Lessons for the academy from non-academic research: on management

Tags

alternative academic careers, grad students, management

I’ve never technically worked for a university. Two postdocs in government research centres, a stint at an NGO, and now at a museum mean the structures, pressures, and opportunities I’ve had in my professional research career of the last decade have been different to those of my academic (university-based) colleagues. It’s a useful comparison because, at least research-wise, we share many of the same goals. And whereas my friends at universities have teaching & admin, I have curation & admin (or more often, admin and more admin).

One area where I think universities can take a lesson from non-academic research environments is in management. As a rule, researchers make terrible managers, and managers make terrible researchers (exceptions do apply, of course), but when I compare the management I do/receive with that of academic colleagues, it strikes me as an easy win for universities.

By management, I mean the formal reporting, oversight, and support system in place for workers. This includes graduate students. Everything from taking leave to annual reviews and career progression to setting work plans and hiring in academia (as I’ve experienced it) could take something from outside and be improved.

 

Recruitment

Here, I’m mainly talking about graduate student recruitment. Often, it’s up to just the supervisor to deal with recruitment, resulting in a veritable mishmash of processes. Of course, the university will have a formal application/admissions procedure, but the steps before there (or in some cases where students are allocated after admission) is a bit of a mess. A few things to think about:

• are adverts written in a way that minimizes gender bias?
• what essential (required) and desirable (optional) criteria are there for the role? Are these assessed by the application, CV, or interview?
• who else is short-listing applicants for an interview?
• who else is sitting on the interview panel?
• what set questions are being asked of every candidate?
• how are criteria being scored & evaluated?

Daily management

Academics are used to a pretty loose reign and that flexibility is one of the incentives. The same goes for grad school. But there should be expectations of a standard set number of hours worked per week on an agreed schedule (allowing flexibility where possible) that takes into account other university-related tasks, such as courses, TAing, and professional development. I often say that students/staff I manage should work 36-40 hours/week, but I don’t have strong feelings on when those hours occur. Equally, there’s an expectation that once that agreed schedule is in place, deviations should be agreed or at least communicated (e.g., days working from home).

The same applies to annual leave. Staff and students do (should!) get a certain number of days off as annual leave, which should be taken with the approval of the manager. My take has always been that it’s up to each individual to manage their own time, and I will approve leave so long as there is leave remaining. But the key thing is that everyone knows how much annual leave there is, and when it’s occurring (which is particularly important when folks work remotely, and it’s not possible to easily tell on a given day whether they were working or on leave).

Annual reviews & work plans

One of the biggest differences I’ve noticed is in how annual work plans are set, agreed, and evaluated. At the museum, I spent about 2-3 hours with each person I manage setting out their plan for the coming year (they put the first draft together themselves). We then go over it, look at how realistic is, what resources they might need, balance it with other commitments, and then monitor it about half-way through the year. At the RSPB, we allocated defined percentages of time for specific projects; we don’t do that at the museum in part because we had more externally-funded work at RSPB, and at the museum many projects run together and separating time isn’t terribly efficient or useful. The key, though, is that both the staff member and manager agree on the plan, and when progress isn’t being made, it’s reevaluated and actions put in place to allow the person to succeed.

At the end of the year, we again sit down and look over the work plan, see where the successes and challenges were, and use that to inform our plan for the year ahead. This can be easier for permanent staff, where HR structures are in place to support them, and their managers, when goals aren’t met. For short-term/contract staff and graduate students, this is harder because the length of the period of employment is set by external funding.

And the same principles apply when doing one’s OWN review/work plan. Many academics are left to their own devices, except for a short chat with a head of department once a year. A friend of mine at a university has less than half an hour a year with their nominal boss. This is woefully inadequate and results in a plethora of requests for activities throughout the year, often at short notice. Granted, it’s also trickier in universities where one can be beholden to several functional managers — one person assigns teaching roles, another has more interest in the research & admin side, and they don’t always (ever?) talk to each other when setting annual workloads.

 

Now, I’m not advocating for micromanagement (which seldom works, and takes a LOT of time), but I think the pendulum needs to swing back somewhat in university environments. Structures to support managers, both in their own work and in managing the work of others, just aren’t there and this causes a great deal of frustration, anger, and chaos. The flexibility, freedom, and independence is why many pursue careers in academia, but in many places (certainly not all, but most that I’ve encountered/heard of) there needs to be better and appropriate support.

Few in research get any training in effective management; heck, I’ve picked it up along the way. But a combination of being sensible, compassionate, and understanding combined with structures to support both my staff and I have resulted in, I like to think, most successes, and dealt with any bumps along the road in an appropriate way. There’s always room for improvement in any organization, granted, but I’ve found it to be one of the areas where academia lags behind non-academic science institutions significantly (for a variety of reasons).

The system of student research in the UK fundamentally broken

Tags

DTP, grad students, NERC

Hot take alert.

Having worked in university-adjacent and research-based institutions for the last 5 years in the UK, I’m acutely aware of the challenges around getting research done. A common solution is, of course, to have undergraduate or graduate student researchers. This can be for an honours, masters, or PhD degree, for example. And while student training hasn’t been a formalised part of my job, I recognize it as essential for the progress of professional science (and not just in research, but cutting across many spheres, like communication, policy, industry, and more). Long story short, the way to get more research done is, unsurprisingly, to have more people working on it. And I know I’m not alone in having a lengthy list of projects that I think need doing.

So what are the mechanics of this in the UK? Unfortunately they do not tend to work in researchers’ favour.

The first is the masters programmes. The museum participates in three such programmes, run through two London universities. Students cycle through varying numbers of modules (taught, and research projects) over the course of a year, meaning a student dedicates ca. 4 months to a single project. There are also longer MRes programmes which tend to be 8-12 months as well, but we’re not formally partnered in any of those at the moment.

Leaving aside the £9000 tuition fees and other barriers to entry from an undergrad degree, the reality is that 4 months is frighteningly short to accomplish a research project, particularly if any data collection is required. The result is the prioritisation of the student’s research report so that they can achieve their degree, which inevitably means a lot of “we can do that later when we turn it into a paper”. But upon graduation, seldom do students have the time (and indeed they are doing it in their own time if at all) to revise reports, do additional analyses, and turn their thesis into a manuscript. It then falls to the supervisor who must often engage in manuscript necromancy and spend a not inconsiderable amount of time doing the revisions, submitting the manuscript, responding to reviewer comments, and more. And this assumes that the analyses are correct and complete, that the data are collected appropriately, and analyses can be reproduced/altered. In my experience (n = 4), only one (my masters first student) has gone on to getting it published, and that was thanks to an additional collaborator who took the brunt of the work. The whole process took 4 years after graduation. And this is by no means a dig at the students! They’re in a tough spot where increasingly masters degrees are seen as an essential precursor to a PhD (in a way that North American research-based masters degrees haven’t been over here). But the time allowed just isn’t enough.

What then of PhD students?

In the UK, there are basically 2 ways of securing a PhD student for your research group: a) have a huge grant that can pay for it (the full cost of a PhD student is ca. £25k a year, plus research costs), or work through one of the Doctoral Training Partnerships (DTPs). For those not in the know, NERC, the Natural Environment Research Council (and it’s companions in other fields) funds these studentships. But rather than dish them out directly, and likely in an attempt to make sure not everyone who gets one goes to Oxbridge, they award the funds to consortia of universities. There are 17 DTPs through NERC, each of which covers a particularly theme/group of universities. Note that if your university isn’t covered, you don’t get students through this route.

But there are also all kinds of unwritten allocation rules to prevent one university in the consortium from taking all the students (and all the money, which happened in the first year at one place). But it means a rigid system of quotas. For example, the museum is part of the GW4+ DTP, covering Bath, Exeter, Cardiff, and Plymouth. But we only get one “lead-supervised” studentship in the whole 5-year cohort (It could be one a year, but that’s not entirely clear). Either way, given the same student, same project, and same supervisory team (we need someone at a uni because the NHM can’t award degrees) the student may or may not get funded because of who’s listed as the “lead” applicant. This happened to me last year.

Take another case: the London NERC DTP receives >700 applications for a measly 13 PhD studentships. This means that one must basically have an absolute top undergrad degree, an absolute top masters, have publications, volunteer (yes, volunteer!) experience, and more. That’s imply not attainable for many students, and is a sure fire way to limit diversity.

As a consequence, it means that at conferences, students want to come and talk about doing a PhD, but even if we work with them, carefully craft a project around their interests and for which they’re uniquely qualified (i.e., game the system), they could still not be awarded the studentship. Equally, a student need not be in touch directly with a potential supervisor before applying, so if they’re admitted to the DTP, the DTP is essentially forced to get them a project.

Lastly on DTPs, because students aren’t linked with specific projects (in some DTPs) until after a 12-week “rotation” across the different partners, there’s a lot of wooing and spoiling of potential students who know they are valuable to supervisors, and I have been dragged on and on by some in the past who ultimately choose a different project.

The system, dear reader, is broken.

I’m not saying it’s better or worse than what came before (I wasn’t here), but it’s pretty clear to me that my time as a PI is better spent just doing the science myself, or working with students overseas where entry requirements aren’t as convoluted and disconnected (e.g., Australia, Canada, US). Which is quite sad for me, as it means I’m unlikely to have “my own” lab, or cohort of students to whom I can impart what I think the culture of science and scholarship should look like. And I really miss that.

If you’re a current (!), or prospective student reading this, though, don’t take it as a signal that you shouldn’t get in touch. There may well be other ways of making things work, but so far I’ve found discussion of the frustrations of supervisors in student recruitment in the UK to be largely hush-hush.

NERC, and other research councils, need to rethink this system. I’m happy to consult, at my usual rate.

 

Post edited 02 Aug to clarify the masters-level courses and their varying requirements.

Combatting the overabundance of reference letters

Tags

grad students, hiring, jobs, reference letters

There is a beast that, though incredibly abundant in the world of science and academe, is one for which I have yet to really figure out its purpose.  The reference letter.

It’s a usual box to check when committees put together requirements for job applications, grants, or grad school admission.  But I’d argue that not only do reference letters not really serve the purpose they may have in the past, but that they can actually be detrimental.

Though relatively nascent in my research career, I think I have sufficient bona fides to call for a massive reduction in the ubiquity of reference letters.  Apart from reviewing several grants that require such letters, I sat on a graduate admissions committee for two years, during which time, I probably read well over 150 letters of reference for 50-60 candidates.

Now, before I take an axe to the tradition of the “ol’ ref lett”, I should say that they do have a limited place in our academic world – as letters of support from organizations for large grants (>$10k), or in perhaps the final stages of a job competition.  I think a standard referee form is far more effective at communicating what a free-form letter attempts to do when read by a committee member.  But more on that later.

 

Break out the thesaurus

I bet the thesaurus function in Microsoft Word receives no more use than when writing reference letters (except, perhaps, when writing grant applications).  Is Candidate X a supreme leader in their cutting-edge cross-disciplinary field? Is the application of Student X endorsed unconditionally, unreservedly, and wholeheartedly?  Academia is know for its buzzwords, but they come out in full force in letters of reference.  I think Rebecca Schuman has hit the nail on the head when she calls them “hagiographic novellas of the absurd“.  Was that student grant application for $1000 really the best thing a faculty member has read in the last year? Last 5 years? EVAR?! Probably not.  But reference letters seek to elevate the everyday to the exemplary, the mundane to the magnificent, and the typical to the unprecedented (as in “without precedent”).  They are replete with hyperbole which, in my view, makes them disingenuous, especially to those who don’t (or choose not to) play the game of inflationary language. Or the use of “code words” is overly interpreted (“She wrote that he was ‘excellent’, so that means he’s probably just average“).  But these letter are written hyperbolically because that’s just what’s done.  As a reader of these missives, some by luminaries in the field, and well-respected researchers, I can’t help but feel a little twinge of something that leaves a sour taste in my mouth. This proposal certainly isn’t the best thing since sliced bread, and they probably know that, so why write as though it’s the next barn-burner by G. Evelyn Hutchinson, Joan Roughgarden,  or EO Wilson?

 

Time, please

If we suspend, for only a moment, my thesis, and believe that reference letters should be written at every opportunity, for even the smallest grant, or most meaningless application, the shear volume of letters is certainly a frustration on those asked to write them (predominantly faculty).  Having written only a few reference letters myself, I have taken great care to craft a letter suited to the person and the purpose of the letter.  Why, then, if a job advert elicits well over 100 applicants, should everyone provide two reference letters?  Fully 90% of these will, in all likelihood, remain largely unread by the people for whom they were written!  This is part of the problem that Schuman points out when she calls for a central CV clearinghouse.  Now, some organizations are pretty good here, and only request reference letters from those on a long-list (or even on a short-list) for a job, or finalists for grants.  But I’d hate to think of the person-hours put in writing reference letters that wouldn’t be read because the candidate’s application was rejected early on.  It surely must be years.

 

Yes, we’re all individuals!

In their wonderfully satirical film on the foundation of religion The Life of Brian, Monty Python cast member Graham Chapman plays a reluctant messiah.  After the hoards of followers literally follow him home, he attempts to impart a little wisdom:

Chapman: You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody. You’ve got to think for yourselves. You’re all individuals

Crowd, in unison: Yes! We’re all individuals!

The point is, I hope, self-evident.  Reference letters perform a similar function, and after reading a good many of them, I think I can summarize 95% of them as “<Candidate X> is an excellent candidate for <position>, and would be a valuable addition to <department>”, or “I can think of no one more deserving of <award> than <Applicant Y>, who is a <superlative> researcher.”  If the purpose of reference letters is to help a hiring committee or granting agency to make a decision, they sure don’t help.  Rarely, a letter stands out, or is written by someone I know of, and who’s opinion I respect.  But if it’s written by Dr. <Lastname>, Ph.D. from the Department of <Discipline> at the University of <Location>, I have no basis for trusting it beyond what’s written (see also my first point above, and how hyperbole can erode that trust).

 

Moderation, or write reference letters responsibly

I alluded to some possible solutions above.  First, don’t make reference letters required for everything under the sun.  If it’s a small grant or student award, would a signed standard statement of endorsement not suffice?  Do all the applicants for a job need to provide two or three reference letters, or just those that make it to the short-list?  Does someone applying to a M.Sc. program need two letters of reference when a standard form where referees are asked what quintile/decile the candidate fell in their classes/supervised students, and to confirm a few factual statements to reduce applicant fraud?  And when letters of reference are required, perhaps they will be more revered as outlets for genuine feedback, and not rife with overzealous, exaggerated superlatives.

How do I find a postdoc? A practical guide for biology & sustainability science

Tags

grad students, hiring, jobs, NSERC, postdoc

Finding a postdoc isn’t easy.  In fact, it’s probably the number 2 or 3 search term that brings people to The Lab and Field.  As much as I might lament the postdoc experience, it can also be a very rewarding part of an academic career (or a career destined for industry, government, the private sector, NGOs, or any other organization that does or uses scientific research).

But as a PhD students, I had no idea what a postdoc was, or where to find one.  I just knew that I needed to have one.

Fast forward three years, and two postdocs later, and I, along with a couple of other local postdocs, presented a workshop to graduate students today on how to find a postdoc, focusing mainly on ecology/biology, but also sustainability & social science.

We put together a resource of current programs, mostly in Canada, but also covering the US National Science Foundation (NSF), and some overseas programs.

The presentation is on figshare for all to see!

This is a workshop we’ll likely give again in the years to come, so additions, corrections, and any other input is welcome.

A postdoc isn’t for everyone, and it isn’t for every career path.  But for those going down the postdoc road, we hope our collective years and experiences can be beneficial.

The never-ending search for an academic job does end… eventually

Tags

grad students, hiring, jobs, NSERC, postdoc

A while back, I asked for readers to contribute data on the number of applications and interviews they put in for faculty jobs (or equivalent, e.g., government scientist, full-time scientist at an NGO, etc), and now the long-awaited results.  Hang on to your seats, job-seekers (and hiring committees), here we go (and pardon my hastily-created figures).

Basic demographics

There were 63 respondents, and I didn’t collect data on age or gender.  Most respondents were biologists (54%) or ecologists (21%), and nearly all were in some field of science (hello, dear Science Policy reader!).

Of those, 27 (43%) were my fellow postdocs, 22 (35%) were tenured faculty, 5 were non-tenured faculty, and there were 6 graduate students (5 MSc, 1 PhD), 1 research associate, and 2 folks that have left academia (Post-Ac).  That said, my further analyses were restricted to postdocs and tenured faculty (which were the career stages I was most interested in to begin with), and I didn’t look at differences among fields.

Applications

First, off, the ever-present question looming over postdocs is “how many applications do I have to prepare?”.  Looking at tenured faculty responses, the median answer is about 8.5 (1st quartile: 4; 3rd quartile: 30), but there was obviously a huge range.

And how do postdoc respondents compare?  Well, by all accounts, we’re almost there! (median: 6.5 applications; 1st quartile: 3; 3rd quartile: 22).

If we (incorrectly, I might add) use the mean ± SD to compare with my NSERC postdoc exit survey, there are some interesting similarities.  The NSERC survey found respondents submitted 15 ± 20 applications.  Tenured faculty responding to my survey had 20 ± 24, and postdocs 16 ± 19.

It’s important to note that the number of applications isn’t really a good metric of the job market.  Some people are more selective in their applications.  The advice I got as a grad student was to apply for everything (I don’t necessarily think that’s a good strategy).  And as I’ve discussed before, job search strategies between Canadians and USians differ quite significantly, and likely owing to the sheer number of institutions in the US (>4000) compared with Canada (~100).

But let’s soldier on, shall we?

Interviews

Ah, the academic interview.  That glorious 1-3-day excruciating event during which your every move is critiqued silently (wait, you put butter on the scones before jam? Tsk tsk), and you over-analyze every decision (“Should I get the soup for lunch? What if I spill it on my one set of dress pants? Is it too expensive? Are we even having appetizers? Oh god!” was an actual thought I had at my first on-site interview.  Tell me that’s a healthy reaction).

But nearly-overpowering anxiety aside, how many times did tenured faculty have to go through this arduous process?  The median response was 3 times (1st quartile: 1, 3rd quartile: 5), and no more than 8.

And just like the job applications, postdocs are following close behind – median: 2 (1st quartile: 1, 3rd quartile: 4; max: 7).  So as a population, we seem to be “almost there”.

In the NSERC postdoc exit survey, respondents had 3 ± 7 interviews.  Converting my survey numbers shows faculty with 3 ± 2, and postdocs with 2 ± 2.  So it seems the NSERC respondents were considerably more variable (but then again, their range was 1-99, and I find 99 interviews to be a bit suspect).

What’s evident is that while a bunch of people are successful at landing a job on their first interview, most aren’t.  And again, this doesn’t account for job offers that candidates decline (for various reasons).

The Application:Interview ratio

This brings us to the main point of my original post – how many applications must one complete per interview?  If you recall, the NSERC group showed ~5 (which I thought was low).  Survey says …

Tenured faculty (who, let’s remember, started their jobs between 1 and ∞ years ago) submitted a median of 5 applications for every interview (1st quartile: 3, 3rd quartile: 7).  For comparative purposes, that’s a mean of 7 ± 7.  But also quite obvious is the long tail to the data.

And what about postdocs (75% of which were currently looking for work in this survey)?  We’ve submitted a median of 5 applications for every interview (1st quartile: 2, 3rd quartile: 9).

So it turns out that while 5 applications/interview is “average”, there’s a lot of variation.  The big question, though, is whether this is different between tenured faculty and postdocs.  A basic two-sample t-test says it isn’t (p = 0.96), and ditto for the less powerful non-parametric Wilcoxon ranked sum test (p = 0.70).  But insert the usual caveats of low sample size, and lots of confounding variables (age, gender, field, country, …) here.

The bottom line

A significant chunk of postdocs’ time is spent applying for jobs, and this process could be streamlined considerably.  And while some seem to land a faculty job with relative ease, it’s a slog for many others (submitting up to 80 applications in total, and >15 for every interview).   At the same time, though, the number of PhD job seekers is rising at a much faster rate than faculty jobs have been created.  My survey didn’t account for what kinds of jobs folks applied for, and there’s an increased awareness of “Alt-Ac” or “Post-Ac” jobs.  And it also includes applications for postdoc positions.

The postdoc career stage seems to be the pinch-point for academics in Canada.  And it’s very easy to get discouraged when so many applications (that take considerable effort) don’t pan out.  Part of the solution would be increased support for postdocs through NSERC and similar programs, and a reduction in the insane amount of duplication that goes into job applications.  Faculty search committees can also help, by not requiring letters of reference until the long/short-listing process, for example, which would save everyone time.

But lastly, and perhaps most importantly, it’s important for postdocs to have a good support network.  The job application process is fraught with giddy highs and depressive lows, all in a short period of time.  Whether this is a faculty member, other postdocs, labmates, friends, and/or family, having a group of people with whom you can share the exciting news about interview requests, or the crushing news that you weren’t short-listed will only help. The adage that “something will come up eventually” will start to grate on your nerves, but those who speak it mean well.  And what “comes up” might not be a tenure-track faculty job, though it can still be fulfilling.

So once more unto the breach, dear postdocs, once more.

 

UPDATE (1 Dec. 13) – check out this post, and the figures that show the career trajectories in science, and the significant amount of attrition.  <1% of those who start in science end up in the professorial route (though 30% might consider themselves “early-career researchers”). It also has considerable resources for non-academic jobs (ht Grant Jacobs)

Why research seminar series suck, and how to make them better

Tags

academic culture, grad students, seminar series

The regular seminar series is a cornerstone of departmental life for many institutions.  Every week (or occasionally more/less frequently), a member of the department, or more often a visiting researcher, is invited to give an hour-long seminar about their research.  But depending on the culture of the department, this can either be an incredibly enriching experience, especially for grad students, or one of the most pointless exercises in graduate education.  There’s no magic bullet that can turn an ailing seminar series around and make it standing-room only, but there are some things that we can all do to put it on that path, from grad students up to department chairs and faculty deans.

Seminars should not be mandatory

The first indication that you have a problem with your seminar series is that it’s mandatory for grad students.  This sends the signal that going to seminar is something they have to do, not something they want to do.  It says that “we can’t get grad students to come voluntarily because our seminar series sucks, so let’s force them to attend!”  This is treating a symptom, not an ultimate cause of the problem.

Hold seminars in an appropriate room

If your seminars are perpetually half-full, move to a smaller room.  Nothing says apathy more than an experience I had giving an invited seminar at a Canadian university that shall remain nameless.  The room was the department’s main lecture hall – a cavernous room of about 20 rows of seats that sat probably 200.  The seminar was attended by maybe 60-70 people, 90% of which sat in rows 18-20.  If the talk had been in a smaller classroom of ~75-100 seats, it would have given me a more positive view of my experience (rather than talking to a mostly empty room with a terrible echo).  Seminars are a lot like theatre (in fact, I would argue that the job of producing a theatrical production has a lot in common with producing a seminar series).  I wouldn’t hold a small one-act play with local actors at the St. James Theatre (a lovely place on West 44th in Manhattan that seats about 1700 people).  Make the room fit the production.

Schedule seminars at an appropriate time

My personal favourite is Friday afternoons – a great time to unwind, and put my own work aside for an hour.  Regardless of when they’re held, try to minimize the overlap with other classes, labs, or standing meetings (or at least rotate through somehow so the same people don’t miss seminar each term).  I prefer end-of-the-day seminars, but then again, I don’t have kids to wrangle, or a long commute.  Take the temperature of your department, and try to accommodate as many people as you can.  If there’s a large group that perpetually can’t make it, try alternating times each semester (e.g., Fridays at 4 during the fall, Tuesdays at 10 during the winter).

Get student groups to organize speakers

When the department’s graduate student association takes responsibility for organizing speakers, booking the room and AV equipment, etc., it gives the students a sense of ownership over the series – it’s their seminar series.  It’s also a fantastic way for students to contribute to the life of the department.  Students will know the research interests of their peers, and they can draw on a large pool of interested parties to suggest speakers.

Maximize interaction between the speaker and the department

If the graduate students organize the series, have one of them act as a host for the day.  We did this when I was at the University of New Brunswick, and I hosted two world-class researchers.  I picked them up at the B&B near campus, they could stage their gear in my lab/office, and I shepherded them around for the day.  After the seminar, we went to the grad bar for a drink (mine and the speakers’ were covered by the grad student association), and then off to dinner with 4-6 faculty and grad students for more informal chatting (again, mine and the speakers’ covered by a generous donation from the restaurant).

During the day, have the host coordinate meeting times with faculty and grad students even if the speaker is from the same department or university or town.  Talk about research, talk about academia, talk about science, but the key is to get grad students interacting with the invited speaker.  For early career-researchers that have been invited to give a seminar (or even grad students if that’s part of their program), the interaction with diverse faculty and students is important.  Just because there’s a molecular ecologist speaking doesn’t mean s/he shouldn’t meet with the ethologist, and vice versa.

Balance speakers’ research interests, but not necessarily in proportion to those in the department

Having a balanced seminar schedule each term shows that there are no favourites.  No one enjoys going to seminars week after week if the topic is radically removed from their own research interests.  But even if your department has a large contingent of botanists, there are only so many weeks in the seminar series (usually about 8-10/term); filling half of those with botany talks isn’t going to make it a truly departmental seminar.  Have a good mix of speakers so that there’s something for everyone.

Have/sell coffee/tea/beer; rotate “snack duty”

One of the great things about the seminar series at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where I did my PhD, was that the grad student society purchased beer from the student union, and sold it at seminar for $3/can.  What better way to wrap up a Friday than seminar and a beer?  And rather than purchasing snacks from a campus chain, delegate snack duty each week to a different research group (ideally matched with the speaker).  If this is established at the start of term, it not only gets more students involved in the seminar series, but again encourages the collegial atmosphere of the department (make sure to thank the snack providers at the end, too!)

Have at least one non-science seminar each year/term

Bring in someone from the sociology, history, English, or other non-science department to give one seminar a term/year.  My most memorable was when we had a faculty member from the philosophy department give a seminar on testimony, and how important it was to science.  The room was packed, and the discussion at the end was engaging.  So whether it’s someone to talk about science in literature, science and gender, the philosophy of science, or the history of science, mix it up mid-term.

Remember the audience

As a speaker, remember that your audience is a general biology audience. I don’t know what the FRK1 pathway controls (and what it’s downstream upregulation of cofactors does). Likewise, I don’t expect my audience to know about biological mercury pathways, or the nuances of Dirichlet distributions generated from Bayesian isotope mixing models.  A seminar is an exercise in science communication, an important aspect of which is knowing your audience.

Establish and cultivate a culture of collegiality within the department

I’ve alluded to this above, but one of the best things you can do to make the department a welcoming haven of researchers from MSc to emeritus professors is to encourage collegiality.  Grad students can and do make important contributions to the life in the department, and should be treated as colleagues.  I often bantered, jabbed verbally, and chided jokingly with profs in my department, and they did the same to me.  For many of us, the seminar series was a chance to unwind with colleagues in a casual atmosphere, and was the only regular place to interact with many in the department outside classes, committee meetings, and impatiently waiting for the printer/photocopier to be available. Embrace this time, and foster these casual connections.  You never know when you might  need to rely on those relationships.

 

At the end of the day, the seminar series is a pretty good bellwether or canary in the coal mine for assessing life in the department (and yes, it’s used by those there on job talks, too!).  I don’t think I’m suggesting anything radical, and most of it comes from my own experiences.  Take a look at your own seminar series – critically.  What works? What doesn’t? Don’t be afraid to shake things up.

How likely are you to get NSERC funding in ecology & evolution? (updated)

Tags

grad students, hiring, jobs, NSERC, post graduate scholarships, postdoc, tenure track position

Spoiler alert: not very.

Research costs money.  Whether it’s lab analyses, field work, or just paying people, research costs money.  It’s a lesson that every nascent B.Sc. graduate learns when they start asking potential supervisors.  “Do you have any funding?” the supervisors ask, “No”, the student replies. The chances that they’ll be able to join the lab are therefore severely reduced.

If we assume a 2-year MSc, and 4-year PhD, funded at minimum NSERC rates, that’s about $119,000 over 6 years.  Now, some of that could come from a variety of sources, including NSERC post-graduate scholarships (PGS).

Then the search for post-doc funding begins, and as I’ve pointed out, the odds aren’t good.  And most folks will do 2, 3, or more postdocs before they land that most fabled of academic jobs: the tenure track position.

But the struggle doesn’t end there – research groups rarely fund themselves (unless you run analyses for others, but that’s another story).  In Canada, the main funding mechanism in ecology & evolution is the NSERC Discovery Grant (which run ~5 years, and average just under $30,000/year).

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Some back-of-the-envelope calculations

So what are the chances that a MSc student will go on to land a Discovery Grant & get their first renewal?  And is there a bottleneck in the system somewhere?

First, some assumptions:

• Grad students, and to a lesser extent, postdocs, are funded by a variety of sources, not just NSERC.  But there aren’t any data for those sources.
• NSERC only funds 1 year of a MSc, and 2-3 of a PhD so that any single grad student receives no more than 3 years of NSERC support (which is odd, when the minimum time is 6 years for a MSc + PhD, but that’s a tale for another day)
• NSERC also operates industry-  and government-funded postdoc programs for which there are no numbers (update: see comments for discussion of the industrial postdoc), and which are largely (if not entirely) funded by the industrial or governmental partners.
• For the purposes of this post, I’ll assume that postdocs that receive an NSERC PDF are either able to find another postdoc, or move into a faculty job.
• We have no idea what proportion of PDFs move into faculty jobs.  It’s probably > 50% (PDF, see table 7.1), so let’s be generous and assume that half of the postdocs get faculty jobs where they could apply for Discovery Grants.
• Yes, funding rates vary from year to year, but I’m going to use the most recent (2012 or 2013 depending on the program).
• Lastly, NSERC funding rates for the PGS-M (post-graduate scholarship – masters), and PGS-D (post-graduate scholarship – doctoral) are overestimates because it only reports on those applications that are sent to NSERC by universities. Unless someone from university admin cares to chime in with actual numbers, we’ll work with what we’ve got.

Ready? Hold on to those mortar boards, boys and girls – it’s going to get rocky from here on out.

We’ll start with a class of 1000 B.Sc. graduates who are all admitted to a MSc program to keep things simple (the transition probability is more likely ~25%, but higher for those who do a research-based honours thesis).

The success rate of the combined CGS-M and PGS-M programs is 53%.  Right there, that takes us down to 530.  We’ll assume that all of these funded students love research so much that they’ll go on to do a PhD.

These 530 prospective PhD students face a slightly tougher field, and only 44% of applicants are awarded a PGS-D.  That takes our theoretical group down to 233 people, or only 23% of our starting population.

Now, these remaining 233 newly-minted doctors all need to do a post-doc, and not surprisingly, this is the major choke-point.  The success rate of NSERCs PDF program was 7.8% last year, which translates to just 18 fellowships.  We’re left with under 2% of our starting budding professors.

Let’s assume that half of these are able to navigate the cut-throat academic job search, and land a tenure-track job – that’s 9 wide-eyed (and likely exhausted) faculty applying for their first Discovery Grant (DG).

Early-career researchers (ECRs) are judged a little more leniently in their DG applications, and the ecology/evolution evaluation committee (committee 1503 if you’re keeping track) funded 52% of ECRs (PDF, Table 7). That translates to 5 Discovery Grants in our population.

If you get a DG, you’re more likely to get it renewed in 5 years’ time, and Committee 1503 renews about 82% of applicants (PDF, Table 7).  So after 15-20 years, from the start of a MSc to submitting a tenure dossier, there’s a 0.39% chance of being funded successfully the whole way through.  That’s basically 4/1000.

Program	Success Rate	Number
Starting population		1000
PGS-M	0.53	530
PGS-D	0.44	233
PDF	0.078	18
Tenure Track	0.5	9
DG-ECR	0.52	5
DG-Renewal	0.82	4

As I said above, these are very rough numbers, but they’re based on what’s available.  There are other sources of funding (provincial government, federal government departments, private foundations, etc), but when one thinks of research funding in Canada, one thinks of the TriCouncil (the collective noun for NSERC, SSHRC, and CIHR).

At my only in-person academic job interview, I was asked by the department head and faculty dean what sources of funding I would use to support my research.  My default answer was NSERC.

What’s more, these numbers are generally going down.  NSERC-wide, the proportion of Discovery Grants to ECRs dropped from 77% in 2002 to 62% in 2012.  Renewals are down from 95% in 2002 (!!!) to 77% in 2012 (summary here; Table 2, PDF)

But what’s most important, I think, is that it’s obvious where the bottleneck is: postdoc funding.  NSERC rewards the training of “highly-qualified personnel” (HQP; grad students, postdocs, and technicians) in the Discovery Grant application process. But the postdoc funding available is in high demand and low supply.  I suspect another bottleneck occurs at the hiring stage, but there aren’t many data for that transition.

What we need is a mark-recapture study to generate a population viability analysis (PVA) where we can estimate the “survival” of each “age class” (career stage), and estimate the “transition probability” (success rates) between career stages.

But until that happens, we can at least be honest with the young researchers we interact with.  As a grad student, I always assumed that it would be tough, but not impossible to land a faculty job, and get my own research group off the ground.  Now, I’m not so sure.

UPDATE: as others have pointed out on Twitter, Discovery Grants aren’t the be-all and end-all.  There are other sources out there, and we need to make grad students and postdocs aware of them.  But NSERC is often used to leverage funds from other granting agencies, and is more likely to be unfettered (i.e., not tied to a specific project).

Sexual assault in the field

Tags

field, grad students, rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment

Field work is the main reason I started on a career in science.  I’ve spent months on remote islands in eastern Canada and the Aleutian Islands of Alaska (in the latter case, without resupply for 11 weeks and with only one other person on the whole island!).  I’ve been really lucky and always had great field techs, all of whom I would hire again.  Being in the field with little / no other contact with humanity is a physically and mentally challenging experience, and with one small exception related to a steep hill and late snowfall, everything has gone tickety-boo and a-OK.

Not everyone is as lucky.

Kathryn Clancy, a blogger over at Scientific American, and an anthropology prof at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has compiled some sobering numbers and accounts of sexual harassment and even assault in bioanthropology field camps.

You should go and read her entire post.

Go ahead, I’ll wait.

 

 

And now I’ll let you digest the fact that 59% of her respondents experienced sexual harassment, and 19% were sexually assaulted in the field.

Again, I’ll wait for those numbers to sink in.

What’s equally sobering (or perhaps chilling is a more appropriate word) is that in about half of the cases, the perpetrators of these occurrences of harassment and assault were higher in the chain of command of the field crew (e.g., a faculty member harassing a grad student).

Read that twice to make sure it sinks in.

In about half of the cases, the perpetrators of these occurrences of harassment and assault were higher in the chain of command of the field crew (e.g., a faculty member harassing a grad student).

 

 

Clancy and her colleagues have opened up the survey to other disciplines, and you can participate here.

Ecology and field biology have extensive field components, so there’s no reason to believe that similar offences are occurring at some level; hopefully this will be revealed in subsequent results of the survey.

In the meantime, if you or someone you know has been harassed or assaulted in the field, bring it to the attention of the proper authorities.  I suspect (and Clancy reports) that one’s degree or career aspirations (and the fact that they can rest, at least in part, in the perpetrator’s hands) are reasons harassment and assault (and a variety of other transgressions that I’ll likely write about sooner rather than later) go unreported.

And remember–this is not just an issue for female field workers. Harassment, assault, and rape are not OK. At all. Ever. Period. Full stop. fin.

Retention, inflation, and other unpleasant news

Tags

cerc program, grad students, graduate student stipends, hiring, inflation, jobs, NSERC, postdoc

There’s been much ado about cuts to universities’ budgets lately.  During these discussions, like the one we’re having at U of S, administrators have said that everything is on the table in terms of a complete budgetary review.  Well, almost anything.

Decisions about salaries and benefits for senior administrators, including deans, is left to the board of governors and even though they have seen a zero per cent increase in salaries in recent years, to retain and attract the best employees they must be well compensated, said provost and vice-president academic Brett Fairbairn.

“We need to offer them competitive salaries,” Fairbairn told reporters after the forum.

–The Star Phoenix, 26 February 2013

So why the double-standard when it comes to salaries for presidents, but not post-docs?  VPs of Research, but not PhD candidates?  I should say that I’m emphatically not in favour of massive salaries relative to a group, like the CERC program ($10 million over 7 years, plus outrageous employment negotiations), or Canada’s Vanier CGS Scholarships (valued at $50,000 for three years; this is 25% more than I make as an NSERC postdoc).  But I’m also not in favour of flat-lining graduate student stipends, especially those from the TriCouncil (NSERC, SSHRC, and CIHR).

So, let’s look at data from NSERC:

Unadjusted annual salaries from NSERC

On the face of it, things look good – there’s been a fairly consistent (and sometimes increasing) level of support for all 3 categories (post-doc, Ph.D., and M.Sc.).  But let’s not forget about that pesky financial concept of “inflation”.

NSERC salaries adjusted for inflation (in 2002 dollars)

Oh dear.  That’s not quite so good, is it?  This is based on the Canada-wide Consumer Price Index, where everything is expressed in 2002 dollars.  The result is a 2.2% increase for postdocs over 1996 levels, and drops of 11% for Ph.Ds and 18% for M.Scs.

But recall, too, that the CPI varies by location.  I arbitrarily chose 3 cities: Saskatoon, Toronto, and Fredericton, and looked up their CPI to compare among cities.  In this case, each city’s CPI is relative to 2002 values.  That’s not saying that you could buy something for the same price in all three, mind you (we’ll get to that in a moment).

Post-doc salaries from NSERC adjusted for inflation in 3 Canadian cities (in 2002 dollars)

Ph.D. salaries from NSERC adjusted for inflation in 3 Canadian cities (in 2002 dollars)

M.Sc. salaries from NSERC adjusted for inflation in 3 Canadian cities (in 2002 dollars)

We can clearly see the effect of the “Saskatchewan boom” (and note that I could only get CPI data from Fredericton back to 2008).  I’m going to focus on Saskatoon because that’s where I live.  Here’s the relative change in salaries from 1996-2012:

• PDF: –27%
• Ph.D.: –36%
• M.Sc.: –41%

Wow.  Even with NSERC’s periodic steps up in the salary, the value in real terms for students and postdocs at U of S has really gone down.  As a postdoc, I’m making $15,000 less in terms of purchasing power than someone who was a postdoc here in 1998.

We all know that some cities are “expensive” to live in, and that most of students’ (and to a lesser extent, postdocs’) budgets go to rent.  The vast majority of students and PDFs, being only resident in the city for a few years, rent rather than purchase a house (though some do).  Here are some numbers from the CMHC on the monthly rent of a 1-bedroom apartment:

Toronto: $1096
Moncton: $619*
Saskatoon: $815

* There are no CMHC data for Fredericton, but having lived in both Fredericton and the Moncton area, I can attest to their similar rents.

Let’s extrapolate that across a year, shall we?

Toronto: $13,152
Moncton: $7,428
Saskatoon: $9,780

I admit that these numbers are likely to be high since many students share multi-room apartments and houses, but it at least shows the relative differences among the cities.  Someone in Toronto will end up paying nearly twice that as someone from New Brunswick.  And this isn’t even considering things like the quality of the neighbourhood, access to transit, etc.

And let’s not forget that these are NSERC stipends. Students not supported by NSERC generally receive less in salary support.

So as Canada’s universities face massive budgetary shortfalls, and TriCouncil research funding is increasingly directed to “synergise with industry” for “maximising commercialisation potential” and shunted into multi-million-dollar chairs who spend 8 months of the year away from the university that hired them, let’s not forget that it’s often the students and postdocs that fuel much of Canada’s academic research. That is, when they’re not out looking for part-time work to make ends meet.

Faculty, staff, and administrators all get annual salary bumps (as negotiated individually or collectively), and to “to retain and attract the best”, you can bet your B.Sc. they’re not paying someone in Toronto the same as someone in Moncton.

NSERC’s total expenditures have doubled from 2001-02 to 2010-11, as has their proportional contribution to “People” (vs. Discovery Grants, administration and “Innovation”).  But why spread the jam so thinly over two slices of toast when you can spread it over one and actually taste it?  Why not tie NSERC’s stipend support to the CPI of the city where it will be held (with some minimum), and increase it with the rate of inflation?

There are about 1600 new NSERC scholars annually (1 year of support for M.Sc., 2-3 for Ph.D., 2 for PDF).  That’s roughly 9500 at any one time.  If they ditched the Canada Graduate Scholarships (a measly $200 more for a M.Sc., but $14,000 more/year for a Ph.D.), to bring everyone up to 2002 levels would cost roughly $6 million (based on roughly 200 PDFs, 2000 Ph.Ds, 850 M.Scs).  NSERC’s budget in 2010-11 was $1,075,987,000.  The bump up would be about 0.55% of their total budget.  Where would this money come from? By eliminating the two-tiered CGS.  Doing so would free up roughly $9,786,000.

It’s simple, smart, and effective. Perhaps that’s why it hasn’t been done.

Links to data sources:

NSERC salaries 1: http://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/_doc/FactsFigures-TableauxDetailles/2005-2006Tables_e.pdf

NSERC salaries 2: http://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/_doc/FactsFigures-TableauxDetailles/2010-2011Tables_e.pdf

Consumer Price Index (CPI): http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/econ46a-eng.htm

Saskatoon CPI: http://www.stats.gov.sk.ca/stats/CPI/CPIHistoricalTables.pdf

Toronto CPI: http://www.opseu.org/research/cpitable3a.htm

Fredericton CPI: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/econ09e-eng.htm

1-bedroom apartments, Oct. 2012

Toronto: http://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/odpub/esub/64459/64459_2012_A01.pdf?fr=1363013309421

Fredericton: http://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/odpub/esub/64407/64407_2012_A01.pdf?fr=1363013273824

Saskatoon: http://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/odpub/esub/64443/64443_2012_A01.pdf?fr=1363013509843