (M.D., J.D., etc.) are usually presented with a bill rather than support.
How do these funding patterns (i.e., whether you have to come up with the money to go to school or whether the school covers the costs) affect the choices you’ve made (or are anticipating) about what kind of education and career path to pursue?
Which comes first?
This morning, I finished making the slides for a talk I’m giving at the BCCE at Purdue next week. (Any of you chemists or chemical educators in the audience planning on being there?) I feel very proud of myself for having the slides written and ready to use days before I even board the plane. I’m even sufficiently enthusiastic that I may just start writing a paper-version of the content I’ll be giving in my talk.
That brings me to my question for academics and others who work in the media of “paper” and “presentation”:
Which do you typically write first?
Do you write a paper first and then adapt it to a suitable format for presentation*? Or do you write your talk first and then use it as the basis for a paper (which might be more lengthy, formal, detailed, etc.)?
Is this a pattern you’re happy with, or do you ever think you’d rather do it the other way around? (If the latter, what exactly is stopping you or has stopped you from doing it the other way around?)
_________
*Opinions vary on what counts as a suitable format for presentation. There’s this practice in philosophy where, rather than giving a talk, a philosopher will read the audience a paper. This sometimes happens even in instances where the paper has circulated to audience members in advance — which means you can watch the presenter reading his or her paper while audience members read along on their own photocopies of the same paper.
Maybe it’s my early training as a chemist (since, in chemistry, no one gives this sort of presentation), but I have always found the reading-to-the-audience format offputting. But, it’s one where clearly the writing of the paper comes before the “writing of the talk”.
Picking out patterns (or not): a few links.
Here are a few items that have been bouncing around in my head of late. Are they connected to each other? You be the judge.
- “In science, feeling confused is essential to progress. An unwillingness to feel lost, in fact, can stop creativity dead in its tracks.” That is, hands down, my favorite sentence in K.C. Cole’s article in the May/June 2006 Columbia Journalism Review. The article tries to explain why editors (and their penchant for making things absolutely clear) can get in the way of good science journalism, but it has some interesting observations on the nature of science, too.
What, exactly, is meant by ‘a life’?
A tale of two job searches (Having a family and an academic career, part 4).
A long time ago, on a flight to a conference, a friend and I discussed the psychology of search committee members. We noticed that even people who thought they were exceedingly fair and open-minded might unconsciously make decisions that don’t seem fair, but do, from a certain point of view, seem rational. So, when faced with two equally talented and promising job candidates, the committee members might opt against the one with visible signs of “a life” (such as children, a partner, even a serious hobby) and for the one with no visible signs of a life. Why? Well, which candidate is more likely to come in every day (maybe evenings and weekends, too) to bust his or her butt for the job? Which is less likely to be distracted from teaching, research, and service to the organization? Which is less likely to need time off for someone else’s medical crisis? Which is less likely to leave suddenly when a partner gets a job offer elsewhere?
The candidate with no life.
For the job seeker, then, we decided the best strategy would be to hide all traces of “a life” from the search committee. Once you had a job offer, though, you could safely ask questions about childcare facilities, employment opportunities for a spouse, etc., because once the committee was at the point of offering you a job, the committee members had a stake in convincing themselves they had made a completely rational decision that you were the best person for the job. Believing themselves to have made a rational decision to hire you, they could accommodate the knowledge that you came with some baggage; not to do so would force them to engage with the possibility that maybe their decisions were not always based on qualifications for the job.
Four months pregnant with younger offspring, as I prepared to fly, alone, to New York for philosophy’s major job-seeking convention, I couldn’t help but recall this earlier discussion on a plane. I was going stealth with my baggage.
Having a family and an academic career: one blogger’s experience (part 3).
At the end of part 2, I had just dropped the baby-bomb on my unsuspecting advisor. Happily, he did not have a cow about it. Now, as we move into the stage of this story that is A.P. (after pregnancy), we lose the coherent narrative structure for awhile.
Given what the first several weeks with a newborn are like, that’s entirely appropriate.
This, also, is the part of the story where particulars start making a huge difference. The decisions we made were contingent on the range of options that were open to us at any given moment; with different circumstances, we might have been on a completely different trajectory. In a number of instances, we were lucky things worked out as well as they did.
Diagnosis, please?
The name of the ice cream and coffee blended concoction Cappachillo makes me think immediately of some chimeraical combination of a chinchilla and a chupacabra (blended with coffee and ice cream, of course).
Do you suppose this is an indication of caffeine deficiency, heat exhaustion, or both?
Having a family and an academic career: one blogger’s experience (part 2).
Where we left off in part 1: In my fifth (and last) year of funding in my philosophy Ph.D. program, staring down 30, trying to finish a dissertation, and bracing myself for the rigors of the academic job market, I said to myself, “How could having a baby make things noticably more difficult?”
Then I remembered: I’d have to tell my advisor.