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Category Archives: Managing an academic career
Impressing us on your graduate school interview
You got an interview! You are so close to leaving behind the incessant tests and classes of undergraduate years and moving on to focussed research, accompanied by deep reading in the areas you love. Your undergraduate debts will wait as … Continue reading
Your web page is your shining face to the world
We have just spent a lot of time updating our web page in preparation for the prospective graduate students that will show up tomorrow, and for the ones from last week that are still deciding. … I learned from Andrew Read That it is really important to have sections on the questions you are asking, and sections on what you have figured out. Continue reading
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Choosing a Ph.D. program – what’s important and what’s not
I view courses as a great way to get the tools you want, or the breadth in another area you couldn’t easily pick up on your own. … Make sure when you matriculate that you print out the requirements for the degree down to the details of exams and be sure this will be honored even if the department changes the requirements later. Continue reading
Posted in Managing an academic career
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How to get the best start-up package as a new professor
This is the first of many negotiations you will have with the department chair and/or the dean, so you don’t want to screw it up. … If you are joining a group of people doing similar work, ask them if there is something you could all use that they would like you to ask for in your start-up. Continue reading
Strategy for a successful academic career
The academic thoughts you read here may be interesting, but what a family member recently told me I really should be doing is helping people with designing a strategic career. So, I’ll try to begin with this entry. I have … Continue reading
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One reason it’s so hard to be a woman in academia: we have personalities
Did you disagree with a male colleague at a faculty meeting? Did you ask a question during a seminar? Did you laugh out loud at a joke in the hall? Are you an extrovert? If you are female, be careful! … Continue reading
What we look for in a new faculty candidate
I think we are generally pretty good at not just picking our friends, but we prefer that your advisors, or people on your committee, be people who have contributed to the field enough that we have read their work, or know their ideas. … If we think you are doing things just like your advisor, and have not branched out, have not read widely, we will worry about what you will be doing in five years. Continue reading
How do I get nominated for an award?
Prizes are a social endeavor, chosen by busy people, so do great science, and make it easy for those nominators to find you and write about you. At some point you will be as happy that someone you nominated got a prize as when you get one yourself. 
Boahemaa Adu-Oppong right after she received the Julian Huxley award for best undergraduate thesis in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, at Rice University. 
Stan Braude right before he receives the top teaching award from the Animal Behavior Society. Continue reading
NSF let us know we’re part of the 99%
Furthermore, this lack of funding did not change the probability that there will be Dictyostelium discoideum in the soil and deer poop samples, though it may ultimately change our ability to analyze them. … If there isn’t much money, and we can’t do much about it, what money there is should be doled out in fair and transparent ways. Continue reading
Research creativity and the importance of vacations
Meetings, teaching, preparing for teaching, reading, lab meeting, journal club, a few minutes for paper writing, data analysis, even a quick peek through a microscope, and maybe a few seconds for lunch with your group take up all the time. … It can help you jettison a hard, time-consuming technique when a newer one comes along, even if the new one requires some activation energy and someone in the group has invested a lot in the old one. Continue reading
