As I’ve been going through graduate school, I’ve been struggling with how I represent and justify the work that I do. Part of this is trying to explain to my family why I would sign up for what they perceive as simply “more school” (which I think I’ve gotten down). Part of this is ensuring that I am finding fulfillment in the projects I pursue for the next few years… making sure that I enjoy what I am doing daily and find inspiration in the larger context of the work. And part of this is justifying the work for grants and colleagues in terms of the science (will this work shed new light on a problem?) and society (how will this benefit other people?). I spent a lot of time during college trying to make sure that I was putting my skills to use for the benefit of others. And my initial inspiration for a career in neuroscience was music therapy, a field which needs a better understanding of music’s effects on the brain.

But it is tough to draw a line connecting the daily work in the lab to the benefit to society. Any “basic” scientist working on understanding some obscure sliver of how the world works has no idea if or when her work will benefit society. When I explain my research to family, after clarifying that I will not be qualified to perform brain surgeries on humans, I typically say, “In 20 years, the work I’m doing might be useful to doctors working with patients.” That’s OK for family, but it is not such a good sell for the public whose tax money is supporting me and my research and the entire institution that allows it all to happen. The ROI isn’t clear.

But that doesn’t keep scientists from making outrageous claims about how their work will benefit society. It isn’t a new theme, though it has been a recent topic of discussion in Nature, Newsweek, and the New York Times. Many scientists I’ve tried to talk to about this get edgy and defensive and worry about such criticisms being fuel for “anti-science”. But ultimately, scientists make absurd promises in order to keep the grants coming (see “Science built on empty promises“). And they can get away with it because there is no way to measure whether or not those promises have been fulfilled. When, 20 years later, the breakthrough doesn’t happen, scientists simply say, “Oops, guess that didn’t work. It’s science, not engineering… you know how it goes. Give us more money and we’ll cure cancer. Someday. Maybe.”

I think that the problem here is largely one of misrepresentation. The uncertainty in the ROI (which every scientist I’ve talked to acknowledges) is not made clear to the public. Many scientists don’t think that there needs to be an ROI… they believe that the public should support them to simply discover new things regardless of the potential for impact. And that is all well and good if you are receiving funding from a source which expects you to simply discover new things about the world. But those sources are few and far between. Most public funding sources for science want solutions eventually… for curing diseases (NIH), for preventing economic catastrophe due to climate change (DOE & NASA), for maintaining US military dominance (DARPA).

It just doesn’t seem to me that the uncertainty  of the implications of a researcher’s work justifies inventing potential impacts, then insisting that one can’t be held accountable to those impacts.

Here is the description of an upcoming workshop titled “Professional Attire for Your Professional Life!” (note the exclamation mark, indicating that this is going to be a very fun and exciting seminar)

Transitioning from a graduate research assistant (GSR) to the professional world is often bewildering endeavor for many graduate students.  Along with your knowledge and skills an individual’s demeanor and appearance are also qualities that companies and institutions consider when hiring—especially in careers beyond academia.  Graduate students thinking about, or ready, to make this transition can greatly benefit from knowing the basics regarding professional attire and self-presentation.  During this gathering you will learn how and why first impression count, how to “stand out “ by your demeanor and attire,  the critical elements of a “professional” look, including what “formal,” “professional,” and “business casual” attire really mean?

Never mind the fact that there was no reason to make an acronym out of  ”graduate research assistant.” Based on the summary, the questions that this workshop proposes to answer can be easily addressed with a quick Google search for “business casual.” For more advanced studies, all I need to do is pick up a copy of GQ or watch a few episodes of TLC’s “What Not To Wear.”

Perhaps the “Lizzie” episode from Season 8? You know, the one that found a PhD student that gets a makeover? Oh wait, that’s the one where they highlight every stereotypically nerdy thing about her and her clothing, then make her look “sexy” with a new wardrobe.

I have a hard time believing that this workshop will be any less trite and condescending. Information presented in workshop form that can be easily found with a Google search? That would be a waste of my time, but not offensive. The offensive part is that the very office that is supposed to be helping grad students find careers seems to have taken very seriously the joke that grad students have poor personal hygiene and are ignorant of standards of attire.

The thing is, grad students dress like slobs because that is the culture of academia. It is a choice. Walk around a poster session at an academic conference and pay attention to what people are wearing… the formality of one’s attire is inversely proportional to their expertise. The ones in suits? Those are the undergrads attending their first conference. The ones with torn jeans and flip flops? PIs. The grad students make up a gradient between these two extremes.

If you break too far out of this mold, people think that you are hiding something. It’s as risky as giving a research presentation where you actually pay attention to font selection, color schemes, and composition.

An inability to properly dress is not the greatest hurdle to grad students securing jobs in industry.

I show up to a presentation by an auditory neuroscientist that wants to show an example of their stimulus. Maybe its some crazy synthetic stimuli or an ultrasonic frog call or maybe they just want to play some music. And the audio doesn’t work. Someone runs to get a pair of cheap speakers off of their desk and fiddles with the poser and audio cables for 3 minutes. Then the speakers buzz or crackle.

A labmate and I were lamenting this the other day when I remembered the little expandable omnidirectional speaker my friend plugs into his iPod. Would something like that work for a smallish presentation, like a journal club, lab meeting, or brown bag? Maybe for researchers in the auditory sciences, a nice portable speaker should be as critical a part of a one’s presentation arsenal as the laptop, VGA converter, and laser pointer.

That said, I think I’m going to get one of these:

The article is titled “Ten Songs that Will Get You High, According to Science,” and it goes on to list these ten songs.

Um. No. If you are going to report on a study, you better read it first.

The author apparently read some other headlines on the article, found the list of songs that were used, and then offered up “ten songs the study used that are as good as your chemical of choice.” As would be expected, many of the songs the commenters disagreed with.

However, there is nothing special about the songs on this list and the study DOES NOT say that there is.

This is an awesome study… but the only things that make these songs special is that they were submitted by the subjects of the study themselves.

From the paper…
“First, individuals provided ten pieces of instrumental music to which they experience intense pleasure and “chills” without restrictions to the genre of music, which included classical, folk, jazz, electronica, rock, punk, techno and tango (see http://www.zlab.mcgill.ca/supplements/supplements_intro.html for samples).”

But then, “control stimuli were selected for each individual using a paradigm where one individual’s pleasurable music is used as another person’s neutral music.”

So its not that these songs are special in and of themselves…. for one subject they might have used Zeppelin as “pleasurable” and Beethoven as indifferent and for another subject visa versa.

The thing is, we already know that music that we like (remember, the subjects chose the music themselves) is pleasurable and there is no need to do a study to test it. What is unique is right there in the title of the study: “Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music”.

If you really want to know the ten songs that will “get you high,” then just go find your ten favorite songs… the ones that “give you chills.” Those are the ones you want.

—-

Salimpoor VN, Benovoy M, Larcher K, Dagher A, Zatorre RJ. Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music. Nature Neuroscience. 2011;(January). Available at: http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/nn.2726.

Until Sunday…

5pm

Thursday

4-5pm

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6pm

7pm

First, a this is not an issue that random people on the internet should be petitioning. There is quite obviously more going on to the story that a random person like myself doesn’t know about.

Second, Dr. Evans seems to be hiding behind the “but, it’s science” argument, ignoring the fact that science has interpretations that are socially relevant. Indeed, the study in question is meant to highlight that things we consider to be uniquely human are not necessarily so and the the very first line of the study mentions human oral sex. In any normal work environment, it would be considered sexual harassment to approach a colleague of the opposite sex and try to engage in a conversation about fellatio. Would the case have been as easily dismissed if Dr. Evans had presented the YouTube video of bat copulation instead? Heck, just check out the list of “similar videos” for that to see the kind of thing that people associate with bat fellatio. The scientific facts are the same in both the video and the paper, so both would be equally appropriate to show a colleague, right? Undoubtedly, there should be more room for such discussion in academic circles, but one should not be surprised that this act was interpreted as harassment.

Third, most discussion has said that the Prez reprimands him despite that HR did not consider the complaints to be sexual harassment. This seems inconsistent with due process, but I’m not going to sign the stupid petition (which is also inconsistent with due process) because there is likely much more going on and much more history to the reprimand than the immediate complaint. Indeed, a closer reading of the letters Dr. Evans has posted indicates that there were *two* formal complaints made against him, one upheld and one dismissed (regarding the bat paper) and that the disciplinary procedures the president instituted were consistent with this. The complaints were not only about the bat paper, but about repeated discussions of sexual topics, unwelcome compliments, and inappropriate touching. Apparently, Dr. Evans skipped these parts of the complaint on his Youtube video and petition.

Academia allows a lot of BS that other sectors don’t (nepotism, sexism) and allows way more discrimination than would be acceptable in industry or government. I could make a long list of TMI profs who would share inappropriate details about themselves… details which would have them kicked to the curb in an industry setting. It is particularly disconcerting that such discrimination and inappropriateness can be so easily twisted into an “academic freedom” issue, with parties claiming “anti-science.”

Interested in pursuing a career in consulting, government, non-profit, policy, finance, academic/student affairs or “industry” in general? Well you will need a concise and dynamic resume and cover letter to peak[sic] any companies’ or institutions’ interest enough to call you for an interview–and résumés often differ drastically from CVs.  This workshop introduces graduate students to the basic but essential strategies and tips for converting a CV into an effective resume. Graduate students are also introduced to the concept of “transferable skills” and given the latest information regarding current industry needs and resume styles.

C’mon academia, grad students are going to need a lot more than a workshop on the latest “resume styles” to land safely after getting kicked out the window of the 92nd floor of the Ivory Tower.

How does one approach a “strategy” for rotations? Well, this is what I’ve been told:

Telescope or magnifying glass? The vertical approach.

Neuroscience is an incredibly diverse field of research, necessitating inquiry at many levels. Research on genes and neurotransmitters happens very differently than research on the visual system which happens very differently than research on the emotional effects of music. Different areas require different backgrounds, knowledge, and use different tools. Since I’ll be developing expertise at a certain level of the field during my dissertation research, the rotations will be an ideal opportunity for me to explore the other levels of neuroscience, allowing me to put the diverse coursework of the program into a laboratory context and understand the methods that are used throughout the field. Further, UCSD requires second year students to develop a project proposal in an field of neuroscience which is unrelated to their dissertation research, so any proficiency which I can build during that first year would be highly useful during my second year.

Filling up the toolbox. The horizontal approach.

The tough part of this vertical approach is that many of the lab techniques and methods that I learn will not be easily transferable to my dissertation research. Patch clamp recording is a different beast from fMRI… they address different questions at completely different levels of the brain and knowing the former would be of limited immediate value for a dissertation focusing on the latter. Further, like many incoming students, I am comfortable and most interested in a particular level of neuroscience and I think I know what kind of research I want to be doing for their dissertation. So why bother learning “useless” methods during the first year when I could be focusing on building a set of techniques which could be incorporated into my later dissertation research? Instead, I could spend my rotations learning laboratory techniques which could be used on the kinds of questions I want to study.

The sample platter

Ultimately, I expect to employ a combination of the “vertical” and the “horizontal.” Regardless, the key thing that I’ve been encouraged repeatedly to remember, whether talking to advisors, professors, or grad students, is that rotations are a testing ground for selecting a dissertation lab. Every rotation lab ought to be a lab that I am interested in entering for my dissertation research.

I’m really excited about how it turned out. The journal, which is run entirely by grad students at Yale, had accidentally lost their old website last year due to some payment mistakes (oops!). So, we built a new one.

The needs of the site were pretty straightforward:

• Publish news about the organization
• Maintain a calendar of events
• Keep an archive of the journal’s issues & articles
• Make it as easy as possible for the staff to update everything without any technical knowledge

The site was built in Drupal, using CCK (especially the node reference functionality) for the Articles and Issues and using Views to organize the content.

• The News page is simply a page view which displays the latest News items at the top of the page.
• The Archive takes advantage of the new “grid” display feature in Views, showing a teaser image and the title of each Issue.
• The Current Issue page is a full node view of the most recent issue of the journal: this makes it really easy to access the latest issue of the journal at the same page.
• The homepage is built with views and an assortment of Views-driven blocks (I had originally intended to use Panels to drive the frontpage, but it wasn’t stable yet when I was developing the site).
• The Events are being displayed from 30boxes. Even though Drupal has modules for making events, 30boxes was an easy way to just pull

The theme was built on top of the Zen theme. It had been a few years since I had used the Zen theme as a starting-point for a Drupal site and it has definitely come a long way since 2005! I was really impressed with how solid the documentation was and, combined with Firebug and MAMP, how easy it was to go from a visual design concept to a live site.

Special thanks to Diana Chu and the folks at YJIA for helping get everything together to launch this.

Take a look at the site, poke around, and let me know what you think!

Yale Journal of International Affairs [http://yalejournal.org]

I wish I had…

1. started signing up for frequent flyer miles

I don’t know how many miles I’ve flown during my undergrad. maybe a bazillion. study abroad. conferences. visiting friends and family. I should have signed up for a frequent flyer program. Since I did a lot of international flying, it would have been best to go with one (or all) of the alliances… like oneworld, SkyTeam or Star Alliance… or I could have tried to get a credit card that gave frequent flier miles. Whatever way, I wish I could now cash these in to visit friends and grad schools, etc.

2. saved all of my course syllabi in a single file

One of the grad schools I applied to wanted me to organize my entire transcript (all 210+ credit hours of it) based on courses which were most relevant to the program including the textbook used for each course. Technically, I save most of my syllabi because I am (was?) a major pack-rat. But I saved them along with every other unimportant scrap of paper I got from those classes. So when I decided it was time to purge myself of the many boxes of junk from the prior 5.5 years of my college career, I think I discarded most of them. Which made determining the textbook used for the CHM115 course I took in the spring of ’03 exceedingly difficult. The course was not on Blackboard at the time and the instructor had since pulled the info from his own website. The Wayback Machine didn’t even help, since it doesn’t archive PDF files. I wish I had had a single file to go to to see all of my syllabi.

3. actually started a portfolio

because, again, one of my grad school prospects specifically asked for this. and they want it on the internet. I think this is especially true advice for “project” majors–that is, majors where you learn to develop a project with a final result. Art, composition, design, engineering, computer science. The tough part I found when I kindof started freshman year is being able to guess what is relevant. But the cool thing I’ve realized is that it is likely all relevant. Don’t know where to start? Try putting this into google… “<your field> portfolio”. Or try to find portfolios of grad students in your field or related fields.