Lessons

Ugh. I learned a hard one yesterday. I was so close to being done with a manuscript I've been working on for a long time. As I was finishing up some minor edits and ran some stats to get some additional numbers. While doing so I noticed a few weird data points. I start looking more closely at the weird ones. Huh, that is strange. I go back to the original electronic data sheet to make sure there wasn't an error importing into the statistics program, but no, everything jives. I pull out the original data sheets and feel a surge of adrenalin run through my body. Wrong. The electronic data I have is wrong. This particular part of the project was done by an undergrad, and another undergrad finalized it for me. I never went back and triple checked the data. Dumb. Real, real dumb, to assume two separate set of eyes would take care of the errors. Not everything is wrong, but enough. Enough that I am now correcting the data and will have to redo the stats from scratch for this part of the paper. And if the results are different....
Oh, I can't think about that right now.
If I do I'll go crazy.
I'll think about that tomorrow.
-Scarlett

p's and q's

Ugh. It's Saturday night and I'm sitting here with my laptop formatting a paper for submission to a journal. Does that make me old, lame or is it just the mark of a fifth year grad student feeling the heat? Probably all of the above.
As a youngster I never appreciated the amount of work that goes into formatting a paper for submission. As a student you only see the finished product and it's easy to be blissfully unaware of what it takes to get it there. It takes days, full eight hour days, to get a paper that is complete and ready in all other respects ready to be submitted. There are a ton of little things that must be done. Like making sure all of your p's (a commonly used statistics symbol) are all in italics and capitalized. But guess what, every journal does it differently, so in one journal it may look like this P, but in the next one it's this p, and others are simply p. This is just one example of many.
So you write the paper, you edit, you rewrite, you get feedback and rewrite and reedit. Then you polish it till it shines, and then, only then, do you get to format, and how you do that depends on where you want it to go. And when it gets rejected and you decide to send it somewhere else? Even if you change nothing about the writing you'll still spend a couple of days reformatting. And that doesn't even include the dreaded bibliography, or figures. Those two sections can suck your soul out of your eyeballs.

Perks

See those pictures? I get to go there. For free. There are a number of perks to being an academic, that is one of my favorites. Traveling to new and exciting places and part of your duties. I'm headed to Western Australia this week to attend a conference (International Society for Behavioral Ecology) and present some of my work. It will be a very nerdy week. All day, everyday, listening to interesting people talk about their fascinating work, telling them about mine, arguing about conclusions and methods, making connections with potential future collaborators and advisers. And then, when my brain is filled to point of bursting and feels more like gray mush than gray matter, I get to take off and travel to countryside for a week before coming back to the real world. It will be spring there, the wild flowers blooming, the whales migrating, and the weather idyllic. It's hard to be me.

Field season is over. I've made it back home and have begun the work of reclaiming the life I left behind. For four months I've been away from my partner, my dog, my house and my garden and all of which require a significant amount of attention before they are prepared to forgive me for my over long absence. It is not an easy thing to leave your life for a third of the year.

If things go as planned this will have been my last field season. What this really means is that, in theory, I have collected all of the data I need for my dissertation. This is exhilarating as I am in range of getting a doctoral degree and moving along to the next step. It is also terrifying in that there is nothing between me and the finish line except data analysis and writing. There is a reason that there are a number of people with the title ABD (all but dissertation). It sounds like a small task but in truth it is the hardest part.

I didn't have a picture to illustrate so instead I've included an image from one of my favorite procrastination places. hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com
Go there and enjoy, but don't blame me...

Science as art

Many people assume that to be a successful scientist you need only to be good at science, and maybe the occasional related field, like math. But the reality is far different. To be successful at science, especially the sort of integrative science that I work on, you have to be able to communicate. So much of our work revolves around being able to convey to others what it is we do and why it is important. Others meaning journal editors (who control when and where we publish which is the currency by which we succeed or fail) and grant readers (who control whether or not we get money to do the research that we want to publish on). But it also means other scientists, the public and students. The ability to write clearly is a hard won skill and not one that we learn very well in high school or even college. Same with presenting our ideas and findings orally. There is an art to being an effective communicator, and there is a minimal level of competence needed to do this job. Of course, many scientist are just barely above this minimum and can only communicate with each other (sometimes that is even a stretch). I think this is a big reason why the general public is skeptical or uninformed about science, i.e. the evolution debate. We, as a group, are just not that good and talking to others, we are as a rule a socially awkward bunch.
I'm currently working as a mentor for a group of undergraduates and that is among the hardest lessons to learn. They understand the concepts, they can do the work. The hard part is putting into words. The above photo shows one of these undergrads and a fellow mentor doing the fun and easy part of science, collecting data.

Is it just me or is that flower sticking it's tongue out at me? This time of year it seems like most things are taunting me. I have a little more than a month left before I leave for the field and sometimes I feel like a hunk of taffy, being pulled in opposite directions constantly. Because the field season is looming I want to spend all of my time preparing for the season. However, I can't really prepare if I don't know what the results were from last summer yet. In order to be successful I really need to get some papers published soon, but if I'm spending my time writing I'm not analyzing last year's data. I also need to need to continue presenting the findings I do have, and applying for grants that allow me to continue to fund my research, but can't do those things at the same time I'm analyzing old data or preparing to collect new stuff.
Consequently, being a grad student is similar to being a short-order cook (I can say this with authority since I worked for a couple of years as a cook). You have to multitask constantly, and if you forget about something, it burns, gets cold, is incorrect, or doesn't get made in the first place. So to be successful, you have to keep a lot of balls in the air. As panicky as I am about how soon the field season will begin, in some ways it will be a relief because once it starts all I do is collect data, there is no real time for much else.

Let's do the time warp

Again, and again. Somehow it is already the end of January. I'm not at all sure how that happened. It always astounds me how fast time goes, and I often have much less to show for it than I would like. In three short months I'll be heading back to the field, probably for the last time during my dissertation years. Before that happens I need to develop a good plan of attack, and that requires knowing what exactly I found out last year. However, given that my data collection patterns are shotgun rather than laser in nature, this takes a bit of work. And the clock is ticking. Time to ratchet down and crunch through a large number of hormone assays, behavioral data, statistics and manuscript preparations. This is not the fun part of the field biologist job, but it can be very exciting when you get the data in hand. The drum rolls, you hold your breathe and do the stats. And then you cry, or more commonly in my case, think to yourself "that is amazing, i must have done the stats wrong, lets try it again". But either way time waits for no biologist, no matter how much we'd like it to.