End of Summer Academic Sanity Saver: Post Undergrad Lab Jobs Now!
Get a head start on fall by knowing what you want from undergrads and what they can expect from research experience. My 8-point listicle of making it a great experience.
Lessons in Leadership: Why You Should Read Colin Powell’s It Worked For Me
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell offers leadership advice through storytelling in this collection of anecdotes and true tales. Each short chapter derives a lesson from an incident encountered in his military and political service, and occasionally from private life. Often chatty and rarely preachy, the text is as enjoyable as it is informative. An […]
Doing Better in Academics in Your 40’s: You’ll Need an Eye Exam for That
Not long ago, the Fighty Squirrel noticed that as her days wound down, she was struggling to read. Over the course of thirty minutes at the very end of the day, I’d go from not being able to read a computer screen, to not being able to read a book to having a massive headache. […]
The Rube Goldberg Experiment of Hiring Underrepresented Minorities and Harassment of Women in STEM Must End
Rube Goldberg was a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist known for introducing the most complex systems of parts to solve simple problems. Like Zacks Red Bull, Easter egg, Connect Four, locomotive fueled way to push a button.Every time I hear of another initiative to increase underrepresented minorities, to curb the abuses of power that occur to women […]
Unexpected Perks of Editing for a Journal
Six months into being a Reviewing Editor for Journal of Neuroscience and my top favorite things, in no particular order, are: 1) Sending out “Your Manuscript has been Accepted” emails. This is So. Much. Fun. Serving on study section, you never know what’s funded and what’s not, so there’s a lot more immediate gratification here. Of course, my lab thinks I’m a […]
Exercising Your Professional Brand at Conference Interviews
At Vanderbilt, we’ve been doing a lot with professional branding lately. What you wear, what you do, and how you speak, sit, and walk all say things about you and can all become part of the 3-5 keywords you want to have as your professional brand. Karen Kelsky of The Professor Is In is on our wavelength. A […]
I’m the Problem: My Generation’s Addiction to Bibliometrics
Publication-based measures of scientific impact provide little of value to the research community. Despite assertions that bibliometrics can improve the evaluation of scientists and their establishments, we lack a qualitative or quantitative argument that substantive problems were solved following their introduction. I am unconvinced that hiring, tenure, or promotion decisions became more accurate after journal […]
Calm in the Storm: Finding Your Zen at Work
Have you ever had a panicked colleague breathlessly share how hard they are working on grants, papers and mentoring only to find that you feel completely stressed out just having talked to them? It turns out there’s a biological basis for it. A subset of your brains neurons are activated not only when you feel bad or are […]
What Folks Want to See on Your Lab Website
Your colleagues, current and potential trainees, collaborators and yes, study sections are doing internet searches on you with greater frequency. Knowing that people are looking, why not show them what you want them to see? Here’s a list, in no particular order, of things these folks want to see on your first lab website. A picture […]
Change Your Default Meeting Time
I’d like to make a modest proposal. We should stop scheduling meetings with zero time to go from one meeting to the next. Does this describe your life? You have a meeting scheduled from 9:00am to 10:00am. And then another meeting from 10:00am to 10:30am. You have left yourself exactly zero minutes to get from […]