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I was surprised the read, over at Incoherently Scattered Ponderings, about the difference The Ponderer sees in hiring a graduate student or a postdoc. Of particular interest were the anecdotes regarding a postdoc who didn’t care to do any of the ‘grunt’ work (soldering), or another postdoc who didn’t want to do any data analysis, favouring undergraduates to do both tasks:
A postdoc in my group wanted to “outsource” most data analysis to an undergrad – which we did (I was lucky to have several talented undergrads) – mostly because postdoc did not want to get heavy into MATLAB. In retrospect, this was a mistake, because now every time we/I had a new idea for data analysis, postdoc had to go looking for undergrad, who was busy with classes, etc. When I was a postdoc I did all of my data analysis – no matter how mind-numbing it was (even though I was often grumpy about it too).
We all like and dislike different aspects of our research. In my field, lots of people hate having to realign lasers, or construct flow cells, or from my old life, pull micropipettes. But I have yet to find someone (other than The Ponderer and his postdoc) who doesn’t love playing around with their data, data that is usually only collected after a significant struggle in the lab. Compound this with the importance of being able to trust and repeat the manipulations you do to tease our important parameters from your data, and I can’t understand why anyone would want to hand off the analysis to someone else. I would prefer to analyze data in lieu of basically any other lab task I can think of.
Comment [4]
I was walking across King’s College Circle and overheard what I assumed to be a couple of graduate students talking about their advisors. As we were walking in opposite directions I only caught a brief snippet of their conversation, but what I did hear I found very confusing:
Grad student 1: “How do I know if I have a bad supervisor?”
Grad student 2: “I really don’t know.”
Everyone’s advisor is different, but so are the needs of individual students. For different students, the same advisor can have completely different interactions and expectations (in fact, necessarily so: a senior graduate student or post-doc should interact differently with their advisor than, say, an undergraduate hanging around over a summer). It all comes down to whether you and your advisor work well together, which I personally think is only related to your own expectations. Some advisors want you in the lab (or the field, or writing code, or whatever…) 100 hours a week, with group meetings on Saturday mornings. Other advisors are in absentia for most of the year and give you very little hands-on supervision. The balance of supervision, freedom, traveling to conferences, etc: it’s all based primarily on a student’s own expectations.
If I run across these two people having the same conversation again, I think I’ll pipe up with the following: If you aren’t sure, I think there are bigger issues than your advisor.
Comment [5]
Jorge Cham started writing Piled Higher and Deeper as a grad student at Stanford and kept it up through his postdoc at Caltech. Finally though, in 2005 he decided to leave academia and pursue his career as a cartoonist and speaker full time. Needless to say, Phil and I are fans of his work and it’s great to see that he’s been so successful. Science has an extensive profile of Cham this week in the News Focus section. It’s also posted on Science Careers so maybe that copy is more likely to be available without a subscription.
Checking the PHD site I was also happy to see that he recently made it to our Alma Mater in the far east: Memorial University! That’s great to see. Newfoundland is a pretty unique place so I hope he got the chance to have a look around. Even better if it makes it into a “tales from the road” comic.
Comment [1]
OpenWetWare tweeted an interesting link to Drew Endy’s take on how to give a good group meeting presentation (though it is clear that this is useful advice for any presentation). Here are a few of my favourite slides:
Giving a good group meeting talk should also benefit you. What are the things you can’t understand or explain, and the rest of your group might be able to help with? If you are in a large group it is often the case that people have no idea what you are doing all the time (particularly if you are spread out over multiple rooms/buildings, as my group is). This is the time to use the collective group knowledge to try and solve problems you might have. For me, item number 3 is particularly important.
This is a pretty accurate reflection of the makeup of a group meeting audience. There will be people who know exactly what you are doing, and those who you never talk to (as per above) might not understand a thing. As my group’s meetings are at 10am on Monday mornings, we also have a fair few Dozers (often me.) Endy’s advice is to peg your talk at both the Lost and the Super Nerds.
Finally, and I can’t agree with this enough:
Biocurious is written by Andre Brown and Philip Johnson, since 2005. Content of the weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
