Academic Secret

Maybe it's the time of year that brought this analogy to my mind, but how might the Christmas story be different if Joseph had been a hot-shot academic? Would Jesus still have been born in a manger, or would Mary have somehow managed to land a spousal accommodation at the inn?

I hate that word - accommodation. More than that, I hate feeling like someone accommodated me (or my partner) so that I could have the job that I do. It's one of those things that you can't complain about, though, because there are people out there who would kill to be in my shoes, who would give anything to be "accommodated."

The hardest part about my own accommodation is that no one will call it that - the party line is that I was hired on merit, because I "deserved" my position. Maybe it's just the "fraud" in me that can't accept that, or maybe I'm more perceptive than people take me for.

What does it mean to be accommodated? Does it mean that I'm less important than my partner, or just less worthy? Should I be happy that I was accommodated? Would I feel better if people were just honest about it? Is it selfish of me to think that I'm worth every ounce of my position, or is it just delusional? Most importantly, will I ever be able to hear the word accommodation without feeling my spirit weaken?

We all know what CFP means: Call for Papers/Call for Proposals. Not here on a.secret though. Here it means: Call for Picture secrets! That's right, we're running low and awaiting your New Year's resolutions, whether high or low (get it?! oh, I'm such a geek to be making graphics puns).

Apologies to the person submitting the picture secret I just posted, it took me a while to get around to it. It's been patiently waiting in my mailbox for a while. I promise to be more prompt with these in the future.

Is everyone else feeling the pressure to work too? Even though it's break?

Are you all feeling as guilty as I am that I am not working as much as I should?

Maybe that is why no one has been posting in a bit. I mean sure, end of the term, grading, holidays -- it's a crazy time.

So I hope you are all enjoying your holidays, and not worrying about how you should be accomplishing more. Because I am, and it sucks. I do not recommend it.

Also, PSA, please send in more picture secrets, yah? They are fun!

No, not some adorable guy at the campus coffee shop, but another professor in my own department! It's not the first time we've talked. His office is close to mine. He knows things about me, he just doesn't know my name. If you know about someone's personal life, I mean beyond what most know, shouldn't you take the time to learn her name? I saw him look at the nameplate beside my door as he opened his mouth to speak. Ugh.

Of course, another professor who's been around here as long as the first (and has the same tenured, full professor status), and whose office is equally close to mine, has never even spoken to me. This didn't stop him from sending a student my way to have me head a thesis committee because, and I quote, "She's a new assistant professor and will have more time for work like that than I do."

I guess it's just the end of the semester stress that has me venting. Unfortunately, unlike my students, these guys don't go home for winter vacation. I can't wait to move up in the ranks, or until colleagues like these move up in the ranks enough to retire.

I can't wait for it to be next semester.

Let me rephrase that, I couldn't wait. I couldn't wait to start new. I couldn't wait to get semester #1 of my first year as an assistant professor under my belt. I couldn't wait, that is ,until I logged onto my account just a few hours ago only to discover that my worst student from this semester decided to take another course from me.

He's not my worst student ever. I mean I've had some doozies. It's just that they never came back. Coming back for more, well that's like a zombie or something. Or like a cat. You know, "and the cat came back, the very next day..." I'm allergic to cats.

Maybe it will be like the one other time when I had a student (who I had failed for cheating) who took another class from me and ended up invaluable. Maybe, though, it will be like a bad zombie movie and either he, or the fear and dread I instill in myself just thinking about his presence, will make my skin crawl and the spring semester creep by just as slowly as it has this fall.

So I was wondering the other night when I couldn't sleep about what I could and couldn't blog about, for fear of anonymity purposes.

And I couldn't think of anything for here that I could share. Partly becasue I have been really wrapped up in this one project and my life has been lame as a result.

But anyway, the question that came to mind was this, why have people chosen the colors/names they have on this blog? Does it say something about you academically? non-academically? does it say something or nothing? basically, why did you pick your name?

I'll start and tell you why I picked strawberries, and why.

Strawberries are my FAVORITE fruit. and I love red, partly because it looks great on me with my hair color. But also, its my favorite person in the world's favorite color, and so I have always liked the color for because it reminds me of that person. But what does strawberries mean to me?

When I think of strawberries I think of babies with their rosy red cheeks, and I love babies, and they are so cute, and I want babies. But of course, in order to have babies, I would like to have a husband, and well, I'm lacking in that area. And also, though it is *way* to early to be worrying about this... I know that it will be super hard to have cute starberry cheeked babies as a professor, if I want to stay at home at all with hypothetical baby strawberry, and that brings up all those things that I worry about, the difficulty of getting my desired job in desired place as a woman, and how hard it will be to try and get tenure as a woman with a baby/child.

And what does being a strawberry say about me? Well, strawberries, while the best fruit ever, are also quite fragile. They must be packed specially, especially for transport. And I am also very fragile. In life outside the ivory tower, I am known to cry quite a bit at sad situations. But also when hurt by people. Inside the ivory tower, I lack confidence. Sometimes I have it, and sometimes, I don't. Usually when I need it, it's not there. Just like you can get a good strawberry that has made it though the transport process, sometimes I feel more like a slightly bruised strawberry who wants to be the best tasting one in the bunch.

But of course I didn't think about all this when I picked strawberries. That day, I looked at the other colors, read their names. Saw pumpkin, thought, mmm, I like pumpkins. I also really like strawberries and red cheeked babies. And red is nice. I'll be strawberries.

What about you?

Is it just me, or are more and more of our colleagues turning to blogs?

In recent weeks there is increasing blog-buzz around my department. I don't know where it came from, but I am scared to death of being found out.

I ask myself if I post risky things here, or if I would be fine with my name being tied to my musings. Maybe it's time to read the archives...

...and to begin using more caution when deciding what to post, and where to post it.

Is anyone else feeling the pressure?

Here’s *my* job market secret: I don’t want to go on it.

Well, that’s not exactly true. As distasteful as the process sounds, I think I will be able to adapt to a lot of it. Even though I hate the idea of “selling” myself, I can live with doing it (or trying to do it). Of course I want a job, and this is how it’s done.

But I haven’t yet told my advisors that I’m not willing to “go anywhere” for a job, the way you’re supposed to. And I think I’ll continue to keep it to myself.

I feel like I’ve been fairly dutiful with most of the professional activities we’re supposed to take part in – going to conferences, publishing, serving on committees, etc—and I’ve even enjoyed those experiences. But this is one thing I don’t think I can be dutiful about. Not only do I feel there are certain parts of the country I truly wouldn’t be happy living in, but there’s this itsy-bitsy problem of having a life partner whose career is location-specific. (I can’t go into what the career is if I want to keep my anonymity, but let’s just say it’s not like being, say, a lawyer, where you might have to give up a great job in order to move but you could probably work almost anywhere. Let’s say, for the sake of (silly) argument, that his career is slaying vampires, which only live on the hellmouth. Or something.)

To be honest, I’d be almost as happy adjuncting forever as I would be in a tenured position. As long as I got to teach, I’d be ok. I know it’s about other things too, like retirement and health insurance; I know I’ve got to consider that. But I’m just not willing to give up living with my partner, and it makes me mad that I should have to consider it. And before anyone suggests that he should be willing to change his career for me, please note that he dreamt of having this career since he was a kid (whereas I was in the “finding myself” stage for years before grad school), not to mention that he has been helping support my little grad school habit, and now (after years of service) his job pays better than even a tenured position would. As a feminist, I’ve always made sure I was financially independent (believe me, it’s my name on the loans), but he has provided a lot of extras, such as vacations, I would otherwise do without. (Just fyi, we don’t have kids, and don’t plan to have them, but have been together for almost 10 years.)

Once, his mother tried comforting me by reminding me that neither of us is in the military, where couples have to live apart all of the time, but with the added burden of being, you know, in the military. So it’s all relative, I guess.

When I was first being introduced to my new colleagues here at SuckyU, one introduced me to her thesis student (undergrad).

He wanted to do his thesis on X in the region. Think, Oranges. No that might actually be interesting, cause you could always do an economic analysis and then talk to the people who are picking the oranges and their different experiences, and the growers of the oranges and the eaters. See, it could be interesting. Ok, X is kind of like, hmm, houses that are painted blue. So student was going to do his thesis on houses that are painted blue.

To show interest and because I am sort of a nice strawberry, the first thing out of my mouth was a supportive “wow, how interesting.”

Colleague says: “But he didn’t do that.”

Strawberries says, “oh why not?” I has just begun to warm up to the idea of blue houses. Maybe there was some significance or something. Plus, people may think my own research is like blue houses, so who am I to judge.

Colleague looks at me like I am a more than a bit weird. “Because he could never have finished the project, I mean that is like a doctoral dissertation.” Please shoot me if I ever advise anyone who wants to concentrate on Blue Houses for his/her PhD. Frankly, it seemed a bit easy to me. I mean count up all the blue houses in the region, which I am sure the data already exists, it's not like poor student has to actually travel to each blue house. And then write some sort of [boring] history on blue houses.

“So instead he did it on Blue Houses in the tri-city that were stolen.” (Now the stolen metaphor really doesn’t fit with Blue Houses, and goes better with say, Oranges, but remember, Oranges are more interesting than Blue houses. So just pretend that the CIA came with all their super-duper equipment and stole some blue houses). And this student is going to write about the ones that were stolen. However, since it was the CIA that stole them, and frankly, when are they going to ever let a student researcher into their archives, student can’t say much more than: There once was a blue house here. It was built in 1783 by Miss Peacock and then bought by Col. Mustard, until it was stolen in 1974 by the CIA. Oh, and look over there, there used to be another blue house that…

Sounds kind of boring to me. But anyway, that is not the point of this post.

What got me was the professor telling the student that he coudn't possibly do all blue houses in the region because it was impossible and that if he wanted, he could get his doctorate in Blue houses. Now, many times students are interested in something, say Gender, but they really can’t do a thesis on that. You have to focus it. But not just because of time restraints, but also because Gender is really broad. Blue Houses present in the region is not broad, just boring. So are stolen blue houses in the city if you’re keeping track. I was just surprised that this professor would say that this was not feasible when it seemed very feasible. I mean this kid had a year to do Blue Houses. Sure, stolen blue houses might be nominally more interesting than all blue houses, but couldn’t it have been a subsection of the thesis?

Which brings me to my final point/question. When do you tell a student that they will be unable to study X? Shouldn’t advisors rather explain that it might be a more in-depth project and it would be doable but hard rather than say outright, nope, you can't do it? There are times when advisors should discourage students from studying Y in favor of Ysub1 because it would be more feasible. Ok, if Y was lets say Education , and Ysub1 was Education of Women and how it has been defined by Z. But this was clearly not the case.

So now what? Student has produced one heck of a doorstop on stolen blue houses. Sure, even blue houses would have been a doorstop, but what is important here is the experience.

If someone told me I could not do it, I would not give up right away, and maybe ever. What sort of service are we doing to students who want to do something and are instead told they cannot?

The other night I (doctoral student) was asked to go to a reception for prospective doctoral students in our program, to mingle and answer questions. Some faculty were also at the reception. A very professional-looking, together prospective student sought me out because she had questions about my advisor and the specific topic I study. We were in the middle of a pretty detailed conversation when a faculty member came over, introduced herself, and began trying to convince both of us to choose the program (that I'm currently in). The faculty-member didn't realize I was a current student, and kept contradicting things I was saying. I would say, "well, one challenge you'll face is that we don't offer coursework on xyz" and the faculty member would say, "oh no, we have some great offerings in xyz".

The faculty-member is from a completely different part of the field, knew nothing about the specifics of what the prospective and I were talking about, and was wrong, but seeing as she thought I was only a prospective student, there was no way she was going to let me knock the program. I kept trying to the let the faculty member know I was a current student, but she wasn't paying any attention, and didn't get it for like ten minutes. The prospective, meanwhile, kept raising her eyebrows at me as if to say, "WTF?" and "Why won't this weird lady in irrelevant-subfield leave us alone so we can get back to talking about the questions I have?".

The kicker is that the clueless faculty-member and I served on a committee together last year, but she didn't recognize me because she ditched all but one of the committee meetings.

This semester, I noticed a group of students who basically sit in the back and laugh the whole time. Turns out (perhaps sadly), this is nothing new. But for some reason, it's bothering me a lot. It feels like they're lauging at me.

As a result, I'm finding myself growing more and more self conscious, and I'm losing my lecturing mojo. I'm constantly checking my fly, touching my nose, the whole nine. It's stupid, but it's bothering me.

The thing that's so weird about it is the way they laugh. They look at me, but turn their heads, and put their hand up in front of their faces to whisper something to the others. Then they all giggle. While staring at me. With their hands over their mouths. Imagine a 7th grade lunchroom, and you've got the idea.

The thing is, they're not really disrupting the class, just themselves and me. I once made a joke directed toward the entire class to the effect that the lecturing stage was not, in fact, a television, and that I could actually see them chatting. The class laughed. For once, the little group did not.

But they also didn't stop. I'm not sure how to handle this - I don't want it to be obvious that I feel bad, because that's unprofessional. Or is it? Gah, what do you all think?

I almost got sucked into a really unnecessary online discussion about some topic that's close to my heart. Does everyone here know what trolls are? Trolls are people who seem to be engaged with you in a discussion seriously, but in reality are just trying to derail the conversation. They are to be avoided. The only outcome of engaging in a discussion with a troll is rising blood pressure and major frustration. Oh, plus lots of time lost. So stay away from them.

I am so proud of myself for having removed myself from that discussion just in time! I had to share this with my fellow a.secreteers.

And how is everyone? Are people walking away from a.secret? No secrets to speak of these days? Everything is going great for everyone?

I normally frown on the use of multiple exclamation points, but I'm making an exception today in the title of this post because this open letter from the President of the American Statistical Association is very cool. It's cool because:

1. An academic discipline is reaching out trying to make the world a better place on an important issue with timely, practical, and reasonably cheap solutions.

2. Voting is a crucial right in a democracy, but a lot of us feel helpless about how to fix the problems with voting, especially now that there are stupid voting machines that can be hacked. The key breakthrough idea that the ASA is offering is that you can use random audits to provide data to estimate the size of the problem, instead of relying on anecdotal evidence or trying to find universal fixes. The idea of sampling is definitely under-used in public policy, which is almost always stuck in an entire-population-or-nothing mentality.*

3. The letter discusses the need to look at multiple sources of error at each step along the chain. The reality is that officials need to be focusing on minimizing error instead of devising systems that are completely error-proof, because it isn't possible to be error-proof. The point I'm inelegantly trying to make is like the debate about the census v. sampling for getting an accurate picture of the American population.

4. The president of the American Statistical Association is a woman. (I'm assuming that because the President is named Sallie).

______
* example = No Child Left Behind which mandates testing for every kid in the nation, when sampling approaches would allow testing with higher validity (like not multiple choice) and be a lot cheaper and not waste the time of millions of schoolkids.

Why don't students realize that "Hey" is not an appropriate way to address a professor? In fact, it's not really appropriate for communication with anyone when it is your first note to them. Does anyone point this out to students? If yes, how?

I went to class the other day a bit frustrated with the quality of my students' papers. One paper I'd just read had relatively good ideas, but the writing (cuz, lower case i, fragments, etc.) completely detracted from it. Unfortunately since I have them submit these assignments online, some people seem to think that they're IM-ing their friends. I don't teach English, but I expect students to write a quality essay. So I gave the students who had not yet submitted their papers a bit of advice - treat it like a real paper: with paragraphs, full sentences, and without the IM language.

Fast forward to today, when I'm sifting through all of them and grading those who heard my advice before writing. Almost all the papers (in an assignment, mind you, where the students are supposed to write about themselves) are in the third person, not the first ("I am").

This is what happens when you mix over-achieving freshman who actually know the difference between first and third person with a clueless professor who thinks students spend time on instant messenger.

Dear colors of this lovely secret society,

I am writing to ask for some procrastination material. I love reading this blog, and let me tell you I cannot go a week with no new posts! Of course dear colors, you are probably saying, why strawberries, why don't you post a secret!?

Here is my quandary. I had some lovely (read: annoying and frustrating) academic experiences this past week, that I would love to share with you all, but here is the problem. I already told my real-world friends. As this is a secret society, and well, I am always very careful not to post something that I have already told my friends about, in the off-chance that they come across this blog and figure me out, and well, that would not be pretty.

So this week, as my frustrations were exceptionally high, I spoke with many friends in other institutions/locations and revealed to them the sadness that is my current institution. And so, I cannot tell you.

So please, help a strawberry out. Tell me what's going on in your colorful worlds!

And since I cannot but leave you with a secret from right now, though it is not academic, here is something to keep you procrastinating by invoking laughter and thinking about how weird this member called strawberries really is:

I am currently wearing a flannel dress and a T-shirt over it. Yes, you read correctly, a flannel dress. My defense? It is oh so comfy and well, comfy clothes lead to productivity no? Or was that blog reading....? Anyways, I am wearing comfy clothes I cannot ever leave the house in, or ever be seen in, in the hopes of eventually accomplishing some work today.

Your secret correspondent anxiously awaiting your secrets so she can continue to put off work,
Strawberries

Bush opened a new front in his ongoing War on Science in a press conference Wednesday, when he claimed that a standard social science survey methodology has been "pretty well discredited".

Bush was responding to a question about a study appearing in Lancet estimating the number of Iraqis who have died as a result of the war. The study used cluster sampling, where survey respondents are chosen from specific communities rather than at random from the population as a whole.

Now, I'm no expert, but every book on sampling I've ever seen talks about cluster sampling as a valid approach to large-scale surveys. And it's my understanding that most national social science and education surveys right here in America use some form of cluster sampling. This is because the SRS (simple random sample) you learn about in Stats 101 isn't feasible to generate for a national population.

Bush went on to insult the scientists behind the Lancet study by saying of the number the study arrived at, "600,000, or whatever they guessed at, is just -- it's not credible." (emphasis added)

A considerable amount of work from a large team of professionals went into that "guess". I find that "guess" more credible, in fact, than the Bush administration's guesses about whether there were WMD in Iraq before the war, whether their diplomacy with North Korea has been effective, and whether the mission was really accomplished when Bush stood on the carrier in a flight suit.

But demographers and public health researchers be warned, you are now evidently part of the Axis of Academic Evil, along with global warming researchers and believers in evolution.

So, I happen to be a visiting scholar somewhere presently. At first, I told myself, okay, different system, must get used to it. No use comparing it to other university I was at...

Day 1: Printer is out of ink. Can't get ink, since it requires filling out so many forms, and then where will the money come from, etc etc. Ok, fine I think, I will use the other printer. Things are laid back here, I like laid back.

Week 3: Colleague, who treats me as less than colleague, suggested that I find other person in other department to talk to re: certain thing that is his specialty. Ok, will do. Each department has a secretary/gatekeeper here. I go and ask for him, when he receives appointments, etc, as you can't actually get to the offices unless you get past the gatekeeper. Gatekeeper says: He's not here, I don't know, try another day. Fastforward to today. I see colleague and she asks if I met with him yet. I explain the situation.

SnarkyColleague: So is this how you do research?
Me: (What did I just say wrong?) I'm sorry, what?
SC: You just give up? You should just tell the gatekeeper where you are going and ask the dept. secretary for office hours.
Me: Oh, well I don't really know the system here, I didn't realize there were two
gatekeeper/ secretaries... (Shocked that she thinks I am a poor researcher simply because I
believed the first gatekeeper that person was not in when he called his office)
SC: (Proceeds to explain in a very condescending way how exactly one gets to this place, finds this person, what one asks to obtain this person, etc.)

Week 3, Later that same day: Go downstairs to the secretary person for our dept. and explain that I need to get some books that they do not have in their library. How does one get them from the other libraries? Do I need a card? (I have yet to receive one and my dept's library books are signed out by hand). Is there some sort of ILL situation?
He looks at me, seems frustrated. Oh I see. He has to start his computer again to find out. It is 3 hours before he leaves but he turned it off because "its so loud and annoying, sometimes you just need some peace and quiet."

What did I get myself into? I thought this would be dream position....

My university IT people keep messing around with the email servers. Over the last couple of days it's been 50/50 whether my email was working. At one point, I didn't receive email for twelve hours. This interrupted a tense email exchange with my advisor.

I'm so codependent with my advisor that not knowing whether she had emailed me back and knowing that she was mad at me sent me into a panic attack. I almost called her to say that my email was down to prevent her from thinking I was ignoring her.

I want to drag the IT people into my therapy session this week, so they can see the devastation they hath wrought.

Update: 23 hours later
My advisor got over it, and we are now back to being the best of friends. We had a super productive substantive meeting yesterday. The kind where you realize your advisor is actually smarter than you, and knows amazing things.

A week or two ago, I was going to post the secret that things are not as bad as I sometimes make them out to be. I complain a lot about not doing any work and letting my advisor down and so on. Lately, people have been responding to my complaints by encouraging me to think about what I would do if I dropped out of grad school (or got kicked out). At first, this took me aback. For all my whining, I hadn't seriously considered quitting, and my suprise and indignation that people actually believed that I might be at risk of being forced out suggested that I might have been exaggerating for effect. Or at least, I thought I was exaggerating. I always assumed that at some point I would stop being lazy and unmotivated and be the relatively productive student I like to think of my "real" self as (never mind the fact that that "real" me has never existed outside my head).

When I was thinking about writing that post, I was having a couple of productive days and it seemed like the problem was my representation of my situation. I decided I should stop misleading people about being on the edge of dropping out, since everything really was going to be all right in the end. Unfortunately, that confidence didn't last long and now I'm feeling worse than before, because I'm taking people's reactions to my complaints more seriously. If everyone I talk to gets the impression I should be looking for alternative careers, maybe there's some truth to that view.

I wish I had a better sense of perspective. It would be good if I knew whether to believe my own Chicken Little-esque views, or my more optimistic moments, the post-doc who claims I have good data, or the well-meaning people who assure me that there is life outside academia.
I hesitate to include this, because I don't want to be making excuses for my lack of productivity, but I wonder as well how much of my pessimism and apathy is due to depression. I'm nowhere near as depressed as I was a year or six months ago, but my motivation is still gone. Is it just laziness at this point, or genuine loss of interest, or will it come back?

I started writing this post as a comment to Orange Ina's post about students who constantly let their advisors down. The posts about writing recommendation letters for mediocre students made me feel similarly guilty. This is the downside to reading academic blogs. It's all too easy to imagine the snarky posts my advisor would write about me, if she had a blog, and weren't as loath to badmouth anyone as she is. Perhaps the disappointed and concerned posts I can imagine her writing would be worse.

Do the students their advisors complain about ever manage to become productive and get decent jobs? I'm starting to imagine the half-hearted recommendation letters I might get (if I even ever make it far enough to graduate) and wondering if I should just give up now.

The blog's not showing up. This is an attempt to see if we can kick some life back into it.

I got a rejection letter today. It's not my first, and it won't be my last.

My main complaint about reviewers continues to be that there are so many who clearly don't read the paper. To make matters worse, I think that the people who are least likely to read the paper are often higher status individuals whose reviews editors weight more heavily (particularly if the editor, who has a lot on their plate, didn't read the paper carefully themselves).

That's not today's gripe, though. I'll save it for another day.

This wasn't my first rejection of this particular paper. In the previous round of reviews (from Journal A in the specialty area of Politics of Primates) I got, "This research is an example of a much larger and more interesting phenomenon, focus on that." So I did when I reframed the paper. This time I got (from Journal B in the same specialty area), "This research claims to be looking at this much larger phenomenon, but what's more interesting is the specific example that it highlights."

Argh. Why couldn't I have had those same reviewers that second time around? Or even better, that second set the first time around? How do you decide whether you cater to those reviewers before you send it out again, or if you just send the same thing out and hope that it doesn't go to the same person? This is a game I haven't learned to play yet.

I'm a total NPR addict. It's one of the reasons I've become middle-aged before my time. NPR's normal target audience seems to be the older end of the boomer range. So imagine my shock when the 'local' sponsor of Morning Edition last week on my public radio station was 'And I Feel Fine: Best of the I.R.S. Years 1982-1987'.

While I love REM, and am happy that there is a newer (older) version of Eponymous, I'm a little weirded out that REM has anything to do with NPR, MarketPlace's bad-ass music selections notwithstanding. Even stranger, the way they said it, the album itself was the sponsor - not the band, not IRS records, but the album. I can't get my head around an album being the local sponsor of a radio station, especially since albums are now more conceptual than tangible in the age of IPOD. It's kind of like the War On Terra, except benign.

Let me preface this with a reminder that I am a new assistant professor, a divorced mother of a school-age child who only sees his father a couple times a year, and live with an academic who never takes a day off.

Here's a conversation that I had with a neighbor the other day. He's up for tenure this year at the same institution, in a discipline much like my own.

Neighbor: "How are you? How's the term going?"
Me: "Eh... really, really busy and stressful. I guess it's just the life of a new assistant professor."
Neighbor: (skeptically) "Gee! That busy, already. The term just started."
Me: "Yeah."
Me: "Hey, what's it like having a pot-bellied pig? Do they take a lot of work?"
Neighbor: "I don't know. You'll have to ask Julia (his stay-at-home partner). She takes care of everything around here."

I do social-science-y type research, for which I need to file a human subjects protocol with my Institutional Review Board before I'm allowed to go ahead with my research. My project should be "exempt" from review given pertinent federal regulations, but at my institution you have to file an exempt protocol and let them review your application before they agree that you are, in fact exempt.*

Even though my research has nothing to do with health or experiments and mostly involves asking professional people questions about things that happen as a normal result of their work, I have to file a RIDICULOUSLY long and complicated protocol form. The protocol is submitted through a web application, which won't let you move forward or submit your protocol until you have answered every single question.

So, pretend my research was about interviewing members of congress about their past votes.** In filing my exempt protocol, I would have to answer questions about***:

-what I plan to do in case one of my research "subjects" needs medical, psychiatric, or other professional treatment as a result of the research

-whether there are other treatments that would be better for the "subject" than the one I am giving

-what I'm going to do with x-rays and lab specimens after I'm done with them

-why I'm excluding minors from my study

and, my favorite,
-whether my institution could make any money off a patent from this research.

The whole protocol form for "exempt" projects is over 10 pages in length of these irrelevant questions.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for review boards in general and I think that protecting human subjects is a really important and vital thing in research communities. It's just that the actual risks to the "subjects" of my research are not addressed at all by these questions, and that the IRB makes people who do social science jump through all the same questions as the drug-testing people, and doesn't let us skip any questions. I would really like to see a protocol review that gets at more pertinent questions, like:

-Are there at least 3 other people, besides yourself, who are likely to care about the outcome of your research?

-How are you going to ensure that your research does not turn into a massive waste of government and/or funder money?

-Please explain what protections you have in place to prevent the oppression of graduate research assistants.

Oh wait. I would probably have to answer "no" to the first question, and except for the fact that the sums involved are miniscule, would have no answer for the second. So maybe I don't want those questions on there after all. Bring on the disposal of biohazard material questions instead!

____________________________________

* This leads to very silly who's-on-first conversations that go:
A: did you file your protocol with the IRB?
B: no, we're exempt
A: but you have to file an exempt protocol before you can be exempt and start your research
B: but if we're exempt, doesn't it mean we don't have to file a protocol?
A: no, you're exempt, so you file a protocol and wait until you get Exempt Approval
B: if they call it "approval", in what sense is it exempt from review?
A: Well, you're not exempt until they say you are exempt.


** All research fields and disciplines have been made up to protect the privacy of the a.secret society.

***The actual wording of these questions is hilarious, but unfortunately I don't want to reveal what institution I'm at, so I'm paraphrasing.

I tried to figure out how to make this a picture secret, but couldn't make it strong enough.

Here's a recommendation to all those "adminstrators" and other morons: if I have already identified myself as a member of the faculty, do not say loudly -- in front of the rest of the panel -- that it's nice to have young faculty on board, even if looking like a graduate student. It's nothing but insulting, and unless I'm wearing pasties or something my appearance has nothing to do with my position (for the record -- no pasties, just a nice, ironed button-down shirt, jeans, and dress shoes, and I was sitting down).

This plays into the larger climate issues at this institution, at which women are marginalized and minorities ignored (and sometimes attacked). It does nothing to encourage retention or the development of a first class research program. Nor, for the record, does giving a talk on conflict-of-interest issues wherein every example in some way involves the faculty member's wife*.

*Hint: not all of us are men, not all of us have partners who are female, not all of us are married.

I have long been a protestor of standardized tests -- even when I took my first PSAT when strawberries was a mere small red dot on the vine. Not because I have never been one of those "I never study and get a 1600" types, but because I do not think they actually measure ability to do well.

Take the GRE for grad school. Now, in my discipline, there are never multiple choice situations. And the quantitative aspects are statistics, complicated statistics that are handled by stat programs. Sure basic math skills are important, but when ever has an academic really figured out an important geometry problem, and then, without a calculator.

Ok, so the verbal section. All important, sure, in theory. But when one is entering a grad program, they should have a) done well in undergrad, b) have demonstrated a capacity to conduct effective research, and c) ability to write well.

The reading comprehension asks questions about what is the next logical paragraph, or title. Then in those lovely books prepared by ETS, they explain that only Y can come after X. I disagree. First of all, writing has a style. An argument can be explained effectively in more that one way. Perhaps Z after X goes better together, even though chronologically Y comes first. This is all a question of style, journal preferences, and topic. And don't get me started on the Writing Analysis section....

And then the ridiculous emphasis that NSF and other organizations place on these scores -- NSF Doctoral Grants /Research grants should not take into strong, if any, consideration standardized tests, but research capability, etc. Maybe the SAT is needed to generalize across different school systems and their grading, and since students still do not know what direction their studies/life will take, general capability is good. But in a specialized field?? I back the idea of subject tests, but carried out in a different manner.

With all the test prep books, the test prep classes, and the test prep costs, it seems to me that aside from being almost useless in determining success in graduate school, it is just one big money making scheme.

Where is the check box for Dr.?

Is this Murphy's Law? I spent my entire grad student teaching career correcting students when they called me Professor, or Dr. Fraud, and now, this week alone, I have heard Miss Fraud, Mrs. Fraud, and Ms. Fraud (interestingly, all from women).

I came up with a plan of action for when this occurs in a phone call. When the student says, "Is this Miss Fraud?" I'll reply, "Yes, this is Dr. Fraud." But how do I deal with the interactions in the classroom, hallway, or my office? Or what if they don't ask is it's me on the phone and just launch into "Mrs. Fraud..."

I'm convinced this is one of those annoying forms of unconscious gender bias. A male colleague, who intestingly isn't even a Dr. yet, said that he's never been called Mr. Know-It-All. Students always call him Professor or Dr. Know-It-All.

A happy hello from strawberry land!

I apologize for my absence and will inundate you with excuses, ahem, I mean reasons, right away. I can't have you thinking I spent all this time "finding myself"or some other such nonsense. I easily gave that up after two days of grading and realized, who cares. So, after some grading hell, some getting sick, I decided to take up my friend on a spontaneous vacation with those super cheap tickets. While much fun, I came back to too much work, behind-ness, and a conference to attend.

All's been said and done. Conference was attended. And here's my problem -- It was one of those lovely European conferences that are often hard to understand, but that's not it. It was the hierarchy. Now I know EU universities function differently, and that its not about tenure and starting as assistant, and then associate, etc etc. and that people actually collaborate with grad students here. Oh my.

The profs did not even speak to the grad students. Nor to the researchers. Who aren't simple research assistants, but actually teach classes. And when it was time for question asking, it turned into more of a here is what I think since I'm so egotistical, I mean intelligent. And only the profs would ask questions. And they would ask them all in a row. So the same 5 people would tell you what they thought consecutively, and then the presenter would get two minutes to "answer".

The hierarchy was disgusting and disheartening. And then in a field where you would hope axes of power would be examined, all of the profs who spoke were men, and only 10% of the presenters/speakers were women.

On the bright side, these EU conferences really do know how to organize field trips! And they're not the corny tourist tour through conference city, but EACH day a lovely field trip to place that had to do with application of discipline in that city. Oh, and did I mention the food? And each night, an organized entertainment for our benefit.

So, would I go again? Yes, but skip all the presentations and attend every field trip. Until that, down with the hierarchical man.

Until today, I'd never had someone cry in my office. I guess, technically, I've cried in my office, but this post is about undergraduate students, not the torment of grad school or the stress of being an assistant professor.

Today, though, my kleenex box got a little lighter and my heart a little heavier.

What the hell am I doing to these students? Most of the people who came in to talk about their papers were upbeat. They came in confused, but with my guidance left realizing where they'd slipped up and, most importantly, with a better understanding of the concepts to carry with them from this day forward. One was a little angry, and left even angrier, but somehow I can deal with that psychologically. Maybe I'm used to that. The last student, disguised as a member of the upbeat club, soon showed her true colors. Her chin started to quiver and tears formed in her eyes. Despite all the jokes I made to my male counterparts in grad school about those crocodile tears just being a game girls played to toy with them, I wanted to cry too. Her emotion seemed so raw, and genuine, and I remembered moments in my own undergraduate career where I wanted to cry (I couldn't remember if I had or not).

Maybe it's a game. Maybe it's the stress of being at a competitive school. Maybe it's being a freshman. Maybe it wasn't about me, or the paper, maybe it was something else. But regardless of what it is, I'm going to have to work on my game face.

The semester has started, and the hallways are suddenly filled with imminent dangers: Advice-seeking students, administrators who want to dump committee work on me, lost people who want directions, more students, book buyers (who deserve a posting of their own). To make things worse, it's Monday, and you know how much I hate that day! First I was torn between marking my presence (see, unlike some of my senior colleagues, I actually make it to school when I don't teach!) and getting some work done. Now that I've given up on the presence thing (I need to get some work done!), I'm sitting behind my closed door, anxiously waiting for inspiration to kick in. I feel like I've set myself a trap...and I desperately need to pee. Help!

Measuring Up: The National Report Card on Higher Education has just come out for 2006.

Some highlights:
1) The Sky is Falling. Our nation is in dire trouble because we are falling behind and global competition is going to kick our behinds.

2) College costs too much. Only 1 state shows improvement on a majority of the indicators for affordability.

3) It's hard to measure college learning with standardized instruments. But 9 states are praised by NCPPHE (National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education) for trying anyway. Coming soon: the one standardized uniform national college exit exam.*

This year's NCPPHE report card is likely to be overshadowed by the release later this month of Secretary Spellings' Commission on Higher Education final report (happily, not in the form of a report card). insidehighered.com has had great coverage of the work of the commission, including an excellent article on how the Dept. of Ed is trying to enact the report's recommendations even before the report is released. Without congress.

The scariest part of the nightmare that is higher ed policy in the US currently is Secretary Spellings' comments on the release of the report card. To the people at NCPPHE who put out the report card, she says “I’m glad to have you with me on the side of the angels,”. Evidently, the angels support standardized learning outcomes assessment, strict accountability and performance indicators, and decreased Pell grants. I personally don't remember the angels saying that in the Bible, but I could be wrong. Maybe it was Charlie's Angels. Whoever the angels are, they seem to have been involved in writing the Commission's draft report, given that the first sentence is about puritans and ministers. PURITANS.

To be fair, there are parts of the NCPPHE and the Commission's agenda that I agree with, like tracking the rates of participation in higher education of people from different ethnic and racial backgrounds. But the overall thrust of the report card and the Commission's report is that the liberal yahoos that have been running higher education into the ground need to get out of the way so that accountable, hard-headed, right-thinking people can get down to the business of assessing what students are (not) learning and laying the blame squarely on the shoulders of the latte-drinking liberal elite secular humanists** where it belongs.


* Ok, this is a bit of an exaggeration. Even the most assessment-happy folks think there should be at least 2 or 3 different tests.

** Not angels.

I spent 5 hours straight tonight watching Law 'N Order reruns on TV. I think this definitely qualifies me as "resident slacker" of a.secret for the day- or at least for those 5 hours.
The truly sad thing is that it wasn't even my favorite Law and Order (Criminal Intent), but the stupid original. Oh - and the truly, truly saddest thing? I've seen a couple of tonight's episodes before.

...but coming from a family of people with little to no college experience, I heartily relate to this article from today's Chronicle.

It's even got a little something about how much money we (as academics) make, which is clearly an issue close to our hearts.

Clear noted that there are a lot of complaints as secrets, so I thought I'd share a happier one: I love my advisor! She's always so enthusiastic and interesting and supportive. It's a secret because all the other grad students I spend time with constantly seem annoyed or frustrated with their advisors. Sometimes I feel like I have to find something to complain about, so as to not be left out of the conversation, or inspire jealousy. Luckily, there are some things my advisor does, like turn every 5 minute meeting into an hour-plus discussion about the state of our field, that I actually enjoy, but other people conveniently interpret as a bad thing.

It's unfortunate that it seems much more socially acceptable to kvetch about excessive demands and lack of guidance, than to say anything complimentary. My advisor is generally known as one of the nicest people in the department, but surely the other professors can't all be that bad.

Of course, her being so nice makes me feel even worse about my lack of productivity, but this is supposed to be a happy secret, so I'll ignore that for now. I did just write 750 words today! I was tempted to put it off again, but I wanted to be able to show my advisor something for a change. Maybe I should try to focus on making her happy as a motivational tool.

Hair boy is a junior faculty member of our department who uses ken-doll good looks and blow-dried hair to charm his way out of teaching service courses. Hair boy is a shameless self-promoter who will do anything to add a line to his CV, including stealing ideas from his masters-student advisees. I think hair boy's charisma will get him tenure, even though his scholarship is mediocre.

I read this article today and wondered where something like this leaves us?

Is sharing our secrets here good or bad? Are they part of our identities or can we keep them stored away safely? Do we engage in conversations here only to preserve our tenure chances, academic safety, and reputability, or to preserve our selves too?

Is sharing your secret with a stranger - or as a stranger - different than sharing it with someone you know intimately?

I was very excited to get an invitation to join academic secret, but I've been feeling twinges of impostor syndrome when trying to think about what to post. I'm not a real academic (any moment now someone will realize they made a mistake letting me into grad school) and I'm certainly not cool enough to be part of a secret cabal. After rereading the archives, however, I'm feeling more confident because I'm pretty sure that I can beat all y'all at something, even if I have to bring up an old argument to do it.

Salmon Ella first claimed to be the “resident slacker of academicsecret” back in July, but didn't seem eager to fight for the title when thistle challenged her*. I'm ready to take you on, though, thistle! Thistle's pretense to the title: “There are many weeks when I only manage to work 20-30 hours at being a graduate student, and I don't even have a baby.”

Ha! I laugh at your “20-30 hours”! A day when I do 2 hours of vaguely work-related activities is a day of astounding productivity for me. Usually, it takes all my motivation to do the bare minimum required to keep my model organisms alive.

Let me share a typical day with you:

8-9am – alarm goes off, hit snooze (repeat)

9am - read email/blogs
10.30am - realize my dreams of one day getting to work before 11am are about to be shattered, yet again
11.30am – start getting ready to leave
12pm - arrive at work, read more blogs (or at least hit refresh until something new shows up in my feed reader) until everyone else leaves the lab
6pm - realize that my organisms are going to die if I don't feed them
7pm – finally drag myself away from the computer to feed my organisms
7.15pm – go home

Anyone think they can top that for slackerness? Bring it on!

Pre-post update: Sadly, since I wrote the first part of my post, my advisor managed to kill my sense of achievement. She came by to ask for an update on my progress and after I mumbled my excuses about shipping delays (read: forgetting to place the order) and lack of facility access (read: not getting around to returning the signed forms), she started talking about all the exciting new ideas she has for my project. She seems to be feeling bad that my project is having problems (it does have some that aren't entirely self-induced) and is sure that once I get some results I'll be moving ahead much faster! I couldn't bring myself to confess the real reason for my lack of progress. She'll just have to learn the slow way that I can bring errors and delays to the best of projects...

Why does she have to be so nice and supportive and make me feel guilty? And why can I not just do some work??

*Turquoise Stuff also mentioned the title fight, but I'm not sure he(?) is a serious contender. I mean, he has a list!

I want to take a moment to clarify my Fraud identity. I might feel like I'm undeserving of my current position, or that people think that I'm more capable than I am, but I believe whole-heartedly that I am bright and capable. These past couple weeks I've also learned that I am great at getting things done.

My partner, adept in all the ways I feel inept, is brilliant. His vita looks like a full professor's (and he doesn't even have his PhD yet). He reads incessantly, and now writes as much, and has the broadest understanding of anyone I know in his field. He does have one kryptonetic weakness; he is really bad at getting things done.

We're both new faculty at our institution and both of us had more orientations than any human should endure and more luncheons, retreats, and gatherings than I think is necessary (despite the usually excellent food, and sometimes booze, served there). I RSVP'd to each of them, and gave my menu choices. I balanced my time and wrote them in my calendar. I arrived at each and every one on time and prepared. I got things done. My partner, on the other hand...

It won't get me tenure, but I derive some sick sense of pleasure that I was able to juggle it all (plus kid, who's mine) and not skip a beat, whereas Mr. Brilliant couldn't.

Maybe it was trading in my denim for some dress pants for the first day of teaching, but I'm feeling a little less fraud-like today.

I just can't do it. There has to be secret force in the universe that prevents the word NO from exiting my mouth. I bow down to those of you have mastered this force and ask for guidance as to how to vanquish this horrible foe. I feel the assault on my spinal column with every request. I do not wish to fall victim to academyosteoporotic syndrome. I mean a forced spinectomy is one thing but this is self-inflicted! Oh wise colleagues, please share your secrets!!

We will be sending out a funky-fresh new round of a.secret invitations in the next few days. If correspondents have ideas for others who, to their knowledge, are not part of the cabal but would be good to have, let Plaid or me know via e-mail.

I was reminded today of something my sister said to me last year, when I was having trouble getting my work done and suffering humiliations galore from my professors.
I was telling my sister about how one professor was mad at me for doing a crappy job on a paper, and how the professor had told me she thought I wasn't taking her class seriously enough and was insulted. I was worried I had permanently damaged my relationship with this professor. I was also worried that this seemed to keep happening a lot with professors, and I was alienating all of the potential committee members in the department. I told my sister that I thought I was running out of social capital because of my flakyness.
My genious sister said, "But you don't need social capital...you have a fortune in intellectual capital." My sister reminded me that because I have strong quantitative research skills in a subfield that is short on people with solid training of that variety, people were going to need me, even if they thought I was annoying or flaky or whatever.
I thought of that today when I was in a meeting with the supervisor of a project that is a year overdue (it was last summer's "summer" project). My supervisor listened to my short lack-of-progress report, and then changed topics entirely saying, "I'm really glad we had a meeting today...I wanted to pick your brain on something..." that was totally unrelated to our project. Awesome! The supervisor barely noticed that my project moves slower than a glacier, and all I had to do was just sit there and expound on a topic I am very familiar with.

By writing this post, I'm hoping to remind myself not to worry so much about what people think of me as a social person - whether they think I am arrogant, a slob, flaky, whatever. Those things matter, but they matter a whole lot less than the mental space I give them. Because if people think you're smart, and that you're uniquely capable, it doesn't matter so much if you have B.O.

I hope.

A few notes about picture secrets. First, keep sending them in, they are great! Second, please send them to me, Plaid, instead of posting them on your own. There are various reasons for this. I won't bore you with them, unless you ask.

I realized that the note in the sidebar about picture secrets (under More Secrets) wasn't really clear on the second point so I have updated it to avoid future confusion. I apologize for not being more clear, uhm, I mean more plaid, in posting instructions earlier.

And rest assured that I am not doing anything to try and figure out who is sending in picture secrets.

While I enjoyed my summer - the first in years that I didn't have to teach - a part of me anxiously awaited the start of school and my first year as a full-fledged faculty member at a reputable institution. Now, here I am, a week from the beginning of classes wondering what the hell I was thinking?!

I just returned from two weeks of various personal and professional duties only to discover that my summer has officially ended. New faculty obligations are in full swing and I haven't even finished my syllabi, let alone that article I wanted to get out.

So, in my little world, summer is over and I didn't even get to have one last hurrah. It's time for my annual pilgrimage to the office supply store, marking the beginning of the new year.

In the immortal words of a childhood friend, "Don't wish for something too hard or you just might get it." Despite knowing the truth in this, I can't help but find myself wishing for next summer.

Sorry about the picture. I'm trying to do the uploading thing so I'll have a picture with my profile. I don't even know if I'm doing this right, and maybe the picture is too complicated to use, but we'll see.

Anyway. The conference our grad program hosts each year is having its abstract reading session tonight, so in honor of that event, here’s a list of some questions a conference chair hates to hear from prospective conference participants:

Q (from someone who hasn’t submitted an abstract yet): “Can you give me more information on your conference?”
A: Well, no. The CFP (call for papers) includes the conference title, date, place, and theme, the deadline for proposals, a description of the themes, a long list of possible topics, the name and bio of the keynote speaker, and our contact info. Did you read the CFP? What more could you possibly need to know? What’s for lunch? What’s the boy-girl ratio? What will the weather be like? How many bathrooms are in the building? Will the keynote speaker be drunk?

Q (also from someone who hasn’t submitted an abstract yet): “Is it ok if I write about [fill in the blank]?” Or, worse, “Can you tell me more about what you’re looking for?”
A: What is wrong with people who ask these questions?!?! I truly don’t understand it. Is it me, or isn’t this the point of a proposal? You propose to deliver a paper about something, and then we decide if we want to hear that paper. I’m not going to tell you what to write about, and aside from the list of possible topics in the CFP, we don’t know exactly what we’re looking for. That’s why you propose something! If you don’t know what an abstract is, or if you need ideas about what to write about, talk to your advisor, or another grad student. Why would you write to the conference chair, a total stranger? Is this even remotely professional behavior?

Q (from a submitted abstract): “Or is it?”
[as in: “It seems feminism is dead…. Or is it?”]
A: Unless you are clearly, expertly writing a parody or tongue-in-cheek reference to B movies (which is highly unlikely), it is in your own best interests not to have a “twist ending” in your proposal or to give the conference committee any extra reason to compare your abstract to a horror movie. You are not M. Night Shyamalan, or if you are, please don’t submit anything to my conference.

So, I've been like a bad father here who hasn't immunized his child against measles because he figures so long as every other kid is immunized she'll be okay. Since everyone else on blogspot seems to have their word verificatoin turned on, I wondered if maybe comment-spam programs didn't bother trying anymore. As it turns out, they do, and they discovered us this evening. So now, word verification is activated for a.secret as well.

Our recent comments blog is working pretty well, by the way, even if we haven't figured out how to put some rundown of the ten most recent ones in the regular sidebar.

As has been noted in recent comments, it seems that most posters here believe themselves to be, to one degree or another, procrastinatory frauds. I am not exempt (although mostly I feel like a procrastinator; I have a startlingly expansive ego and rarely feel like a fraud, in part because of what I'm about to discuss here).

I would argue that part of the reason that everyone here feels like a procrastinatory fraud is the academic culture in which we're embedded. It never fails: any time a group of graduate students disperses, they all start wailing about how incredibly busy they are and how they have so much work to do. Meetings with faculty members tend to go similarly, although at least in that case it's easy to see what the participants are trying to prove (grad student: "I'm hard-working!"; faculty member: "I'm important!"). It doesn't matter what the grad students are doing, though; they always have to talk about their incredible workload.

I'm not saying we don't all have a lot to do. I've spent most of my summer focusing on one extremely important task to the detriment of other tasks. There are people who are not thrilled. No doubt I could have worked more and harder. But I am firmly convinced that if I had, I would be a crazy outlier in the working habits of graduate students.

Because no one is actually going home and working their ass off every time they leave a group like that. Many times, they go home and watch some TV, maybe surf a little internet, brush the cat, whatever. The important thing is not to let the side down. Anyone who admitted how much of their time was spent not doing work would immediately be That Slacker Grad Student even though everyone else would know, unless they were in extreme denial, that they're not doing any more than that. I'm sure this continues into faculty life. They're always yammering on about how graduate school is, perhaps most importantly, a socialization experience, and this is probably true, and what a benefit! We've all been socialized to feel guilty about reading something that isn't an academic journal and to believe, deep down, that a single episode of Law & Order will be what keeps us from getting tenure.

Maybe you aren't working hard enough. I don't know you, or how much you produce for X amount of work (another issue here being that you can get away with a lot of slacking if you're more productive/efficient when actually working than the average philosopher or what have you). I certainly could have worked harder on multiple tasks this summer, although it would have been a crazy joyless wistful-for-grape-picking existence.

But the important thing to remember, if you're measuring yourself against your colleagues, is that none of these people are actually working as hard as they claim to be, either. It is all a lie. You participate in the lie, you try to judge your life by the lie--don't do it! Take a sneaky insider's delight in the lie, and tell people very solemnly how much work you have to do before you go out for ice cream.

Procrastination has been a major theme around here. I could spend some time adding links to the relevant entries, but seriously, pick a post at random and chances are good that procrastination is part of the theme (if not the entry then the comments).

And while it has been helpful to hear that other people face this issue as well, it was especially helpful to read this about a method that may actually help you/me/us get over it. Yes, I'm seriously inspired and plan to implement this method. I don't think I'll go as far as to write the check out to an organization I hate, just because I am hopeful that I won't need that kind of added pressure. However, the general idea sounds very promising. And seriously, it all requires less than an hour a day for some tangible productivity. Sign me up! And as an added incentive for implementing the method, I promise to report back to you on how it goes. (I mean that as added incentive for me, not for you per se, but feel free to join me in promising that you'll have something to report on in a week or two.)

Why did it take me several weeks to follow the exciting (and secret!) invitation to join this blog? Because I'm a professional procrastinator, of course. I don't think that this is a big secret in academia, but I have to confess that I make considerable efforts on a daily basis to hide my true nature from the vultures circulating over my head, the most voracious of all being my bad conscience (this is where faking your own death doesn't come in handy, dear Scarlet, since you'll always know your own whereabouts...so if anyone has an idea on how to hide from oneself without the use of psychotropics, please share it with me!). The vultures are always particularly aggressive on Mondays. I hate Mondays! Every time a Monday comes around, I feel like some evil troll is holding a mirror up to me, asking me in a gnarly voice: "So, are you proud of yourself now, Wisteria?" The arrival of any given Monday is a proof of my failure to fight procrastination. Here's a recent (er, ongoing) example:

• Nice flattering letter from big name journal on June 3: "Dear Dr. Wisteria, we're asking for your expert opinion" etc. etc. "To allow for a speedy turnaround, please submit the review by July 20."
• Thinks Wisteria: Piece of cake! That's, what, 3 or 4 months from now. I have plenty of time to squeeze that in. Forgotten is my past experience in which I started suffering from cold sweats, pulsing headache, mild to severe nausea according to the degree of menace in the tone of the once sympathetic editor the further the due date disappeared in the past (but, unfortunately, never went away). So merrily I reply with an enthusiastic "Yeah sure!"
• On July 13 I find a polite reminder email in my inbox. There still is plenty of time. However, I can now start using the pending review as an excuse for other tasks to be queued. As in: "I'm awfully sorry, but I can't do xyz because I'm working on this review".
  
• On July 20 I find a polite reminder email in my inbox. That's right, the review. I understand, I understand. Don't rub it in my face: "The review is now due". But today is Thursday, and that's almost Friday, right? And Friday is the beginning of the weekend. What editor in their right mind would make a fuss over a tiny little weekend extension? Monday's as good as ever. So I grant myself a tiny little weekend extension. This means that I have ALL WEEKEND to read the paper and write the stupid review.
• On July 24 something terrible happens: It's Monday. I haven't started reading the paper, and the week tumbles upon me with a million distractions.

I'm going to spare you the details of all the torments I've gone through, but today is Monday again, two weeks later, and no progress has been made. Am I the only one who suffers particularly on Mondays? Are there self-help groups that deal with this kind of issues? Could one solution be to just abolish Mondays? Or rename them?

Some of us have rather long names on here and it may be tedious for others (or even ourselves, but we rarely have to) to type out the entire name. At the same time, it seems advisable to avoid offending people by using abbreviations that miss a crucial part of the person's name (see Orange Ina's clarification of a related "incident" over the weekend) or names that they just don't like.

So I thought I'd post this note and invite everyone (who cares) to comment on their preferred abbreviation. I'll put mine in the comments as well so it's not getting special treatment here (really, it's just so you can see my nifty new profile image:).

I've been thinking about what to write next, but before I could commit to something, I wanted to make sure that I was different here than on my regular blog. After all, why pick a new secret identity if it's not gonna be secret? Isn't that part of the fun of being a superhero? I mean a blogger.

Which brings me to Poppy Red's recent post, about writing style. Now let's not talk academic writing style, because surely we all write in some way or another that is different than how we speak or write in other venues. But what I am afraid of, after revealing my love of secrets (secrets sounds like such a better word than gossip doesn't it?) and revealing, though vaguely, some of my knowledge, that someone out there will figure out this writing style, compare it to the writing style of my personal blog, and hence, find me out. So just to clarify, department head is not always drunk -- he is quite a brilliant academic, who just so happens to be able to pound back 18-20 drinks at all social gatherings. And really, all those secrets I shared, it was opposite day. So don't believe them. Plus they were written in code. Sorry for turning freaked out, but I have seen one too many episodes of Alias and 24 to be careless.

In trying to figure out how to write here, and wanting to make sure that it is different, I have come to a road block. What is my writing style there? I don't really know. I am not a good judge of my own style, though I can comment on others'. I guess I am too close to it all. Any tips that other colors might have will be greatly appreciated. Since academics are way smarter than the reporters who couldn't figure out Clark Kent was Superman when he wore his glasses, I don't want to just add new frames to the same face, you know?

After all, this is my first secret society membership, and though it may not be considered as prestigious as whatever that one where all the president's at Yale come from, I think it's even better, and I am quite excited.

So until I figure out if you can figure out my voice, I will be working on figuring out my voice. And then using one of those voice changer things to make it sound different. Only not those robotic ones that kidnappers use to demand ransom, cause everyone knows those are just creepy. Plus with CSI, they always figure you out.

Clear and I have been trying to figure out how we could showcase recent comments on the sidebar of this blog. The Blogger solution is sub-optimal (we had it on here for a while), because it presents comments by recent posts instead of most recent comments themselves (who came up with that idea?!).

We are at the point of having created a "separate" blog that displays all comments. That blog is generated automatically from information submitted to this one. What we would like to have now is a bit of javascript (or whatever script that works with Blogger) that we can put in the template of a.secret so the most recent comments show up on the sidebar right here. (There over to the right that is. --->)

Those of you who use a feed reader can just subscribe to the feed of the a.secret comments blog if you want to be completely up-to-date on happenings here. But since we doubt most/many of you do that, we would like to offer the service on the sidebar right here.

Can anyone help us? We know of a few RSS-to-javascript services out there, but they each come with their share of ads and such, unnecessary material we would like to avoid here.

To summarize, what would be of real help here is if you could send us the exact script that one would generate from the feed link above that can be put in the template file so the most recent comments (say, the most recent 30) show up in the sidebar. Thanks!

A busy Saturday on a.secret, and I'm sorry to push some splendid posts down the page with administrative matters, but:

1. We've recently received positive notice on BlogHer, so the first known review of a.secret in the blogosphere is a rave.

2. We are itching for more Picture Secrets (see sidebar). We were getting a nice queue going, and our hope is that if we built up some momentum somebody would admit to a murder or, worse, plagiarizing large portions of their dissertation from Megan McCafferty.

3. Special note to a.secret contributors: If you want to add a secret-preserving image to your Blogger profile, the easiest way to do this is to upload the image in a post and then paste that link into the Photo URL of your profile. Once the image is uploaded in Blogger, it is not deleted if you delete the text in the post or if you do not publish the post, so you do not have to actually include the image in a published post to use this method.

4. (Problem solved! Thanks!) Special note to generous souls who read this post but are not a.secret correspondents: We want some way of being able to track recent comments in the sidebar, but Blogger does not have this feature and the easiest work-arounds don't really work. Plaid and I are interested in trying this other workaround that requires a GMail account, but our interest in secrecy leads us to be reluctant to use our personal GMail accounts to invite ourselves. So if you have GMail invitations and would be willing to send one to asecretplaid-at-yahoo-dot-com (and maybe, since you probably have 90+ invitations anyway, asecretclear-at-yahoo-dot-com), we would much appreciate it.

5. Presently, the official time of a.secret is Greenwich Mean Time, which may be dear to one of the coordinator's hearts for reasons to remain unelaborated here. We are willing to consider declaring an alternative location for a.secret headquarters (with time zone set accordingly) if there is another place that seems fitting for our clandestine project to profess to be housed.

I'm not Buffy, damn it. And why the hell don't the senior faculty pull their weight? Now, maybe it's unique at my admittedly screwed-up institution, but around here we've developed the term "spinectomy"* to describe a process which apparently occurs after tenure is awarded. Now, normally, you'd expect it to be the other way around, right? But no, apparently not. And every time I have to fight for something that ought to be already in place, I cost myself good will.

It gets particularly bad for "women's" issues. At a focus group in response to climate survey last year (most of the participants to whom I spoke were afraid to answer it honestly, even though it was nominally confidential, by the way), there was a very clear divide around the table -- untenured women on one side, tenured on the other. And we (untenured) all said the same thing: why are you leaving us out here to fight all the battles without backup, even though we are the ones without the protection of tenure, the ones who have to risk our careers to get a bloody restroom within 4 floors.

Maybe I'm just naive, but I expected better than this.

*Credit for coining this goes to another colleague of mine -- and hopefully she'll be blogging about it soon.

I want to know how Salmon's was!

This is my first post here, so I hope it's good enough. Secret number one: I often don't think I'm good enough to be blogging.

Speaking about secrets, I gotta say I know a lot of them. In my department, I seem to always be wearing a shirt that says "Come spill your guts, I won't tell!"* See, I added the "*" because I usually tell. I am GREAT at keeping secrets. ....Unless I think that someone knowing that secret would be beneficial to the secret sharer. Or unless it's gossip. Or unless I think me telling you a secret will get you to tell me one beneficial to me. And I don't tell if it will hurt anyone.

Now I know what you're thinking. A) your colleagues must be dumb to trust you. I guarantee they are not. I am definitely the least intelligent. Well, maybe except one person. B) How do you know if telling will not hurt anyone? You aren't a psychic are you? Well no. But I am a pretty good judge of people, so I only share when I trust the other person.

Hmm, now to share a secret in vague terms. I can tell you which professor shares a room with their teenage child, which admin is secretly applying for a better job in another dept, why that post-doc really went to that other continent, which professor didn't have an affair with which former post-doc and which professor thinks that he did. But see, if I give any more details to make these secrets more juicy, I might compromise my caveats.

So instead, I will tell you a secret about myself: I am scared of tampons. Ok, that's not academic enough, I agree. I have napped in my office during the day when I was supposed to be meeting students.

Oh my gosh, please don't tell the drunk department head I told you that.

Most of us know that my name refers to an overwhleming fear that I'm a fraud, a severe case of the imposter phenomenon.

Today, as I talked with an old flame (from high school and college) about finally being Dr. Farud, I was completely floored when he asked me, flat out, if I still felt like a fake. He did it in this, "Surely now you know that it's not all your charm and luck, and that it's actually your brains and ability that got you this far?", way. I'd forgotten how much a part of my identity "fraud" was in my life before graduate school.

I realized then that I have had this feeling my entire adult life and that it might never go away. Graduating high school wasn't enough, and college didn't change it, honors classes and degrees, awards, graduate school, a job, and ultimately a pass without revisions on my dissertation (granted by top scholars in their respective fields) has not been enough to conquer this fear.

My old flame kept on, and asked if I respected my professors, valued their opinions, thought of them as intelligent and wise, and I agreed on all fronts. Why then, would they fall victim to me - little old fraudulent me - and my fake identity?

He's right. I know he's right. But I'm afraid that instead of feeling less like a fraud, because these wise, respected people in my field think otherwise, I feel more like one. It's worse because now there are so many more people who will be exposed and humilated when the day arrives that the world discovers I'm a fraud, Dr. Fraud.

Hi everyone! I'm pleased to be creating my first post on academicsecret. My post is actually somewhat related to Mahogany's, in the sense that it's about writing style/voice -- but rather than being about detecting an advisor's voice, it's about an advisor detecting mine.

I got the rather daunting news about a month or so ago that the style of my first dissertation chapter is not up to snuff, that it needs to be more exciting, punchy, vivacious; in short, my style needs to be more... stylish. (I'm in literary criticism, so this matters, especially given the increased difficulty in getting literary studies published these days.) In the past I've been told, by my advisor as well as others, that my work is well-written, so this hurt. But upon re-reading the chapter, I realized it was indeed rather boring. I was doing the thing I really hate when published critics do it: my topic sounded cool at first, but I wasn't engaging the reader.

Here's my secret fear: what if I don't have a style? This might sound ridiculous, but I really don't know if there's anything distinctive about my critical writing, and I have a lot of doubts about being able to develop a style at this stage in the game. At first I was upset with my advisor for not giving me any specific tips on how to develop a style, but then I thought about my own teaching and how difficult it is to help students develop a writing style. You can show them what defines other writers' styles, and you can help them find topics that might tap into their voice, but it's very difficult to teach style. Is style one of those "either you have it or you don't" things? And what if I just don't have it?

There's a good article in insidehighered.com today on a law suit alleging that a university didn't comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act because a professor wouldn't provide accommodations for a student with a disability. I've been thinking of posting about my own situation for a while now; I would love to hear your reactions.
I've got serious problems with depression. I've been on medications and in treatment for it for 7 years now. Because of family history, and how depression progresses as a disease, it's very likely that I will have episodes of depression periodically for the rest of my life. This would be true whether or not I was in academia.
While I was still taking courses, I had an extremely hard time getting my big papers done by the deadlines at the end of each quarter. The quarter system is brutal to everyone, but I would get paralyzed by anxiety sometime around the 9th week, and not be able to make progress on the big papers. Small papers or short assignments, no problem. But research papers were problematic for me. I would do WAY too much reading of the relevant (and irrelevant literature), outline a paper that was 5 times too long, and then panic because there was no way that I could finish the project I had started. Classic perfectionist, overachiever problems. But because of the depression this became a life-threatening situation when anxiety and panic led to suicidal thoughts and withdrawal. Each quarter I would sink into despair, and become totally incapacitated. I would end up sending overly apologetic emails to professors saying that I couldn't complete their papers, and could I please have an extension or an incomplete. Eventually, I learned to email the professors at the beginning or middle of the quarter and give them a heads-up that this was likely to happen, and try to negotiate something in advance. I would tell them I'm registered with the Disability Center, and have documentation of my problems.
I've received a wide variety of responses from professors. A few have been supportive and nonjudgmental. Many say that they don't ever give extensions or incompletes, as a matter of fairness to other students. Others say they won't give it to me for my own good, because they've seen too many grad students' careers get sidetracked by an incomplete. I feel like shaking these professors and telling them the thoughts that go through my head every time I think about their paper: literally, whenever the thought of the class or paper would come into my head, I would think "I want to kill myself" or "I want to die". If they knew that, would they still act is if I was just lazy and unmotivated? Do they think that I'm not trying?
I sometimes think that I get weird reactions from professors because up until that point in the quarter I was usually a star student in the course, achieving well beyond expectations*. That's one of the reasons I stay in academia, even though I have mental health problems. I am actually very talented at what I do, when I'm able to get it done. It's just that I can't get it done on other peoples' schedules some of the time.
I know that academia is chock full of people with depression, especially during the phd years. So why aren't there better systems in place to deal with students like me? How come the professors are allowed to unilaterally decide that I don't need an accommodation? But also, should I really be trying to be an academic if I've got so much anxiety around deadlines? Furthermore, what does "fairness" mean when some of us are fighting mental and physical illnesses (or both at the same time) just to get to the starting line? If the battle is that steeply uphill, should we even be fighting it?

* I don't mean to be egotistical, but this is what they tell me.

Kodachrome just posted two copies of a really interesting post. Being an administrator on the side of good, I deleted one. But then someone deleted the other. (Kodachrome? Plaid?) I hope it's not gone--I was trying to post a comment on it and then Blogger told me I couldn't because the post didn't exist.

As a graduate student without a trust fund or other outside income, I find myself having frequent money difficulties. I was telling my advisor about the latest troubles, and she said that when she was a grad student and broke, she used the pain to channel her energies into finishing her degree. The idea of finishing and not being broke anymore kept her motivated.
This is ironic, I think, because I could make more money doing almost any other kind of job that requires my current qualifications than I could make being an assistant professor. Just saying.