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.

Old White Men

After a week of frantic proposal writing, that document is done and sent in to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. I am now at a meeting organized by this same agency on this same topic. Why they scheduled the meeting on top of the proposal deadline is truly bizarre, but that’s what they did. I suspect most of the people here did not write proposals, as it was only open to universities, and there are only about 3 of us here from academic institutions. Tomorrow I get to give my pitch, and hope that those here from the military like it. As I have never actually done anything with modeling (or any research) of artificial radiation belts (i.e., from a high altitude nuclear explosion), I call my talk a pitch because I will only show “natural” radiation belt results, and talk about how the model could be used for this specialized source term. There are about 40 of us here, and I’d like to describe this crew. One of the attendees is female. She also looks Native American, and works for the Air Force in LA. There is another guy here from the Naval Research Lab who is Indian born (now a US citizen, as is everyone in the room). Everyone else is a white guy. About half are over 60 years old, a good number of them over 70. I don’t think I am the youngest in the room, but I am pretty darn close...perhaps 2 or 3 are younger than me. Many at this meeting are a crew that began in this field at the dawn of the space age 50 years ago. The field has lost interest over the years, and I am sure there is some decay lifetime for the number of researchers in this field. In the last few years (okay, since 9/11), this field has gotten more attention within DoD. So, that’s why there are the younger people here, but the younger crew is not a particularly diverse population, and the room (and the opening speaker list) is certainly dominated by old white men.

Peer Review Workload

I review a lot of papers and proposals. It’s part of my job. For those of you not in a scientific research field, here’s the deal: all of the papers I submit to obscure journals and all of the proposals I submit to funding agencies are then sent back out into the world to several other scientists in the field for “peer review.” The editor or program officer then takes these reviews into account when making their decisions. When there is a specific proposal deadline, this usually means that the agency will convene a one or more panels of peer reviewers (in addition to mail-in reviews), where 5-10 people will sit around a table for 2-3 days discussing and rating each of the proposals submitted on a particular topic. All of these people are anonymous to the submitters and are supposed to be unbiased and objective in their evaluations. Typically, journal paper manuscripts go to 2 reviewers and proposals go to up to 5 mail-in reviewers. If there is a panel, then each panelist is usually assigned to be lead on 3-4 and secondary on 3-4 more.

So, with this in mind, I should be peer reviewing several manuscripts and proposals for every paper I submit (as first author) and every proposal I submit (as PI). I submit at least 2 papers a year as first author. I used to submit 4 or 5 as a research scientist, but that another story. So I should do 4 manuscript reviews a year. But that’s not enough. I should also do 2 for every paper my students or postdocs submit (not the research scientists, though), because they will most likely not be asked to review anything yet. This adds another 3-4 papers a year. So, I should be reviewing at least 10 journal manuscripts a year. I submit probably 3-5 proposals a year as well. If the average mail-in review number is 3, then I should be doing at least 10 mail-in proposal reviews for various funding agencies. Also, I submit mostly to NASA (that always convenes panels) and NSF (that sometimes convenes panels), and, because each panelist is lead on 3 or 4 proposals, so I should also be serving on at least 1 panel per year as well (which means another 6-8 proposal reviews from those assigned as part of the panel).

A paper review takes me about half a day, and a proposal review a little less than that. So, this adds up to well over 100 work hours of time each year devoted to evaluating what other people are working on. This is a hidden time sink that no one told me about when I was considering becoming a scientist. Maybe I’m just too nice to editors and program officers and don’t say “no” enough, but I’ve worked out the stats and think I’m doing a reasonable number of reviews for the burden I place on others.

Scientists out there: does anyone else do this much peer review?

Manager Mode

I just submitted a proposal to NASA, as did one of the research scientists that I support. They will be reviewed by the same subpanel of the same program, and will be ranked relative to each other when the final funding decisions are made by the NASA HQ discipline scientist. It’s kind of weird directly competing with another proposal not only from the same department but also from the same group.

This brings me to the concept of “manager mode.” Three years ago, when I was research faculty instead of instructional faculty, I had time to write my own code, do my own simulations, analyze my own data, compare my own model results with the data, and write my own papers. I cannot do this now. The teaching and service loads of an instructional faculty (now tenured, as of 2 months ago!) greatly limit the time I have to do any of those things. Plus, I am expected to maintain a research group. I think I have done pretty well creating one. Three years ago it was me and 2 grad students. Now it is me, 2 assistant research scientists, 4 grad students, and 1-3 undergrad students (2 this summer). Funding all of these people is a major priority in my life and so writing proposals is a constant activity. Proposals usually have hard deadlines, so these often take precedence over everything else for a week or two when such a deadline comes up. Meeting with all of these people is a major time commitment as well. The undergrads need a few minutes (perhaps an hour) every day, the grad students and research scientists a few hours once or twice a week. Between proposals and managing the people in my group, most of my time allocation for research activities is spent. Another chunk of time is spent in peer review. Whereas I used to say yes to every request, I often say no to paper reviews not, not doing more than one every month or two. Proposal reviews I do every time, though, and this takes some effort to do it right. Another chunk of my research time allocation is spent at conferences, which takes away a whole week every now and then.

All of this leaves very little time for me to do my own research. That’s especially true during the school year, when the constant deadline of the next lecture or homework set posting is usually just a day away (and the various departmental committees are active). During the summer months, I now look forward to getting something done. Last summer I wrote 2 first-author papers. The summer before...2 papers. This summer...nothing so far. It’s July 9th; I have less than 2 months to get stuff done. Luckily, this week and next are now fairly open, and I hope to spend a lot of time making plots and writing text.

Do I like “manager mode”? Yes. I like teaching, and that is essentially what I am doing with both my students and my research scientists. My publication rate is actually higher now than before, counting all of the coauthorships on manuscripts. But, that said, yesterday afternoon was very satisfying: I spent it writing code, running the model, and making plots. Today...compare those results with data. Life is good.