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.

How Many Grad Students?

I have 3 graduate students working for me right now.  I find this to be enough, along with the undergraduate students I advise on projects (usually 1 or 2 at any time), other faculty I collaborate with, and post-docs or research scientists that I support and/or work with around here. There are a few faculty in my department who have 5 or 6 PhD students at a time.  I am not sure I want that many people reporting to me and looking to me for direction and mentoring.  I know of a few in our field who claim to have 10-20 graduate students in their group.  I don’t see how this is humanly possible.  In fact, I don’t see how that is even remotely responsible. 

 

To me, having more than 5 PhD students, let alone 10 or 20, is irresponsible on several levels. It means that the faculty member is continuously in meetings with these people (assuming that they have regular interaction with each student).  This cheats the faculty out of time to do their own research investigations, and they are probably giving up all home life in order to publish the first-author papers that I see from them.  It also means that the students don’t get very much one-on-one time with their advisor.  Perhaps this is fine for some students, but I have found that most PhD students like regular interaction with their advisors.  In the early years, they like it so that they learn the field and discover a research project that suits them well.  In the later years, they like it because they have results and need to show them to someone and get feedback.  It is also not good for the field, because such a faculty member is replicating themselves (well, at least producing new PhDs in the field), which increases the pressure on the already over-subscribed traditional funding sources for the field.  It is probably only acceptable to have so many PhD students if you know that most of your students will leave the field and not pursue research careers.  In this case, under-advising and over-producing them is fine.  But, even still, for the few grad students in your group who want to continue as a researcher in the field, life in a huge group might not be the optimal situation.

 

I will probably have a student graduate this year, and I will probably take a new PhD student next fall.  Somewhere between 2 and 4 grad students seems like a good number for me.

Homosexuality and Christianity

I was recently sent this link:
http://www.newsmax.com/us/us_lutherans_gays/2009/08/21/250805.html

It comments on the recent proposal before the governing board of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) to allow open, practicing gays to serve as clergy. The article is posted on NewsMax, so it is written with an anti-gay slant and hints that the ELCA will be split apart if this proposal is passed.

So, the question is this: is homosexuality incompatible with Christianity? As a Christian, should I hate all homosexuals and make it my mission to point out their transgression and actively persuade them to give up their life of sin? Should I protest Gay Pride marches and vocally oppose gay marriage laws?

I think the answer is no. As the article states, the ELCA, and in fact most Christian denominations, do not follow a literal prescription of every verse in some English translation of the Bible. Like the article states, what about women? Paul says that they should be silent with covered heads and no braids. What?! I don’t get the no braided hair rule at all. Why should I not braid my daughter’s hair? She likes it!

In reading the Bible, especially Paul's letters, I believe that you have to take into account the context of the culture and the local circumstances that the particular church was facing. The braided hair concern of Paul most likely was directed at a local custom of another religious sect (like the followers of Isis or Aphrodite). I think he was concerned about people trying to turn Christian worship services into worship of one of these other gods. He probably wrote it to preserve the integrity of the local Christian community, and physically distinguishing themselves from the actions of other religions was a way to do this. Did he mean for the no braids rule to become part of everlasting Christian doctrine? No.

So, what about homosexuality? The book of Romans has a lot to say about this. All negative. It is easy to think that Christians should be anti-gay. However, the local custom was that gays were promiscuous. I believe that this is what Paul was arguing against, whether it is heterosexual or homosexual promiscuity. Paul would probably dislike the scantily-clad leather outfits I have seen on groups of gays in the French Quarter, and would probably have strong words against the one-night-stand mentality of gay pick-up locations. However, I do not think that he would condemn loving, monogamous homosexual partnerships.

Why? Because I believe that our relationships with others is our relationship with God. We should treat others as we want to be treated, and I cannot see how two consenting adults in a loving relationship is against God or creating any problems for me. I fully support gay marriage and I hope that other Christians realize that allowing someone to fully care for their life-partner is the loving, compassionate, Christian thing to do.