Languishing Projects

Like just about every other scientist out there, I have far more data than I can write up into wonderful shiny papers. If you want to help/collaborate/take over any of these, let me know. There’s no money for any of these, but if they interest you (or one of your students), get in touch.  You can see more of my research on my website, or on Google Scholar.

 

I have bits and pieces of data (mostly breeding biology-type data like measurements, but also stable isotopes) for a variety of seabirds from:

• New Brunswick (Arctic Tern, Atlantic Puffin, Common Eider, Common Murre, Common Tern, Leach’s Storm-petrel, Razorbill)
• Alaska (Least Auklet, Crested Auklet)
• Newfoundland (Atlantic Puffin, Black-legged Kittiwake, Herring Gull, Leach’s Storm-petrel)
• Gough Island (quite a few species of shearwaters, petrels, & albatrosses)

I also have some data on introduced rodents on Gough Island, Tristan da Cunha, and Henderson Island (Pitcairn group) looking for a good home.

Some of these are already published (or published in part), but if you have any ideas, let me know.

The whirlwind of returning – recommended reads

Tags

LGBTQ, links, natural history, publishing, sexual assault

I’ve just returned from about 4 months away doing field work on Tristan da Cunha, the most remote inhabited island in the world.  I had an absolutely fantastic time, and will reflect on my experiences a bit over the winter.  One of the things I look forward to on returning from the field (where there is little or no internet connectivity, poor email and phones, and a myriad of amazing experiences in nature and natural history) is catching up on all the amazing blogging and writing from my time away.  Below I’d like to highlight a few that caught my attention or various reasons, and add some thoughts of my own.  These are certainly not the only amazing stories from the last few months, and there are others that gave me much more to think about that I’ll write about later.  So without further ado, here we go:

 

#IAmANaturalist reclaim the name campaign celebrates natural history research

It’s no secret that I believe natural history is important and has a place in the modern scientific curriculum, so I was thrilled to see this initiative from the Ecological Society of America’s Natural History section.  The photos and stories on Twitter embody the innate curiousity about the natural world, and the importance of observing the world around us.

 

Ninety Minutes

Kate Clancy recounts three experiences that each took place in an hour and a half.  In particular, her musing that keeping the grass watered and green is a metaphor for the struggles and uncertainty of working to improve the learning and research environment while others seek to overhaul/decimate/table-flip it is worth thinking about.

 

Science’s sexual assault problem

I’m obviously late to the much-lauded New York Times op-ed by Hope Jahren but it’s too important to not include here.  Personally, I really identified with her sadness (and perhaps frustration) at not being able to travel to countries where she felt unsafe, even though this changed her research path, and obviously influenced the questions she pursued.  I’ve mentioned this in passing in the context of LGBT field scientists, too. We still have work to do.

 

Deconstructing creationist “scientists”

This piece from The EEB and Flow makes some excellent points in the context of how non-scientists use credentials to pass themselves off as scientists.  But what struck me and made me twinge a bit was the table that highlighted the four things needed in order to be a scientist.  It included:

• publishing peer-reviewed papers
• being asked to review papers
• securing research funding
• training students

What I take exception to is that the list seems to be very/entirely academia-centric.  As a scientist working for an NGO, supervising students isn’t part of my job description.  And I doubt it is for many in government (though many do).  Similarly, I would argue that many field staff that I’ve worked with are indeed scientists even though they have not published papers, secured funding, reviewed papers, or trained students.  I’ll be writing more on non-academic science in the future, so stay tuned.

 

Making science more welcoming for women and minorities: a workshop

Along the same lines, Ambika Kamath led a workshop on how to make women and minorities more welcome in science, and posted her thoughts and recommendations for others wanting to tackle topics of bias in a workshop environment.  Props for including orientation and gender!

 

Busy is no myth

In which Tim Poisot casts the “I’m always busy!” trope as an example of the Red Queen.  Teach those time management skills early!

 

Conservation Basic Training

Dez Huber tackles a comment by National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Enrick Sala and makes the case that teaching is the “basic training” or boot camp for the next generation of conservation scientists. Couldn’t agree more.

 

Homage to the squished mosquito

A student in Chris Buddle‘s field biology class had a squished mosquito in their field book, and wrote a poem about it. Natural history can be an inspiration for the arts as much as for science.

 

No you’re not paranoid – there is a bias against publishing marine conservation papers

Chris Parsons has an interesting analysis over at Southern Fried Science of the number of marine conservation papers in various journals, and finds them less likely to be published in general conservation journals.

 

Two interesting papers

I don’t often highlight specific papers, but there are two that have come across that are worth looking at.  AS Glen writes in the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America on the “golden rule” of reviewing – review for others as you would have others review for you.  And over at PLoS Computational Biology, Rougier et al. gives some advice for improving figures.  I’ll also plug what I see as a “classic” paper by Don Kroodsma on figure legends.

 

Systematic gender bias in editorial boards in ecology

Again from Tim Poisot, an analysis of the gender disparity in various ecological journals.  Spoiler: it’s not great.

 

The Campus Alcohol Problem That Nobody Talks About

Rebecca Schuman nails it once again in this must-read on the prevalence of alcoholism among faculty, and the consequences for those who don’t partake (or even with less frequency).

 

A handy guide to UK-US feedback

How to tell what your UK or US prof/colleague means in handy tabular format.

 

Finally, but certainly not least, I’d like to highlight a new initiative to profile LGBT scientists that Beth Hellen started recently called LGBT STEM.  I highly recommend you check it out, and if you’re an out worker/student in STEM, submit your own story.  Jeremy Yoder highlighted (again) the perceived lack of queer STEM mentors for young scientists, as was described in Jack Andraka’s op-ed in The Advocate.

How I ended up with an alternative academic job

Tags

altac, jobs, postdoc

Astute readers might notice that the frequency of new posts has tailed off lately.  This isn’t reflective of any change in my interest in blogging, or want for post ideas (trust me on this one), but is caused entirely by the fact that I’m changing continents in a month.

For the last 31 months, I’ve been a postdoc in some program or another.  It’s been simultaneously the most exciting, and most anxiety-inducing experience of my life.  Professionally speaking, being a postdoc has brought the highest highs and the lowest lows.  Yes, lows lower than my first paper rejection, or when I got a red-ink-dripping draft back for the first time, and highs higher than being admitted to a PhD program, or even graduating as a bona fide Phiosophiae Doctor.  And I can announce today that it’s coming to an end.

It should come as no surprise that postdocs (and the closely-related “adjunct” or “sessional” lecturer) are fairly ignored (dare I say neglected?) in the career progression that starts at 17 or 18, and continues, well, for some time thereafter for those pursuing a career in research.  There’s not much funding, and what funding is available has success rates so low they rival the interest rate on the tens of thousands of dollars we often have in student loans.  That’s not to say it’s a living wage, though.  But as others have shown, the search for an academic job does eventually end, sometimes with success.

I keep a folder of bookmarks for a large number of job sites (yes, I still haven’t deleted them), and every Saturday, I would right-click, “Open All”, go grab some tea, and spend anywhere from 10 minutes to 2 hours filtering through, checking out, and generally lamenting the state of my job search.  Throughout my Ph.D., my supervisor and I never really had what I would call a realistic talk about jobs.  “Apply for everything” was his advice, but to someone in the narrow-minded mentality of “academia or bust”, that meant applying for jobs at universities that, shall we say, stretched my abilities.  It wasn’t until I was a postdoc spending hours each week being scared, depressed, and anxious that it hit me – Yes, Virginia, there really is a Santa Ph.D.’s aren’t just for academia.

Perhaps it’s the circles I travel in on Twitter, but this point has been made abundantly clear by many (and much more eloquently than I could do).  When I wrote one of most frequently visited posts on Lab & Field just over a year ago (“What’s a Ph.D. to do?“), several folks got in touch by email and Twitter to either a) commiserate, or b) mention their own successes outside the ivory tower.  That’s when I started adding non-academic job sites to my Saturday.  I applied for a few (mostly in data analysis), but never heard anything positive.

About 8 months ago, a friend of mine alerted me to an upcoming job posting where he worked (it was one of the sites I check every weekend, so this wasn’t “inside information”).  At the time, I was driving across Canada (well, about 4500 km of Canada), so I shelved it until I got back.  I applied in October, had a 30-minute Skype interview in November, and in December, I was invited for a day-long on-site interview.  I flew over in January, and in February, I was offered a job.

So while this might sound like an academic interview, at least on the surface, it’s not.  I’ll not be working at a university.  Or as a government scientist.  Starting on June 1st, I’ll be a (full-time, permanent) Senior Conservation Scientist for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).  The RSPB is a charity, and Europe’s largest environmental NGO.  It’s supported by dues-paying members (the “Society” part of the name).  It has a staff of 1300 people, and operates more than 200 nature reserves in the UK.  And just recently, it launched the RSPB Centre for Conservation Science, of which I’ll be a member.  In particular, I’m in the International Research part of the Conservation Science Department.  My beat – avian and biodiversity conservation in the UK Overseas Territories, particularly Tristan da Cunha/Gough in the South Atlantic Ocean, and Henderson Island, in the Pitcairn Islands of the South Pacific.

This would be where I would add a paragraph or two about how I knew that a career in a university was never in the cards, not matter how many times I applied, and that I sought out an alternative academic (or “altac”) career by design.  Except that wasn’t the case.  Even up until 6 months ago, I still had my eyes set on a faculty job.  I suppose I didn’t choose the altac life, the altac life chose me.  But I’m glad it did.  And I wish I had known more about non-academic careers when I was a grad student and a new postdoc.

 

In the spirit of making things better for those who follow, if you have questions about altac careers (and environmental NGOs in particular), I’ll do my best to answer (though I’m sure I can be a bit more authoritative in my answers once I’ve been there a bit).

 

I’ll continue to do the things I enjoy (working on [avian/marine] conservation issues, doing field work, visiting strange islands, enjoying tea), and that includes blogging here.

So carry on – I’ve got 4 8 12 a few boxes of books to pack up.