Obligation

When I graduate with my PhD I will have taken zero graduate-level courses from women (out of 11 or 12 total courses). I have had a few women in advisory roles, but my thesis committee will also probably not have any women on it. Sometimes I feel like I have an obligation to be a professor, to show young women that it’s possible and help them envision themselves as engineers. But other times I just wonder if the fact that I haven’t personally witnessed it being possible is a warning sign. I have to remember that something being difficult is NOT a good reason to want to do it.

I've heard rumors there are even fewer women in industry, and I don't personally know any with graduate-level technical training. At least on the academic side there are some good female science/engineering prof bloggers writing about their experiences. I haven't found too many bloggers who are women working in industry, or really, women with graduate level training in a STEM field that are working outside of academia. Anyone have any recommendations?

Your advisor is always watching you

Or at least, my advisor is always watching me.  There is an upcoming event on campus and a photo of my advisor features prominently in the promotional posters.  Promotional posters that are approximately every 10 steps along every hallway in my building.  It's no ordinary photo either.  He looks like a convincingly mad scientist who is staring directly into your soul, deciding whether or not you are a worthy next "test subject."  It's impossible to ignore this photo.  The best part?  This poster is also inside every stall in every bathroom in the building!  Just when I think I'm going to take a break and go to the ladies room: Bam!

This event can't happen soon enough.

Oh right, there are industry jobs for engineers.

One of the subtle differences I’ve noticed between science and engineering is that scientists have an “optimal” career path: after undergrad you go to grad school, and then you can get a job.  The best job is of course being a professor, but some other jobs that require quantitative skills are acceptable.  I think chemistry might be an exception to this rule, although at my undergrad I think chemists mostly went to grad school, like the other scientists.  Overall, for scientists there was a lot of support for students who wanted to go on the expected career path, and not very much for students who wanted to try something else.

In engineering, however, there are always opportunities to get jobs.  You can get a job right after undergrad if you want, and get paid real money!  Or you can get a MS and then a job, or job and then MS, or a PhD and then a job, or the other way around.  There doesn’t seem to be as much of a “right” way to be an engineer, and people who work in industry aren’t seen as inferior in the same way as they are in the sciences.  In fact, I have had people high up in the academic structure stress to me the importance of patents over papers, and real world experience instead of staying in academia for my entire career.  I don’t know if I will ever get used to this.  It’s a small thing, but every time someone says, “of course you should spend some time in industry!” it’s like they started speaking a foreign language for a moment.

The other part of this that has been a surprise to me is that the less external pressure there is for me to conform to a certain career path, the more I find myself thinking about what it would be like to be a professor.  I’m not convinced that’s the life I want for myself yet, but it’s become a possibility in a way it really wasn’t when I was a scientist.  I wonder though, if professors generally know that they want to be professors from the time they start grad school.  Do they get to the end and think that being a professor, or post doc on the way to being a professor, is the career they want?  Or did they know all along that was what they were working for?  And do people decide to be professors because they want to run their own lab?  Or they have a strong drive to teach the next generation?  Or their advisor knows someone who would be a great post doc advisor, and then it just goes from there?

Salaries for Grad Students and Post Docs

 FSP just posted a poll asking about the salaries of her faculty readers- I thought I would do the same for graduate students and and post docs who are feeling left out.  I'm doing 12 month salaries instead of 9 month as it seems to me that most grad students and post docs are paid 12 month salaries.  Here's the poll:

What is your annual salary in US $?
	less than $10,000
	$10,000-14,999
	$15,000-19,999
	$20,000-24,999
	$25,000-29,999
	$30,000-34,999
	$35,000-39,999
	$40,000-49,999
	$50,000-59,999
	$60,000-69,999
	$70,000-79,999
	$80,000-89,999
	$90,000-99,999
	$100,000 and up
pollcode.com free polls

Abstract Reveiws

I agreed to review conference abstracts for a conference I’m not going to as a way to stay current with what’s new and hot in my field.  When I signed up, they said that there would be maybe two dozen abstracts each person would have to review, which is a lot, but doable.  When I got the assignment, however, there were more than 40 abstracts to review!  Even worse, I listed one of my areas of expertise as (roughly) “combining two or more techniques,”  which is a good description of my primary research interests, but I didn’t consider in terms of abstracts that means the topics I’m assigned are “combining ANY two or more techniques for ANY reason.”  I have yet to come across an abstract that I feel completely unqualified to review, but some have been in fields I only know through coursework.  I feel like I am learning more from reviewing these abstracts than I would by going to the conference.

After reading several abstracts, it’s clear what impresses me: statistics or quantitative data, figures, and references (though the references are mostly a proxy for placing the work in a larger context).  Some people didn’t take the abstract submission very seriously and they say almost verbatim: “we took some data, analyzed it, and found a result.”  I haven’t decided if those are in the reject pile yet: they are certainly “not even wrong,” so is the reject line at being wrong or being too vague to tell if they are wrong?

On Failing

Qualifying exams at my school are three consecutive half-hour oral exams on topics you’ve taken graduate courses in.  My background:

Topic 1:
1 undergrad course
1 grad course
1 audited grad course on a subtopic
years of research experience between undergrad and grad school
final exam for this class was an oral mini-qual
many friends who could quiz me on this topic

Topic 2:
2 undergrad courses
1 grad course
TAing 1 grad course including extensive discussions with the prof
generally intuitive subject for me
1 expert friend who gave me a few practice quals

Topic 3:
1 grad class, that I did alright in but not awesome
extremely busy prof who is known for failing students on quals
a few acquaintances that could spend a few minutes quizzing me


 I bet you can already guess where this is going.

When I took quals a few months ago I passed topics 1 & 2 easily but failed topic 3.  Although at my school, no one really said that I “failed,” just that I had to “retake” topic 3.  The way the qual structure works is here that if you don’t outright pass or fail (i.e., you are deficient in just one area), they make you retake the exam only in that area within a few months.  If you don’t pass that time you must transfer to the master’s program.

There are a lot of reasons why I didn’t want to transfer to the master’s program.  I’ve wanted to get a PhD for as long as I can remember, and due to some geographical constraints it would be difficult for me to do a PhD after an MS.  Plus, I transferred schools to attend my current institution, and I already passed the hard PhD qual at my first school.  Being in MS/PhD limbo for several months made me incredibly grumpy.  Despite the fact that everyone told me they were sure I’d pass, I didn’t want to jinx it and had a hard time thinking ahead to any time past my qual retake.  I didn’t want to think about going to conferences.  I didn’t want to think about what I’d do for my PhD project.  I didn’t want to have any big ideas, or buy books related to my field because I might have had to leave it.  And I was spending all my time and mental energy desperately studying a a topic that I don’t like very much.  Perhaps saying I was incredibly grumpy is an understatement.

Last week I retook the exam on topic 3, and I’m very pleased to say that I passed!  It was clear the examining prof was very impressed with my knowledge.  For the first time I’m a real PhD student, and it feels awesome.  Almost immediately after passing the qual I got a ton of new ideas on how to advance my current project and things I could do for my thesis.

As for failing the first time around, I’m still not sure whether I’m happy it happened or not.  I certainly know topic 3 much better than I did the first time, and could confidently teach a course on it now though I don’t think I could have after the first time I took it.  I don’t mind failing things every once in a while either- I think that if you never fail you’re not trying hard enough.  On the other hand, restudying for the qual took a huge amount of mental effort that I could have used to make actual progress on my project instead of listlessly poking at it for a few months.

On the third hand, sometimes you just have to jump through hoops and all that matters is that you got through, not how graceful the jump was.

Conferences: Not Feelin It

Usually I am really excited about going to conferences.  I remember the first conferences I went to very clearly: the ones in my own field, ones in fields I was thinking of switching to, the excitement of meeting people, learning new approaches and whole new problems to think about, getting feedback about what I was working on from new people, etc.  Even a few months ago I was excited thinking about the conferences I could attend.  Now that some deadlines are coming up, I am not feeling motivated at all. I think I’m tired of throwing things together for conference abstracts.  I want to spend my time working on something new and big and awesome, not rehashing the same things I’ve been working on for months with little progress.  Or maybe my data is just uninspiring lately, and if I’m not inspired, no one else is going to be either. 

Or maybe I’m just getting old and grumpy!