Dr. Shellie

I am reading applications from prospective PhD students for my research group. Most applicants are foreign. The professors who have written recommendation letters often comment on the student’s personality traits. (The title of this post is typical of this style, which I do not think you would generally find in a US student’s application.)

I am delighted by imagining these prospective students of mine, who in addition to being intelligent, independent researchers, are "always very kind and helpful" to their classmates and have a "cheerful outlook and honest disposition."

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make an impact.

First, there’s my research. By now, I’ve written a lot of papers, and people have cited them a fair number of times. So that’s good. But I am surprised by which papers have become popular (=cited more that others). They weren’t necessarily my favorite papers, or the ones that I felt proudest of, or the ones that were most creative or required the most work. I couldn’t have predicted that they’d be popular.

Then, there’s teaching and mentoring. I haven’t done a lot of formal teaching, but I have done a variety of tutoring and volunteering here and there. For a year I tutored Spanish-language GED students. You would think that would be very useful, and yet I’m not sure that any of my students even passed the GED in the end. (Due to the way the class was organized, new students were constantly coming and going, and they had widely varying levels of formal education, making progress difficult.) Quite possibly, the most useful mentoring I’ve done so far only took one hour. A few years back, I ran into a classmate who looked a little down. We got to talking, and it turned out that she was really unhappy in her research group and wanted to switch. I gave her a few tips, and she found a new group. A few weeks ago, she told me that she is planning to graduate this year, and that she didn’t think she’d still be in a PhD program if it hadn’t been for me. I was really touched. I really didn’t do much at all! I just happened to help a tiny bit at exactly the right time.

I like it when I feel like I’ve had an impact on other people’s lives. As an aside, I do wonder sometimes whether that is gendered– why am I not as happy and proud about my paper citations as I am about helping others? Am I too timid to aspire to be a Great Scientist? (The male students writing to ask me for research positions all claim to be aspiring to this goal!)

But anyway, my biggest impact might be the least expected of all. Next week I will be a bone marrow donor. Before you all pat me on the back for my tremendous sacrifice, let me point out that this does not involve giant needles, "spooning" out of marrow, or excruciating pain. Thanks to recent medical advances, all I have to do (more or less) is get a few shots and then donate blood. Through no effort of my own, I happen to have the right genetic makeup to be compatible with my sister’s immune system. And so, right now, my cells might possibly (hopefully) save her life. Pretty dramatic. How’s that for unexpected impact?

A new faculty job search season is beginning. The people I talk to who are looking for jobs don’t seem worried at all. How is this possible?!! Are they just hiding it? Or is too early for the anxiety to set in? Or do some people just not worry?

I’ve been talking to a bunch of my friends from grad school in the last few weeks, some of whom have switched fields and are in new careers. This was related to the talk I gave a few weeks ago at the university where I did my PhD– I sent out some questions about life after grad school to my friends, and incorporated their answers in the slides for my talk. I got very emotional reading their answers– it was very sad to hear how people described the "heartbreak" of leaving their PhD field to pursue other paths. In my PhD program, going to industry tended to be seen as a failure— the successful route was to be a research professor at a top university. And yet, few alumni achieve "success" by this definition. Just looking at the numbers, it’s impossible. Most people do something else, which should be just fine.

And yet… the transition can be painful. Three years after graduating, even 10 years after graduating, there is still a lot of emotion there– the pain of giving up long-held dreams. One friend said it was like a long and painful breakup– I think it’s more like a divorce. You spend such a long time in grad school, that leaving academia for the "outside world" can be heartbreaking. It’s the only home you’ve known, even if it never seemed like a comfortable one. It makes me sad. I don’t think it has to be this way.

I think that engineering is doing a better job than the sciences in this respect– in engineering, both students and faculty are aware of a wider range of options for life after graduation. But in the pure sciences, it is science, science, science, straight ahead, or else you disappear over a steep cliff. No one seems to have much of an idea what happens outside of academia, particularly the faculty. In my program, doing anything "applied" tended to be sneered at.

These are gross generalizations, of course. Not everyone is clueless. I hope that they will become less and less clueless as time goes on. I hope universities will continue to sponsor career panels and talks by alumni and networking events, more and more. I hope faculty will take increasing pride in all of the different types of success that their students achieve after graduation, not just success in a research career. Bringing in smart, hard-working people, training them in critical thinking, analysis, project planning and execution (for that’s what a PhD teaches), and then making them feel like failures for not being academics afterwards is just plain stupid, and a gigantic waste of talent. And I think it hits the women particularly hard.

This week, two students wrote me to ask about possible PhD positions. They are both from University X in Far-Away-Country Y. I wanted to get an idea of what good GPA and test scores would be for Country Y, and so I went to talk to two co-workers from there. While we were talking, another student came in who happened to be an alum of University X. I showed him the students’ CV’s. "Look," I said– "they both say they are ranked 2nd in the class. What does that mean?"

Within 5 hours, I got an email from one of the prospective students. He had heard on his alumni bulletin board that I had been confused about how two students in the same university could have the same class rank, and wanted to explain how it worked. I am impressed! News travels fast in the small world of academia.

Clearly, I have to be careful about what I say in the lab from now on!