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Thoughts on the PhD defence
Last Friday there was a PhD defence in our department and Terry’s post about open defences in the USA got me thinking about the different cultures surrounding PhD defences. The first thing that came to...
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Letting go and deciding what is important
This week has been yet another lesson in patience and letting go. I had a lot of big plans at the beginning this week. There was a hint on Sunday that things wouldn’t go as planned when my daughter was...
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Maybe I am a writer after all
I’ve been head down, focusing on writing grants lately. These days I spend a good deal of my time writing and thinking about writing, which isn’t what I imagined life as a scientist to be. When I was...
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Backyard science
Spring is springing in Sweden and I’m finally out from under my grant writing load. It is pretty easy to complain about writing grants and I am not innocent in this respect. But it is also an...
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Save the bees, but maybe not this way
I’m all for saving bees. Heck they’re some of the most important players in the plant systems I study. No bees means no sex for my plants, so there’s that. And I generally have a soft spot for bees....
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More backyard reflections: connections between farming and fieldwork
The weekend was beautiful and I spent a good portion of it in the backyard digging up grass. The plan is to have a small raised garden for vegetables, nothing too extensive but enough to plant a few...
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Is grad school a good time to have a baby?
I have no clear answer and I had my daughter just after finishing my fourth year… A post on having kids in grad school has been on my roster basically since I started blogging. I sometimes get asked...
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How honest should I be about my career goals? My post-PhD story.
My post-PHD journey is peppered throughout the posts I write here but I was inspired by a blog carnival over at the Contemplative Mammoth to put together a single post. After May 28th Jacquelyn...
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Field courses: a blessing and a curse
Since I began my position at Uppsala, my summers begin frantically. Although my teaching load is relatively light, the majority of it comes in the spring just when I am getting ready for my own and my...
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Teaching Challenges: group projects
Science is a collaborative effort and in essence, more and more of our scientific effort is done in groups. We come up with projects together, divide the labour, and co-write the papers that come out...
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A vacationing scientist.
“I wish those flowers were closer and then we could pick them and you could do the work.” –my daughter to me while on vacation Last month we traveled as a family to Corsica for a real honest to...
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Academic self care
The semester has begun and everyone is returning back to campus. It means my commuter bus is full and I rarely get a preferred seat. Bike parking in Uppsala is a lot harder too. For me this means that...
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Where do you eat lunch? And does it matter?
Lunch culture seems to vary a lot from place to place. I will admit to sometimes eating lunch at my desk, even though it is seems a highly unusual thing at European universities. But these days it is...
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Graduate training, missed opportunities and the good ol’ days
A couple of recent conversations have got me thinking about the culture of academia and grad school training. The first conversation relates more to the general culture of academia. The complaint was...
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Invasive species, immigrant emotions and a guilty conscience
I have a confession to make: I live in Sweden and I have lupines in my garden. I didn’t plant them, they were there when I moved in, but after two seasons I haven’t removed them either. In Sweden, I...
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Writing a review: thoughts from the trenches.
Somehow I’m in the middle of writing three review papers so I am gaining some perspective on writing them. The first one is basically my own fault; I started thinking a lot about nectar rewards and how...
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Taxonomy vs research theme based conferences: which do you attend?
These two weeks are allowing me to contrast two very different kinds of meetings. As a member of the Linnean Centre of Plant Biology in Uppsala, I attended our yearly meeting last week*. The centre...
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The conference hangover
This week I definitely had a ‘hangover’. Two weeks of meetings* left me a strange mixture of excited, enthusiastic, invigorated and completely drained. I have lots of new ideas and enjoyed both making...
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Social media: what is it good for?
For better or worse, I am the only person in my department who engages regularly in social media. Blogging here, reading other blogs (and occasionally commenting), chatting on twitter…over the last...
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Academic dress code or why women seem to think about clothing more than men
Last week we saw a blatant example of not considering the implications of your wardrobe. There are a lot of good perspectives on That Shirt worn by Dr. Matt Taylor not the least Terry’s own last week;...
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Be a gracious winner and not a sore loser (or don’t be a jerk)
There are a bunch of life skills that come in handy in academia. Some are obvious and discussed a lot like time management, setting goals, getting stuff completed, etc. Others fly under the radar but...
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The academic cold contact
A lot of science that gets done these days results from collaboration. Collaborations can come about it a multitude of ways. Of course there is the classic networking approach. You know someone they...
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Should ecologists teach writing?
I could start this post with a back-in-my-day story and bemoan the state of student writing today but I think you can probably fill in the blanks without me hashing out a familiar tale*. Sufficed to...
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Academia and friendships
At one point I thought about writing a post about the difficulties that academia wreaks on friendships. All that moving about means picking up, making new friends and leaving behind the old. It is...
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Academia is flexible/science waits for no one
Whew, I’m just coming through a stressful personal and professional time. Never has it been clearer to me exactly how academia is both very flexible and completely inflexible at the same time. Of...
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Academic Hazing
A recent conversation* on twitter made me think about academic customs. The conversation centered on PhD comprehensive exams (PhD candidacy in the US system that happens about halfway through the PhD)...
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Working away from work and making work home
Guest post by Rosie Burdon, a PhD student at Uppsala University in Amy Parachnowitsch’s lab. She is studying interactions between Penstemon digitalis and its pollinator Bombus impatiens in eastern USA....
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Practicing what you preach (or rather teach)
I have been fairly absent from here over the last many months. I’ve wanted to write and even started a few posts but they never got completed. The clashing of personal (husband’s surgery) and work...
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Review unto others as you would have them review unto you?
I am going to go ahead and assume we all want quality reviews of our journal submissions, however you define ‘quality’. Reviewers that take time to seriously evaluate your work, provide constructive...
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A collective blind spot in measuring natural systems?
A few months ago I got a Fitbit, which for those of you who haven’t heard of it is basically a step counter. I’d been thinking about getting one for a while to help me motivate my exercise and keep my...
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Academic job security and productivity (or the plant ecologist weighs in on...
I had been planning this post for a while because the topic has been on my mind but now it seems like a perfect fit. Following up on Terry’s theme about nourishing research at teaching schools, I’m...
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Science topics that you feel compelled to discuss in polite conversation
As a scientist, I am sometimes shy to talk about what I do in social groups. I’m not a constant science communicator, although I do try to be a better one. Yes, I love my job. Yes, I am happy to talk...
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Useful science communication resources
Inspired by my own endeavours in science communication and an informal talk I gave to my department, I started to think about offering a course. There isn’t anything like that for PhD students so I...
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The dangers of twitter
When I first joined twitter, I was nervous I might mess up somehow. I wanted to use my professional identity but because no one around me* was using twitter, I didn’t know how it would be perceived....
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Should I stay or should I go now?
Or maybe an alternative title could be “The Accidental Academic”. This November I heard back from the two main Swedish funding agencies that I didn’t receive a grant this round. For me this means not...
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First week off the job-life as an unemployed academic
This week I am officially unemployed. What does life as an unemployed academic look like? Well, in the first place not so very different from an employed one. Sweden has a long school break so we’re...
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Can on-line networking replace the traditional kind?
A few weeks ago Terry wrote about going to conferences, networking and social capital. The post struck home for me for a couple of reasons. First, I agree wholeheartedly with the diffuse benefits that...
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Blurred lines in academia–what is work?
While navigating the unemployment system in Sweden, I’ve discovered that I need to report every month what I’ve been doing to find a job. It includes applying for jobs of course but also training. I...
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What is creativity and how creative are scientists?
As often happens to me, I have a post idea banging around in my head (or sometimes started on the page) but before I fully flesh it out, some amazing scientists post about the idea even better than I...
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Parade of professors or solo scholar?
There are two basic models for teaching courses and the norm varies a lot depending on the type of ecology course. A single professor was responsible for the majority of classes I took as an...
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Is social media ruining everything?
I have been involved with a few conversations in the last month that basically went along the lines of social media is ruining X. It got me thinking is that really true? The first conversation was...
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Confessions of an unemployed academic
I have had versions of this post topic rattling around in my brain for many months. There are various reasons for me not writing it but ironically probably the biggest one is that I am unemployed. My...
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Write anyway*
This month, I started a writing/productivity challenge for myself. I wanted to start tackling many of the projects that have floundered in my year of unemployment and intensive job searching. One of my...
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How many rejections should scientists aim for?
Earlier this year an article on aiming for 100 rejections a year in literature was being passed around. The main idea is that by aiming for rejections, rather than accepted things we’re more likely to...
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Should scientists write Wikipedia pages for their study species?
I’ve been working on Penstemon digitalis for a long time now. I first met the plant as a starting PhD student looking for a new system to make my own. I wanted something local (to Ithaca, NY), a plant...
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When scientists are dishonest
A case of scientific dishonesty has hit close to home and got me thinking. This isn’t a post of the details of the case (you can read more here if you’re interested) or the players involved (I don’t...
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The writing curse of negative data
Summer is sometimes a contemplative time for me. It used to be long hours in the field would give me time to think but now it is just as often that I’m weeding my garden or some other summer activity....
View ArticleBringing ecology blogging into the scientific fold
We’re co-authors on a new paper on “Bringing ecology blogging into the scientific fold: measuring reach and impact of science community blogs”.
View ArticleScientific identity crisis
Well, all right, maybe identity crisis is a little overly dramatic. However, I have been mulling over my science identity for a while now even if I’m not confused about what kind of science I want to...
View ArticleSkype A Scientist (Skype a Classroom!)
It is time to sign up for skypeascientist. This is a program connecting scientists with classrooms. It gives students and teachers a chance to talk to real living scientists and scientists a chance to...
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