Allocating TAships

Prof-Like Substance has a good post (here) on how his department allocates teaching assistantships to PhD students.  His department is similar to mine: using TAships as buffer/bridge funding when grant-funded research assistantships temporarily dry up for an existing PhD student.  We rarely give them to first-year PhD students, and instead only take new PhD students if a faculty is willing and able to “promise” funding for the expected 5-year dissertation timeline.  We are still in that happy naive state, however, of not enough PhD students needing TAships compared to the available slots.  So some of the TAships  usually go to the Master’s students, who almost never get funding otherwise.

PLS has emerged from this state and his department is now struggling with how to allocate TAships when there are more PhD students needing such slots than the openings available. In particular, PLS raises the question of what to do when a faculty member with little or no research funding/projects asks for a TA slot. These are actually 2 separate (but related) issues.

For me, I see two clear priorities for TA positions.  The first and foremost is this:  existing students whose professor has been unlucky renewing the grant that’s funding the student.  Most grants are 2-4 years long, yet the PhD timeline (in my field) averages 5 years.  We expect the faculty member to fund the student for all of the years of the student’s PhD, but the faculty makes this promise without actually having the out-year funding in hand.  So, it is very easy to see the need for bridging funds in such a situation.  These cases, in my opinion, should get first priority.

The second use of TAships should be to help untenured faculty build their group.  It’s hard to get grants, especially without a proven track record of productivity with grant funding.  Much is asked of new Assistant Professors, and making them sweat about not graduating enough PhD students before tenure review is not helpful.  If, after the first priority students are taken care of, there are still open slots, then the junior faculty should be asked if they would like to take on a new student or even have an existing student TA for a term (to stretch out their start-up or grant funding).  This is tricky, though, because the junior faculty also wants scientific productivity out of their PhD students, and TAing often slows this down.  But, that’s a choice the Assistant Professor should make (in consultation with a senior faculty mentor) to balance their resources.

After this the prioritization gets fuzzy for me, but here are two other criteria that might come into play.

Existing PhD students who simply want the experience of teaching.  Some grad students (like me, way back when) were continually on RAships and never had to teach as a grad student.  I didn’t really know it was an option, and I doubt I would have taken it anyway.  I wanted to get through quickly.  Others, though, want that experience, and should be allowed to do it, if their advisor doesn’t veto it.  In fact, I am not even sure that I would want the research advisor able to veto such a request.

New PhD students for highly productive faculty.  This seems backwards, but I believe in the saying that “to those who have much, more will be given.”  That is, I think that such faculty have proven themselves able to handle multiple grad students and lead them through to successful dissertations, usually with ample funding throughout for all of their students.  However, sometimes such a faculty wants a new student to start a new project or to continue an existing project for which the current student is about to finish.  The promise of funding is there and real, but just not in place that first semester or year (while proposals are written and/or senior students finish up).  This is a low-risk situation, and the department is usually well served by such a TAship.

As for the deadwood faculty asking for a TAship, the chair or grad director needs to speak frankly with them.  I would not rank this faculty high on my priority list for getting a TA slot.  Not only would it be a new PhD student position but also there is no recent track record of successfully advising (let along funding) a student through completion.  Such a position would be high risk for the department and the student.  I would have serious reservations about making such an assignment.  That said, I am not totally against such a faculty getting a TA slot, for a term or two, with the expectation of copious proposal writing and the threat of losing the student to another faculty if funding does not materialize.  I would also ask the grad director to regularly check with the student to make sure that things are going well, and intervene if they are not.

 In summary, vague rules need to be drafted and adopted and a TAship czar needs to be appointed, one who will make the unfair decision regarding which students get this slots.  This decision cannot be done by committee.

Could've Been Better

I finished the book “The Shack” by Wm. Paul Young. I don’t think that this was a well-written book. I like the philosophy behind the personality of God in the book: God’s relationship with us is one of love, care, and compassion. It’s the story that I didn’t like. There actually wasn’t much plotline, and instead it had these lengthy dissertations by the three God characters. The writing wasn’t that compelling and I often found myself questioning the emotions stated for the characters. The text would say that Mack was comfortable with the God characters and loved the way they talked with each other and interacted, but then didn’t convince me of that feeling by actually detailing the comfort-inducing conversation. So, instead of being engrossed by the story and not wanting to put the book down, I found it easy to stop reading each night because the story rarely left in a state where I just had to get to the next page.

I also greatly dislike the fantasy encounter of it and the bitterness it might make others feel who have undergone similar loss. Why hasn’t God invited me out to the Shack yet and had a personal, read encounter with me? This is where I greatly dislike the Foreword and Afterward of the book, in which the writer attempts to convince the reader that this is a true story. These two parts of the book should have been omitted because it completely soured the novel for me. Why even pretend it’s a real story? Then I went to the website and realized that the author’s life is remarkably similar to Mack’s life situation...many kids, lives near Portland, experienced unbearable tragedy. This frustrates me. My understanding of the book now is that it is his advice to others about the style of God he found when dealing with his grief. Yet he wrote it as a novel instead of a nonfiction inspirational/spiritual book. It isn’t that I dislike the image of God that he found and is sharing with others, I just chafe at the method he chose for this distribution.

Almost Mad Today

I almost got mad today. I am traveling to Europe, and had the unfortunate experience of getting into the slowest passport control line available this morning. This is not a good thing after flying all night and only getting a couple hours of sleep. I was watching the other lanes continue forward at a much faster pace than the one I was standing in. I was committed, though, with no way to switch, knowing that switching meant going to the end of a different line and risking that one suddenly becoming slower. I was stuck. Frustrated. Tired. Grumpy.

I almost got mad. I was beginning to get all steamed up about the incompetence of the officer in the booth ahead of me. Clearly this man was a systemic obstacle to efficiency and needed to be beaten with a stick. He was delaying everyone in his line and I could see that others were visibly frustrated with his lack of processing speed. The thought was boiling up within me that he doesn’t care about us and is intentionally wasting our time. I was starting to consider him as not only incompetent but evil.

Then I realized how tired I was. I tried to stem my anger, brushing it off as just my less-than-fully-awake state. Then the thought occurred to me: he might also be near the end of his shift and running on less than full perkiness. He might have been approaching the end of his shift and in need of a break from the fast-paced scrutinization of passport after passport. I started to feel sorry for the guy and let my mind wander about the scenarios he might have been through to put him in this less-than-optimal processing pace.

When I was about fifteen people away from the front, another lane opened right next to mine. I jumped into it and, in so doing, cut the line ahead of me in half. Wouldn’t you know, my new line ground to a halt and my original line picked up. I made it up to the counter just a couple people ahead of where I would have been in the original line. The officer behind the window was not incompetent and processed me through passport control very quickly.

So, a new thought entered my mind: the original line was slow because the particular mix of people ahead of me were especially complicated to process and clear. Perhaps the delay had nothing to do with the officer at the head of the line, that they were all roughly equal in their ability, and that the delay was beyond their control. All anger within me was defused, because I realized that, in the end, I had no idea why the lanes were slow when they were.

My only conclusion is that, when I am in a situation that starts to frustrate me, I should not jump to conclusions about the cause and start blaming people. I will most likely be wrong, and if so, making a fuss would only make a fool out of myself (or worse).

Scary News Story

The death of Annie Le at a Yale laboratory (here) brings up the very real threat of violence on campus. I work at a big university in a fairly urban setting, and I am sure that on any given day, there are hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of graduate students working late into the night in their corner of some building.  I know that one of my female grad students prefers a shifted work schedule, getting in around noon and working until 10 pm or midnight.  That’s her choice, and I don’t have a problem with it, except that it means that she is walking home, alone, nearly every night, well past dusk (even in the summer).  It is a safe campus, but we get crime alert emails whenever something happens, and so we are all aware of the potential danger.  We have card readers on the building’s outside doors, so only those with reason to have access can get in, but there is nothing to stop the violence like that which occurred at Yale.  The charge is that it was an employee attacking another employee.  Our safeguards wouldn’t have caught this.  I doubt that such a crime could be prevented without intense (both invasive and expensive) security measures.

I guess the answer is that it is a personal choice and depends on how safe you feel and how much you really need to do what you are doing while in the building (instead of, say, on a computer at home).  We have desktops for our students, not laptops.  I could let them check out a desktop and have it at home, but then would I ever see them again before graduation?  Hmm.

How do you keep a workplace safe yet accessible?

Strange Coincidence

About a week ago I started reading the book “The Shack” by William Young. It’s this novel about a man who becomes extremely sad when his youngest daughter is abducted while they are on a camping trip together, and the police track the perp to a remote shack, where they find the truck and the girl’s dress but not the girl or the kidnapper.  Three years later, he is called back to the shack to have a very strange encounter with three very loving and generous people.  Over the course of conversing and interacting with them, he learns to understand his pain and accept his loss.  I am only halfway through the book, so I don’t know how it ends yet.  It’s well written and entertaining, and I am enjoying the break every evening to get absorbed into this man’s adventure at the shack.

Sidenote about The Shack:  I greatly dislike the Foreword, which is written from the author’s perspective and tries to convince the reader that the following story is true.  I cannot accept this premise, and my impression of the book is negatively tainted because of it.  To me, the author has spoiled an otherwise engrossing tale with the intentionally misleading deception of trying to make me believe that the events in the book really happened to someone. That is dangerous false hope and unreal expectations for others.  He should have simply left it out.  If you ever get the gumption to read this book, I encourage you to skip the Foreword.

Anyway, back to my story:  a friend from college has been battling cancer for several years, but passed away this last weekend.  She is a mother of 4, and was diagnosed with the illness during her last pregnancy (I think that was 8 years ago now, or maybe more).  I haven’t seen her in over a year, at which time she was well enough to make the trip to another mutual friend’s wedding.  Before that, it had been several years, probably since before the diagnosis, that I had last seen her and her family.  It was a slow decline with ups and downs, but never particularly good and cancer free anywhere in there.  She lived her life as well as she could, and fought the disease with all she had.  I am sad that I won’t get to see her again.  I am sad for her husband, who is a great guy full of life and overflowing with opinions.  I am sad for her children, who really only knew their mom while she was sick. 

I am not looking for a lesson from her death.  It pretty much sucks.  It is a strange coincidence, though, that I am reading a book about sadness after loss and the redemption and healing that God can give you.  Perhaps the book will help me deal with this.

Prayers for Tenure Casebook

My friend (since childhood) is up for tenure this fall.

Tenure didn’t work out so well as University #1 for him.  It was a hard blow, and no one likes to be told to move on, but I think that the culture of that college and that town wasn’t right for him anyway.  He seems to be more comfortable at University #2, and from what I hear, the administration has been treating him better than his former management.  The fit is also particularly good for his wife, as I hear that this town is an excellent location for her profession and that she has developed a well-established network of contacts. 

As with most tenure reviews, this is an up-or-out assessment of his abilities, and the future of his life at University #2 is in the balance.  He is very hopeful about his chances of tenure, but there is still that uncertainty providing a bit of stress to the start of this new school year.

Being in a humanities field, his casebook I am sure will look substantially different from mine.  Books are far more prevalent and expected on his publication list than on mine. I am sure he has topical journals in which to publish, and hopefully he has an ample stack of such papers to show for his years in the field.  In my research area, numerous peer-reviewed journal articles per year are the norm, and books before tenure are an extreme rarity. In fact, I was specifically told not to write a book too early, because it detracts from the regular and expected measures of productivity.

I can only trust that he has received good mentoring from senior faculty in his department (or others in his field elsewhere around the country), that they are advocates for him within the college, and that he has accomplished all that he needs to have done regarding teaching, service, and research.  I can only trust that others in his field beyond University #2 have a favorable impression of his contributions to the field, that they know and respect his work, and that the evaluation letters clearly reflect these positive opinions.  I can only trust that he has mentored one or more graduate students through thesis or dissertation completion, that these former students have favorable impressions of their time with him at University #2, and that they will adequately voice their opinions back to the casebook committee.

So, I hope that you will join me in praying for the success of his tenure casebook, and should it not work out for him, to ask for God to give him the courage and perseverance to move on with his career, wherever it might take him and his family.

Bad Advisors

To go along with the “how many grad students” question from the last post, there is a discussion on FSP’s blog about Bad Advisors (BAs). I hope that I am not a BA.  I hope that just being aware that there is such a thing as good and bad advising is half the struggle to avoiding the BA label.  I might be an unintentionally bad advisor (UBA) for some of my students.  I don’t know.  I try to err on the side of over-advising, sometimes at the expense of my own first-author publication production.  This summer has not been good for paper writing, but I have been helping others get out papers and proposals.  I did get to code for a while this summer, and that was fun.  I don’t think I could do this with 10+ PhD students at once, or even 5 grad students.  I would have no time for myself and my own pursuits.  I think that I would be in constant manager mode and wouldn’t get to actually do any science directly.  It would all be vicariously through my employees.  That’s not what I want to do, though.  I am still very interested in coding and making plots and spending time with a problem, and I don’t want to simply be one who gets the money for others to able to do these things.  So, I will not grow my group too fast.  For one, that takes a lot of money, but for another, I want to be able to (very slowly) transition into the permanent manager position.  I am pretty happy with the state of things right now, although I would have liked to have had more time this summer to write a paper or two.  But, I do not regret my time advising others.  This is productive time for me, just in a different direction, and I am not bitter about it.  Just a little nostalgic for the days when I did everything myself.  No, not really.