Rising to the occasion

The sun is back

2009-03-21T13:33:00.005+01:00

The photo is from a fieldtrip a few weeks ago, on the first day the sun peeked over the mountains this year. Now it's back in full force and in another few weeks we will have midnight sun.

I have spent the transition from the dark time to spring season on getting research projects up and running, getting grad students started on their projects and paying some attention to myself and having a life. Getting the research projects started hasn't been easy, and I'm not quite there yet, but at least I have had some time to devote to this and I do see things develop and begin to see the contours of a reearch program that will work. I have also spent some time with family and haven't been working very particularly long days. The latter will probably come back to haunt me, but it's been good to take it a little easier for a while.

Since my last update I've:

Been to a conference in Scandinavian town where it always rains (not a major important event scientifically, but nice to catch up with colleagues and friends)
Visited home country to attend the christening of my new nieces
Prepared the paperwork for three new MSc students projects including budgets and logistics for field work and developed a project description for something I don't know much about.
Almost finished major revisions on a manuscript I submitted last year (still needs some final comments from a co-author, but is almost ready to go).
Coached MSc student through writing her first abstract, finding funding to go to the conference and preparing a poster for upcoming conference in Grad School City.
Had a week long family visit by sister and toddler nephew.
Prepared week long visit by MSc student including organising housing, safety training and arranging contact with various people who will assist with aspects of the project.
Spent a week visiting youngest sister and travelling with her to Eastern European City where I often go for research.
Worked on getting a student exchange agreement between University above the Arctic Circle, and University in eastern Europe I collaborate with.
Worked on pulling some strings for increased formal collaboration between current university and previous institution.
Gotten up-to date on literature in new topic direction and studied previously published works about rocks from specific time interval.
Done the initial legwork for getting a group together to develop ideas for proposal for continuation and expansion of project.
Gotten an overview of previously published literature on another specific time interval in order to decide field sites for this summers fieldwork.
Maintained some contacts relevant for different angle of new topic direction and explored some other options for how this work may be framed and eventually funded.
Set up meetings during upcoming conference to discuss new project ideas and options for funding.
Started preparing practical arrangements and guest lecturers for field course this summer.
Been on a one-day field trip to explore the geology around town and read up on some of the general literature from this place in order to get a better overview and prepare for next time I run the undergrad general geology class.
Gotten back to practicing Fieldwork Country language regularly
Been socialicing with colleagues and joined a group of female colleagues/friends who exercise together.

What I didn't do was to

Finish the other major revision, which doesn't seem major at all compared to the last two major revisions I have gotten, but still needs to be done, or start preparing the poster I'm supposed to present a week from now.

And now for a more practical attempt at some goals

2009-01-06T11:32:00.000+01:00

I’m taking classes this week and it’s probably a good way to ease into the semester, but half the time they seem to be cancelled or cut short and I end up with some free time on my hands. Right now I spent one such hour on writing a blog post rather than getting started on any of the real work on my to do list. I think I can cut myself some slack as it’s only the second day of the semester and it’s likely I would have prolonged the break anyway if it wasn’t for this course, but I wouldn’t want it to go on like this for very long.

I will have a lot of unstructured time this semester, and that’s promising for being able to be productive, but also dangerous for someone like me who work better and more efficiently if I have a lot to do. In some ways I think the craziness of last year’s schedule forced me to be productive in the short time spans I had available and this year it will just be easy to let administration and all the little day to day tasks take over the days.

I’ve tried various schedules for what to do each day before and they usually fall apart after a while, but maybe it’s time to try to follow a new one any way. So for the weeks where I don’t have another full-time activity going on I’ll try to follow this reincarnation of a previously tried and tested schedule.

For all days where I’m not full-time occupied with something else (at meetings, in classes, travelling)

At least 4 hours research (actual writing and reading):

At least 2 hours writing first thing every day
1 hour reading to catch up on literature

No more than 4 hours admin (anything else than writing and reading incl. student advising, meetings, phonecalls, other research-related tasks, planning, reports):

At least 1 hour spent on typing up field notes, photo lists etc for last year’s field report until it’s done

That’s it.

For this week I’ll spend these extra hours (if any more comes my way) to catch up on the literature for big projects I’m supposed to know something about by now.

A new year and new challenges

2009-01-06T11:19:00.000+01:00

2008 was good but crazily busy with starting a new job, moving and finally getting some publications out. The past three years have been very much about reaching up and out and achieving new things. This year will hopefully be about getting settled and about building a foundation at work and at home on which I can rely for some years to come. Professionally I don’t want to take on more new responsibilities just for the sake of it, and want to build on what I already have and focus on getting better at what I already do. Personally I want to get involved in the community here and keep working on making personal well-being a priority.

I will be teaching very little in 2009. I only have a summer course for four weeks in June-July, but this is a new course and will require some attention to logistics in addition to catching up on the literature and preparing the course. Hopefully the lesser teaching load will allow me to focus on getting through the backlog of papers to write and manuscripts to revise, especially as my main projects are moving towards a heavy writing-up phase in collaboration with many others. I also want to get back to reading and catching up on literature, something which has truly fallen by the wayside the past few years. This post and it’s comments gave some good ideas for how to get back to the pile of papers-to-read that is always lurking. I have three grad students to get started this spring semester and another one to follow up, two conferences to attend in the spring and at least one in the fall, about six weeks of field work planned for the summer and probably more than enough work-related travel. If I can get the two new projects off to a reasonable start, get some papers out the door and some time during the year, when the time is right, start working on one larger and maybe some smaller proposals I’ll consider the year a success.

Personally I want to get back to running or doing other kinds of exercise regularly. I started thinking about how to really make this a priority in December and want to keep thinking about it that way. I also want to learn to have fun outside here in winter. I want to buy some better skis and learn proper skiing, so I’m not afraid of making a fool of myself when being outside. I want to learn to be comfortable with winter fieldwork and all the safety and logistic issues that one needs to know to enjoy time outside here. I’m always shying away from this, because I don’t like things I’m not good at and I’m not practical at all, but really want to approach this in a different way.

I hope I will have more time at home than last year and especially a more regular schedule with fewer interruptions by travel. Never having more than two or three consecutive weeks at home was probably the single most stressful issue last year and the lack of consistency makes it difficult for me to stick to a writing schedule/ training schedule/reading schedule or attend any kind of regular event or activity. I’m sure there will still be travel and for the next few months there will be some travel each month, but we have cancelled a planned vacation in order to get some more time at home and actively limiting travel should probably go on my priority list for 2009.

Happy New Year

2009-01-05T15:35:00.002+01:00

It's the first day of the semester and my first day back at the office after a two week break. the students are back, University above the Arctic circle is buzzing with life and I'm attending a week-long long safety course to learn how to survive the winter field season. I didn't do any work at all during the break and I'm happy about that. I needed to leave the work thoughts behind for a while and focus on other things. I've spent time with my family, met my twin nieces for the first time, spent time with the husband's family and visited grad school city. It's been great to see the sun, sleep, read books for fun, catch up with people, talk to my parents and my siblings, see my nieces and nephews play and just be me for a while. It's also been kind of exhausting because much travel was involved, and I'm not very excited about leaving again already next week for an upcoming conference and another family visit or about settling back into work for that matter. I am excited about being back, though. About sleeping in my own bed, deciding what to eat and at which time and about spending time with the husband in our own home. I'm also excited about being back in the polar night, about getting back to running regularly and about not teaching this semester.

End of semester Saturday morning

2008-12-20T10:13:00.004+01:00

My grades are in.

The revise and resubmit with a firm deadline is in.

I need to go into the office today to catch up on some minor things (email new grad students, email colleagues regarding a grant proposal and next summer's fieldwork, send off some figures to the coauthor for another revise and resubmit and write a recommendation for a student), but aside from that I'm done for now.

I've caught up on sleep, been out to celebrate with the husband who has returned from far, far away and am getting ready for some last-minute Christmas shopping before leaving to spend the holidays with the family.

I can't remember the last time I've felt this caught up on things, but it's unbelievably good.

The Geologists' 100 things meme

2008-12-14T16:29:00.003+01:00

It's a little lame already to be doing a meme again, I know, but I'm in the middle of revising a manuscript with a deadline tomorrow, so this is all I've got for now.

As seen at All my faults are stress related

Obviously I have a long way to go before I'm a fully educated geologist.

1. See an erupting volcano
2. See a glacier (every day, except right now when it's too dark to actually see it)
3. See an active geyser such as those in Yellowstone, New Zealand or Iceland (Iceland)
4. Visit the Cretaceous/Tertiary (KT) Boundary. Possible locations include Gubbio, Italy, Stevns Klint, Denmark, the Red Deer River Valley near Drumheller, Alberta. (Denmark)
5. Observe (from a safe distance) a river whose discharge is above bankful stage
6. Explore a limestone cave. Try Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, Lehman Caves in Great Basin National Park, or the caves of Kentucky or TAG (Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia
7. Tour an open pit mine, such as those in Butte, Montana, Bingham Canyon, Utah, Summitville, Colorado, Globe or Morenci, Arizona, or Chuquicamata, Chile.
8. Explore a subsurface mine.
9. See an ophiolite, such as the ophiolite complex in Oman or the Troodos complex on the Island Cyprus (if on a budget, try the Coast Ranges or Klamath Mountains of California).
10. An anorthosite complex, such as those in Labrador, the Adirondacks, and Niger (there's some anorthosite in southern California too).
11. A slot canyon. Many of these amazing canyons are less than 3 feet wide and over 100 feet deep. They reside on the Colorado Plateau. Among the best are Antelope Canyon, Brimstone Canyon, Spooky Gulch and the Round Valley Draw.
12. Varves, whether you see the type section in Sweden or examples elsewhere (ice-dammed lake deposits in Russia)
13. An exfoliation dome, such as those in the Sierra Nevada
14. A layered igneous intrusion, such as the Stillwater complex in Montana or the Skaergaard Complex in Eastern Greenland.
15. Coastlines along the leading and trailing edge of a tectonic plate (check out The Dynamic Earth - The Story of Plate Tectonics - an excellent website).
16. A gingko tree, which is the lone survivor of an ancient group of softwoods that covered much of the Northern Hemisphere in the Mesozoic.
17. Living and fossilized stromatolites (Glacier National Park is a great place to see fossil stromatolites, while Shark Bay in Australia is the place to see living ones)
18. A field of glacial erratics
19. A caldera
20. A sand dune more than 200 feet high
21. A fjord
22. A recently formed fault scarp
23. A megabreccia
24. An actively accreting river delta
25. A natural bridge
26. A large sinkhole (only small ones)
27. A glacial outwash plain
28. A sea stack (what is this?)
29. A house-sized glacial erratic
30. An underground lake or river
31. The continental divide
32. Fluorescent and phosphorescent minerals (only indoors)
33. Petrified trees
34. Lava tubes
35. The Grand Canyon. All the way down. And back.
36. Meteor Crater, Arizona, also known as the Barringer Crater, to see an impact crater on a scale that is comprehensible
37. The Great Barrier Reef, northeastern Australia, to see the largest coral reef in the world.
38. The Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Canada, to see the highest tides in the world (up to 16m) (not Bay of Fundy, but some other impressive high tides in Bay of Mont St Michel,France and the yellow sea coast, China)
39. The Waterpocket Fold, Utah, to see well exposed folds on a massive scale.
40. The Banded Iron Formation, Michigan, to better appreciate the air you breathe.
41. The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Tanzania
42. Lake Baikal, Siberia, to see the deepest lake in the world (1,620 m) with 20 percent of the Earth's fresh water.
43. Ayers Rock (known now by the Aboriginal name of Uluru), Australia. This inselberg of nearly vertical Precambrian strata is about 2.5 kilometers long and more than 350 meters high
44. Devil's Tower, northeastern Wyoming, to see a classic example of columnar jointing
45. The Alps.
46. Telescope Peak, in Death Valley National Park. From this spectacular summit you can look down onto the floor of Death Valley - 11,330 feet below.
47. The Li River, China, to see the fantastic tower karst that appears in much Chinese art
48. The Dalmation Coast of Croatia, to see the original Karst.
49. The Gorge of Bhagirathi, one of the sacred headwaters of the Ganges, in the Indian Himalayas, where the river flows from an ice tunnel beneath the Gangatori Glacier into a deep gorge.
50. The Goosenecks of the San Juan River, Utah, an impressive series of entrenched meanders.
51. Shiprock, New Mexico, to see a large volcanic neck
52. Land's End, Cornwall, Great Britain, for fractured granites that have feldspar crystals bigger than your fist.
53. Tierra del Fuego, Chile and Argentina, to see the Straights of Magellan and the southernmost tip of South America.
54. Mount St. Helens, Washington, to see the results of recent explosive volcanism.
55. The Giant's Causeway and the Antrim Plateau, Northern Ireland, to see polygonally fractured basaltic flows.
56. The Great Rift Valley in Africa.
57. The Matterhorn, along the Swiss/Italian border, to see the classic "horn".
58. The Carolina Bays, along the Carolinian and Georgian coastal plain
59. The Mima Mounds near Olympia, Washington
60. Siccar Point, Berwickshire, Scotland, where James Hutton (the "father" of modern geology) observed the classic unconformity
61. The moving rocks of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley
62. Yosemite Valley
63. Landscape Arch (or Delicate Arch) in Utah
64. The Burgess Shale in British Columbia
65. The Channeled Scablands of central Washington
66. Bryce Canyon
67. Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone
68. Monument Valley
69. The San Andreas fault
70. The dinosaur footprints in La Rioja, Spain
71. The volcanic landscapes of the Canary Islands
72. The Pyrennees Mountains
73. The Lime Caves at Karamea on the West Coast of New Zealand
74. Denali (an orogeny in progress)
75. A catastrophic mass wasting event
76. The giant crossbeds visible at Zion National Park
77. The black sand beaches in Hawaii (or the green sand-olivine beaches)
78. Barton Springs in Texas
79. Hells Canyon in Idaho
80. The Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado
81. The Tunguska Impact site in Siberia
82. Feel an earthquake with a magnitude greater than 5.0.
83. Find dinosaur footprints in situ
84. Find a trilobite (or a dinosaur bone or any other fossil)
85. Find gold, however small the flake
86. Find a meteorite fragment
87. Experience a volcanic ashfall
88. Experience a sandstorm
89. See a tsunami
90. Witness a total solar eclipse
91. Witness a tornado firsthand. (Important rules of this game).
92. Witness a meteor storm, a term used to describe a particularly intense (1000+ per minute) meteor shower
93. View Saturn and its moons through a respectable telescope.
94. See the Aurora borealis, otherwise known as the northern lights.
95. View a great naked-eye comet, an opportunity which occurs only a few times per century
96. See a lunar eclipse
97. View a distant galaxy through a large telescope
98. Experience a hurricane
99. See noctilucent clouds
100. See the green flash

With all that time spent in the field it'd better be good

2008-12-12T23:00:00.010+01:00

The new Accretionary wedge on Favorite Places for fieldwork is up at Geology News. As usual I was behind on everything, so writing a post of my own slipped to the bottom of the todo list (and that's far down). Anyway the call for submissions did get me thinking about the field, which is my home for some months each year, and to try to work out whether I had a favorite place.

I have a bit of a crush on all my field sites. They are all in the northern part of the northern hemisphere in a a type of landscape I've come to love. They are all in areas where I would probably never have come as a tourist and they all involve my favorite activity of all times - travel. But they are also different. Not only as in actual geographical differences, but also different to me. The first place was like the first love that completely changes one's perspective on the world, but didn't last and now is just a faint memory. The second is the full blown longterm relationship, that gives me a great deal of happiness and inspiration, but which also sometimes sucks beyond belief because I know all it's downsides. The third one is the fling, that now seems to be developing into something more serious.

My first field site was my home for two summers more than ten years ago, when I did fieldwork for my MSc thesis. I went with a fellow grad student whom I didn't know particularly well before we left, but who became one of my best friends. We were both new to geology and to the Arctic and to field work. We didn't understand what was up and down in our outcrops. We didn't know how to do good descriptions of the sediments or what was an appropriate size of a sample and got frustrated with the quality of the data we brought with us home after the first year. The data were really that bad (at least mine were) and we did go back for a second summer to remedy this, but while I was learning how to collect data and what things to look for, I also got sucked into the geology. I hadn't been a particularly enthusiastic student prior to this, but little by little I got genuinely excited about what I was doing. I began to see patterns and systems , to see where my observations fit in with the literature and where they didn't. I went from picking the topic mainly because it gave me the possibility to go to the Arctic, to thinking that fluvial sediments were one of the coolest things ever (I still think so). It also gave me a longlasting crush on Arctic landscapes. I haven't been back to this particular place in ten years, but somehow the Arctic still looks like this* to me.

My second field site is here, and as some readers might know, I go there every summer. It has been the backbone of my professional existence for years, and will, for all I know, continue to be so for many years to come. It's where I get my best ideas. It's where I spend time with my "field family" and where I have local friends and colleagues. It's where know how things work (to whatever degree that is possible), where I know beautiful, peaceful and fun places and places I'd rather never go to again, where I have a history with people and places and where I feel at home.

Lately I've added another field site to the collection. I have spent some time in this area before, including a short field season last year, but next year will be the first time I'll have a real longterm field program here. As with all new things this is one part exciting and one part unfamiliar and a little bit frightening. I don't have the comfort of long term experience or of connection to the people who also work here. It's new and different and a little mechanical, because it is about reusing routines once learned elsewhere and about getting students involved rather than engaging wholeheartedly in the work myself. I do know the area is spectacular though, and that this is something I will be returning to.

*(no photos from this site because I did my Master's back in the day when digital photography was nothing but wishful thinking, and I'm too lazy too scan any of the real photos).

Wordle your dissertation

2008-12-12T00:36:00.005+01:00

Couldn't resist this one. Alice explains how to do it.

I dumped my entire dissertation into the wordle webpage and was more than surprised to see how quickly the whole thing was turned into this little summary.

Click for a bigger image

Some random thoughts

2008-12-10T20:02:00.002+01:00

If a journal has some very special rules for how they want reviewers to structure the review wouldn't it be a good idea to put that information somewhere on the webpage where the review is being uploaded, and not only in an email that was sent weeks ago? Needless to say that I just messed up and put everything in the wrong boxes according to the system outlined in the email.

A major administrative thing is going on at work and although I don't have any real role in this, it is difficult to shake the feeling of somehow being responsible for some action after a year and a half of administrative duties in former workplace. On the other hand it's been nice to see that there are people here who will and do speak up for my interests, even if it feels weird to be in a position where I am not in a role to speak up for other people's interests.

Most of my department has left for holidays or for that big conference on the other side of the pond where the geobloggers are going to meet up. It would have been awesome to meet the geobloggers and to attend this session, but I'm actually happy, I'm not going anywhere. Quiet hallways, no students and the dark time is just what I needed to up the writing productivity. I will go conferencing in Scandinavian town where it always rains in January, so I'll get my fix. Speaking of which, I also need to come up with some ideas for a maybe slightly too ambitious talk, I've been stupid enough to submit an abstract for at said conference.

How do you do your science?

2008-12-09T22:27:00.008+01:00

The way I tend to think my kind of earth science should be done

1) Sit down, read literature, think of interesting problems and come up with a suggestion for a study

2) Go in the field to collect data

3) Type up field notes, organise waypoints, photos, sketches and samples

4) Spend many hours in the office bent over said data thinking up explanations for variations, comparing data from different sites and looking up references in the literature.

5) Carefully draw clean versions of figures to go into papers and presentations and write up the findings.

What the process (and division of time between tasks) really looks like these days

1) Meet with some random friends and colleagues and throw some ideas around at a meeting or a party or both, chat to another colleague over email, do some sketching on the back of a piece of paper, send some emails back and forth to people who may or may not be collaborators some day and bingo at some point a project idea has emerged.

Secure funding

Plan logistics, buy tickets, get permissions, buy and get together equipment, organise maps, food, safety gear, people, travel plans. Pack. Travel.

2) Advise students and other newcomers, buy food, gas, equipment, stuff, whatever. Do some field work and collect some data. Organise logistics and plans for the following days. Talk to people, make arrangements for next years field season. Discuss potential developments of future projects.

3) Type up field notes and organise data in small one hour increments throughout the year or in a frantic last minute sprint come May. Meanwhile tell students about the importance of keeping good field records.

4) Throw some ideas around at conferences or workshops with colleagues, prepare some preliminary figures when getting stuff together for talks or lectures, prepare some preliminary figures for co-authored talks given by colleagues, throw some more ideas around when talking to people about other things or while discussing writing projects. Travel to meet with collaborators and maybe collaborators and discuss potential presentations, collaborations, publications and some research ideas. Occasionally jot down ideas or outlines for manuscripts or put aside articles that will be relevant.

5) Start working on a paper based on various preliminary figures and descriptions used in presentations and more or less well organised field data. Do some literature searches and read up on the literature that seems most important. Draw final figures and write up the work. Meanwhile think about the implications of the study and how this can be developed into new projects.

I sometimes think about what happened to reading and actual analysis of data, but hope that discussions and presentations is just a different way of working through the material.

How do you do your science?

100 things I maybe did or did not do

2008-12-09T21:41:00.004+01:00

I'm working on keeping up with my priorities. It's not working very well to be honest. Last week it was writing that fell by the wayside, this week it's sleep and exercise. The plan is probably too ambitious or just not flexible enough. I do however think that it's been good and useful to think in terms of priorities, in the sense that it makes me more aware of how I choose to use my time. It's for example a choice to spend all day working on the revise and resubmit because it's more important and put off the evaluation of student reports until tonight. It's also a choice to leave you with this little meme placeholder, while I go and type up some comments for the students.

Seen at Bright star's

(Bold the ones you've done)

1. Started my own blog
2. Slept under the stars (I'm a geologist after all. I live outside for about a quarter of the year)
3. Played in a band (does it count if one was twelve years old and part of an after school music activity)
4. Visited Hawaii
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than I can afford to charity
7. Been to Disneyland/world
8. Climbed a mountain (again - a geologist, what do you expect)
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sung a solo
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched lightning at sea
14. Taught myself an art from scratch
15. Adopted a child
16. Had food poisoning
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown my own vegetables (not since I had a small piece of vegetable garden as a kid though)
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. Slept on an overnight train (oh yes, many times)
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitchhiked
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill
24. Built a snow fort
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping
27. Run a Marathon
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
29. Seen a total eclipse
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise (worked on one)
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
34. Visited the birthplace of my ancestors
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught myself a new language (Russian, I'm not saying I'm any good at it)
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David
41. Sung karaoke
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
44. Visited Africa
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
46. Been transported in an ambulance
47. Had my portrait painted
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. Kissed in the rain
53. Played in the mud (this is my favorite question as it is practically what I do for a living)
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Been in a movie (does a sixth grade school project movie count)
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia (more times than I can count)
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies (this is a very americanized meme, so I'll substitute this with girl scout advent calenders of which I must have sold hundreds)
62. Gone whale watching (or rather seen whales when out doing some science anyway)
63. Got flowers for no reason
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
65. Gone sky diving
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
67. Bounced a check
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten caviar
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
77. Broken a bone
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book (does a digital book count)
81. Visited the Vatican
82. Bought a brand new car
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had my picture in the newspaper
85. Read the entire Bible
86. Visited the White House
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
88. Had chickenpox
89. Saved someone’s life
90. Sat on a jury
91. Met someone famous
92. Joined a book club
93. Lost a loved one
94. Had a baby
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a law suit
98. Owned a cell phone
99. Been stung by a bee
100. Ridden an elephant

Day 4...or are you bored yet?

2008-12-04T21:50:00.004+01:00

I spent nine hours working today and didn't get home until 8 pm, so I'm giving myself a break tonight.* Hiding under a woolen blanket with a big cup of coffee and realising that this week has been the first in more than a month where I had any significant downtime at home. I had to reschedule my plans for today and take care of an urgent budget issue, but I did get another few of the admin/teaching tasks out of the way. As the semester and the fiscal year is coming to an end there are all sorts of paperwork things that must be attended to now within the next few weeks. I keep a list of correspondence/paperwork/follow-up things I absolutely must do and it's good to see the strike-throughs on the list add up. Today I finished the exam sheet for my undergrad class, did all remaining travel accounting for this year and had a meeting with a colleague to go over the details in the budget for a project I'm leading a module of. Yesterday I was discussing the outline for a master's project with a potential new student, sent off some follow-up emails to people I met at meetings lately regarding collaboration and gave a talk at the university. Earlier this week I got through my email after weeks of neglect, submitted a final course description for my graduate course, found someone who agreed to be external examiner for the undergrad course and had a phone meeting with a new collaborator regarding joint field work next summer. It's good to see that things are happening. It's also good to see that things are coming together and reaching a natural break, where it is acceptable to leave it for a while over the holidays and pick it up again later.

The new research program is coming together. I have two new projects in the start up phase. Am getting people together and building a network of activities. I have a new master's student who will start working on some of this and maybe another one on a different side project. I have a new collaboration with someone I will go in the field with this summer and between us we have a bit of funding and possibilities for some more. After the break I need to deal with logistics for the field season and some serious preparation for a proposal with one project group, but right now things are more or less on track.

The teaching related administration is almost done. I need to spend some time tomorrow going over the budgets and maybe order some maps and field equipment as long as I can still squeeze them into this years budget. The course plans are submitted and will either be approved or not. It's out of my hands now. If I get the go-ahead for planned courses I need to start developing plans in more detail, organising logistics for field excursions and inviting guest lecturers, but all this awaits decisions from the higher-ups.

I'm not burdened with a lot of general administration. I'm on one committee thus far and I have a small task to complete in that capacity. Most of this involves a colleague who will be away for the next month or so, so it seems this must be postponed. I should probably begin to look into my part before the break, though.

I may be whining and complaining, but things are really going rather well. If only I could find enough time in the day to get the revisions I'm working on now turned around, before they kick me out of the volume for being too slow, I think I could be happy.

*It goes without saying that I didn't reach my goal today either. I did two hours of writing this morning and then the rest of the day was swallowed by meetings and all the accounting business. I haven't given up on the goals, but wanted to talk about something else today.

Day 3 ... or not quite there yet

2008-12-03T23:16:00.004+01:00

This is getting old. I still have no real success to report. The first part of the day went well. I did a couple of hours writing in the morning, went into work to give a talk and take care of some of the administrative tasks on the agenda for today, ended up staying longer than planned, and lost the good schedule entirely in the evening. I didn't get back to writing as planned and I didn't get out to do any exercise, but I did talk to my mom on the phone for two hours, which I guess was a good thing. It had been a while, so it was definitely a good priority, but still the hours just doesn't add up. Sigh.

Amanda commented in the post below how it's difficult to make life outside of work a priority, when the work part is always driven by deadlines and expectations and I replied that I felt I couldn't go on like that for ever. I wanted to talk a little more about it, but thought I'd do it here rather than in the comments. It totally agree that it's difficult, because it's simply not possible to make other things a priority without letting work suffer to some degree. I'm not sure I'm quite prepared for that, because it will mean opportunities gone by, and I'm really just making this experiment now when I have few outside responsibilties (so that's how committed I am after all), but I think it's good to think about it, and realise that it has consequences to make the personal life a priority. Most of the time I just complain that I don't have a life, but don't do anything about it. The thing is also that this has been going on for so long, that at some point it just has to change.

It's like a moving target. First it was about going full steam ahead while finishing up the PhD, then it was about giving it all I had for the post doc, and the visiting position in order to get a faculty position and now it's about establishing myself here and get grants and papers and grad students and I don't know what and it just never ends. We don't have a tenure track system, so basically I've made it by now. Sure, I need to be competitive for jobs if I want to be able to move and competitive for grants in order to keep going here, but there is no specific goal post with a specific date on right now. Still it's not possible to kick back and say that this was pretty well done and now it would be OK to take it a little easier. Most of the time it feels like the bar has just been raised once again, and I don't see that this is going to end any time soon. I can't actually see other solutions than to either accept that my life is so that I will never have time off and don't have a personal life or spend any meaningful time with other people, or to decide that maybe what I'm able to achieve in my professional life is slightly less than what I'm physically able to do if I give it all I have. I think especially for someone who doesn't have kids, elderly parents, health issues or other pressing demands on time, work easily becomes all consuming because one can just never do enough. Maybe I don't need to have a lot of time off every day, but I really want to have enough time off to want to (re)connect with people, to have interests outside of work and to want to do things in this town and to become part of the community at the university. I hope it will be possible to find some sort of balance to make this work, because having no personal space at all really makes me a grumpy old lady and that's not who I want to be.

The life balance challenge Day 2 or one can't have it all

2008-12-02T19:34:00.002+01:00

So, exercise, sleep and having a life outside of work has moved to the top of the list. It's surprisingly difficult to make these things a real priority. As in actually taking time off work to go running and to relax at home without feeling guilty. There are always things that should have been done or ought to be done right now, and making the decision to let work things slide to make time for myself is harder than I was aware of. But I've done it today. I went running and did some yoga, and spent time this afternoon connecting with some long distance friends on facebook. Writing on the other hand have so far not even made it to the list. I had to be in the office early for some meetings and spent the afternoon doing all this healthy for-me stuff and now it's evening and I've got a talk to prepare for tomorrow. It's a mystery to me how succesful people manage to work long hours, exercise, sleep and have a life at the same time. I seem to able to do one or the other, but not all.

The life balance challenge Day 1

2008-12-02T08:42:00.002+01:00

It started out as a complete failure yesterday. I got to bed too late, got up too late, were too tired to even contemplate exercise and ended up spending all day on administrative tasks. But I did get through the mountain of email and the most overdue course administration tasks and no one commented on me for being slow and lazy. I now have a description for a new course, that will hopefully be approved by the powers that be soon and an external examiner for the upcoming exams. I also went home after a normal work day, spent the evening reading a book (and blogs, who am I kidding), talking to my brother on the phone and went to bed at a decent time. Today I'm going to make a new effort towards sticking to my priorities. At least I'm not completely exhausted anymore.

Priorities

2008-11-30T20:27:00.002+01:00

I'm back home after another three weeks of travelling only interspersed with a few days last week of continuous grading and student presentations. I've been to Russian metropolis to work on a paper, to the capital of this country to attend a committee meeting and to nearby city for a project meeting. All good and interesting and part of the reason why I love my job, but it also means I've been away from home for more than half of the time I've been living here and that I've been living more or less in a suitcase for six months. I've sort of had it for a while. I have barely read my email for the past three weeks, much less responded to anything. I'm behind on some important course admin related things and feel I've really not been doing that part well enough. I have a deadline for a manuscript revision that has already been extended twice and which will require some serious effort on my part this week if we're going to meet it. After that there are other tasks which do not feel extraordinarily urgent because the deadlines haven't actually passed yet, but which will fall into that category soon enough. I don't think I've been doing a poor job here in general. I've taught a new course, contributed to the department activities with an upcoming course and committee work, maintained an active research agenda, developed a new additional research agenda for this geographical area and developed contacts for a future proposal for funding and general networking. But I've been doing all these things in the most superficial way possible and it feels like a lot of important things are falling through the cracks all the time. I definitely have too many things on my plate, but it's hard to see which parts it's possible to let go.

I figured out the other day that I've been working a little more than 50 hours a week on average since I got here. I realise that the actual number of hours could have been much worse, but with all the travelling and the amount of full day meetings and semi-work social events in evenings on top of that I haven't had much regular free time at home for months. The few weekends I've been at home lately have been spent in a state of collapse. I feel guilty when an entire Saturday goes by doing nothing but sleeping and watching a movie, but I haven't got the energy to be creative when keeping this kind of schedule.

I have three weeks here before Christmas break. I want to spend those three weeks putting out most of the fires that are immediately urgent, but also to make room for something resembling a life. I want exercise, sleep and developing social connections in my new hometown to be a priority. I also want to be able to engage in things at home that are not work, like cooking, reading, learning something new and getting back to blogging. I have made lists like this in the past, and somehow they never last for long, but I think that starting over again and again is better than just giving up completely. In order to keep the get-back-to-blogging goal and secure some accountability, I'm going to check in here to report how it goes.

Exercise, sleep and food: Uh oh, this is the one that always falls to the bottom of the list, but really should be at the top. I want to have one hour a day for exercise and to go to bed at a time where 7 hours of sleep is still a realistic figure. I normally have quite ambitious ideas on what to eat, but some semi-ready made solutions might be what is needed to not spend half the evening on shopping and cooking. Instead I want to cook some proper food on the weekends, since I'm actually going to be near my kitchen for the next few weekends (yay).

Writing: I didn't join InaDWriMo because I knew writing just wasn't going to happen for me in November, but that doesn't mean I can't have my own December writing goal. I want to spend at least four hours a day on writing (probably more during the first week while finishing up revisions of the first manuscript). This is not going to be easy because there are a gazillion emails to reply to, travel reimbursement forms to fill out, exams to grade and papers to read, but this exercise is about getting the priorities right and writing really must be high on that list right now.

Teaching and admin: Regular teaching for the semester is over. My students will have an exam next week, which needs to be graded and I need to read some of the papers on the syllabus this week, I'm also giving a talk, which must be prepared and have a mountain of neglected correspondence and admin tasks. This could easily soak up all my waking hours, but I want to try to limit this to four hours a day. We'll see how it goes, if I'll just get even more behind or if it's actually possible to get the most important things done if I just keep my priorities straight. The development of projects and collaborations is really well under way and much can be done now by a few emails and phone calls to the right people. My main projects have received a lot of attention recently, and if I just get the writing done, they don't need a lot of admin attention right now either. The really important things are the course admin stuff, the upcoming talk, a paper to review, get the few but important emails sent and read for exam questions.

Personal activities: I want to keep up blogging and have some free time at home now and then. I think I need to do some work on the manuscript revisions in the evenings during the first week and possibly also some preparation for the talk, but I don't want to feel guilty every time I do something not work related. I also want to spend about an hour twice a week of picking up the online Russian course I've been trying to do.

My goal is to spend a lot of this time at home. We have some pretty rigid rules for how much we must be present at work, but I'll try to find a way to work around that. The teaching and admin part needs to be done at work anyway, but I'd prefer to do the writing part at home at least on some days. I'm still not sure how I want to organize this tomorrow. Part of me wants to come in to do the admin part first, because I haven't told anybody I'm going to be away all morning and everything is urgent. Another part of me thinks that this is exactly what causes the days to slide and that I will probably not get any writing done, if I do it in that order. We will see. And right now I have one hour to write a course description before bedtime.

An update from the trenches

2008-11-09T14:08:00.001+01:00

I've been at University above the Arctic Circle for a little more than 5 months now. I've actually only been here about 4 months since my official start date was while I was away in the field, but anyway it seems about time for an update.

I've been here for 23 weeks:

Of these I've been:

Doing fieldwork for 6 weeks

Been on field excursions with students for 3 weeks

Attended an international conference for 2 weeks

Taught intensively for 5 weeks

Done labwork in Grad School City for 1 week

Been away for a family event for 4 days

Been sick for 3 days

Had family visiting for 10 days

and

done final edits to a manuscript and submitted it

written two abstracts for meetings and submitted titles for two other talks

started revisions on a reviewed manuscript

developed ideas and an outline for a new paper based on new awesome data

developed a table of content for a book proposal with colleagues

dealt with department politics

spent time on course budgeting

attended a two-day workshop for a project I will have a significant role in

attended several follow-up meetings on new project

typed up half of my field notes from this summer

developed ideas for one new graduate level course and a make over of undergrad course

sat in on several lectures by co-teachers in undergrad course

been advisor for 15 undergrad research projects all of which are due tomorrow

tried to be helpful and accesible for my one MSc student

made progress in learning about the local geology

made some contacts with potential collaborators

made progress towards a real plan for fieldwork in this location next summer

made progress towards possible collaborations and funding opportunities in my other field area

Sadly I've not been:

Sleeping enough

Spending enough time with my husband

Exercising enough

or

Blogging enough

A teaching puzzle

2008-08-07T14:35:00.002+02:00

According to an email in my inbox the semester has officially started. Not that it makes much of a difference. With an intensive short course program in the summer and overlap between summer courses and semester courses the change is barely noticeable. But, the students who are going to stay here for the full semester have arrived, and classes have started.

I have spent most of my time the past week preparing for the course I will be running in the fall semester. It is broad and location dependent, but builds on knowledge from several sub-disciplines and covers a broad range of geological topics. The students have very different backgrounds. Some have only taken an introduction to geology course, while others are near completion of a B.Sc. degree. The overall outline of the course is established in the school curriculum and consists of a fieldtrip, lectures, weekly exercises and an independent project to be completed during the semester. Within this broad outline it is up to me to structure the content of field work, lecture and exercise activities and decide how and when to involve guest lecturers/ co-teachers.

Previously this course has been taught in a relatively traditional lecture format with lectures two-three times a week and a weekly exercise/lab. The individual projects have been literature review projects with presentations at the end of the semester. Two years ago when I was teaching here for six months while being on part-time leave from my postdoc. I developed a course that is now the “sister”-course to this one. The two courses have a very similar structure, but the one I developed two years ago has more field activities and a larger and more research intensive independent project. My goal has been to translate these ideas into the course I’m teaching now, while also keeping some of the elements that have traditionally been part of this course.

I have been struggling with finding a way to connect the field work they do on the excursion to a practical two-week project they carry out in groups and eventually to their own independent research projects. My goal is to make each part become a piece of the next, in a way where they will have an experience of a continuous practical activity running parallel to the more traditional classroom teaching throughout the semester. Most of the stratigraphy here is sedimentary basins, but some students may choose to work on tectonic/structural geology topics for their independent projects. I’m not sure I will manage to connect all the dots this year, but I’m going to outline some of the problems I see, and if anyone has ideas to how to handle any of these successfully your advice would be much appreciated.

The link from excursion to two-week practical project: What kind of data could be collected in limited time with a group of relatively inexperienced people, which will be useful for a larger two-week project concerning partly a different part of the stratigraphy?
We can spend a maximum of one day at each field site as one of the aims for the excursion is to see as much of the stratigraphy as possible, and we have a very good and expensive logistics solution that allows us to move around. They will get to visit a couple of localities with rocks of the same age as they will be working with in the practical project, but with a different position within the basin. I am not sure they will be able to describe enough rock record during a one day stop to be able to do some good comparisons, though.

The link from two week practical project to independent research project: How can a bulk of data collected and processed as group work be separated and distributed into different independent projects. Here I am really lost. I think it would be a good idea if at least some of the independent projects could build on and expand the work they get started during the practical project weeks, but am not able to estimate how this could be done or how many projects there would be basis for doing. I am also not sure how to connect these two parts for those who choose different topics for their independent project.

In good news

2008-08-05T10:47:00.003+02:00

Well, life is busy here. Between starting up new courses, scrambling to put together some research ideas that will work here in my new environment, settling into a new place and doing laundry between field trips, time is scarce.

Yesterday I spent most of the day making a fool of myself in various situations, but today seems to start on a better note.

The sun is shining after days and days of fog.
I got a very nice review back on a paper. Like a letter from the editor saying "This is really cool science and good work. If you could just add some details and some explanations we would love to publish it in our top of the subfield journal". Yay!
We unpacked the last boxes at home, and my home office is almost up and running. Now we just need some new curtains, because all curtains in the apartment are hideous. Really. Like if someone picked them out while blindfolded.
I found a very cool conference where I could present some of the ideas my research program here will likely build on and get a chance to meet some important people in my slightly-new-to-me field. The timing of the conference is not splendid and the abstract deadline is soon (too soon given that I have field work and excursions and another conference back to back until then), but I'm going to give it a try.

Maybe it is all coming together anyway.

When field trips are so much more than what's outlined on the itinerary

2008-08-03T14:54:00.009+02:00

I’m back from a great excursion to some of the world-class outcrops that lie on my doorstep here at University above the Arctic Circle. For the past week students from all over Europe have been studying the basin fills from the Carboniferous, Cretaceous and Tertiary. Each morning we would climb some hundred meters above sea level to get to the open air class room where we have discussed sedimentary processes and sequence stratigraphy, practicing field work techniques and geological arguments, all while enjoying some spectacular sunny weather and stunning views.

Something special always happens on these trips. People loosen up and get to know each other and conversations drift from the professional to the personal and back without people even noticing. I like the way the barriers between teachers and students are broken down when in the field. In fact the free and easy atmosphere was part of what attracted me to geology in the first place. I like to get to know my students as more than rows of faces in a class room and to hear their ideas and plans and thoughts. I also like that I get to show a more personal side of the scientist. That the professors are people too, and that we also have families and pets and hobbies and interests and thoughts about things outside the geology classroom. I like the opportunities to discuss career options and education choices and to share the experiences I wished someone had shared with me when I was younger and at a lower level in the ivory tower hierarchy.

I want to show the students that it’s not about being tough, but about doing a good job. That it’s about learning the necessary techniques and bringing the right equipment. I want to show them that the skills needed to do a good job can be learned and that lack of experience does not mean that one will not be able to make it. The process of becoming a field geologist is not only about learning the science, but also about learning to navigate the outdoors. Some students come equipped with mountaineering skills and top notch equipment, but many come with only the most rudimentary knowledge of how to use a compass or how to move in a mountain side. I want to do field courses in a way where it is accepted to be less experienced and where being hungry or tired are legitimate reasons for a break.

The field part of geology is perhaps the area where we are closest to an apprenticeship system. This is where the trade is learned, where connections are made and where ideas about what symbols to use for what structure are etched into brains. It is where skills are mastered and where the way future geologists will go about doing their observations is shaped. It is a place where the tone is set for an open dialogue between teachers and students and where we get a chance to influence or inspire each other. Of course it is also a chance to go to some spectacular places that most people never get to see, enjoy some wet sandwiches after a long day in the rain or just the relief of reaching the destination after a long hike or hitting the shower at the end of the day.

I think that one of the coolest things about moving here is that much of my teaching will be based on field activities.

Going in the field with students

2008-07-21T11:43:00.003+02:00

Thanks for the welcome back comments, everyone. It’s good to be back.

When I saw Ron Schott’s call for submissions to the Accretionary Wedge on the topic “Field Camp Geology” on Saturday, I thought, wow, what an appropriate way for me to re-enter the scene on blogging. University above the Arctic Circle is located in the middle of world class outcrops of rocks from the Precambrian to the Quaternary and teaching is strongly focused on field based activities. This is one of the things that attracted me to this location in the first place, but it is also a challenge. Not the least in the practical sense. In a few weeks I will be leading a field course to several localities I have never visited before. There are no road signs here, and one needs to know from which side of the mountain the ascent is easier, where the best outcrops are or where it would be convenient to place, say four groups of students, who should work on the same formation, but not breathe down each other’s necks. This kind of knowledge requires a familiarity with the localities that cannot be achieved from the literature and which isn’t easy to obtain in the course of a few weeks as a new faculty member. Therefore I’m happy to have been asked to tag along as a co-teacher on another field course in the department, led by an experienced colleague who has been working on these outcrops for a long time. We are leaving today and alas this trip is also getting in the way from me writing a more coherent post on my thoughts on field camps/ field excursions or dig out some old stories on time for the Accretionary wedge. I will leave you with a photo from one of the places we’ll be going to and I’ll be back to talk more about field trips in general and this one in particular in a week’s time.

The one in which I reinvent this blog

2008-07-19T13:09:00.002+02:00

Once again I've been missing in action for a very long time. My mini-sabattical turned into a tough and demanding writing boot camp (though a very productive one) and I lost inspiration for blogging entirely. For some people academic writing and blogging go hand in hand, for me the energy put into the former seems to correlate negatively with my motivation for the latter. I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't even have the energy to sign on and write a short reply to the people who actually came here to ask how I was doing. I'm sorry, but your comments were very much appreciated.

As I talked about in the spring I was undecided about which direction I wanted this blog to take, and couldn't strike a tone I was entirely satisfied with. To the endlessly repeating tune of what would I write on the blog if I wanted to update it now, spring and early summer was taken up by finishing a major writing project, field work and moving, and then lately, slowly settling into a new place. I have been here for three weeks now. The house is still a mess and my office is still in boxes, but it feels good. Summer classes are well underway. I'm leaving for the first field trip with students on Monday and I'm working on the final adjustments to the syllabus for the fall semester undergraduate course. I've even managed to do some edits to a manuscript and do some small research tasks every day.

I'm happy and I think I will enjoy working here. I'm also nervous about how I will manage to get grant money, if I will ever come up with a good research topic for this particular location, how interaction will be with the rest of the department and how the switch back to a sub-discipline I haven't really worked actively in for several years will pan out. Thinking about what a source of inspiration and support the academic blogging community has been to me in the past, when navigating other difficult paths from the dissertation to the post doc to new teaching and admin responsibilities made me realise that I wanted to jump back on the wagon. It also made it clear to me that what I'm most interested in here, is how to navigate the academic carreer as a person, as a scientist, as a geologist and as a teacher. I have learned a lot from watching others and I want to share my version as well. Ideas about whether this should be more personal or private and maybe in my mother tongue or whether it should be a more streamlined research blog are just out of line with that main interest, and maybe setting some boundaries for myself about what this space is, will actually allow me to do something more interesting with it.

I may redesign the page a bit, to make it a more professional place for me. I want to be able to talk more freely about what I do, and since I'm in a very small place now, that due to its location and priorities gets a lot of attention, it will be easy to figure out who and where I am. I don't think I will come out of the pseudonymous closet, just yet, but I want the page to be in a way where I wouldn't be terribly embarrased if a colleague found it. Changes are not likely to happen over night as I will be travelling an awful lot over the next couple of months, but at least I am back in the game, and am looking forward to reconnect with all my lovely blogfriends.

It's been quiet here lately

2008-03-07T11:30:00.003+01:00

Because I've been doing this:

Let me just say that the work-from-home-mini-sabattical has turned into a very exhausting, though rather succesful writing-bootcamp. An update is in the works, but right now I'm heading out to enjoy a rare sunny moment and get some fresh air.

How I spent the leap day

2008-03-01T13:57:00.003+01:00

One would think receiving an extra day should be great. Who doesn't need more time? Whether using it for getting all the stuff done that needs to get done, or as Jo(e) suggests, leave it off the calender altogether and indulge in extra sleep and fun, extra time ought to be good.

Personally I'd be happy to wipe yesterday off the calender:

I spent all day in meetings (including this rather emotional one), while having a terrible shoulder ache that only got worse during the day. By the end of the day I was supposed to fix some tables for a poster a colleague is making, but could barely lift my arm to my desk and decided I'd better go home. My colleague suggested I should see a chiropractor for the shoulder, but they don't open until Monday (I will go then if the pain persists). On the way home someone crashed into my car while reversing in the parking lot. The damage will be covered by her insurance, but I will be the one who has to go to the mechanic and get it repaired, plus I got to stand for half an hour in a freezing cold parking lot to fill out an accident report for the insurance company. I did none of the research related tasks I had on my list for yesterday, got home at 7pm too tired to make proper dinner and fell asleep in front of the TV (which I was watching from a very strange angle given that I was lying down on the couch, but couldn't bend much because of the shoulder pain).

So on top of having a really crappy day yesterday it now looks like I can add a visit to the chiropractor and to the mechanic to my day on Monday. I really need someone to help me run my life. It seems that each time I have cleared up time for writing (or God forbid, for relaxation), I am inundated with other life-stuff, which must be attended to, and then I haven't even talked about another health appointment, online banking, cleaning the house, contacting the shipping company about possible dates for our move, the deadlines for next week and the social event I have agreed to attend.

Rant over. Let me just say that I hope today will treat me more kindly and that I'm totally ready for spring and a new month and a new beginning.

When there's more than one side to the story

2008-03-01T11:50:00.002+01:00

I resigned from my postdoc position yesterday. This should not come as a surprise to anyone as I signed the contract for my new job nearly five months ago, and I have been open about accepting the offer and leaving the postdoc prematurely all the time. I still have a year and a half left on the postdoc contract, but the money will be used to hire someone else, who does something I don't, while I will continue to work with the group, so technically it's a win-win situation for everyone.

Personally it is obviously a step forward both in terms of independence and better pay, and it is also the switch back to the university environment, I have been contemplating for a while. But, because there is always a but, I am truly sorry to be leaving the people and the research environment I am a part of here.

Let me begin by saying that I am in a field where collaboration is vital. Not only in terms of idea exchange and professional networks, but also in practical terms of organizing expeditions and being safe in the field. It is very difficult to get by in this discipline without effective working collaborations. The intensive social experience of being in the field together for weeks on end often fosters a special bond between people. Whether connections continue or not, the shared experiences under extraordinary conditions tie people together and can make even colleagues you have never met, but who works in the same or a similar area, feel like your kin. Sometimes the collaborations turn into professional/personal friendships and sometimes the professional matches of collaborators interests are more thought-provoking and inspiring than others. I have colleagues and collaborators who have become close personal friends, others who have become valued and respected professional aquaintances and connections. Some who spark my ideas and others who are inspired by mine. Some who are cherished field companions and others who are my support network, inspiration and intellectual challenge. It is, however, rare to find all these traits in the same people, but that's what I have with the research group, I'm working with now. We are field companions, professional collaborators, know each other well and appreciate each other's company whether at a party or discussing the solution to a scientific problem. These people have become a huge part of my work life and are a major source of inspiration and reason why I like my job. They are also sometimes obnoxious and make me frustrated, but isn't it so with even the best people.

When I leave this much of this will change. It's not like we will never see each other again, but it will be different. I will miss the way we interact on a day to day basis, and I will miss this feeling of connectedness to someone in the same department. I will miss the more personal side of our professional friendship. To have immidiate allies and someone to discuss tricky topics with and the combination of personal trust and appreciation with professional inspiration and development of ideas. As with all personal relationships, longdistance is just not the same.

We were talking about this yesterday, and about how to keep up the good work and still have fun together, while not working in the same place anymore. We were talking about what our future collaboration would look like, and how we could develop the line of research, we are doing now. As I mentioned in this post, I don't really know what the future holds for me research-wise yet, but I do know, that I will need to think outside the box, and start something different from what we are doing now. I started talking about, how I hoped, that eventually it would not only be me participating in our current research, while starting something new, but also them being involved in my new line of research. While we talked, ideas of how this could be done started to form. Completely new ideas of something that has never been done before. Ideas about applying our current research to something different, I will get access to in my new location. I heard my voice increase in volume with excitement, as I began to see the contours of the bridge between the two lines of research, and of how to continue the collaboration in a meaningful and rewarding way. Not only was this an answer to some of the research questions I can start looking for in the new place, it was also a great way of confirming how the collaboration can grow and transform and continue despite the distance. I still think it is sad to leave, but I left the meeting thinking that this will take our collaboration to a new level and that, once again, good discussions with great people, can generate ideas and solutions to problems that seemed insurmountable to me on my own.

I am late for this months Scientiae on renewal, so instead of letting this post be a part of the carnival, let it be a birthday celebration post for the very first birthday of the carnival for women in STEM fields. Thanks to Skookumchick who took initiative to the carnival a year ago and who put up this months theme, which made me think about the positive aspects of yesterday's meeting rather than writing a whiny post about how resigning didn't make me glow with joy at all, but rather made me feel like crap.

Why would anyone spend time on administration?

2008-02-28T21:19:00.003+01:00

In a post from last week, I mentioned, how the position of "assistant department head" was invented at my institution in order to recruit women into administrative positions*, and how, I felt, that move sent a conflicting signal about women needing special training in order to move up in the hierarchy, in a way men did not. At the same time this "lower level administrative position" also became an attractive stepping stone for young people like me towards the decision-making level of the institution, and it was actively encouraged by the institution as a career-enhacing step.

Administrative work in academic institutions is often described as a thankless job and something that should be avoided as long as possible. To some extent I suppose this is true, and being swamped by administrative work can surely derail an academic career quickly, especially as long as one is at the entry level.

So it is not surprising that Wilhelm asks in the comments to the above post:

"Why on earth would you want to take on an assistant department head position, though? From what I have observed, something like that would put a serious dent in your scientific output and give you all kinds of mind-numbing administrative tasks."

Rather than just giving a brief answer in the comments I wanted to expand this a little. Administration is not for everyone, and institutions obviously differ with respect to how much real influence it is possible to obtain as a junior person, but I wanted to share why I think it has been worth the time and effort and what I have learned.

There are definitely days when I ask myself the above question repeatedly. But although taking on administrative tasks has taken quite a lot of time away from scientic production, and the fact that some of the tasks are indeed mind-numbing, I also think it has a lot of (somewhat overlooked) positive aspects.

Now, an administrative position will probably contain different tasks depending on the kind of institution, and I can only speak to why I chose it in this particular setting.

When I was offered this position initially, I didn't know much about what it would entail, but I saw it as a tactic career move if I wanted to stay here beyond my postdoc (and I'm quite sure it would have been). The honest answer is also that I was flattered to be suggested for such a position after being here for less than a year, and that also played into my decision.

However, when I got started and as I developed with the role, it got more and more interesting. Sure, there is a lot of boring paperwork and dysfunctional administrative software crap, but it also turned out to be a real opportunity to make a difference and influence the development of both the department and the institution.

Now, this is not a university, so we are not talking about little ol' me having an influence of tens of thousands of students, but on having a say in matters that affects a mid-size public research institution. A department (not the literal translation of our subdivision) does also not consist of faculty members with wildly differing research interest, but is better described as a collaborative group of researchers working in the same subject area.

I think it has been a great learning experience to get "behind the scenes" and see how such an institution works. How we argue for our state funding, how we distribute the funds internally and to have a say on which direction the institution is moving in.

At the department level this involves taking active part in shaping the future strategy for our group, arguing for hirings/other investments and delivering our input to the institutional strategy.

For me this position has been about so much more than just the paperwork and I honestly think it has been worth the time and commitment. I think it has been personally rewarding to see some of the results, and I also think this experience will be helpful in the future because very few, if any, scientists can escape administration and leadership in one incarnation or another.

*In all fairness it should be said that these positions are not exclusively for women. Currently I think there is one male assistant department head, but the typical configuration is the senior male department head matched with the junior-ish female assistant department head.

I knew it wasn't just me

2008-02-27T07:29:00.002+01:00

As seen at Styley Geek's

The quest for papers - by the numbers

2008-02-25T11:46:00.002+01:00

So i finally, finally submitted one of the papers I have talking about since forever. It has been in my sidebar for so long, that I think it has changed both its title and its content several times, since I put it there, and I have been so frustrated by the slow progress, I haven't even bothered to update the ticker.

As an experiment I have been counting all the hours spent working on the most recent reincarnation of this paper and reached 160 hours when I hit the "submit" button last night. Quite enlightening I'd say, because I've never had any real idea of how long the individual steps of writing a paper are supposed to take, and as I said in the post below, I suck at estimating time.

The 160 hours are however just the tip of the iceberg, covering a major revision of a diss chapter from splitting the original manuscript in two, some major reorganisation and rewriting and creating about 2/3s of the figures from scratch (some seriously detailed graphics work involved in what I do) and adding some new analysis.

The real journey from idea to submission looks more like this:

2001: Idea developing as part of dissertation proposal

2003: Start playing around with software supposed to help analyse data (spent about 6 full months on this and it never worked) and gave first talk based on this idea (a reincarnation of one of the figures is still in the present manuscript)

2005: First draft of paper written and revised into dissertation shape, gave first international conference presentation on this topic (didn't go well, because there were still some serious flaws in the way I interpreted the data and I didn't quite know why), defended dissertation

2006: Another conference presentation on the same data (still some issues with interpretation)

Early spring 2007: Began revising the dissertation chapter manuscript into something publishable. Got stuck at issues with interpretation and realized the manuscript had to be split into two, but didn't know exactly how to split them (spent about a month on this).

Late spring 2007: Wrote an abstract for a conference I'd been invited to speak at and realized that the abstract content was the aim of the second paper (insert lightbulb here).

Late fall 2007 - 2008: Revising the manuscript I left behind in spring 2007 to its present form.

If I had known from the beginning that this process would take 7 years I'm not sure I would have started. It's no wonder my publication rate is slow to nonexistent, and then I haven't even gotten the verdict from the journal yet. I've sent it to one of the better journals in the field. Not a top of the line one, because it's not that kind of research, but probably the best for this kind of papers. So while I'm waiting, I'm going to start writing the second paper.

Know your enemy (some thoughts on perfectionism)

2008-02-24T11:28:00.002+01:00

I used to think perfectionism was about being overly committed to detail, being afraid of making mistakes, studying obsessively and holding on to drafts much longer than necessary. This is probably all true and most of these are certainly true for me and my workstyle. I am attentive to detail and work at getting things right, but these traits are actually valued in research, so it always strikes me as somewhat counterproductive when people suggests "letting go of my perfectionism" as a way of attaining a better balance between my expectations of what I should do and what I actually get done.

When I started out on this self-analysing path some weeks ago, I began my thinking that I needed to let go of some of my ambition and to stop being so uptight about about doing everything correctly. But except letting things slide a bit at home (you wouldn't want to come and see the kitchen floor), I couldn't cut that many corners after all. I couldn't make the final draft of the paper I'm working on more messy, because if I tried, my co-authors would point out the mess anyway and insist that we fix it before submitting. The truth is that scientific work is meticulous by nature, and that final manuscripts need to be spotless. If you have an eye for detail, like I do, you will probably find many of the issues that need to be adressed by yourself, and if not, the reviewers will find them for you. Either way they still need to be fixed. I learned to write messy first drafts years ago. During my Master's I spent hours and hours on meticulously crafting and polishing sentences, but I got over that particular part of myself a long time ago. I don't suffer horribly from writer's block. Yes, I do get stuck and I procrastinate, but I have a whole bunch of little tricks up my sleeve that I can actually apply quite succesfully and get myself started again. So what I'm really suffering from is lack of time and completely unrealistic expectations of what one person should be able to do, and closely related to that, what other people get done. I also have a poor sense of my own boundaries and tend to do what others expect me to do (or what I think they expect me to do).

I tend to wildly exceed other people's expectations. I don't say this to brag, and I actually wish this wasn't so. I have spent years of my life resenting my Master's thesis advisor and the grad school for pushing me to pursue a a very difficult research topic at an unusually independent level and polish it to, if not pefection, at least a very good standard. I still think there should it would have been helpful and recommendable if my advisor had let me know that this was a bit much for Master's, but really, when looking back, this project was crazy. I obviously had no sense what a Master's was supposed to contain or how comprehensive it was supposed to be, but seriously, nobody else did that much work, but I somehow never realized that it was crazy over the top, and seriously feared failing right until the end.

I think I might be doing the same now. I have three big projects (one of them is my own), all requiring field work, processing of data, meetings, colaboration, networking and conference presentations. I have admin work, I try to publish papers, I teach (admittedly not much, but I do it on my own time because it's for a second employer and take vacation days or overtime off to do so), I organize all our group's contact to students and I need to start learning a lot of new stuff in order to invent a new research programme and teach a couple of new courses. It may not sound like an unusual work load, but I do have more field work, admin and teaching than most other people in the department and no one else has as much extra in combination. I am spreading myself very, very thin and more so than anyone else in our research group and yet I think I do nothing or barely keep up to the lowest standard. Technically this is probably considered the Imposter Syndrome, but it's not like I think I shouldn't be here or don't deserve my merits, it is just that I think, I should always do more.

I think I could do more if I could judge more realistically what a given project should entail. When doing the final edits to a manuscript last night and seeing that it barely scrapes in under the maximum number of words limit for the journal, I realised that this could have been two articles. I put in some extra data, because I had this grand idea of how this paper could tie it all together, and I think it might do so (let's see what the reviewers think). But if I could learn to acknowledge the smaller pieces of ideas, maybe I would first of all, be more productive in a measurable way, and second, see the intermediate milestones more clearly.

I also think it would be a great help if I got a more realistic perspective on what I am supposed to do. Beginning to talk about this topic with different people have actually opened up for some unexpected responses. A colleague I respect a lot told me, she thought I was hugely productive, while she always felt like she did nothing (which is obviously not true as I think she is hugely productive and I do nothing). Another colleague shared his frustrations about never having time to write and went on to tell a story about another colleague he just met, who had made the same complaint. So obviously people think about this, are frustrated by their own limitations and I'm not the only one who thinks everyone else are more productive than I am. So why am I doing this to myself.

As I said in the beginning I think this has much to do with my poor sense of my own boundaries. I agree to do things or to do them in an incovenient way, partly because I am ambitious and overcommitted and don't see my limitations, but also because I adhere to some cultural ideas that say I should work hard at accommodating others. I don't know how often I have heard myself say things like "well, I don't even have kids, so this shouldn't be hard" or "I don't have kids, so of course I will pick up that extra work over summer/ winter break/ Easter/ other inconvenient time", like it is somehow illegal to get tired or have wants and needs, if you don't have kids. All due respect to parents, but I use this as a way of undermining and underrating my own accomplishments as if not being a parent on top of everything else means that I'm just a lazy sucker who should do at least twice as much as anyone else. I use the same insane logic when dealing with my family, where career-oriented life styles are not appreciated. Rather than requesting them to accept my choices I hem and haw and bend my plans to fit around theirs, and actually enforce the idea of being the misfit who should accommodate others. I think rather than stop worrying about being nit-picky about the organizational details of a manuscript or the clarity of a detailed figure, this is where I really need to give myself a little kick in the butt and start changing something.

Reinventing my research

2008-02-21T16:56:00.002+01:00

With my new job follows a new field area. It is expected that I will be carrying out research in new university region, and that I will get acquainted with the immediate surroundings at a sufficient level to guide field trips and suggest thesis topics for students. I have been visiting this area for professional reasons for a number of years now, so I am not a complete loss when it comes to getting around and the overall perspective of what can be done, but I have yet to aquire any detailed knowledge about the local rocks. To make matters more complicated (because why only have one problem when you can have two for free), I am not only changing location, but also research angle with this move.

I am working at the boundary between two sub-disciplines, and although the one topic does not preclude the other, there is still, let’s say a cultural, difference between the two fields. Once you are brought up in one of them, people rarely switch to the other, and methodology and terminology associated with each field are rarely used in the other. For those of you who know something about geology, let me reveal that I am talking about sedimentology (in a pre-Quaternary sense) and Quaternary geology (broadly speaking). I started out in one of these subfields for my Masters, switched to the other for my PhD and have spent my postdoc years to refine the type of research that contributes to both fields. My upcoming faculty position will be in the same sub discipline as I did my Masters in. Although I am (working on) publishing in this field and have stayed up to date on the literature, gone to the conferences and kept some contacts, I haven't done active research directly in this field since my Masters. For the geo-crowd, this means I have been doing sedimentology and stratigraphy in Quaternary settings, but haven't worked on anything compacted for the past 8 years.

I always (more or less secretly) harboured a wish of going back to my original sub-discipline some day, so I was tremendously flattered when I was suggested for the faculty position. I considered the offer a golden opportunity to make a leap that might otherwise have been difficult, as most of my connections are within the field I have done my PhD in. The hiring committee was clear on the fact that they were interested in the interdisciplinarity I could bring to the position, but they wanted someone whose core research would be in the topic I did my Masters in. For me this means that after years of using field studies of Quaternary deposits to say something about sedimentological and stratigraphical principles, I will now try to use what I have learned from the Quaternary and apply it to much older rocks and basins. This might sound easy enough, but in reality it is no small task. I am still convinced, there is a good connection to be made, and that I have the necessary experience from both sides of the fence to make it, but now the problem is to figure out how.

After many years of being involved in projects driven by others and being part of a big network of collaborators and friends, I am now starting all over again. My network in my new (old) sub discipline is tiny and though I know the principles, the terminology and the methods I don't know the local geological history of my new field area. I am reading up on the geological record from scratch and I am trying to make educated guesses of which units or areas might be more (or less) suitable for the type of research I want to do. I have sold myself on potential rather than evidence that I can actually pull this off, and sometimes it's hard to silence the voice telling me that I will not be able to do it. As the start date is coming closer, I feel like I cannot keep giving the same vague answers to what I am going to do. It is a bit like I have been telling everybody about this fantastic trick I am going to do, but I haven't figured out what the trick is yet. That is not true, I know, but looking at the pile of literature about stuff I know nothing about, makes it seem like it is.

Time to make a plan

2008-02-20T10:21:00.003+01:00

So far, this working from home stunt is the most wonderful idea I have gotten in a long time. I actually did go into work for a few hours yesterday afternoon to discuss a manuscript with my co-author, but it felt so different because I came to do someting specific and not just because I had to be there (I really do have a problem with being told what to do). I will also come in for some meetings next week, but rather than come in the morning and stay the full day, I will come for the scheduled meetings and leave afterwards. I have been thinking about the duration of this "sabattical" and unless I get really bored at home I will probably be away from the office quite a lot for all the four weeks leading up to Easter break. Given that I want to come in for all the meetings I think my original idea of two weeks is too short to really get something done at home, and I might try to squeeze in a family visit in connection to Easter break near the end of the four weeks. This might not make me the worlds most popular person at work, but what can I do. I am four months away from starting a faculty position, and I really, really need to create the best possible circumstances for myself to get some serious writing done before my life is taken over by teaching.

So what should I be doing for the next four weeks?

Writing projects:

Finish the last layout details and minor edits to illustrations on manuscript that should have been submitted long ago and submit it (this should be doable in about a day)

Write a first draft of new manuscript and make first versions of some of the figures (this should be in a state where my coauthor can take over the manuscript around March 1st, but some of the figures should be in a state where we can meet and discuss them already next week)

Final revisions to text and illustrations on another manuscript which should have been submitted long ago (this should not take more than a week, maybe less, but since the manuscript doesn't have a particular deadline and is already late I don't want to make this a priority until I have a decent grip on the other two)

Research maintenance work:

Scan all illustrations from field notebooks from last summer and finish field reports (this is unbelievably boring, but totally mindless work, and some colleagues need the data in the field reports in order to prepare joint conference presentations, so it cannot wait much longer)

Go into work for a few hours and finish the sample list from last summer, call someone at the lab at organize where to deliver the samples for analysis (if I don't do this very soon, the samples won't be processed before I leave the institution and I might end up having to pay for the lab services because the lab hours are budgeted internally)

Creative research projects

Read and search for literature related to my field in new location and narrow down some research ideas I can start looking into (this is kind of vague and open, but I think I need to leave it like that. I don't need a formal research proposal, but I need to have an idea about what kind of research I can start up in the new place, in order to decide, whether I should plan some initial field work this summer)

Develop new work-related blog (I put this here because I think this might go hand in hand with thinking about a new line of research, but also to make it clear to myself that I consider it a professional project and not only a personal hobby)

Personal projects and necessary life maintenance

Clean the house (seriously, this goes high up on the list)

Pay bills and go through finances (this is also something I have let slip lately and which I really need to catch up on soon)

Sort big pile of personal paperwork from bank, insurance, salary slips, car purchase and much, much more

Start investigating prices, companies, time lines for move (this doesn't have to happen right now, but since everything will be shipped long-distance it can't wait forever either)

Blog about all the topics I have been wanting to talk about in a long time, but didn't have the energy to actually write.

Buy some clothes, an external harddisk and a few other items I have had on my wish list for a while, but haven't prioritised the time to actually find and buy

Get to the gym and back into a habit of regular exercise

Other research stuff

This is the big black box or the time sink that is a result of being involved in several large research projects. This is meetings, admin, visits related to outreach projects, planning, logistics, organising and I don't know what. This is the demands on my time I hope to keep at a minimum for the next few weeks, but which cannot be eliminated completely, because when the project ball is rolling, it's rolling whether I want it or not. Planned activities for the next few weeks include so far:

Meeting to discuss an archiving system for all the digital data related to the project and how to connect analogue data to this database.

Visit to science exhibition to figure out how we are going to set up a similar exhibition next year on another topic.

Meeting to discuss formalities and preparations for students who will be joining us in the field next summer

Institution wide photo session

Department meeting

Meeting to learn to work with new data in GIS

This is just for the next two weeks. More meetings will probably pop up soon.

I will consider anything that gets crossed off this list during the next four weeks a success whether personal or professional. I really need to make all of this a priority for a while.

I have given myself a break

2008-02-19T09:41:00.002+01:00

As of today I am working from home for the next two - three weeks (right now I have a hard time imagining coming back at all, but I hope that feeling will pass). Thanks to my 9 to 5 work environment and endless counting of hours, I have four weeks worth of overtime to do with what I want. Rather than blowing it all on some exotic holiday or an extended family visit I have decided to give myself a mini-"sabattical" at home. I will be working because I have many, many things to do, but I will be doing so at my own pace, and since this is the first day I have given myself permission to do nothing for a little while.

I am excited and motivated and feel like I want to do twice the amount of work I do on a regular day. I really don't know why it is so liberating not to have to come into work each day. People there are nice. I have a nice office with a view and there is really nothing wrong with anything. But I love that I can sleep as long as I want, and work on the hours that fit me rather than 9 to 5. I love that I can start up quietly, blog and do hobby-things in the morning and work into the evening. I love that I don't need to spend time packing lunch and that personal errands, shopping and cooking don't need to be crammed into a small time window between 6 and 7 pm, when I'm already hungry.

I have tried to explain to my colleagues why I think working from home for an extended period of time is great, but judging from their expressions, when I talk about it, I don't think they get it. Most people either use the overtime for flexibility throughout the year, for vacations or simply let it disappear when the clock is zeroed once a year. Generally people without families(or with grown kids) don't take off the overtime, but use it to point out how much work they do all the time. I don't want to defend myself for taking off the time, I have rightfully earned, just because I don't have a family. I also don't want to defend myself for using that time for work, because developing a research proposal for my new job and writing papers is not only something I do for my work place, but basically something I do for me.

I am also looking forward to have more time and freedom for blogging and I think I will spend some time developing this work-blog this I have been talking about.

Just another day at the office

2008-02-18T23:20:00.002+01:00

I often wonder what I spend my time on since I get so little done compared to how many hours I spend at work each week.

Today went like this

9.10 am: arrive late because I am unable to learn that it takes more than ten minutes to drive to work

9.10-10.00: read e-mails from the past week, freak out over the number of e-alerts announcing a gazillion new articles I will never find the time to read, download a few anyway just for the pain of it

10.00-10.30: Find colleague's syllabus from two years ago for course I will be teaching next fall and study the reading list looking for hints of how to go about developing a new research programme on this topic. Download two random papers on the topic, which came up in a Google search, put the whole thing in bag and decide to work on it some other time)

10.30-11.30: Move new data obtained during meeting last week from usb stick to work PC and try to open the files. They don't work. Probably because they are in Russian or because something is wrong with the software or with my head. Everybody who knows anything about this software are on winterbreak, and my head is what it is. Move folders around and check if they still don't work. Make sure I have back up and put the project on hold for another day.

Lunch: Discuss meeting with public outreach group for tomorrow. Make list of how to proceed with digitalising/organisation of data. Send copy of list to co-worker. Print copy of manuscript in progress.

1.30 - 2:00 pm: Sort out bills and tickets and receipts from last week's travel. Fight with new awful software for travel expenses and watch in disbelief as it continues to delete all my previous entries when I push return. After consultation with the head of the accounts department, I finally figure out the kinks of the program and manage to send off my request for reimbursement off into the black box that is my institutions intranet. Make list for the administration of hours spent travelling .

2.00-3.00: Procrastinate aimlessly on the net while trying to avoid ever answering three complicated emails

3.00 - 4.00: Clean out some old folders and toss about ten old versions of the same manuscript in preparation. Update CV with most recent conference presentations. Archive business cards from last weeks meetings.

4.00-5.00: Write emails (no more obvious procrastination activities available)

A follow up to the equal opportunities

2008-02-18T21:30:00.004+01:00

This started out as a response to the comments on the previous post, but it got so long that I'd rather make a full post of it.

I talked about how I have often felt like the "token woman" in my overwhelmingly male work environment and the contradictory consequences of the involuntary exposure, and I talked about how women are often dependent on male mentors in order to be considered serious colleagues. I do still think there is something to this idea, but as Wayfarer Scientista pointed out in the comments male scientists are also dependent on good mentors to advance in science.

I discussed this with a male and a female colleague the other day. We talked about how most senior scientists in our field are men and therefore most potential mentors would be men. Even if there is something seemingly offensive about female scientists being put forward by male mentors to their male networks, it is hard to see the alternatives at the moment when so few of the senior scientists are women. But we also talked about how we all had experienced subtle (or not so subtle) patronizing comments to or about female colleagues in various work settings and how sometimes even the most diversity-minded people at our workplace do this (sub)consciously*.

I wasn't satisfied with the post below when I wrote it, but it was late and I was leaving and wanted to finish it. In hindsight I realize that one thing I wasn't satisfied with was that it somehow sent the signal that I don't appreciate what my mentors have done for me because of their gender. That is not true. It is not about trashing all men or saying that senior scientist men cannot have female protegees, but about the way we talk and act that make women feel unwelcome or less worthy in many professional settings.

Even here, where we have all the right legislation in place, where affirmative action has gone to extremes and women don't have time to be on all the committees they need to be on to fill their quotas, the understanding of what really matters is sorely lacking.

*A few examples:

When I came to the first meeting as the only woman in the leader group at current institution, and at some point during the meeting asked a relevant question, whereupon the person responsible for diversity patted me on the back and said how brave it was of me to say something. (Geez, thanks, what else would I be doing there)

When a younger female scientist who has done extremely well recently and won a prestigious grant was introduced at a recent meeting as young and up-and-coming, while her male peers of the same generation were simply introduced by name and credentials. (she was however the only female speaker at a two day meeting supposed to show off the best of the instution's work)

When assistant department head** positions were introduced in order to encourage women to move into department head positions. (I am one of the fools who jumped on that wagon because it seemed/probably is career enhancing, but in hindsight it is also really offensive to assume that women need a special training ground, while men can jump directly into the "real" department head positions. WTF!)

** this is not a university and department head positions are not only given to people in the top rank

So much for equal opportunities

2008-02-10T22:25:00.000+01:00

My work place recently celebrated something big. People of power from a whole range of institutions were invited for the event, the place was made to look it's best and the daily routines were interrupted by fancy meals, important speaches and people dressed to impress. A lot of work and thought have gone into planning this thing. A dedicated committee has been working on it for at least a year, and I don't even know how many people were involved in the practicalities of the actual event.

All went smoothly. No scandals, the invited guests seemed happy and all of us employees somehow felt a little more important from being surrounded by all the flowers, free stuff and important people. Part of the program was a seminar series with invited people from just about everywhere and some representatives for our workplace. Out of maybe 25 speakers one was a woman. I don't know if the women did not get asked or if they declined the offer, but off the top of my head I can think of at least a handfull of women who were around for the seminar and whom it would have been appropriate to ask.

The final big-deal-event was a party with many invited guests from all sorts of leadership positions within academia, industry and government. I'm not sure exactly how many invited guest were there, but somewhere between 30 and 50 is probably correct. Out of those 5 were women.

I live in one of the most progressive countries in the world when it comes to gender and diversity issues. Politicians speak at lenght about how to accommodate women in particular, and families in general, and most girls and some women believe they have equal opportunities. Sometimes I almost believe that too. On paper we have equal opportunities and we have one of the most accommodating maternity/paternity leave legislations in the world. Some people would argue that women even have better opportunities, because of affirmative action initiatives (I don't agree, but that's another can of worms). But equal opportunities only go so far.

For my PhD I did all my field work with an all-male group. For most of the time I felt like an outsider in this group, but at least we behaved like a group when we went to meetings. We were part of a bigger research network, and in total we were only five women in the network (of a group of 50 or so people). Three of us were PhD students, and as ridiculous as it sounds, our groups scored some sort of extra credits among the others for having the "token" females onboard. My group were endlessly proud when I wrote an above average dissertation and got a job before I finished, but I was never really accepted into their clique. It wasn't exactly a delightful experience for me, and I have been more than happy to put it behind me, but even in such a toxic environment I wouldn't have had the connections I have today if it wasn't for some of the people I worked with.

I have moved faster in this career than most women/people. I am often the youngest person present at many meetings/ in many situations and I often have somewhat unusual roles for my age. I know many of the bigwigs in my field because it's a small and tightly knit community and I have good mentors who introduce me to people. I also had an advisor in grad school who made an effort to introduce me to his network. I tend to think that I interact with these people on an equal level, and to some extent I do, but really, most of the time it is the token female thing all over again. I have the positions I have and go to the meeting I do because (male) mentors have pointed me out and made it possible. Not that I'm completely passive and don't seek out opportunities myself (I do), but many of the doors that are open to me are so because someone made an effort to make them open to me. There are women in my field, but they are rarely in positions where they can offer to open these doors for others.

I thought about this at the big event the other day, where practically everyone who were in some position of power were men and many of us who were in no position of power at all were women, and then I thought about the seminar and how part of the reason maybe is that women don't even get asked when it really counts. Maybe one of the reasons there are so few women in upper level positions in my field is that the only way one can reach any level is to be "adopted" by one or more male mentors who will make sure that the token female is promoted and shown off in the world. And even if that happens, and one happens to get "adopted" by good people apparently no one makes it to the very top.

This post is a bit messy, but I've got to leave it as it is because I a plane to catch before sunrise tomorrow morning and I still haven't packed. I'll be back in a week and probably won't have internet access while I'm gone, but if the post really doesn't make sense to anyone else but me I'll clean it up when I get back.

Whoa, we've got some catching up to do

2008-02-10T15:18:00.000+01:00

Thanks for all the nice comments on the accretionary wedge post below and to all of you who keep checking in here despite my very irregular posting routine. I keep constructing new posts in my head, but somehow never find the time to actually type them out. This always gets worse if I don't blog for a while because my ideas end up being so many and so messy that I don't know where to start anymore. So rather than starting out with one of the more substantial ideas for a post, I'll do a decluttering post here so I can move onto something better and more coherent afterwards.

So what's on my mind right now:

I am torn between the wish to write more about my field and my research and why it matters to me, and the wish to write about more personal thoughts and the general aspects of being a young, female scientist. After writing the previous post and getting a lot of good response I thought wow, so cool, I really want to discuss this with my readers. At the same time I couldn't make myself sit down at night at home and write out another lengthy post about a geological topic without feeling like it was just another chore on my list.
I think blogging is one of the most amazing innovations that have come with the Internet. I see scientific blogging as a great leap forward for the general public and scientists alike, and the idea of sharing the thought process behind science as well as results and discussions about new science is exhilerating and fun, but nevertheless fun in a work-way understanding of fun. I mostly write this blog on weekends and in the evenings, and blogging and reading blogs is mainly a downtime at home hobby . I think blogging at length about work-topics is a work related project and something I would like to do in a more official space, and maybe also get some sort of credit, or at least acceptance for. I would also like to be able to occasionally post on such a blog from work as well as consider it a part of my professional identity. I think the way forward for me will be to get a second blog under my own name that could be devoted to more work/field specific topics. It is not going to happen today, but maybe soon. I need to think about how I want to use such a space in a way that makes it serious enough to be a work activity, but relaxed enough to become something I actually want to keep up.

I'm still in a bit of a funk at work. I have a post brewing on perfectionism and how I've realised how many areas of my life it affects. I am going through a very self-conscious and introspective phase and some of the insights surprise me a lot. I want to share this on the blog because I know that many people in academia struggles with self-confidence and perfectionist issues and it's often taboo to talk about it in work places because it is associated with weakness. I have often gotten advice along the lines of "try not to take everything so seriously" or "try to be less of a perfectionist", but it's more easily said than done. Personally I never knew how to go about being less of a perfectionist, until I realized that it hasn't so much to do with the way I treat tasks as the way I think about life and myself in general.

Otherwise life is good, or as my Russian colleague used to put it "life is not too bad". January was a bit of a nightmare with several fiancial emergencies after each other (old car broke, buying new car, discovering brakes didn't work on new car, repair brakes and an emergency visit to the dentist to top it off) and repeated annoying dealings with authorities about imported car and a delayed tax refund. Most of this have been sorted out now, and I look forward to finally getting the tax refund from a year ago and to blow whatever is left after car repairs on a new spring wardrobe and maybe a trip to someplace nice and warm.

Why journalists get it wrong when they come to the Arctic

2008-01-22T21:54:00.000+01:00

I spend much of my time in the high Arctic. The mythological place of ice, midnight sun and endangered polar bears. By now everybody knows what the Arctic sea ice cover looks like and how fast it's shrinking, and satellite images of the globe with ever decreasing ice cover have become common fare in even the most popular of newspapers. Each summer tourists land on these shores in great numbers. They venture out of their comfort zone to see for themselves what it's all about and with them come the journalists, the nature conservationists and the politicians. Most go on day trips to glacier fronts. They go by boat through the fjords and they look at old maps and talk about how the ice has retreated since the map was made and how beautiful it is and how sad it is for the polar bears.

We take students on similar trips. Not because we want them to experience the Arctic before it is gone, but because they need to go to the same fjords to study the modern processes and geology in their curriculum. Because professors are not mean we also go on short "sightseeing" excursions like up close to glacier fronts, and we talk about the same things other people to do when they experience this dramatic play of nature for the first time. We also talk about former positions of the ice margin, but rather than concluding that the ice has retreated two kilometers since 1963 and therefore we are sad, we talk about how glaciers behave and what ice marginal positions mean.

Many glaciers in this particular corner of the world are what we call surging glaciers. It means they accumulate snow (which eventually turns to ice) over many years (often decades), while moving very slowly. At some point the imbalance between the accumulation on the upper part of the glacier and the mass loss near the front will be so extreme that gravity and the sliding capacity along the base of the ice force the ice mass to move forward. Surging glaciers can move forward at incredible speeds of up to 100 m/ day or more than a km in a year. They alternate between the surging phase that commonly lasts a few years and the quiescent phase that lasts for decades. During the quiescent phase glaciers retreat to an "equilibrium position" and build up towards a new surge. In the high Arctic where modern science came with the polar explorers of the late 19th and early 20th century very little is known about the past behaviour of surging glaciers. For many glaciers it is not known whether they are surging at all. Surging glaciers often leave remarkable traces in the landscape in the shape of moraines. The force involved in the surge allows for the ice to push up "slices" of the bed and stack them in front of the glacier. When the ice retreats the moraines remain. Dating organic material (C-14 dating) or Quartz or feldspar mineral grains in sand (luminescence dating) can tell us about the age of past surges. Sometimes they also leave traces in the sea floor like plough marks where rock fragments attached to the base of the glacier have scraped the sea floor.

Surging glaciers are dependent on the ability to slide across the bed. Large glaciers and ice masses like the Greenland and Antarctic inland ice are wet at the base because the weight of the ice allows the ice mass to reach its pressure melting point. Smaller glaciers in cold areas are often what we call polythermal. It means the glacier snout is frozen to the ground, but the thicker ice mass in the hinterland is wet at the base. Surging glaciers are often polythermal. When Arctic glaciers decrease in size they become cold based or perenially frozen to the ground. Cold based glaciers don't really move. It is possible that many glaciers that were surging in the past aren't so anymore. It is also likely that some of the glaciers that surge today will not continue to do so.

In historical terms, glaciers used to be bigger. A global cold phase, "The Little Ice age" lasted from the 17th to the 19th century and is confirmed from historical records from harvest to diseases and narratives about cold winters and wet summers. It did however not begin and end simultaneously and different regions have reacted differently to the climatic fluctuations that characterized this time interval. It seems from temperature records that the north Atlantic snapped out of the cold phase relatively late, maybe as late as the 1920's-1930's. Ice margins from the maximum position of glaciers during The Little Ice Age are still dominant in the landscape. In areas with permafrost, moraines degrade very slowly. Some people have suggested that glaciers are still adapting to the temperature changes 70-80 years ago. This does not suggest that no mass loss is going on today, just that it is difficult to distill the modern change from historical change when standing on a ship experiencing the scenery for the first time.

Each year glaciologists camp out on the glaciers in order to measure thicknesses, ice temperature and isotopic composition, trace gases and other evidence of "the state of the ice". Practically all of them come to the conclusion that most glaciers in the world loose mass rapidly, and the well documented studies should leave no doubt that the heat has been turned on and that ice is melting. So what am I complaining about? I am complaining about the lack of talk about how the glaciers really move and what it is we see in the landscape. The moraine five kilometers in front of the modern glacier margin is not a sad sign of the ice retreat, but a sign of a not climate related natural phenomenon called glacier surge and the retreat from the Little Ice Age moraine is partly an adaptation to warming over the past 100 years. The real signs of climate warming such as the thinning of the glacier, change from polythermal to cold-based glaciers and shorter duration and thinner sea ice cover may be less photogenic, but all the more important.

Let me end by saying that I do "believe in global warming induced by humans and I do think we should do everything we can to turn or diminish the global warming trend. I'm all for higher gas prices, environmentally friendly cars and public transportation and I think it will at some point be considered unethical to fly everywhere and use bargain air tickets. I am also deeply conflicted about this need to always point out that I'm not against global warming when pointing out inaccuracies in terminology or public lingo about the state of the Arctic. As someone who studies palaeoclimate rather than present climate these issues come up a lot when some study or other suggests that things were different in the past than we think.

This post is submitted to the geology carnival "The Accretionary Wedge" on "Favorite geological misconceptions".

(I admit that this post does not conform with my own views on what geology is as discussed recently on Clastic Detritus, but it does have a lot to do with something I encounter regularly in my professional life as a geologist)

Update on the burn-out posts

2008-01-21T10:20:00.000+01:00

Things are looking up here. I want to thank the commenters in the posts below for good suggestions, support and feed back. It helps to know that someone is out there and your thoughts and ideas have helped me to see things clearer and ask myself some important questions.

Since last week a few things have happened, which were all small steps towards making things better.

I have slowed down at work and made time for reading widely within my field. This is not a long-term solution because I will not always be able to work at a slower pace, but right now ditching a few self-imposed deadlines and making time for thinking and reading has been nice.

Likewise I have taken evenings and the weekend off. Read a book, watched TV, cooked nice food, gone to the gym and in general taken good care of myself. Again this doesn't solve the problem in the long run, but was a nice breathing break.

I picked up where I left one of the manuscripts before the holidays and realised that although making the last figures will take time, it is not impossible. I think I am realistically looking at some 15-20 hours of work and since I don't have too many other obligations this week it should be possible to finish this paper soon. I also got an email from the co-author (and former advisor) on the other paper, and she has very few comments, so it looks like this papers is also close to being submitted.

I tried to talk about the flexibility issue at work. I ended up mentioning it in a group meeting dedicated to discussing work conditions, so I figured it was appropriate, but couldn't talk about it in a very personal way. I think my point about the need for more work from home time was largely not understood and maybe even seemed a bit offensive to some. The actual meeting was awkward and I felt a bit like I was the problem kid who wanted different and unreasonable rules. However, bringing up the topic made me realise that one of the reasons the others don't understand is that I'm in a very different situation to most of them with being a post doc and on my way out. My intense need to publish over spending time actively on the ongoing projects is mainly brought about by my leaving from this institution. Maybe I am also wrong to assume that I can have all the time in the world to write right now. I am still employed via ongoing projects and I realise now that it is totally reasonable for my PI to expect me to spend many hours a week on those, even if it doesn't mean writing. I think the issue is partly about my preferred way of working while writing (comfortably at home at the longest possible stretches of time) and partly about a lack of discussion between the PI and I on how I should spend my time (writing or doing new research). Even if the meeting made me feel like a fool, this realisation alone was enough to make me consider the meeting a success. I think I understand better now how to frame this discussion when bringing it up again.

I'm trying to work on some of my own issues that brought me in this crossroads position in the first place. I've tried reach out to friends and even tried to talk to my mom about it. I'd say it's definitely with varying levels of success, but I've also gotten some challenging and really useful input. As I've said in one of the earlier posts, one solution is obviously to lower my expectations for my own productivity. This is difficult for a number of reasons. Partly because in academia one does just not lower ones level of productivity and stay in the game, but it's also difficult because having high expectations of myself and getting acknowledged by others because of my accomplishments has become a huge part of who I am. As I just told a friend, maybe the dilemma is to find a way to still achieve academic goals, but not for the acceptance from others, but simply because I think it is important/ interesting/fun (which I still do, at least some of the time).

Revisiting priorities

2008-01-13T13:43:00.000+01:00

I hope last week was a low point and that I'm on my way back up. As often before just writing about my worries makes them seem easier to handle. I don't think there is anything physically wrong with me, or put differently, I think if I could be less stressed, I would feel better. I don't think it's a matter of having more downtime each day, fresh air, exercise and eating healthily, though all that certainly helps. I don't think the pressure is really put on me by anyone else. I already got the next job despite my meager publication record and nobody will complain if I don't publish a lot now during the spring. I think the pressure is very much in my head which in a way makes it simpler because I can control that, and in another way makes it much worse because if I really could control my thoughts, I would have done so a long time ago.

It is not entirely true that I have forgotten what I am passionate about in my work. I haven't. My passion for my field is just becoming overshadowed by all the things I must do and haven't done. I am excited about the ideas I have for new papers and for the data collection I am working on. I am excited about developing new classes for next year, about working on a more field-based way of teaching and about new research ideas that can be carried out in my new location. I want to have time in my day to think about the projects and problems I am excited about, but the only way I can do that is by neglecting the endless revision projects that makes me feel useless and stupid and slow, but never ends unless I spend so much time on them.

The paper that tipped me over the edge before the holidays is one I have been working on for years practically. It was in my dissertation as a manuscript and I knew it needed some more work before submitting it. It connects with some of the things I have been working on since and after spending some time revising it last winter, it turned out that the better decision was to split it into two papers and incorporate some old and some new data into both. The first of these papers was due for a journal in early December and I started working on it in November thinking that it would be two-three weeks of revisions. So far I have spent 80 full working hours on it (yes, I've logged them and breaks are not included) and I'm still not done. Because I rarely have a full day to work on anything, it took me from early November to mid December by spending all evenings and weekends and all available work time. It makes me feel sick to think about that it's still not done. It makes me feel slow and hopeless that it takes me 80+ hours to finish a paper that was already half-way there, and to think about how long it will take me to complete the remaining maybe 20 or so hours. It makes me feel I should spend all my waking hours working on it, although I know I will feel bad again the moment I put myself on that kind of track.

This is what happens all the time. I set out after the field season or a vacation with all the best intentions of having a balanced work life with time for writing, reading, communal tasks and research group logistics each day and it goes fine for a little while until some deadline is approaching. Then I realise I am not working hard enough and need to speed up to meet it. The first thing to go is the new research, reading and development of ideas (all the things that make me want to do this in the first place). The second thing to go is exercise, dinner and social time and within no time I am back to working non-stop, feeling sick and having no life at all. Sometimes, as the case was in December, I don't even meet the deadline anyway, leading to further despair.

I really don't know how to deal with this in a better way. Obviously my current strategy is not working but each time I have tried to set up a more balanced schedule I fail at it, because I just don't have time for it. I hate that it is not "allowed" to talk about struggling with work in academia and that the mention of difficulties is the same as admitting to a weakness. I hate that not having kids is making it even less acceptable to struggle with work demands*. It makes me sad that I don't have any close friends here and that my only network is people who are also involved in my workplace.

I think it would help a lot if I had more time to work on new research, new ideas and time to read. It would also help if I had a much more flexible schedule and by that I mean if I could work from home significantly more than I do now. It seems that many of my colleagues thrive in the corporate style environment where they meet in the office in the morning, write happily on their papers all day and punch out after 8 hours of consistent work. Maybe I'm just more lazy, but my brain simply doesn't work like that. I need breaks, I need to get up and go outside and think and be creative. I want to be able to spend a break reading blogs without feeling guilty the moment my boss shows up in the office or go to a coffee shop to think or write if a change of scene is helpful. It may take me longer to finish something, but it is more inspiring for me. I have talked about this at length before, and I am not sure I can do much to change it in my current job, but I think I need to find a way of bringing more creativity with me to work, even within my current constraints. I also need some success experiences with the old research/ manuscripts. I don't even need to see them published right now, but I must at least submit something and get a feeling of making some progress. I really must a find a way to combine the two, because still not having published (or much worse, even submitted) the dissertation papers makes me feel awful.

The really difficult thing is to apply these thoughts to everyday life. I would love to hear what you all think and how you deal with the work pressure and publishing demands. We all talk a lot about balance between work and life, but what about balance between different work tasks. Do you ever feel overworked to the point where it seems worrying and if you do, what are you doing about it? Have you ever opened up to colleagues about such concerns and if you did, how did they react?

*I think this is the other side of the coin of the family friendly politics and society in Scandinavia. The acceptance for parents needing to leave work early, having constraints on traveling plans or just in general being pressed for time is high. This is good, and I might need this acceptance soon enough, but I think it strikes back at people without a family in an unintended way. Often it implies that people with kids are understandably stressed but single people or couples without children couldn't possibly have other demands in their life than work. I don't question the stresses that parents face, but I also think it is essentially more comforting and assuring to arrive home to a loving family who needs you than to an empty house where you can just as well start working again. I was at a seminar about stress in the fall and the psychologist giving the talk actually said that single people often got hit by stress in a different way than families with children because the family demands made the parents leave work earlier and forced them to spend less time and energy on work. This is probably not true in academia, though.

Reality bites

2008-01-09T07:39:00.000+01:00

So I did it. I got up on Monday morning and went to work and it was hard, and I was tired and had a headache, but it was not awful. I can do this. I can get up and come to work every day, because, really, why shouldn't I. Other people do this all the time. Then yesterday it felt like I was coming down with something again, and I'm beginning to think I am allergic to work, or maybe to writing papers. I have already had several sick leave days in the fall, and I can't believe this is going to continue. It's been the same for a while now. I'm fine when I have time off and get to recover and instantly get worn out as soon as I return to work, without even doing much, and that scares me. I think it must be psychological in a way, because I cannot really imagine what else would function that way, but I don't know how to break out of it.

It's not even that I truly dislikes my job. It's OK. It's even interesting. I have a lot of freedom to do what I want. I am being recognised for my work and get a lot of positive feedback and the few things I might be less content with are mostly going to change when I start my new job in June. I have done all the right things like taking time off (four weeks vacation in spring and a long Christmas break now), used overtime hours to create a more flexible schedule (took a lot of Thursdays off or made them part-time work from home days in the fall) and it works. I do get more rested and more connected to myself when I take time off, but it doesn't last as soon as I get back.

When I was completely worn out after the field season I tried to talk to some friends and colleagues about it, but they didn't really get it. It is so accepted and I'd say expected in this profession to be tired, overworked and behind all the time, that it's not perceived as an alarm signal, but rather like normality. Maybe I'm just different and can't accept this normality, maybe I'm weaker or less healthy and can't push the limits the way some other people do, or maybe I have just been pushing the limits for so long now that I don't know how not to do so.

I started the postdoc right after defending the PhD. Like in getting up and packing my belongings the morning after the defense and start my new job in a new country the following Monday. I got the visiting ass. professor gig, which was really my first extensive teaching experience, while I was still working on publications from the dissertation, writing my first big grant application and getting my feet wet with the postdoc research and logistics. I moved twice within that year and had a fifty percent post doc on top of being a visiting professor. I got my first big administrative post while I was still working on grades and make up exams from the fall semester and continued to work on my postdoc research while being a new department head/group leader, and on top of that came the worst field season ever this summer as a new expedition leader on two long field seasons with lots of social tension in both. I don't think I have ever been so tired or felt as weak as during the last of these field campaigns. I am awfully behind on publications, because so much of my postdoc time has been spent in other roles and I'm feeling squeezed now because I need to publish more before I start the next job. But I'm tired because I have been loaded with new jobs and extra activities and short term pressure to learn and finish up something new for so long now.

Last year around this time I thought a lot about how to balance work and life and I thought the solution to my problems was to get better at this, take more time off and create a good home life for myself to help take off some of the pressure. Now I think that was only a way to try to cure or keep down the symptoms, but not the underlying problem. I think the real problem and my worst enemy is my own ambition and lack of ability to let go of opportunities. I think now, that maybe there are some of the opportunities that came my way that I shouldn't have taken, because I'm not a machine and cannot keep going indefinitely. I also think I need to let some of my publication goals for the spring slide, but it is hard, because I have already set myself up for being behind and it won't get better when I start teaching in the fall. I sometimes think I dislike my job, but deep down I don't think I do. I love my research when I have time to dive into it and think and play, but the pressure to be productive and on top of it all is crushing me in a way where I don't remember what I'm passionate about anymore.

New Years meme 2008

2008-01-08T18:39:00.000+01:00

Wayfarer Scientista tagged me for this, so here goes, though I guess it should have been posted before we switched to 2008. But who cares. It's my blog and I make the rules.

1. Will you be looking for a new job? Not looking, but I will start my first job as a faculty member this summer

2. Will you be looking for a new relationship? No, I'm happily married, but I'm hoping to meet new friends and make social life and relationships in general a higher priority.

3. New house? Yes, as I will be moving in summer.

4. What will you do differently in 08? I hope I will learn to accept my limitations and be satisfied when I do my best. I don't really believe I can change my obsessive-compulsive, perfectionist nature overnight, but I will be working on cutting myself some slack.

5. New Years resolution? I don't make New Years resolutions, but since finishing the PhD two years ago there seems to have been a kind of overarching theme or focus for each year. The first year was about finding my place academically, financially and socially. Getting settled in a new town, struggle with the newness of a foreign country, getting started on projects and paying off debts with newfound income. The second year was about reaching for goals and establishing a life and a routine. It was the year I got married, were able to save money for the first time since forever, began to feel at home in the new town, established friendships here and the year I landed my first faculty job. So now what? This year will bring more change than I am comfortable with right now and it will also bring an awful lot of work. I want it to be the year I accept that I don't want the career at the expense of my physical and mental health and find a way to deal with the workload that allows me to keep both.

6. What will you not be doing in 08? Umm, who knows? Anything might happen. Seriously, take on new administrative posts. The one I have now is more than enough.

7. Any trips planned? A trip to Italy with the husband in late spring, a family gathering in mid-summer, a conference in UK in March, maybe a work trip to Russia in February and two field trips to Russia in summer. On top of this I'm still contemplating blowing off all my overtime hours on a trip somewhere nice in spring before I quit my job here and the overtime hours will dissolve into thin air.

8. Wedding plans? Well no. I just got married last year and we are very happy, thank you very much.

9. Major thing on your calendar? Manuscript submission deadlines. They control my life in an unhealthy way.

10. What can’t you wait for? The husband to return home from the next few months overseas. In a shorter time frame: to go home and eat chocolates and watch the Gilmore Girls final season on DVD.

11. What would you like to see happen differently? A lot in the political debate. For starters I'd like journalists to get a basic grip on earth science if they want to participate in the climate change debate.

12. What about yourself will you be changing? My mind. Can I have another one? Seriously, I am quite happy in my own skin and don't really want to change anything.

13. What happened in 07 that you didn’t think would ever happen? I grew to like the town I live in, and I feel like I've come home when I return from trips.

14. Will you be nicer to the people you care about? Maybe. I don't think I am not-nice now, but stress tends to make me very introverted and unsocial, so some people might think that I'm not being nice to them. I'll try to improve. OK.

15. Will you dress differently this year than you did in 07? Not by choice, but I'm moving to a place that is quite a bit colder than where I am now, so I guess thermal underwear and woolen socks can't be avoided.

16. Will you start or quit drinking? No, I am quite content with my drinking level.

17. Will you better your relationship with your family? It's good and difficult at the same time and I doubt it will change much in 2008.

18. Will you do charity work? Probably not, though, I should.

19. Will you go to bars? Probably more than I do now because that is just something that happens more where we are moving.

20. Will you be nice to people you don’t know? I think I'm already nice enough to people I don't know.

21. Do you expect 08 to be a good year for you? Probably. I have high hopes and it looks promising.

22. How much did you change from this time last year till now? Not at all, but maybe a lot. I think I am more confident in my professional life but I don't think I changed much in my personal life.

23. Do you plan on having a child? Being a new faculty member is not ideal for getting pregnant, but I do wish for having kids in a not too distant future.

24. Will you still be friends with the same people you are friends with now? Hopefully. I have lost many friends in the past due to me letting the friendship slide when moving away. I am becoming more aware of the importance of taking care of the long-distance friendships.

25. Major lifestyle changes? I don't think so, although some people would call moving to our new location a major lifestyle change.

26. Will you move? Yes to a place where it's completely dark three months of the year and where everybody owns a snowmobile, which sounds extremely remote and strange but actually feels much more connected to the world than you would think.

27. What will you make sure doesn’t happen in 08 that happened in 07? Well, nothing really bad happened in 2007 that I absolutely must protect myself or anyone else from. My Russian colleague died, but although it is sad when people die, it's hard to prevent. Maybe less social tension on field work. It's unbelievably draining to be away like that when the group doesn't function.

28. What are your New Years Eve plans? We spent it at my brother's house with his fiancé and my two nephews. It was a last minute arrangement due to a change in travel plans, but it's been years since I celebrated New Years with my brother and it was lovely.

30. One wish for 08? Better and more consistent blogging habits. One can always try.

It's all about expectations

2008-01-06T22:44:00.000+01:00

It's almost one week into the new year and I'm going back to work tomorrow after a three week break. I have deliberately taken the time completely off and it's been wonderful. The husband and I have travelled to visit our families, we have had some time off on our own and I feel reasonably rested and much better than before the break.

I worry about getting back to work, because I feel the demands on my time there are higher than I can cope with, and I don't know how to deal with that or make it better. I haven't been blogging much in quite a while now, partly due to being away but also partly due to being worked completely into the ground for a long time now. I had what I could best describe as a couple of small breakdowns in the week before the holidays and in our first week of actually having time off, and it worries me that I don't see a way to prevent that from happening in the future. I feel pushed and squeezed and dragged in all directions. The expectations are high and although I do my very best at the expense of eating, sleeping and getting regular exercise it is never quite enough to keep up with what I am supposed to be doing. I see that other people are able to work very long hours and weekends in order to reach their goals, and it frustrates me that I can't do the same, but I'm beginning to realise that I really can't. I cannot work for much more than the designated 40 hours per week for any extended period of time. My time on the job is constrained and I don't have the academic freedom of lounging around in pyjamas all day if I want to, going out for lunch or making an appointment in the middle of the day. I get up at six every morning, commute to work and sit in my office for eight hours. If I ever want to work out, cook dinner, clean the house, talk to my spouse or have friends (something I barely have anymore) or lounge around in pyjamas and blog or watch a movie, I cannot work two or three hours each night and weekends. It makes me feel like a failure that I am not able to do this, but when I quit the real life stuff for too long, it pays back and that's where the weepy "breakdowns" came from.

It also bothers me that my year is so interrupted. In most years the months from about the beginning of May to the end of September are taken up entirely by logistics for field work, actual fieldwork and teaching field courses and unpacking gear and wrapping up logistics from the field season. That leaves no time for summer breaks or vacation time and a year's worth of work need to be accomplished in about seven months. I do more fieldwork than I have the time to write up any time soon, but it's the way to play the game as it is now we have the grants. Maybe this bothers me even more because my/our private life is similarly interrupted with the husband working far away from home two times three months a year and only one of these seasons coinciding with my field season. I think this lack of break and uneven pace of the year is something that really makes my life more difficult.

I know those are the conditions of the trade and I don't complain in general. I think my working conditions are just fine and that I/we as academic(s) are to a large extent pushing ourselves, but then again I don't think it's possible to be successful in this career without pushing oneself. I don't know if it's possible to succeed while taking the expectations down a notch or two, but I do know that I need to try to do so unless I want to get sick and unable to work at all.

Guilt riddled as ever

2007-12-09T14:17:00.000+01:00

I have been a lousy blogger lately. I finally checked into my blogger account today and realised that my last post was from mid-November, right about the time when I started working on the paper that has been keeping me up at night ever since. So, I haven't forgotten about you and it wasn't my intention to take a break this long, but my attention has been needed elsewhere.

I am working on a rather significant revision of a paper that was supposed to be submitted about ten days ago. I worked more or less nonstop for two weeks in order to make the deadline, but kept getting sidetracked by last minute meetings, urgent administrative decision-making and permission requirements for next years field season. I got an extension for a loosely defined deadline sometime asap and hope to get it off my hands tomorrow (but don't be too surprised if the manuscript is still chasing me around come Tuesday).

In addition to all the external distractions I also somehow lost the superpower that allowed me to get up at six in the morning and work till I dropped late at night somewhere around the original deadline. So for the past week I have been going about the writing at a more leisurely speed and prioritised to attend a planned family event including two full days of travel, a two day scientific meeting, a Christmas-cookie-baking day, Christmas tree shopping and finally catching up with my blogging peeps. The paper will get done eventually.

btw: I have been tagged for a couple of memes during my absence. I will get to these. Thanks for tagging me. I also have some really interesting follow-up to the blogging about science discussion to share from the project meeting this week. Hopefully I will get around to this soon.

At night the monsters come out from under the bed

2007-11-18T10:40:00.001+01:00

Yesterday I dreamed I was being fired from my job. The setting of the dream was clearly out of context, taking place in a carpenter's shop all complete with saw dust on the floor, old furniture and people dressed in work overalls, but the cast was people among the higher ups at work. The reason for the firing was that someone had pointed out something I had said in a meeting the other day, and although I only vaguely remember the reason, it was something along the lines of me saying something impolite to some service staff. Hardly a reason for being downright kicked out in the real world and the process behind it all was also a tad too Kafkaesque to be true, as it was only this one persons word against mine and the decision was already made.

Although I missed two days at work last week due to a cold I don't really think I'm up for being kicked out but the dream was distressing on it own for being so real and featuring the right people in the role of power. It also pushed on some very real buttons with some real situations lately brought about by my future change of workplace. Maybe it's all in my head, but I am having such a difficult time with the decision to go after my new job. It's not so much the move and the saying good bye to very nice colleagues here (although that in itself is taking its toll), it's more the guilt of not being grateful enough for the chances and opportunities I have been given here and maybe most of all the fear that in being open about my desire for New Job/ New Institution I am inevitably showing a lack of passion for Current Job or more correctly Current Institution. It is not so much about the actual work to be done in various projects, because I will continue to be involved in those and my closest colleagues know that I plan to be invested in our shared interests for the foreseeable future, it is more about the type of institution.

I am not unhappy where I am. I work with an extraordinarily good group of people who are excellent scientists and fun and kind people to be around. I like my workplace and recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone and I appreciate many of the privileges associated with this kind of business. I also like the city and the place and in general I am not ready to rule out the opportunity of ever coming back. I might never do so, but at the moment I like to think of leaving a door open. But it is not a university and it has a different mission. Not a worse one, just a different one. It has a heavy emphasis on applied science and the potential to do great and important work that affects lots of people every day, but I don't know if that mission is for me. I am not sure it is, but with being a postdoc and being in an almost entirely basic research focused group I haven't really experienced the true side of this workplace. At the moment I have a hard time seeing how the kind of research I am most interested in right now fits into the main idea of this institution, but to rule that out forever is a bit of a long shot, I'd say.

Ever since finishing my Masters I have had a desire to teach. I love teaching and I am good at it. I have a passion for teaching that I just can't muster up for applied research, and my main goal is to work at a university. The position I have gotten now is my chance to do so, and may eventually open the doors to another university in a more desirable location (the place I'm going to is definitely desirable in its own right, but it's not a place most people would want to spend the rest of their lives) or it may not. There are not hundreds of universities to choose from here. There are maybe something like ten universities where my field is taught in the region of four countries where we could imagine living for the long term. In other words there are absolutely no guarantees for being able to sustain a lifetime career as a professor.

I have been trying until now to signal interest in both worlds (I mean who on the job market wouldn't do so, if they could possibly under any circumstances see themselves in both types of careers), and trying to get credentials in both types of work. I have actively been working towards getting as much teaching experience as possible, but maybe my colleagues haven't realized I thought of that as a way of making myself marketable towards another type of position. I have found it difficult to be open about my wish of switching to the university environment because I feared it would change how my commitment to the applied research type institution was viewed. I think that was rightly guessed, because that is what I am experiencing right now. Now when everyone knows I have accepted the other job I cannot really hide where my preferences lie, and some people don't like that. It's not only that they don't like it, but I'm fairly sure that some people also take this as disinterest in what we are doing here and may well remember this if they ever receive an application from me again in the future. What bugs me even more is that although I don't want it to be that way, it may be true and if it is I will not be able to return to this place, and that leaves me really sad.

My job does not exist

2007-11-17T13:26:00.000+01:00

After almost two years you would think I should have realized, but alas, no. A few weeks ago I got a questionnaire from the union I'm a member of, who were doing a survey among their postdoc members about work conditions. All fine and an excellent initiative. In one of the first questions the respondents were to choose their workplace among a list of institutions. My institution was not on that list and according to the explanation following below neither were any of the other non-university research institutes. Apparently according to the rules in this country one cannot be a postdoc if the position is not linked to an university. Huh?

Granted, nowhere on my contract are the words "postdoc" mentioned. My position says research scientist on a contract that runs out four years from the start date, but the name tag on my door and my business card says postdoc. How's that for confusion? I don't really care whether my particular position is called postdoc, or contract-based research scientist or worn out young scientist waiting in line for a permanent job, but I do care about the implications following from the postdoc position only being associated with universities*.

For one this brings up my favorite pet-peeve, about the postdoc being considered a second educational step beyond the PhD. This bugs me to no end and I have written about it several times on this blog in the past. I have no problem with the postdoc as a time to refine ones ideas, get the dissertation research published, get a foundation of new research to publish from in the future and to provide some preliminary results for the first big grant applications. But, emphasising that this must happen at a university, sounds to me like saying that one must be in a degree-granting learning environment under supervision of teachers in order to do so. Sounds to me like the next step will be the "postdoc degree" achieved by defending a set amount of research in front of a board of academics.

On the flip side, this rule might be well intentioned and signal the need for a training ground where postdocs can get experience with teaching, interaction with students, advising etc. If it is so, even I might agree that it makes some sort of sense. But as far as I know, the goal at many institutions and various associations with postdoc's best interest at heart is to shield post docs from teaching loads, student advising and too much interaction with students. The ideal postdoc in my field seems to be considered ample time for research and development, without "wasting" too much on taking part in department commitments.

Last, but not least, how on earth do the union people imagine the research institutes can be effective in churning out papers to the degree they are now, if postdocs weren't involved in the process? Do they have no idea how a research group or the grant proposal process works? I wonder who they think do much of the science in the government subsidised research institutes if not young contract researchers, and what these people are entitled to or not, if they are not postdocs? If the postdoc title somehow suggests that one is under training, does that give the university real-postdocs access to development tools, that the research institute contract researchers haven't? Or is it the other way around that the non-postdoc contract researchers have more freedom as scientists because we are considered average slaves rather than people in training? If that is so, I'd like the title on my business card to be changed.

*I should emphasise that I am at a research institute, in a department with a strong emphasis on basic science. We are not associated with a particular university, but many senior (and some junior) scientists hold associate/ full professorships at universities in addition to their position here. We do not do commercial science and compete for grants from research councils and other public funding bodies on equal terms with the universities.

Field photo Friday

2007-11-16T20:42:00.000+01:00

One of my field areas is this mid-size river in subarctic Eurasia. It is not only an important waterway, source of freshwater and (sadly) a major outlet for industrial waste, it is also a potential climate archive for the past 100.000 years and an example of what some oil and gas reservoirs look like inside. It is several hundred kilometers long and a thorough study of its deposits and the mechanisms they reflect is probably going to be a lifetime of work. So far we are only scratching the surface. This year we went to five or six sites near the river mouth to investigate what happened to this river as sea levels fell and rose during the last ice age.

I have been a bit obsessed with this story ever since I worked on my dissertation and my advisor talked me into working on some previously published data in a new context. I don't think he really understood this new context himself*, and it took me a lot of overtime and detours to understand where the potential was. At the time I mainly saw the frustrations related to having to write a manuscript for my dissertation based on some data that were not appropriate for the kind of study I was trying to do. But somewhere buried under the frustrations I was also intrigued by the idea of some day going back and collect the right kind of data and do this the way it was supposed to be done in order to work.

This summer I got back to do my own work. It was raining practically every day, we stayed in an awful hotel in town because the ground was too soggy to put up a tent anywhere and we had to go out for dinner in our muddy field clothes each night because we couldn't cook for ourselves in the hotel. But we got some nice results. They didn't change the world from what I knew already, but they did confirm and strengthen some previous ideas based on what other people had done at some of the same sites, and they gave way to more questions and more field work next year. Some of the data will go into the manuscript from my dissertation, which is still sitting, barely touched, on my desk, but which I need to submit to a special publication of a journal in two weeks time. Some will go into another paper I'm going to submit some time next year. But the best part is that I'm pretty sure this will form the start of a lot of future work and presently it's the best foundation I've got for some day applying for a real grown-up grant from the research council.

*My former advisor is an excellent scholar in his field and I'm not trying to imply he doesn't know what he's doing, because generally he does. But, in this particular case I think he had gotten a bit too excited about some new technology that he didn't really know much about, but thought that probably a bright young PhD student could work something out with applying this method to "bunch of old data". Sadly no, either the PhD student wasn't bright enough or the entire idea was rubbish. It cost me about a year in overtime on the PhD, a whole lot of money and gave me only a database of "bunch of old data" which is not very much in demand.

Small rays of light in an otherwise crappy week

2007-11-16T19:18:00.000+01:00

Good news of the week

I got an invitation to submit a paper for a special volume of high profile journal in my sub field based on a talk I gave earlier this fall

A student contacted me asking if I would be her advisor for her Master's as she'd heard from a friend what an excellent teacher I was (Ha, those are the moments that makes it all worth it)

Misbehaving senior colleague closed the discussion* with the words "I see now that you do, indeed, have some experience with "our shared field" (I guess this can be consider a success under the circumstances).

*The discussion ended up in a series of emails in which we did eventually find some common ground and he did sort of explain his point of view. Despite the seriously peculiar start, I have the feeling that we will probably be able to do some good work together, eventually.

It's done and in the mail

2007-11-12T22:05:00.000+01:00

It is about time I chime in here with an InaDWriMo update. I am far behind my goal and have been embarrassingly quiet here. I have been working a lot to make first the original deadline and then a couple of later ones, but alas, things take time. But, as of this night, the first paper is done. It is still going out for a last round of comments from the co-author before being submitted, but I have a good feeling about the paper this time. The argument is stronger than it was before. I have tied up some loose ends, rewritten parts of the results section where some unclear writing covered up some gaps in my understanding of the data and, I think, come to a conclusions that is neither too adventurous nor too trivial.

The manuscript is standing firmly at 13.275 words, or just about the same as I started out at about two months ago (see why I didn't do a word count for InaDWriMo). That's fine. It's a little on the long side, and technically I think one part could be left out completely or moulded into a separate paper, but just the thought of major structural changes now makes me want to puke. So I'll wait and see what the co-author/ reviewers suggest before doing anything major.

Manuscript 1:

To do (list for InaDWriMo posted Nov 1):

Finish revision of pages 21-25 - DONE

Edits to figures - DONE

Rewrite discussion + add sections (currently 6 pages and shouldn't get much longer) - DONE

Write conclusion - DONE

Re-read introduction and revise according to final discussion - DONE

Re-read abstract and revise according to final conclusion- DONE

Check reference list - DONE

Burn CD with text and all figures - DONE

Print manuscript - DONE

Mail to co-author - DONE

Why would you want common courtesy in Academia when we have so much fun without?

2007-11-06T10:21:00.000+01:00

Perplexing email conversation with senior colleague (whom I have by the way never met)

Chair (to Esteemed Professor of rocks, cc to saxifraga):
"Dear Esteemed Professor of Rocks. Dr. Saxifraga is our new faculty member in Speciality of Rocks and will be the future coordinator of your course. I suggest she gets involved somehow in the teaching this year in order to become familiar with the course content and structure"*.

Saxifraga (star struck): "Dear Professor of Rocks. I understand I will be the future coordinator of your course and look forward to meet you. I will be able to give some of the lectures/ practicals or participate in field trips, whatever you think suits the course".

Esteemed Professor of Rocks (not impressed): " Dear Saxifraga. Who (the hell) are you? This is a graduate course, what do you know about graduate teaching, I am sick and tired of having newly minted PhD's teach other PhD's some textbook crap, they just read last night. Where did you learn about this subject? Who were your teachers? Which textbooks do you know? **

Saxifraga (HUH???): "Dear Professor of Rocks. I suppose we will meet when I start my position and I will be happy to discuss my research activities and teaching ideas with you in person. Until then I am sure the university can provide you with information on my background. I suggest I don't participate in your course this year (because, hello dude, why would you want me there when me presence obviously fills you with rage).

Esteemed Professor of Rocks: "I get the feeling that you were annoyed by my previous email. Why the fuss? I was just trying to find out something about your background and didn't even know you were coming. Even if you are very famous, you shouldn't assume everybody knows you***.

Two days pass where saxifraga has other things to do than reply to grumpy old professors.

Monday morning the saga continues….

Esteemed Professor of Rocks: "Are you still angry with me, stop being such a baby"

Saxifraga (WTF, does this never end): "Dear Professor of Rocks. I am not angry, I am busy and haven't had the time to reply to your email. I understand why you would want some background information about me, but refuse to write a job application to teach in your course. In brief my specialty is such and such, I have this kind of teaching experience and you can read more here (link to department webpage). Whether I will participate in your course or not depends on whether my contribution is appreciated or not. I have a full course load already and suggest we will keep my participation in your course minimal.

Esteemed Professor of Rocks: Cheer up, listen to this and smile (attached mp3 file of actually quite good song possibly with some hidden meaning)

* Chair explains in another email to Saxifraga that this is just an option and not a demand since her formal teaching obligations are already filled with other courses.
**Sadly I am not making the questions up. The rest is not the actual words, but close. The meaning is certainly the same.
***Hell no, surprise or not, I don't assume anybody knows me, but I assume the university who hired me somehow guaranties a minimum expected standard for their faculty.

Blogging about science II

2007-11-04T11:34:00.000+01:00

In connection to the previous post I'm delighted to see that science blogging seems to be in a healthier shape in other parts of the world.

Dr. Freeride at Adventures in Ethics and Science is involved in an upcoming conference on Science Blogging in North Carolina, January 2008 (head over to Dr. Freerides page if you're interested in attending). For me this is on the other side of the world, so I won't be there, but can I just say that I'm equally impressed and inspired and ever-so slightly jealous for not being able to go. I have no idea whether a similar community of people exists here in these parts, but I doubt it as I have never ever heard a peep about such a thing. Anyway I'm exited that it's possible to gather more than a hundred people (number of attendees still counting I suppose) for an event like this and maybe particularly excited about the number of non-bloggers attending. One thing is to get a bunch of bloggers together who already think blogging is a cool way of communicating, but taking the step outside of the blogosphere and get other people excited about what is happening here is where I think it is getting difficult.

When I was digging around on the conference web page I also found a link to this seemingly excellent book - the first ever science blogging anthology. How could I have missed it? But I did go straight to the check-out counter to buy it. I have put a link in my side bar where you can nominate posts from the science blogosphere to go in the 2007 anthology (until December 20 as far as I understand)

Blogging about Science

2007-11-04T08:54:00.000+01:00

I promised a follow-up to my previous post on "Who reads blogs anyway - do professional scientific blogs work?"* a long time ago, and while I have been thinking quite a bit about the topic, I haven't followed through and written anything.

I wrote the post after a seminar about public outreach at which I got the impression that no one except for the bloggers themselves really cared about blogs and found them rather boring.

Since then I have been thinking about how I select the blogs I read and which blogs come across as boring to me, because yes, there are lots of blogs that don't interest me at all. My favorite online newspaper has a tendency to attach a blog to anything and everything they are writing about. Upcoming elections - let the politicians blog about their life; book fairs or movie festivals - lets get some live blogging and see what the journalists are up to; armed forces in Iraq - let's show the human side and give the soldiers their own blog; expeditions - let's talk to people while they are struggling towards the peaks of the world or crossing oceans. All good causes for blogging. I find it generally interesting to get a peak into the minds of people who affect my life and my world and that's what good interviews or feature stories are for among other things. However, I don't really follow the newspaper-based blogs and the reasons surprise me, because maybe these are some of the things we need to think about if we want people to engage in our scientific endeavours through blogs.

So what is wrong with those blogs I don't read

1) Often they are not particularly well written. Maybe the young first time soldier in Iraq is not always an exquisite writer. Fair enough, that's not why she's there. But maybe it's also a matter of not spending the time on crafting a good piece of writing because blogging conflicts with the real matter at stake. This is something that's highly relevant to me and others who blog from field work/ expeditions because we just don't have the time to do this properly. My creative juices are as good as gone when I get back to my tent after 12 hours outside in rain and wind and a dinner consisting of something that came out of a can. I have field notes to write up, expedition accounts to take care of, plans to make for tomorrow and blogging is at the very end of my to-do list. When I finally get around to it, it has become a chore I need to get out of the way as quickly as possible and at that point I'm certainly not at my wittiest.

Lesson number 1: Good blogging takes time and brain activity and must be made a priority

2) Often they become private e-mail accounts in a public space with well-wishes from parents and friends and personal comments from people at home. I have seen this in all kinds of travel/ expedition/working abroad blogs and while the occasional comment from a family member doesn't bother me, it puts me off when this is all there is. I get the feeling of entering a personal conversation where I don't belong. I like to read about peoples lives, even the mundane pieces about what they do with their days, because this is something I can relate to. I also do laundry, take my car to the garage and argue with my husband, but when it oversteps the boundary between between the generic and the private, I loose interest, and I don't care whether some blogger is making arrangements with his friends to meet when he gets back from his mountain climbing expedition.

Lesson number 2: Limit exchange of private information and arrangements in comments - use email for God's sake.

3) I lack interest in the topic and don't feel part of the community

This is where I think it becomes crucial for blogging about our own research. I think it takes some extraordinary good writing to get me interested in life behind the scenes at a movie festival or in the holy halls of my government. I think it takes writing at a level the average blogger is just not capable of/ interested in investing the time in, because I'm not all that interested in neither movie making nor national politics. This doesn't mean these blogs shouldn't exist, it just means that I won't read them. The reason I do read academic blogs to name an example, is that here I find a community where I can listen to conversations and speak freely about topics I find that most people in my everyday life don't want to talk about all the time. So why would anyone be interested in a scientific blog if it is not giving the feeling of belonging to some sort of wider community and to some degree triggers interests this person has already. This is where I think mine/ our research blog is failing miserably. There might be people out there who have a penchant for the part of the world where the research is carried out and an interest in the scientific questions, but we do not give our readers any feeling of being invited into a whole new world of cool people who share their interests.

Lesson number 3: Pick your audience, link to other blogs and make an effort to provide access to a wider community than just your own blog.

Kjerstin at PlusUltra who responded to the original post also brings up an important point

"....On the other, I've come across a gazillion science blogs, and most of them just seem to share science news that they pick up from journals and newspapers, which is not what I'm looking for in an academic blog. The science blogs that I read, are the ones that let me see how the research and the thinking is done from the inside, and what the scientist finds interesting about it. Unfortunately, most academics feel compelled to blog pseudonymously, so they can't be specific about their research. That's why I think your blog project sounds interesting".

Lesson number 4: To make a scientific blog interesting one must be able to be share scientific details about the work in progress

The blog project in question is a project blog written together with colleagues, so it is not entirely up to me how it is framed, but I think I am beginning to get some of the mechanics for making that kind of project/research blogging work and to understand some of the reasons why the blog doesn't seem successful to me as it is. I have been toying with the idea of a private research blog under my real name as well for a while, as a way of exploring my own thought process. I think it would be easier to play around with new ideas if I didn't have to confer with a panel of fellow contributors and also if I didn't have to simultaneously market a specific research project to a funding agency (which is also part of the mission for the existing blog). That is also one of the reasons why I'm thinking about what a blog can do that other media can't and how/ if it would be possible to integrate such a blog into teaching activities. Earth scientists are not generally huge on blogging and I have yet to meet someone who has taken blogging into an earth science class room, but that's of course not the same as it can't or shouldn't be done.

Enough is enough

2007-11-03T21:42:00.000+01:00

I have spent all day updating my blog roll (and do go and check out some of the new links) and tried to update the technorati cloud. Somehow the technorati thing doesn't work and it is driving me crazy. I can't get my new tags added to posts to show up (isn't that what they are supposed to do?) and to top it all off there is a snippet of old info about this blog on the technorati page, that I just can't seem to get to update. I'll have to give up for today. If anybody knows what the problem(s) might be, please let me know.

No more secrets

2007-11-03T10:20:00.001+01:00

Well, it appears it's no longer possible to hide one's country in the blogger profile. Can that really be so? Does anyone else know?

A day off

2007-11-01T22:14:00.000+01:00

When I sometimes complain about the corporate style work environment in a research institute compared to universities I tend to forget that this job also comes with it's perks. As much as I loathe the punching in and out and the lack of spontaneous flexibility, the fact that we are actually counting overtime and being encouraged to take it off is no bad treat. We count all hours we are at work and no hours for work done at home. This system sucks in many ways, I think, as it encourages people to stay inside the building even if they are not doing anything or are tired and unproductive and would get more done by moving to a coffee-shop or going home to take a nap and continue later. BUT we also count all hours away on job related travel, and for field work people this means that we rack up loads and loads of hours each year. One reason we often don't get around to taking all this time off is of course that we wouldn't be able to get all the work done if we were away on vacation for half of the year, and many people end up never getting this extra time. But for someone like me, who is generally longing for more flexible days and possibilities to work at home or basically anywhere outside my office, this system is actually great.

So I'm taking Thursdays off work. I'm taking out overtime hours to stay at home and since I'm officially not working I can do whatever I please. I might work some, but from home, or I might sleep the whole day and work some other evening or Sunday or whenever it fits. It gives me some of the freedom I have been dreaming about, it cuts my week in two and I don't need to feel bad about it, because I did officially earn the right to take this time off. It also has the added benefit of seeming extremely enthusiastic and hard-working if I do decide to reply to a work email or pop by at work on a home day.

So what did I do with this lovely day of freedom. Well, first I went to a day-time yoga class (strangely exotic to me by know to do anything in the city during the day), then I met with a friend for lunch and dress shopping*, spent the afternoon watching some lame TV (also become increasingly exotic to me these days) while browsing blogs, cooked a nice dinner, spent a lot of time searching for the perfect laptop backpack online and attended a bit to this poor too-often- neglected blog of mine. I didn't do a thing work related, except getting involved in a weird email conversation with a future senior colleague at New University who sent me a rude email and has apparently decided to dislike me, although he has never met me.

* The dress-shopping was a long-planned event and I bought this gorgeous latino-inspired dress, that fits me perfectly. The photo doesn't really show it's true beauty, but I almost didn't want to take it off in the shop. Now I can't wait for the upcoming christmas party season.

InaDWriMo

2007-11-01T21:48:00.000+01:00

International Dissertation Writing Month, or InaDWriMo has begun. Dr. Brazen Hussy explains it here and has a whole long list of people who have signed up to do some serious writing. As I am one of the poor souls who have promised to produce a lot of words come end of November I'd better get my behind in gear and get started. I also need to set up some sort of word count, but I'm not sure how to do it yet as my writing goal is revising rather than producing new text. I have however sneaked in a teensy bit of new writing and hope I can keep it going.

My goal for InaDWriMo is to finish two manuscripts:

Manuscript 1: needs to go the co-author at the end of the weekend (Nov. 4th)

To do:

Finish revision of pages 21-25
Edits to figures
Rewrite discussion + add sections (currently 6 pages and shouldn't get much longer)
Write conclusion
Re-read introduction and revise according to final discussion
Re-read abstract and revise according to final conclusion
Check reference list
Burn CD with text and all figures
Print manuscript
Mail to co-author

Manuscript 2: Submission deadline Nov. 30 (and actually yes, that's the real deadline from the journal)

This has to be revised pretty much from scratch, so I'm not sure exactly what the bullet points on a to do list are going to be yet.

Field report: Submission deadline Nov. 30 (and yes, once again this is the real deadline from the funding agency)

This is not going to be long. Something like 5 pages I guess, but it does require some steady work on the data from this summer every day until the report is due.

and writing for fun: 20 minutes a day

Here I am not thinking about blogging or emails or starting a novel, but about 20 minutes a day dedicated to new research writing. Either on outline for new paper I just started, making outline for upcoming paper or revisiting manuscript I worked on last year but abandoned due to not-very-nice comment.

Postdoc carnival

2007-11-01T21:44:00.000+01:00

Propter Doc put together a very nice Halloween Postdoc carnival. Go and read.

Busy

2007-10-31T08:06:00.000+01:00

Things are quiet here right now because I'm squeezing in as much time as possible to work on the manuscript from hell. I have talked about it before and announced often enough that I'm just around the corner from finishing it. Well, as you all know, turning those corners often take an awfully long time and the paper isn't done yet. But I'm getting there. It actually feels like I'm moving forward now that I can put in several hours a day, but still it's two steps forward and one step back. Yesterday I spent the entire afternoon revising a section that I had considered done. It IS much better now and the revision WAS needed, but geez going back and forth like this is slowing me down. It's really good to think about that I have plenty of material to publish in the future, but going at this rate I will probably never get around to most of it.

Although its slow like hell I love having time for research again. I haven't had the possibility for this kind of full-time dedication to research since working on the dissertation, and I had forgotten how much more enjoyable research is when time for it actually exist. I'm pulling away from department obligations as much as possible and try to keep my admin responsibilities to a minimum. I'm not uninterested in the well-being of the department, but there are some weird dynamics going on with the current department head and since I'm not going to be there in the long run, the easiest thing right now is just not to get too messed up in it.

When I'm not working I'm day-dreaming about going to a warm place and soak up some sun. I don't know why I have ended up in these cold climates with my sun and heat loving mind and body. I just function better when its warm. The fall is beautiful here, on good days, and we have had quite a few of those recently so I shouldn't complain, but I'd give anything for a bit of heat right now.

A place in the world to be called home

2007-10-27T19:21:00.000+02:00

Breena Ronan from Who doesn't love roses asked how the location is for my new job and let me just say it's special and give you all a few hints.

It's somewhere on this map

It is a small town in a cold place, but it's a nice and friendly community in spectacular nature in the middle of my new field area. It's a small university with a good reputation (let's see about that once I arrive, hope I don't ruin it) and it's a really good environment for what I do. It's not so much for heels (gonna miss those) or business suits, but it does have some nice places for going out and it is possible to buy a decent cup of coffee and a good meal. I guess we will do more outdoors activities than we do now, but there are local cultural events as well. It will be difficult not to out my location once I'm there, but so far my lips will be tight. If you can guess where it is, please don't mention the place directly in the comments.

It's not all work

2007-10-27T18:50:00.000+02:00

Tonight I'm going out with Husband to celebrate the anniversary of the day we met. I was a grad students on a study abroad programme in the Arctic and mightily impressed with this guy who seemed to know everything worth knowing about how to navigate the dark and icy north. Our first dates were shaped by our somewhat unusual surroundings where dressing up for going out means multiple layers of fleece and wool and where it seemed perfectly natural to have a first date that consisted of an excursion to an old industrial installation on a mountain side. Sometimes I wonder how we were able to figure out that we would also be a good match in the more civilised parts of the world, but I am very glad we decided to give it a change through long-distance phone-calls and commuting across borders and chose to live with all the inconveniences of nomadic life until we were able to settle down together here. I cannot for the life of me imagine where I'd been, if it hadn't been for him.

Saturday morning

2007-10-27T08:49:00.001+02:00

Writing for fun

2007-10-24T17:20:00.000+02:00

I am slowly reengaging with research after the summer of craziness and a year of unusual obligations. I remember how I in the beginning of my postdoc sometimes found it frustrating to be in my office with myself and my papers all the time and wanted distraction and new challenges. Now I think it is pure bliss to close my door and work away on my own things all day. In a way I have achieved what I wanted in the short term now with getting the job, and I don't see the need to spend a lot of time on teaching or admin or any other complimentary CV-building activities right now. I have seven months left in this position and I've decided to live the postdoc life in all it's glory to the fullest and enjoy having all the time in the world to work on publications. It's interesting how it's much easier to be enthusiastic about this prospect now, when I know it will not last forever than in the previous two years when I had plenty of post doc life ahead of me and the mere title made me feel unenthusiastic.

So I have been typing up my field notes recently and while this is a completely brain-less task it is still a way of reconnecting with the work we did a few months ago and get an overview of the kind of data we have brought back. Yesterday, after finishing the typing, I sat down with the notes, went through all the localities and started scribbling down which data have the potential to become which kind of publications. I've always been a bit frustrated with the way these projects are organized, because the control-freak inside me, loves the idea of having a proper hypothesis, finding a good place to test it and see what the outcome is. Sadly my field doesn't really work that way. Of course we have some sort of a hypothesis, but since we don't know how and where we will find the pieces for the puzzle, it always ends up with a situation where we come home with the data and then we begin to figure out what it's all about.

This project has been running for two years now and until yesterday I was seriously worried that my publication outcome of this post doc was going to be embarrassingly small, because I just couldn't see where it was all heading. After yesterday's combing through the material for publishable bit and pieces and bigger arguments I've counted 10 potential publication topics that we could start writing right now and 7 more that require more data, but are work in progress. I mean, how could I not see that before? So, obviously I'm not going to write 17 papers tomorrow (and some of the topics would not be me as a first author anyway), but looking at this list makes me so much more inspired to write than I have been in a long time.

It will probably be years and years before all of this will appear in print and some of the ideas will probably never fly, but it was so cool to go through this process of connecting the dots, identifying ideas and seeing the potential in what was so far just a couple of dirty notebooks with loose pages and weak binding. I have written so little over such a long time that everything has been revision of old manuscripts and that process is so tedious and drab that I get tired just from thinking about it. I have been thinking about how to make the most of my workdays and I think I shall try to sneak in a small portion of writing for fun each day and get started on some of these new ideas.

Balance of the mind

2007-10-23T21:23:00.000+02:00

I tend to think that I'm an efficient and well-functioning person who can push myself hard and get results. I'm generally healthy, care for what I eat, where I buy it and how it's produced and am in relatively OK shape despite my preference for the sedentary lifestyle. I get really stressed when needing to finish something, but on average I don't work extremely long hours and I do take time off at home and to travel to visit family and friends. So what's to worry about.

The other day we had a seminar at work about stress and how to deal with it. I almost didn't go because I had too much to do, but realized the irony and went anyway. As an introduction the presenter said that sometimes people who were in the middle of dealing with long term stress symptoms had been uncomfortable with attending the seminar or even started screaming. I was pretty sure that I'd be one of the people who would find it uncomfortable, but also hoped that I'd at least not act like a lunatic and start screaming. I didn't, but I found it downright terrifying when she talked about how stress leads to all sorts of physical reactions and diseases and how it could take years to recover from burn-out once it got that far.

I don't have a crazy day to day schedule. When I'm at home, going to the office every day, doing some research and some administration and replying to some emails it's not bad at all. But my work life is only like that for part of the year. From about May to September I rarely have weekends, I'm always on the move - preparing to go in the field, being in the field, working hard, sleeping in a tent, reorganizing equipment when I come back, preparing for the next trip, preparing field teaching, reorganizing, travelling etc. It's rarely under 14 hours work days, sleep is limited and the responsibility on the expedition leader when travelling with people in remote arctic regions is immense. It's tiring under the best conditions and it's exhausting when any sort of difficulties arise. This year I got sick while I was in the field. Not a cold or a flu but some seemingly more serious digestive problem that had lingered for a while and hasn't subsided yet (although it is much better now). I had a couple of warnings earlier in the summer with sudden problems with sleeping, outbreak of some already known skin problems, strange aches and just overall feeling tired and not being able to snap out of it.

When the stress-seminar lady showed a list of physical stress symptoms and asked us to write down how many we had experienced lately I was too embarrassed to actually put the number down on paper. I know I have been wearing myself out lately. The last year has been crazy. First with the visiting professor appointment that was supposed to be a 50 % appointment, but ended up being more like a 200% appointment with a 50% postdoc on top of it. Then the six month stint as department head, which was again a steep learning curve and a lot of work before being up to speed and then this crazy summer in the end. It's hardly rocket science to figure out why my body cried for a break.

I'm taking it easier now. I simply had to. Luckily the summer teaching is done and I'm not department head anymore and for the first time in more than a year I can actually just be a postdoc and nothing more. I get to keep reasonable hours, I've started biking to work, I've improved my diet and try to eat what seems to help and I've taken up yoga, which also really helps me to get out of my head a bit. So I'm probably getting there, but I still think I need rest. Actually I think the seminar presenter was onto something right when she said that people need to stay at home and relax when recovering from long term stress, but when will anyone in the research world ever get to do that unless they get really ill. I think that prospect is absolutely frightening. I have no idea how to deal with it in an environment where everybody being stressed all the time is the order of the day.

Study techniques, anyone?

2007-10-22T19:02:00.000+02:00

I did something unusual today. For me at least. I sat down and read through a full volume of Important Journal in my Field and skimmed through a dozen more and I didn't forget everything I'd read the moment I closed the door to the office. Instead I spent about fifteen minutes before leaving summing up the main new ideas and additions to ongoing discussions in the field and felt invigorated and inspired and, like someone with an overview. I tend to think that everybody else gets much more done than I do, and it's probably not unlikely that you're all way more on top of your reading than I am, but honestly reading is something I've almost cut out of my work schedule.

I mean I do skim the e-alerts from Science, Nature and the most important journals in both my fields. I do read papers when prepping classes or writing up papers or the occasional paper by a friend or close colleague, but I don't have the kind of overview I used to have when all I did all day was work on first my Master's thesis and later my dissertation. One reason is that I don't have that kind of time or continuity anymore, but another reason is, as I discovered today, that I've simply stopped using the good study habits I used to have. These days it's all about cramming in time for writing and data processing between all the other obligations and I tend to think that reading for overview is slow, time-consuming and requires my concentration in ways I rarely have when working in the office. The latter is true and I've started closing my door most of the time (much to the disgust of my chair who enters without knocking as a way of signalling that I've stepped over some openness and availability line). But the former is not necessarily true. I used to be able to read thick piles of papers, understand them and use them in my work in a reasonable time, by concentrating, working for longer time intervals and taking notes.

And that's what I've rediscovered. For some reason I've come to think that I should be able to suck out all useful information by flipping through new volumes of the journals while being preoccupied with other tasks, and if I don't get it that way I need to invest hours and hours in meticulously combing through the entire paper word by word. Today I closed my door, set a timer for two 45 minutes increments with a break in between, made myself a cup of tea, turned off the computer, sat down at my desk with a pen and a notebook and started going through the papers, quickly but seriously, writing down key sentences for each paper and it worked. Unbelievable. I've now promised myself to go through some of the other volumes lying around in the same way. It took me two hours and I feel more on top of things than I've been since I passed my defense. So easy, and I knew it all along. From now on I hope I'm going to be "someone who reads".

Sunday morning - progress report

2007-10-21T09:02:00.000+02:00

I'm up ridiculously early for a Sunday to work on the manuscript from hell for a couple of hours before we leave for the christening of our friends' son. I obviously didn't finish the manuscript a week ago as I'd unrealistically promised myself (I've got to learn to judge the actual time I will need to do some work, soon), but I have made very good progress in the past week. I'm the type of person who loves schemes and schedules and calendars and planning, and I used to make overviews of deadlines and workplans for myself all the time. Somehow this habit has slipped recently with so little time available to work on research at all, and instead I've taken to vague goals of finish this paper in October and the next one in December etc. But this obviously doesn't work. For one that kind of planning goes without paying any attention to what is actually in my real-life calender already and second it's just too unstructured and too easy to dismiss. So earlier this week while battling with another bout of procrastination I sat down with a calender and tried to make a realistic estimate of when I could work on what, which deadlines I have to meet and remembered to leave in time for comments from co-authors, finishing the field reports, organizing the samples, meetings etc. I'm pretty sure this system will break down at some point, but if I can keep it going for a while, it might offer some support in terms of short term deadlines to make sure I'm not overwhelmed to the point where I do nothing.

So far it has been successful (counting since Tuesday). I've worked on the manuscript every day, put in four hours yesterday and hopefully between one and two hours today. Yesterday I finished some illustrations, which have been hanging over my head for years, and actually it was no big deal. I think the remaining illustrations can be done in about two to three hours, so maybe today, and then the text should be easier to handle.

Things that made me feel old recently

2007-10-21T08:44:00.000+02:00

I went to a spinning class that promised workout to music from the 80's, just to find out I was the only one in the room who could possibly have known these songs when they were around for the first time.
I friended my younger sister on Facebook and her reply to my request was "wow, are YOU here, I thought this was mainly for students"
Along the same lines, I'm not able to find ANY of my old friends from home on facebook. I guess they are busy with raising kids, earning money and participating in the real world rather than spending their days playing around in cyberspace.

I GOT THE JOB

2007-10-21T08:39:00.000+02:00

I'm going to be a professor and leave the postdoc world behind starting summer 08.

I'm wildly excited about it but also a bit apprehensive about the upcoming move, about leaving this place when we finally begin to fell settled and feeling weirdly guilty that it went so easily for me. I haven't told many people yet. That's a bit strange, I thought I would be yelling from the rooftops, but truth to be told all I feel when it comes to announcing the news to my colleagues is guilt for leaving, for having bagged a better job and for not appreciating enough what I have here. I told my PI who was excited on my behalf, but sad to see me go. I also told my department chair who was excited on my behalf, and maybe not too sad to see me go and I told some friends and colleagues in grad school city who ranged from through the roof happy for me, to well, OK if that's what you want. It's not as strange as it sounds, because my colleagues are mainly people from what I consider my secondary sub-field and I'm sure I could make a good career for myself here if I wanted to stay in that field and if I didn't want to teach. But my new job is a chance to switch to my primary sub-field and a chance to switch to a university environment rather than the more corporate style workplace here and I think that's what they don't understand.

Who reads blogs anyway? Do professional scientific blogs work?

2007-10-10T07:37:00.000+02:00

As some of you may remember I have been blogging under my real name as an outreach activity from one of the research projects I'm involved in. I have been meaning to get back to that and discuss my experience and what we have learned from it, but didn't find the right angle to discuss it from, until yesterday. I was at a one day "Public outreach for scientists" course where invited speakers were brought in to teach us about how to promote scientific stories in various electronic media and how to work with journalists. An extraordinary opportunity and an eyeopening experience. Participation was optional, the number of participants limited and there was a waiting list to get on the course, so my immediate reaction would be that the people who were there were interested in working with the media one way or another. I would also think that most people there would be open to nontraditional means of communication to/ with the public.

Some of us had experience with scientific blogging from field work, data collection or expeditions to remote parts of the globe and eventually we got into discussing how those blogs could ideally be framed, who is the audience, what should be our goals in terms of readership etc. All fine. We are all fairly new in this arena, and learning as we go along. Even with experience from more personal academic blogging I think I have a lot to learn about how to use a professional blog. The discussion took place mainly between people who already had scientific blogs, which shouldn't come as a surprise, but when others started to chime in it DID surprise me how negative and demeaning their comments were. Some of the most common comments seems to be "Blogs are boring", "why would anyone read blogs", "when would they do so?", "so, you mean that people read blogs when they are supposed to be working", "who reads blogs anyway?", "kids?".

Are you surprised? I am. But I have heard these and similar comments from enough people in scientific fields (at this meeting and elsewhere) to speculate why it is people think blogs don't work. I should say that none of these comments were related to any particular blog and I doubt any of the commenters have seen the research blog in question before commenting. I tried to explain what it is I think blogs can do that other media cannot. That we have a chance to show how we do science while we're doing it and where our shared knowledge actually comes from. That we make science accessible to anyone who are interested and that people can talk to us if they want to. That even if no one ever visits our blog it forces us to reflect on our own work in a way that's rare in science but which might eventually help us communicate our science, goals and visions better in any media or any setting. I think they somehow saw the point in using blogs as a self-development tool, but self-development is not highly rated in the sciences.

What do you think? Does professional, scientific blogs make sense or should those of us who absolutely must share our dirty laundry with the world stick to write personal blogs for our friends and shut up about it? Is the blog media worth using for scientific communication and would anyone ever read? Is it the scientific dorks who are behind and should just get in the loop and follow up on what has happened in the blogosphere during the past 5-ish years or are we as bloggers just at the extreme forefront of things and should wait for other people to tag along?

Please share your opinions. I will get back to this topic, but would really like to hear what you have to say first.

Do you have a research agenda?

2007-10-09T08:21:00.000+02:00

I am trying to finish a manuscript for an article before Thursday morning when I travel to grad school city to meet with the co-author. I have a few comments to address, need to fix some details on illustrations and should polish the discussion, and the actual work remaining is totally doable in a couple of days. Yet, there is something holding me back. Partly this is probably my own laziness, but it is also fear and seriously I think some sort of post-partum mechanism. The time spent working on this thing is downright ridiculous. It is research from before I started my PhD and while I obviously haven't worked on it continuously for ten years, I have revisited the project with one-two year intervals since my early twenties. I know it was good research when it was done, and as I'm in a somewhat slow moving field it is not outdated as such, although it has been re-framed several times and might need another serious make over if it isn't published soon.

Part of the fear comes from my coauthor's (and then advisor's) lack of confidence in getting anything published in the top-tier-journals in our field, and the way her extreme perfectionism rubbed off on me during my years as her advisee. I have over the years wiggled myself out of the idea of nothing is good enough for anyone to see, ever, but apparently she hasn't, and since this work was originally shaped under her critical guidance, my own judgement of the quality of work goes out of the window as soon as the question of showing her a draft arises.

This is the last piece of research from my grad school years that is dependent on my former advisers and haven't grown into an independent shape. I'm still mining additional publishable research from my dissertation, but more in the sense of ideas and preliminary data for further studies. Although the focus of the current manuscript has also changed significantly from my MSc thesis it is after all still the same basic idea and as such the last reminder of an ironically rewarding but extremely difficult period in my education and a time it took me years to recover from.

It is however also the time where my views and interests and foundation in my field were shaped and since I have never again been through such a rigorous programme, it is also the one sub field where I feel most confident. It is where know the literature in and out and still ten years on am able to jump straight into discussions, it is where I am able to find ideas and gaps in explanations and the background for any contribution to my current sub field. This is research I want to come back to and where I can see a way forward in applying ideas from my current sub-field. I cannot let this article slide, as I need it to demonstrate that I can handle both sub fields, before submitting research proposals that combine the two. I cannot let the opportunity of drawing on two lines of experience go, and I cannot let a ten year old advisor-advisee relationship bog me down. More important, I can't let this feeling of inadequacy tied so closely to the whole project hang around forever, it is really time to let go and free up some energy to actually develop those future project ideas.

What not to do when applying for a job

2007-10-08T19:11:00.000+02:00

I've been reading through a number of job applications recently and considering the wealth of information available everywhere on how to write a good application I am seriously mystified by shortcomings of those we've received . With being on the job market myself and all I'm not above giving people the benefit of the doubt for typos, minor redundancies or overdoing the self appraisal a bit, but man, some of this is unbelievable.

So please, if you recognize yourself in the following and I have been slaving away reading your application, I don't feel sorry for you. You can consider this a wake-up call and join the nearest job search course or type in "advice for job applications" in Google, and I'm pretty sure you will not be recommended to do ANY of the following.

If your wider field is, say particle physics, why would you think it would be worth your time to apply for a post doc in archeology (or whatever similarly far fetched field it is that I work in)? A particularly surprising aspect of this is that we actually got two applications from people with the same irrelevant background. I'm now considering putting these two people in touch with one another. Maybe they can figure something out together.

If you haven't finished your PhD yet, you shouldn't write "PhD degree expected spring 2007" in a CV updated a mere month ago.

If you have ever been in the same class for a grad school course as someone on the search committee, don't state in your CV that you are an expert on the topic, if the course is all you have ever done. (What do you think, I was there, I'm not even close to being an expert on the topic). If you can't help it and really think you are now an expert on orange-growth in cold climates, at least don't state the course as the reason for this.

If you don't write who you are or why you are applying, please, don't expect me to invite you for an interview.

If you can't come up with a single sentence about why you would want to work with this topic or what you have to offer, don't waste your time, and go do something else.

If you don't have a PhD, are in the process of doctoral studies or were ever admitted to a PhD programme, you are not eligible for a post doc position - and yes, that actually goes for two applicants out of the pile.

If you have applied before for the same position and we re-open the search it doesn't help you to change the titles of what you were doing in various stages of your life (it was not about the titles in the first place, but because you don't have the necessary experience).

If we mention in the add that it is very important that you have a good network in your particular discipline as you will be responsible for starting up a new line of work in our group, it is not good enough that you think our field is exciting and of importance to humankind, when you have no experience whatsoever.

Seriously, what is the matter with you people?

Sorry about the rant, but this took HOURS out of my day. I'm off to calm down at yoga class.

The cat is out of the bag

2007-10-03T08:02:00.000+02:00

The application is sent and will be evaluated very soon and I have done the right thing and told my PI that I'm applying to prestigious-job at good-school-in -the-high-north. He is less than thrilled, although I think he has come around a bit and see the opportunity from my perspective, but I feel horrible. I know it's just a job and no one owns me and I'm just a post doc who should be expected to leave some day. But I also know that I'm a really good fit in my current department, that I'm doing good science with my current group and that a significant amount of resources have been spent me and my future potential at this place. I feel bad about maybe leaving my colleagues and research group and I hope that my leaving won't mess up our good relationship. I know they'd like me to stay, but no one stays in a job just to be around good colleagues and have coffee with them on a regular basis, right?

I have two years left on my postdoc project and am sure I would have interesting things to work on in that time and that effort is being made to turn the postdoc into a permanent position, and that it's not unlikely that those efforts would be successful. I don't feel that I'm turning my back on something that's not working, rather looking for something that's even better and I'm torn between accepting my own ambitions and possibilities to go for my first choice and staying here where people care about me and where I'm basically satisfied although not all dreams will be fulfilled. I've had difficulties getting friends in this town, but it's getting better and I'm actually enjoying living here right now. I like my work place. It's a well-functioning institution with a better work climate than most university departments I have seen. I could probably be happy here for many years to come. But I would also be forced to stay in the sub field I'm in right now, which is slightly on the side of what I really want to do and I would not be able to have to influence in teaching that I wish to have. Granted, my department and bosses have been generous and let me run quite a bit of teaching activities on the side, but it bothers me that I get no credit for this since it's not part of my job description here. It bothers me when I want to go up for salary negotiations that all effort put into teaching is basically worthless and just leave me with even less time for the stuff I'm evaluated on. It also bothers me that I'm the only one in my group in my discipline and that the fight for doing my things my way did not end with the dissertation. I have lots of influence on projects, but only as long as my perspective fits into the whole frame, which is always shaped by people seeing things from a different angle. I really want to see what I can do if given the possibility to create something myself from my perspective and based on knowledge from my discipline. That being said, I'm also terrified that everything will crumble under me and that my ideas are really better in my head than in real life and that I will regret leaving this safe haven for the great unknown. It's not every day one is specifically asked to apply for a dream job and the verdict will come through soon. Meanwhile I'm heading to work for another round of intertwined guilt and suspense while waiting to hear back.

Win or loose - writing the cover letter

2007-09-30T10:21:00.000+02:00

I'd like to say I'm working on a cover letter for my job application, but rather I'm fretting over getting started. I'm now on my third cup of coffee this morning and a good deal of surfing on the internet, laundry and baking preparations have been done in lieu of writing. It shouldn't be so hard. It's only one page of text after all, and it's about myself whom I know fairly well and I have already thought a good deal about why I would want this job and why I think I would be a good fit. I have also thought a good deal about the fact, they this particular department in the past have tended to hire people with significantly more experience than me and about my embarrasingly short publication list.

I know this institution, I know what's important to them and I know they think I'm a good fit, but I don't know a single soul in the evaluation committee who will be judging my application. I have no idea what they will be looking for and how to emphasise my strenghts in a way where they will be convinced those are more important than my weaknesses. Outlining my strenghts in a well-organized and compelling way in a one page narrative suddenly seems frightening beyond reason. It's not that I don't think I have any strenghts. I know I have a strong teaching record. I have gotten grants. I'm in the middle of succesful research that will yield publishable results. I have ideas for future research that I think would fit the goals for this particular institution and ideas about how to involve students into this. But looking at the cursor on a blank page make me sick to my stomach.

I think that more than the doable job of jotting down notes, reorganizing sentences and crafting the strongest possible letter, what I really worry about is putting myself out there. Actually joining the competition where you win some and you loose some. It's so easy for me to put all the arguments for why I should be a good candidate together in my mind, but so difficult to send these thoughts off into the world where they will be scrutinized by people who don't know me, who don't care about what I would like, but care about getting the best candidate. It also makes the job search real in terms of the possibility of leaving my current job. Once the application is out there, it's official that I'm looking for something else. Even though I am looking for something else, for a different type of institution and more focus on one of my sub disciplines than the other, it's strangely sad to let go of what I have here.

Advising - in hindsight

2007-09-29T10:15:00.000+02:00

I think I got little and poor direction during my PhD and in my acknowledgements I wrote only a subtle compliment for the two people who had been co-advising me for four and a half years. I still believe lack of direction was directly contributing my delay in finishing and financial frustrations related to this delay. It took well over a year before the anger towards a difficult process and a system allowing this to happen subsided, and I'm surprised to find that I don't resent that phase of my life anymore. So why open this can of worms once more?

Almost two years have passed since I defended and I haven't been dependent of my former advisers for as much time. I started in my current job immediately after the defense and moved away from grad school city. I have kept in sporadic contact with both former advisor and keep a friendly relationship with them that fits the level of contact we have now. But I sometimes regret I didn't thank them profoundly in my acknowledgements for my dissertation, because truth to be told, I wouldn't be anywhere near where I am today, if I hadn't come across these particular people.

They did not fulfill what I consider to be basic requirements of practical help especially at the beginning of the research and writing phase, but they did make a difference in a, for me, significant way. They saw my potential, picked me out of the crowd and made me do my best. Some people have the self-confidence to stand up for themselves and ask to be given opportunites at an early age, but I didn't, and I wouldn't have gone into academia or into an interdisciplinary field or been able to make notice of myself without this initial motivation and introduction.

As much as I think former advisor #1 wore me out for a long time, because she didn't realize her perfectionist tendencies and mine put together would make me work till I dropped, she also recognized a potential that I had no idea I had. As much as I resented the flailing ideas of my interdisciplinary project and the lack of overview from advisor #2, I think his vision was right, and that my combined background gives me something unique to bring to the table now. I also know that if advisor #1 hadn't recommended me to advisor #2 and he hadn't introduced me to his network of colleagues I would not have held any of the positions I have held since the end of my PhD.

I still think proper advising during the PhD should be a minimum requirement, and I'm talking about actually getting involved in the project and assisting in navigating the process. I didn't get that and I hope I will be better on that front for my students, but I still think my advisers should at least have gotten a thank you note for getting me where I am today.

scientiae-carnival

So what's new around here

2007-09-25T20:57:00.000+02:00

I've gotten married. A couple of weeks ago, at a beautiful ceremony in the town where we live . We couldn't have done it a better place and got to share a small piece of our life here to family and friends from home. After weeks of downpour we got clear fall skies for part of the day and light wind and drizzling for dramatic effect during our photo session. We got to gather family and friends, who otherwise never meet, for a few days and see them have a good time together, and to meet all of them at the same time. With being perpetually on the move keeping a social life together is always an issue, and seeing friends and family together is an extraordinary event. I cherished the time before and after the wedding we were able to spend with our families and to see how much they enjoyed sharing the day with us. Much of this wedding was planned last minute and on the phone from far-off places and yet I couldn't have dreamed of a more perfect day. Afterwards, I've had People ask me if being married makes a difference, and yes, I think it does.

I am maybe on the job market. It's all a good thing, I think, but also strangely unsettling. Deep down I don't really like change. You will get to hear more about this one way or the other, but for now I can't say much.

I'm home. For the first time in months I am not only here as a short stopover to do laundry and repack my bags, but I'm actually going to stay here - uninterrupted- for weeks on end.

Resurfaced

2007-09-24T18:27:00.000+02:00

Sorry for leaving you all behind without any notice whatsoever. The more time I spent away from the blog, the more difficult it was for me to get back to it. I've been dreading this site to the point where I didn't even go back to look at my blog roll, but somehow I knew that I wasn't about to quit but just didn't know where to go.

I've contemplated changing the format, the theme, the language and everything else about this blog, but keep coming back to the idea of keeping the style I've got. I'm not sure I like my own voice here. I feel it tends to be too bragging and self-congratulating since acknowledging my own achievements is partly what I have used it for or the other option is to be too whiny. At the moment I don't know exactly where I'm heading but I know I still want to write here and that I need the blog and the community here to help me process the thoughts about career and life-issues that I can't really share with my colleagues.

This summer have been one of the most stressful times of my life. I know other people cram more activities into their days than I do, but apparently my limit is here. I have been traveling on and off, but more or less continuously since mid May, done extensive field work for two different projects each with their difficulties, had my first experience as expedition leader under difficult circumstances with a malfunctioning group, taught a summer field course, taught regular classes and given my first key-note lecture at a conference. I have been burned out to the point where the mere thought of popping in here to leave a note about my lack of presence was unfathomable. Lately all sorts of physical ailments have been popping their head out and even I can tell it's time for a change of pace.

Sorry to be such a downer, but maybe the story of burning oneself out too easily isn't just my story, but the story for many of us early career people, working too hard to get ourselves established.

I'm back in a more reasonable work pace for now. After last weeks guest lecturer stint I'm now back in my own office, with my own projects. I'm also off the hook as department head as the person I was replacement for is back from sabbatical. I'm actually looking at full days of research time and no imminent deadlines hanging above my head.

A very lame 100th post

2007-07-11T22:08:00.000+02:00

As the title says this is my 100th post and I definitely had something more decadent in mind for this milestone, than saying "I'm back, but too tired to say anything", but that's more or less what I'm going to say here. It has been more than a week since I returned from the field but I feel as energetic as a wet towel. The field season was harder than usual for many reasons and where I am usually tired after being in the field, this time I am drained. The trip was ill-planned due to lack of our usual collaborator and the new group didn't really work well together. We have travelled more than usual, been away for longer time and had more scientific focuses than I remember from any other field trip and while the results are exciting I'm just bone-tired from trying to keep the whole circus together. I am working on my recovery by doing very little, eating plenty of fresh strawberries and reading an extremely funny book written in my mother tongue, where for once I DO get all the cultural references.

Basically, I just wanted to let you know that I'm here, even if I'm not speaking much, and that I'm on my way back to blogging.

Blog break

2007-05-24T21:14:00.000+02:00

I am in the field with no internet. Blogging will resume later this summer.

May retrospective

2007-05-24T20:51:00.000+02:00

I think the post below sums it up quite nicely. The rest of this month will be spent in the field, doing actual research. Although the past few weeks have been loaded with logistical concerns and practical questions such as "did we remember to buy batteries" and "who brings a ruler" I am probably doing more research this months than any month earlier this year.

So what did I do so far:

Made final preparations for six weeks field expedition
Attended a full-day seminar about improvement of working conditions
Made presentation and work plan for department meeting
Made admin report (financial reporting for first part of the year)
Read and commented on draft xx of soon-to-be submitted manuscript
Searched for additional literature on problem topic on manuscript and read several papers for overview
Reviewed applications for postdoc position
Dealt with multiple smaller and larger admin issues in the department
Attended committee meeting on community-related topic I will be coordinator of
Wrote recommendations for students applying to grad school*

*Actually this is not really done yet, but on my list for tonight

Random bullets of field preparations

2007-05-24T19:21:00.000+02:00

The field season begins tomorrow. The good thing is that regular life obligations will be left behind. The bad thing is that I'm ridiculously tired from dealing with regular life obligations for the next two months. Planning a wedding and two field expeditions at the same time cannot be recommended.
I am going to live in a tent far out in the forest for the next six weeks and right now the thought of simple life in the nature seems quite appealing. This will probably change as soon as the first mosquitoes make their way into the tent or at least the first time dinner will consist of a random, grey substance coming out of a can.
I am bringing about 15 unread scientific articles and a manuscript for an article. I wonder when I think I am going to work on all that. 10-12 hour days of hard, physical work doesn't leave an awful lot of time for studying. I seemingly have no memory of previous years or am expecting a lot of rainy stay-at-home-in the-camp days.
I am also bringing 4 novels, which are totally unrelated to my work. Somehow my imagination of how I will make time for these is much more vivid. One of the good things about living in a tent for weeks on end is plenty of uninterrupted reading time.
Yesterday I bought the most ridiculous piece of clothing I've ever owned. It's a fishing* vest, that looks a bit more stupid than this, but otherwise the idea is the same. A particularly weird thing about mine is that it had a small patch of white, teddy bearish fabric on one of the pockets. I have pulled it off now, but I suppose it was there for a reason. *I am not going fishing, but need it to carry all the equipment and tools I need for my fieldwork. Yes, sometimes I could just as well have become some sort of handywoman.
We are bringing 8 big boxes of equipment for a field party of four people (our personal luggage come in addition to this). We would like to believe we're travelling with a lot of important scientific equipment. In reality most of it is camping gear. Some clothes pegs, a blanket or 22 bottles of mosquito repellent, anyone?
I have also brought a language course on CD and a phrasebook because obviously I think I will have lots of time for spare time activities.
In reality fieldwork doesn't really deal with spare time or alone time. We live together in the forest in a camp, eat together, work together all day long and return to the camp for dinner and some social life around a campfire. Not too different from living in prehistoric times (although we do have drinks and chocolate and laptops with many, many extra batteries for full function without access to electricity).
I'm going to return in excellent shape, as field work is just a really strange way of getting some exercise. There is really no better way for me to force myself to get fit, but it's not going to be fun for the first few days.

Lifting the veil

2007-05-20T11:28:00.000+02:00

I recently figured out who someone I only know from the Internet is in real life. I don't consider myself a stalker type and would never dream of outing anyone against their will, but I couldn't resist the temptation of Google. What happened was that I was immensely impressed by this persons accomplishments and while that was not surprising given what I already knew about this persons alter ego, I think my reaction was somewhat surprising. I was not only impressed but also immediately felt that this person was completely out of my league and I would never be able to compete with someone so succesful. Up until that minute I knew that this person experienced the same struggles as I do and that was exactly the reason in the first place for both of us being in this particular Internet forum. Why is it that as soon as people get a name and a face and a CV I suddenly think they are unapproachable, scarily successful and dealing with everything in a much more elegant way than I do, while I am convinced they are just like me despite all successes as long as they present themselves as an avatar with a fantasy name? Isn't that a little sad?

I sometimes give away my real email or my real name and location to people I've connected with in the blogosphere or internetfora. I almost expect people to google me if they get hold of my name by chance (not because I'm hugely interesting, but because Google is a huge temptation for the curious mind). But I never thought about how getting access to my real life info could change anybodys perception of me (it is really quite harmless, I have never been a sumo wrestler or anything really surprising).

What does a postdoc do - part II: The research

2007-05-20T10:06:00.000+02:00

I was hired as a postdoc on a four-year research project beginning in December 2005. My contract runs the full lenght of the project and will end in December 2009. I packed my belongings, moved abroad and started my new position within the week after my dissertation defense and arrived with four papers from my dissertation in press and two yet to be submitted. I also brought one half-finished manuscript from my Master's research five years previously, which had been in and out of the dissertation several times due to disagreements between advisers.

The new project had barely started. What I do relies heavily on fieldwork, which is done in summer, so the first six months were mainly about getting acquainted with the new topic, planning the field season and trying to get my old manuscripts published. The new topic was closely related to my dissertation topic, though seen from a slightly different angle. I performed literature searches, went to field site country to meet with potential collaborators and got to know my new surroundings. I also wrote a reasonable full first draft of the old manuscript from my Master's and sent it off to my former advisor and fretted about how one of the dissertation manuscripts should be revised. My research group decided to participate in a collaborative proposal for a big grant. As one of the things we wanted to do was originally my idea, I wrote that part of the application and was involved in the fitting-it-all-together process. I don't remember how long time I spent on this, but as a group we were probably engaged in the grant writing activity more or less full time for a month. As summer was coming closer I spent almost all available time prepping for the field season. It is maybe not at the core of our work descriptions but for field scientists logistics takes an awful lot of time. It is paperwork and planning and booking and packing, shopping for personal gear and field equipment, figuring out a train table in a foreign land with a different alphabet, vaccinations and health checkups, learning how to use equipment, packing lists and did I mention shopping. At the same time I was offered a six months stint as a visiting professor in another place and made arrangements to continue my postdoc research alongside with the teaching while I was away.

While summer is the quiet time for many academics with time for in-depth thinking, reading and writing, summer is the busiest time of the year for someone in my field. Summer is the time for week-long field expeditions, for student field trips and for conferences. In the summer 2006 I spent 5 weeks in the field for my postdoc project, came home for four days, left for six months away beginning with twenty days of student field excursions and then preparations for the semester. Five weeks in the field ought to generate a lot of data, but often it feels like nothing has been achieved yet when we arrive back home. Much of the interpretation actually happens in the field along with data collection, but like everybody else we need time to dive into the literature and to connect the dots before getting to the writing phase. Most of all we wait for one specific kind of lab analysis to tell us whether the results are useful or not, and it is not unusual to wait for a year for those results.

Before I started the visiting positions I had ambitious ideas of all the work I would get done when I was not teaching. In reality I could barely keep up with necessities such as eating and sleeping. Teaching three courses - one of them an intensive undergrad course - and all of them for the first time was just not compatible with research activity. During the fall I went to one conference (at which I spent more time in my hotel room studying material for an upcoming graduate seminar), wrote one proposal for a field excursion (which I later had to cancel), wrote one proposal for a small independent grant (which I got), did some revise and resubmit work on the big grant proposal from spring and had a few meetings about some background material for the postdoc project. I didn't touch the manuscripts besides when moving the paper piles around in the office to make room for more class-related articles.

This spring, I'm one and a half year into the postdoc and I still haven't submitted any of the manuscripts I brought with me in a half-finished state when I arrived. I haven't written a word on any new paper related to the postdoc project (I finally finished the field report from last year less than a month ago). The postdoc project is still officially my main research activity and I do spend time on it, but mainly in terms of being responsible for the background material (involves drawing the strings to keep some other people working on this), organizing data from last year and planning logistics for this years field season. We got the big collaborative grant and while I am a co-PI on one of the modules I haven't really done any science in the project yet. It has a heavy outreach component which I have been quite involved in (attending meetings and developing ideas), but other than that others are keeping it flowing. I got the small independent grant and have been working on logistics and field preparations for that one for months. It is not a lot of hours per week, but it's always there in the back of my head and takes attention away from other activities. I am still working on the manuscript from my Master's. My former advisor finally got her act together and sent me comments in February and we have been working on it together on and off when time is available.

I don't dare to say when those darn manuscripts will be done, but hopefully I won't round the two-year mark without submitting at least some of them. This years field season begins in less than a week and I still need to participate in packing the shared field equipment, go through the results from last year, go to the dentist, pack my own stuff and spend time with Fiance, so it's not likely to happen right now.

What does a postdoc do - part I: The beginning

2007-05-20T09:38:00.000+02:00

Among all the more or less mysterious ways google leads people to this blog, the "what does a postdoc do" question is by far the most common. Some time in the not so distant past, when I was a grad student, I thought that a postdoc somehow equalled the grad experience just with better pay and without coursework, advisers and a demand for a dissertation at the end. What i mean is that I thought a postdoc equalled working on a specific research project for a set amount of time with the goal of publishing on x and y topic during that time. For some postdocs this is probably the way it is, for others it's something completely different. One thing I have realized is that the "postdoc" term covers so many variations that it's almost impossible to explain once and for all what it's all about. Most of us probably fall in a category somewhere in the middle. The "postdoc" title usually implies a position funded by someone else's project money. Depending on the PI's characters postdocs seem to be everything from research slaves to semi-independent participants in research groups, but I've also seen postdoc money fund people in more technical positions. Strictly speaking postdoc positions should not contain teaching or administrative duties, but most of the postdocs I know in real life as well as in the blogosphere find themselves participating to some degree in one or both of these activities sooner or later. As the postdoc employment should be a temporary experience most of us need to think along the lines of career enhancement at the same time, and often that means taking part in advising, teaching, administration and grant writing.

In reality only a small percentage of my time is being spent on the original research project that feeds me. One and half year in my responsibilities have developed to span three research projects, a heavy administrative load, some teaching, some advising as well as trying to publish articles from my dissertation and previous research activities. Is it good for CV building - yes, I think so. Is it good for keeping the work load at a sane level - No, I think not. Is it common - I have no idea. The specific combination of hats I wear on daily basis is probably not common, but I don't think development of side projects and additional responsibilities on top of the research project are uncommon at all.

Norwegian national day

2007-05-17T17:08:00.000+02:00

I usually keep quiet about my location, but I think I am in a phase of maybe becoming more open about my identity on the blog (or at least where I am and what I do). Anyway, today is the national day here and we're just back from the parade.

Countdown to fieldwork

2007-05-10T21:55:00.000+02:00

I am sick, but there is only two weeks left before I leave for a full summer of field activities so no time to wallow in self-pity and staying at home, but have to keep going at fast pace. There is so much to do before leaving and none of it are the kind of activities that will ever go on a CV. Sometimes I wish I was in a less field-oriented kind of science with some time, ever, to think and read and finish all those pesky manuscripts and conference presentations and half-baked ideas I have lying around. I have research ideas I want time to develop, especially one that already exists in a semi-finished manuscript, but needs serious refining and rethinking. I want time to think through how to present certain ideas in a light that will attract potential industry sponsors when I meet these at an upcoming conference. I want time to think about where my own career/ work situation is heading and how to get there (I've been spending so much time on doing annual reviews with everybody else, but haven't had the chance to talk to anyone about my own performance and goals). I need time to prep for teaching later this summer/ early fall and I want to do it well. I think teaching is seriously neglected in my field and often done in a boring and disengaging way. I want to make an effort to improve that pattern, and honestly to leave a good track record at the university that invites me to teach. I could come up with a million things I could do with my time that would make me feel like I was moving forward, being productive and using my postdoc time wisely, but in reality I will be packing mosquito repellent, sampling equipment and camping gear, making hotel reservations, reporting department finances, meeting with a group of journalists, writing up minutes from a meeting where I have taken responsibility for big institutional development thing.

The roots and all that

2007-05-10T20:51:00.000+02:00

I am back from the trip to the home country. Even though I haven't moved very far away I am sometimes homesick bordering on the pathetic. Back home the weather is much nicer, the nature is gentler, the cities larger, the food better, the jokes funnier, the people more diverse, the cultural life more sophisticated and everything better known - to me. A few years ago I would have ridiculed anyone saying the above. Anyone who would be opposed to emigrating or at the very least working abroad for several years would have been a looser in my opinion, especially if the abroad in question was a mere 24 hours road trip away.

The thing about Europe, aside from giving people from other continents the chance to visit several new countries in a matter of days, is that it's actually quite diverse. Even within regions that might seem superficially similar to the visitor. Although a neighboring country might not be far away in distance or language group it is still a new country complete with its own official rules and regulations, traditions, food, news, literature, music, TV-shows, ways of doing things, perceptions of good and bad, wrong and right and not least cultural heritage. Sometimes it is just a matter of getting that special kind of bread, listening to that song from the 80's on the radio or knowing who the heck they are talking about when referring to that comedian who used to be so funny. One of the things I love about going home (besides the yummy food and the hip and happening cities) is to get all these cultural references, to know what things used to be like and to have shared memories with someone else.

I am not more nostalgic than I remember some things that were less than ideal (say ridiculous real estate prices anywhere near hip and happening cities or complete lack of jobs in either of our fields). For the same and other reasons I also don't think we will be living there anytime soon. Instead I think I am on the verge of becoming obsessed-with-home-country-emigrant type who will go out of her way to get recognizable home country products, only cares about home country news and gets crazily happy about any chance to elaborate on home country ways of life. We already subscribe to the emigrant newspaper and have the kitchen cupboards stocked with Weird National Specialty, and I know more about what happened at home the last six months than what happened here yesterday, so I'm well on my way to achieving this. Watch my steps, I'm not sure I like this about myself.

Back to the roots for a happy occasion

2007-05-03T20:14:00.000+02:00

I've bought an expensive gift, a nice dress and some accessories. I am off to a family event and a few days of indulgence in everything that is sweet and good about Home Country (since I don't live there anymore I don't have to deal with all the things that are just crappy and dull). See you next week.

Looks like I'm really far away from my true home

2007-05-02T19:21:00.000+02:00

Who would have known?

Thanks to PropterDoc for leading me astray.

You Belong in New Zealand

Good on ya, mate
You're the best looking one of the bunch
Though you're often forgotten...
You're quite proud of who you are

What English Speaking Country Are You?

April retrospective

2007-05-01T20:40:00.000+02:00

I suck! That's pretty much the feeling I'm left with after another month of not submitting any publications. It's not that I'm not doing anything. I'm doing more teaching and more admin than any other postdoc at my institution, and this month I have actually spent more time on tasks related to my actual postdoc project (yes, I do have one such, although I almost forget it sometimes). Right now is the prepping-for-the-field time of the year, with activities such as equipment shopping, travel planning, customs arrangements, visa arrangements taking up an unreasonable proportion of time. It is also the time for wrapping up results from last year, figuring out where the potential lies and what we'd better forget about. In between endless logistics and Easter break and unforeseen events threatening to jeopardize the entire field season I've managed to get the following done in April:

submitted one conference abstract
transferred and labelled all photos from last years field season in new database
made new base maps for field area
figured out the nuts and bolts of new software
printed satellite images for field area
made sample list
made itinerary for this years field expedition
dealt with various logistics for upcoming field season
dealt with various logistics for summer teaching
made arrangements with student for summer research
written project plan for new project (funded by my first ever independent grant, however small)
had annual assessment meetings with everybody in department
had full day meeting with colleague at another university
had a couple of half-day admin meetings

To me it still screams - "but you still haven't submitted the papers you idiot".

Talking about science in the public

2007-04-29T12:03:00.000+02:00

Remember, I talked about the blog we are going to have in one of the research projects I'm involved with. It's up and running now, but still only contains a few entries. With this blog being pseudonymous and all I am not going to link to it, at least not yet, but I do want to talk a bit about it here. Especially after I found this link yesterday where a freelance science writer and blogger here in my neck of the woods explains why she thinks we should change the way we think about science in the media. Her main points are that science has an oddly distinguished status in the news media, that it's only found worthy of mentioning after major discoveries have been made and that the general public knows too little about the scientific process before the results hits the headlines. I wholeheartedly agree. If I hadn't become a research scientist/academic I would probably have gone into either teaching at a lower level or into public outreach, and if there is one thing I hope to be able to change as a scientist it is to demystify the process.

It frustrates me daily that my own family and friends know so little about what I am doing , that the world of scientific research is so foreign to most people, that one is perceived as either extraordinarily bright and intelligent or remarkably different. I want people to know about the time, effort and money behind scientific results, the tedious collection of data, the careful analysis and heated discussions that are also part of the process, or the competition for grants, people and status. I am disheartened when the breaking news of my field fills the TV screen in a simplified and wrongish way. Not because journalists shouldn't talk about science, or because they should know all the minutiae, but because people are not offered any insight into where the results come from and why they are complex and two-sided.

When we first talked about having a blog for the research project it was as part of an extensive outreach package for a project that already has attained a bit of publicity. Apparently the blog as a medium has become so commonplace that every decent large collaborative project ought to have a blog these days. Nobody really talked about what should go on the blog until fairly late in the process. Most people involved seemed to think along the lines of reporting results/ field specific facts/ background and then we hope someone joins in and creates a discussion. What I wanted to do was to write about the day to day process on a more personalised level - provide a peak behind the curtain so to speak. I wanted to use this opportunity to talk about what happens before, during and after the research project, the people, the logistics, the After some discussion other group members seemed to come around to the idea, so that is the focus of the blog now. As I said it is early days and I don't know whether we will generate an audience or what an audience will gain from the blog, but I do think it is a different way of communicating science and I wish we would all try out more new avenues when it comes to public outreach.

Blogosphere spring cleaning

2007-04-28T17:40:00.000+02:00

As you may have noticed I have been adding some more links to the blog. I have also removed a few that didn't work anymore and generally thought a bit more about who I want to link to and why. Generally I will link to you if I read your blog regularly or if you link to me. I also link to some fellow postdocs who post on the "what's up postdoc" carnivals. If you read my blog and would like your link in the side bar, let me know.

When I started blogging two years ago (on another blog) I was a lonely and frustrated graduate student desperate for contact to someone/ anyone in the circus that is academia who were not my advisors. I cast my net wide and joined organisations and fora, listservs, groups and networks and searched for blogs, diaries, real life stories and anything I would come across. I still read some of the blogs I came across during this frantic search for connection and company, others have disappeared or I have lost interest and others I have come back to. Most of the blogs I was able to dig up were written by people living in the US or Canada, and at the time blogging seemed to be a foreign concept to most people where I was. Since then blogging has exploded here and while I have no intentions of cutting out my fave blogs from other parts of the world, it would be nice to meet people from my region too. While my focus is not on factual research, I often wish I knew about more blogging people in my own field, and I have tailored my new links list so that it reflects my location, work and general interests a bit better than the old one did.

I have deliberately searched the blogosphere for some new links to people in my geographical area and of course Danish, Swedish and Norwegian graduate students, professors and science geeks are blogging too. I have also chosen to be more flexible regarding language and allow links to blogs fully or partly written in Scandinavian languages as well. If you belong in any of these categories and read my blog I'd be happy to link to you too. I think it would be nice to have blogosphere friends on this side of the pond as well.

I have also been searching for people in my broader research field. I have added a few link to earth science people who blog about research, work, life or all of it. Blogging doesn't seem to be particularly big with people in my field, but maybe that just makes it all the easier to connect with the few brave ones out there.

Other than that I have been playing around with technorati and their new "tag cloud" feature, but I can't get the cloud to show on my page. If anyone has tried this and made it work I'd love to hear what you did. I can only get a link to the cloud on the technorati page, but not show it directly on my blog. WTF?

ETA: Thanks to nice and helpful technorati people the tag cloud problem is now magically solved. Thanks.

Friday night recap and how the evaluations went

2007-04-27T21:05:00.000+02:00

It is Friday night and The Week of Continuous Demands From Other People has finally come to an end. I am tired and exhausted and want nothing more than sleep, go shopping for my sister's wedding next week and hang around and do nice things. But Fiance is out of town and I have sort of a longish weekend so I am going to camp out at my desk for a little work retreat beginning tomorrow morning. I am going to work on the manuscript I have been close to submitting for months, but I just haven't had the time to finish it up. It will probably be very boring, so expect lots of blogging.

As tonight is the last bout of freedom until after the manuscript is done I am going to waste it by watching TV and reading my non-intellectual but very hilarious book and generally enjoying myself in the laziest possible way. I do have some blog posts on my mind, but I don't have it in me to write those out tonight. What I can tell you is that I am almost done with the annual assessment meetings and it has been such a great experience. Everybody has been nice and taken me seriously as the head of the group (something I tend to worry about more than necessary) and I have gotten lots of great and positive feedback. I know it can be annoying when people brag on their blogs, but let me just say that you'd probably brag too if you got responses to "how is the leader perceived by the employee*" like "fair, organized, gets things done, open-minded, respects peoples differences and has a good balance between authority and listening to other peoples opinions". In short, I am definitely happy with the outcome. I have also gotten some good feedback on what people think the role of the group/ department leader ideally is and how it should be filled**. Basically it seems people want the head of department to take care of administrative necessities, inform them and involve them when necessary, provide good working conditions and support/ create a good social environment. While I am happy to hear that people are generally satisfied with how I approach these tasks, I think it's interesting to think about the process and how the daily interaction with people somehow captures so many aspects of what the workplace is like.

*As it is an annual assessment for employees most of the questions are concerned with the work situation for the individual, but we follow a pre-made questionnaire, and the one question about the leader is there to open up for a discussion about how the department works.

**As I am at a research institute I have nothing to do with administering teaching staff, courses, academic programmes etc., only administration relevant to running a research department.

Annual assessments

2007-04-24T21:45:00.000+02:00

I had the first annual assessment meetings with people in the department today. According to institutional rules the department head must offer one-on-one meeting with each employee once a year. It's an opportunity for the employee to get feedback on their contribution to the group and the institution and a chance to air thoughts or concerns regarding the way the department is structured, projects, responsibility, ambitions, plans or wishes for the future etc. It is where the manager is supposed to give constructive criticism or feedback on how individuals can improve and where our little group is going. It is also a chance to discuss the way the department is run, the quality of management and to which extent we have been successful at creating a sense of belonging. Given that I am young, recently hired and have limited experience it is probably the one thing I've been fretting the most about since I put on the department head hat back in January.

I inherited a very good group of people. We work closely together on a number of projects, our research interests match and individual people's skills fit in neatly with what others are missing. We have a good social life, at least while we are at work. People speak kindly to each other and we laugh a lot. I think most people are generally happy and satisfied, but I do see potential pitfalls and a few clouds on the horizon. The department is expanding and the power balance is changing. Maybe a centre of gravity is developing around certain people while others are being slightly left out. Many new things are happening, and I am not sure they are all as coordinated as they could be.

My ideas about running a department are still developing. Each day brings new decisions to be made and new opinions to be had, and some days it evolves in a more haphazardly manner than I'd like it to. My general idea, besides go with the flow and try not to make too many fatal mistakes, would be something along the lines of creating an open environment where everyone has a chance to be heard, give everybody lots of freedom to decide for themselves how things should be done but listen and take it seriously when people request something from me. One thing I like about the job is way it forces me to care about and point attention towards other peoples work and results in a different way. I also like that I have a chance to distribute resources to the people I think deserve them and need them and how it's up to me to point it out if someone has done a great job. My weak points are definitely my lack of insider contacts higher up in the system and maybe my team building skills (because honestly I wouldn't really know how to do that if the team wasn't already great). I don't know how this kind of management is being perceived and if people think it works at all, so I am very excited to get feedback (sneak peek preview: so far it has been going well, but meetings will run all week so who knows where it might end up). Initially I was also freaked out by the idea of having this sort of conversation with people many years my senior and with far more experience and natural authority, but so far that part has been OK. Most people have asked for a time slot for a meeting so I take that as a signal that they don't mind having this talk with me. We'll see. I'm jumping in for another round tomorrow.

Third carnival of postdocs

2007-04-24T21:33:00.000+02:00

The Third Carnival of Postdocs is up over at What's up Postdoc. Once again PropterDoc has done a great job putting it all together. My brain is fried these days and I completely forgot about the carnival until today and haven't written anything of relevance in a long time. Hopefully I will get my act together before the next carnival the 23 of May.

The real me

2007-04-24T21:20:00.000+02:00

As seen everywhere today. Apparently I'm a Junkie Monkey. Who knew? Thanks to ScienceWoman for directing me to another procrastination tool.

Read my VisualDNA™ Get your own VisualDNA™

A week in the world of the academic administrator

2007-04-23T18:29:00.000+02:00

This week is going to be crazy. I tell you, I don't remember the last time my schedule was this tight. It's like all administrative duties has been crammed into the next week with back to back meeting from tomorrow morning til Friday afternoon. Tomorrow hell breaks loose with the monthly department head group meeting followed by the first two annual assessment meetings with people in the department. Wednesday I'm going to the local travel clinic with the rest of the field crew for this summer to get immunised against all sorts of diseases before travelling to faraway field site. Hopefully I will make it back from that appointment just in time for the lunch seminar I suddenly find myself in charge of and another couple of annual assessment meetings. Thursday will be the big "get research group together and discuss our results from last years fieldwork"-meeting. This will probably be the day where we realize that we have nothing to report and that our work sucks (or that we are fabulous super scientists who will change the world). Friday I am going to attend the women's rights group at my workplace for their monthly meeting for the first time. While I'm all for women's rights I have a strong suspicion that I don't resonate with the work of this particular group very much, but time will show. They give a kind of career workshop/ talk about once a month and while I do like the idea of having that kind of resources available, I don't like the way they are singling out women for access to these events. Especially because we don't have any such resources available for male employees.

Random pieces of what's up?

2007-04-21T10:12:00.000+02:00

Once again it has been a while. Good days and bad days have come and gone along with thoughts and ideas for blog entries. I don't know how you guys who blog every day do it. I find it next to impossible to keep up with 9 hour work days + commute time + cramming in a bit of exercise a few nights a week + keep the bare minimum of contact with friends and family + not let the household fall completely to pieces (Fiance is already taking more than his fair share during the week) + have quality time with Fiance and yet find the time and the energy to blog. I soooo wish I could blog from work (since I'm at the office all day anyway), but for one I really don't have the time when I'm there and second, I'm afraid it could eventually cause me trouble if anybody found out. So back to square one. I miss blogging when I don't find time for it and I still think about ways to write about what happens in my life, so don't despair I'm not about to quit, just organizing my thoughts.

So what have I been up to:

I'm back at work in full force after the South America adventure and Easter break. It is surprisingly good to be back. I am really in two minds about this job. Sometimes I feel endlessly frustrated about the character of the institution, the lack of freedom in deciding where and when and how to work and the outdoorseyness and small town-feel of this city. Other times I am hopeful and excited about the research projects that are growing around me, the initiative and success coming from the group and the way I've been given responsibility and freedom to develop more than just research skills. Right now I'm in the positive mode. Things are happening, projects are getting done, the group is happy, people do not seem to hate me although I'm their manager.

I've figured out how to follow European job advertisements in my field via e-alerts. As my European readers will know the job market on this side of the pond is completely fragmented and I hardly ever hear about open positions outside my immediate geographical area. With the very few universities here and limited number of candidates It's almost known in the community who is next in line to get a position. I don't think I am at the end of the line, but I'm not first either and with me doing the postdoc at a respected research institute people tend to think I am not even considering switching to a university. With the help of a few dear friends I have finally figured out where European jobs are announced (at least some of them) and having a lists of vacant positions pouring into my inbox on a weekly basis is extremely liberating even when I am not planning to act on it right now.

I have finally made myself go back to the gym and I don't hate it yet. Or I never really hated it. I like it when I'm there, I just don't like having to leave the house again after I get home at night because I'm lazy and tired and feel like doing nothing. But since we are going together now it's been fun and it's nice to feel better and get some exercise.

We redecorated the home office and it looks really nice and professional. I rarely work at my desk at home. Usually I bring all my stuff to the living room table where the view is gorgeous or just sit in the sofa or somewhere else where I'm comfortable, but with the new furniture the room seems much brighter and more appealing. I think I'm going to spend more time there now. And I have room for all my stationary, pens and other work stuff and don't have to keep it in a cardboard box anymore.

We are going to start a blog in one of my research projects at work. This is really weird and surely deserves a blog entry of it's own. My colleagues are the least tech savvy people you would know and they are obviously not the kind of people who reads blogs at home. I am trying to steer them away from the worst beginner's mistakes without admitting to having a blog of my own. Maybe I will eventually just come out and tell them. At the moment I am the magic blogging wizard who out of the blue knows one thing or another about the blogosphere. So far I have been given the task of writing the information letter to the other subgroups who will be participating in the blog because, as they say, "I have so many ideas". We'll see.

No strings attached

2007-04-09T22:44:00.000+02:00

When I was 20 my sister and I decided that when she'd finished high school we'd go backpacking and see the world. I was fresh out of undergrad when I signed up for endless days of high-stress, low pay and no need for a brain work to save for the adventure (but with the living on my own and having expenses I never really saved as much as i was supposed to). I was excited about it and I looked forward to the break from school and reality. I did not expect to find myself, or inner peace or any long-lost connection to the third world, but I was curious about what faraway places would look like, how people would be there and about tigers and elephants and altitude sickness and how to avoid getting a rat for dinner and everything I'd just read about up until then. I did not expect it to change my life for more than a few months, but in a way I was never quite the same after I came back.

Like anybody else who have ever done anything slightly outside of their comfort zone (i.e. most functioning adults) I was proud of situations we'd handled well, learned from situations we'd handled poorly and fond of exotic memories and new insights into different ways of life. But that part fades over the years and doesn't really cause any trouble. A much more complicated effect was a constant yearning for doing this again. Not just travel for work and vacations like normal people, not just going back to some of the same places or finding new ones (and God knows I have visited plenty of peculiar new places since then), but having months and months of freedom, no plans and and no strings attached. I guess most people who go backpacking across continents ends up having a great time and remembering the good times. They probably also go travelling again one way or another, but most people seem to put it behind them at some point.

I did not sell everything and head for the roads. I wish I'd done it, if only for a year, just to get it over with. Instead I went back home, went to grad school, got really busy and really serious and very boring, while I was desperate to throw it all overboard and go travelling again. I got a PhD scholarship, travelled a lot, got a little less boring, but all the time there was deadlines and money issues and peer pressure and fieldwork during summers and what not, and then there was the defense and the new job and who on earth goes backpacking across continents while in their thirties and at beginning of their academic career.

Due to some lucky circumstances we happened to have one paid return ticket to South America and I happened to have some money available for spending (that is spending on something else than paying off student loans and awesome-new-house-rent) and the backpacking idea did not seem sooo far away. Not the full version with oodles of time, but the downsized plan with quite a bit of time available and just enough freedom to let the itinerary develop as we went along. One of the perks (and annoyances) of being in government research is that working hours are regulated as if we were factory workers and that overtime is actually registered somewhere. It's not good karma to take it out, but no one has complained so far and an entire field season of twelve hour work days seven days a week last summer nicely earned me the right to four weeks off.

The initial plan was born far far out in the Russian woods on a particularly hot day in mid-June last year. We were miles from anything, had lost our way and sense of direction and were walking through some über pristine forest, more akin to jungle than anything else, and it seemed like the right place for the idea of "why not take advantage of this and get some time off at another time of the year" to pop into anyone's mind. I mulled it over for a while, introduced the idea for my boss who did not hate it and time passed and off we went to the southern hemisphere to explore a new country and a new continent.

It was absolutely fantastic. I was completely taken aback at the variety of landscapes, the vast empty spaces, the kindness of people and the roughness of living conditions in parts of the country and the sophisticatedness of other parts. But most of all I loved the freedom of having no set plans, carrying few possesions and moving with the whole lot from place to place from day to day. I think we will be back in Argentina. I hope we will also be back on the road.

Easter

2007-04-09T17:11:00.000+02:00

Eventually we did give up the layabout lifestyle and joined the rest of the nation in the mountains. Gorgeous weather and amazing landscape. Sometimes I'm very happy we got the chance to live here (remember that I said this next time I complain about the weather, the food, public transportation or whatever it is I'm complaining about).

Easter garden blogging

2007-04-09T16:59:00.000+02:00

Ha! I did it. Found the one spot in the garden where I get a signal from our wireless network. For the past fifteen minutes I have been sneaking around the house and the garage to find a spot with a signal and here it is. I'm on the deck, sun in face, protected from wind by the signal blocking garage and with a beautiful view of a snow clad city. The sun is warm enough that I can sit outside comfyly without hat or mittens or thick coat (though dressed in woolen sweather, thick socks and boots). I'm still off work till tomorrow and I'm kinda excited to go back. Isn't life just awesome?

How so little can be done

2007-04-07T22:18:00.000+02:00

This has been one of those days where I almost (but not entirely) feel guilty for being the geeky, lazy type rather than the sporty energetic type who jumps up and runs outside at the first sight of sunshine. It's Easter, the whole country is more or less shuts down during the holidays, it's snowing and it's been sunshine/ not too cold/ not too warm and I'm pretty sure everybody who can stand on two legs have been out in the mountains skiing and exercising and looking really healthy. My only excuse has been the occasional snow showers, the niceness of staying inside and the fact that I'd already rented "The devil wears Prada" on DVD last night and had to watch it before 6pm tonight when evil rental place wanted it back.

So what did happen? I spent a LOT of time on the Internet (imagine where i could have been if I spent all that time working instead of reading about other peoples jobs), watched the movie (which was just as good as the book and very funny), did a lot of laundry, finished synchronising home laptop with work PC and talked to my mom on the phone (and had related breakdown because she is a master in turning something that is very important to me into a problem, and I am a master in spilling whatever anger I might carry around inside over her). I guess tomorrow it's time to start looking at that pile of papers I brought home from work.