The End of the Semester

I’ve written about teaching nerves, and the anticipation of that new semester and new academic year. This week is finals week, the semester is now almost over. I’m writing this post as much for me as for anyone else, although I will always gladly take comments. This post is about the end of the semester and the feelings that I come to have by week 16, it’s a reminder of them, that I plan on re-reading shortly before I start teaching again.

Last week I said goodbye to the students who I had seen on a regular basis for 16 weeks. I am sure that they didn’t all share the same feelings I had, which were those of a type of sadness that comes with knowing that people you’ve seen routinely will now fade into the student body. For a small group of those students, that actually won’t be much of a change from the times when we did meet. However, for the large majority whose personalities have been more evident to me, I’ll miss their habits and being able to potentially predict what they might say.

There are the students who always sit in the same place. Even if they say nothing, I know where they will be. They are also the ones that look vaguely confused if someone else happens to take their seat. There are the students who show up for exams in pajamas and other fine attire (I had a student who wore a shirt suggesting to me that he was in Spain when they won the World Cup this year, I thought what a fantastic experience that must have been and wondered whether that was made possible by the GT Barcelona program). T-shirts with lots of geek humour made me smile, and appreciate the sensibilities of their wearers. And of course there were students who were preparing for job interviews and came to class looking much tidier than the instructor, a piece of me was rooting for their success, another wondering whether I should have combed my hair or attempted something more tidy for class myself.

Then there are the students who speak during class discussions. I learnt so much from them, not just content that was related to the class, but through their perspectives about their lives, their experiences and so forth. Glimmers into the myriad of different worlds that our student body collectively comprises. Over the course of the sixteen semesters I watched as people found their voices, saw individuals drawing connections among the different elements of the class materials. I guess that’s what it means to watch learning happen. I had after-class encounters. Sometimes a little awkward, not everyone wants to hang out with their Professor on the Tech Trolley, it’s not very hip after all. Ah, I remember feeling the same. That was a long time ago. But others wanted to chat, about class, about life outside of class. Some wanted to know about England, what could I tell them about student life there and so forth.

And now that’s done. It is time for all of us to move on to the next challenge. People I saw routinely will no longer be in that circle, but I am sure I will continue to catch glimpses of them as they move around campus into new classrooms and experiences. I started with apprehension and ended by missing those familiar students.

What do you Love about your Job?

I am quite sure I am not alone when I say that feel so busy I don’t feel like I have much time for anything other than the long list of things that need to get done. But, I had a conversation with someone and he asked me what do I love about my job. I paused. I’ve told many people that being an academic at Georgia Tech has been my favourite job to date. (It’s not that I have not enjoyed my two previous jobs, just in summary not quite as much as this). In fact, i’d just said it again. I love been an academic. Why, came the reply. Pause. Er…

Why is it that I can easily enumerate the challenging parts. If I look at this blog I see a pretty sizable enumeration. So, this post is an attempt to address that.

Diversity in activities. The three elements of being an academic, research, teaching and service, mean that I have variety in my job. Most days I spend in some combination of the three. In the short term this can feel chaotic, in the longer term though it means that I am exposed to a variety of activities. I feel stretched by these activities, and that can and does mean learning (as I prepare, say, for another lecture in the new to me class I am teaching this semester).

Grant Writing. Grant writing pushes me to think about the important intellectual problems I want to solve, and articulate their import and the best conceivable approaches to solving them. After writing one I am almost always eager to get on with the research described within.

Writing. Writing takes time. I like the difference between what sounds good in my head and what reads coherently on paper. Setting things down on paper makes me realise how much more there is to structuring an argument than what is in my head when I start. I like the process of wrestling with text. I’d prefer not to have to do it more than once of course, but that is the way of reviewers!

Mentoring. Wow. I love mentoring. I’m not always sure that the people I provide advice too like it or find it helpful, but I love giving advice. It is humbling to be asked, always intellectually demanding and rewarding when in my mind I find the “right answer.” Sometimes, as I am sure my students know all too well, I have to talk-out-loud and through it to get to an answer.

Knowing the Mission. I worked for two companies both of whom would change their mission statements. I still remember spilling my coffee over the book that Lucent published to help me understand it and what the corporate values were (there was a poster included so that you could hang the concise edition on your cubicle wall). I remember wondering “how do I fit in?” What I like about academia is that the mission statement seems clear. Educate. That includes teaching, but also research. It involves the students, it involves the State and the public. Educate. Really simple, and when I see the students running from one class to another (in the 10 minutes that Georgia Tech allocates for this), there it is, mission statement alive. As I squeeze into thTech Trolley, there it is again.

As I look at this list, and I am sure that there is more it’s all about learning (research, teaching and even service). That’s the skill that our Ph.D. training emphasizes. Research in the short term can feel like a series of to-dos. Meetings. Grants to be written. Papers to submit to conferences and journals. Reviews. Rebuttals. Rejections. And of course other people’s validation of your ideas in each of these events. Perhaps that’s why reflection gets lost. I am driven to do what I do for a love of research. I guess the conversation was a reminder that I need to spend more time thinking about what it is that I am passionate about.

What about you?

Twitter Question

I developed an important portion of my “friending” policy for social media after I made a mistake on flickr. I made a connection to a student in the spirit of having enjoyed my interactions with that student. I didn’t think. A faculty member reaching out meant that the student rapidly reorganized their photographic collection. Thankfully they told me that they had taken these steps. I realised what I had done.

In light of that, my policy w.r.t. to students is that I will friend anyone who seeks me out on social media, as long as I know the person through our shared invisible college, visible college or some other connection. But, I do not reach out. That’s my way of respecting a student’s privacy and not putting them in a situation where they potentially feel they have to edit their content. I guess the counter-argument might be that it means they have to work harder to network with me.

I have a question. Twitter. I am followed by a student whose tweets (which while I do not see in my feed since I do not follow them) I enjoy. Is it appropriate to follow them. If I am followed, may I follow in return? How does that work? What do people feel comfortable with?

Ignore it: A Strategy for Dealing with Email

Thanks to those who responded to my email posts.

Along the way I learnt about another strategy which is to ignore it. OK, I do that too. Ouch, that’s hard to say, it’s one of the times when I wish I had an anonymous blog, but that’s an entirely different post.

So, now to back up a bit. I do in fact just ignore some of it, if not permanently, at least for a while. I think that’s as much related to not knowing how to deal with it as it is with not wanting to deal with it. Sometimes, if I get really lucky it’s a group message and someone else does deal with it. Sometimes it’s important not to be a first responder.

Occasionally, and somewhat embarrassingly sometimes it gets lost in my inbox and enough time elapses that clearly it has been dealt with. What I mean is that the deadline by which the email made sense to respond to passes. Whoops. Silence becomes the decision, sometimes that’s also “dropping the ball.” I am now wincing, but continuing under the belief that I am not alone in this practice.

There’s another category too, which is ignoring it even though I want to respond to it. The faculty have a discussion list which I very much enjoy, and am glad we have. But sometimes I decide that in terms of time allocation it’s not a good idea for me to respond to a message. So, I ignore that opportunity.

Teaching Nerves

I’ve been writing about service lately, so I thought it was time to give teaching some coverage. It’s week 12 of a 16 week semester, and at this point my teaching schedule has been internalised and I have gotten over most of my nerves. But, nerves about teaching accompany each semester.

The very first time I taught at Georgia Tech, I actually did not teach I gave a 1 hour conference talk. Mmm… not so good. My first thought was “oh shit, I’m going to run out of all my carefully prepared material” in a fortnight. I also decided that I was going to need to come out from behind the podium and interact with the class. I was nervous and frightened, not because of the students, they were lovely and kind and as my first class I have fond memories of them (thank you, you know who you are). But I was still nervous, I wanted to do a good job, but it was apparent to me then that I didn’t know how to teach and had had little practice to draw on.

My style has evolved in the 7 years since then. Mostly in a good way. I am still known for getting off topic, for my “um”, and for mispelling things on the whiteboard and then trying to unsuccessfully convince people that it’s British English. Georgia Tech students do not typically fall for this, but it does mean I don’t try to correct the misspelt word anymore. (I have learnt that once the word has gone wrong it’s just best left alone, attempts to correct frequently result in even worse misspellings).

But despite the evolution in teaching methods the nerves remain. Before class starts each semester I typically have dreams about teaching. I miss class. I teach the wrong class. I discover 5 weeks into a 16 week semester that I was meant to teach a class that’s been meeting without me (not likely) for those 5 weeks.

This builds until the first day. And I now understand it to be a combination of performance anxiety and meeting new people. I’m always a bit nervous when I meet a lot of new people. And there’s nothing like class for meeting a lot of new people. All at once. They all know you, and you don’t know any of them.

One of the things that eases over time is that you start to get to know the students. Some by name. Some by the place where they sit, for we are all creatures of habit. Some because they knit in class. Some because they show up wearing pajama bottoms to class, something that you wish you could do. A degree of familiarity gets established, for these particular hours on these particular days, we will be together, and we’ll have to make the most of it.

One area where my nerves have dissipated over time is in trying to reach everyone. Some people have terrible game faces. They sit there staring at you as if you were mad, or as if they were angry, but it turns out that that’s just the way that they pay attention. Knowing that made me less nervous. And I am glad that there is reach there, even if it’s accompanied by a look of vague hostility (sometimes not so vague).

I used to get nervous when I couldn’t reach someone. Then I read a wonderful book about the experience of being a student. I learnt that some of the students in my classes are not there to be reached (or at least not as much as I would like). They’ve made calculation that involves prioritizing among the classes they are taking, and yours doesn’t make the top end of the cut. I still try, for a while, and then once it is clear what my place is in their classroom calculus, I recognize it, and at least while other feelings of frustration may ensue, I am not nervous.

There is one thing that still makes me nervous, when students receive grades that are not what they wanted or expected. Female Science Professor wrote about this, I am glad I am not alone.

But the main reason I wanted to write the post was to say that in the 7 years I’ve been teaching, my nerves have subsided, but they have not gone away. I spent some years thinking that eventually my nerves would pass, now I wonder whether some degree of nerves is central to the experience.

Service

Quite often I am asked about service that can be turned down. What do others think? Always looking for suggestions…

First, I’d like to propose that the HCI community consider a new faculty workshop at one of its conferences, like Software Engineering faculty hold at ICSE. A discussion about service, what’s appropriate, and at what point in a person’s career, seems like a perfect topic. I also know that by suggesting this I have ivolunteered to organize such a workshop. That’s the way of service.

OK, now to answer the question. Caveat, I am only fairly recently tenured and have never seen a tenure case being reviewed. These are my thoughts as an outsider.

* Know your Institution. What do they expect, of me, and others like me? Do I do a similar amount and type of service as colleagues who are at similar career points?

* Split service into at least two different categories: research community and university-based. Research community includes reviewing, associate chairing, papers chairing, general chairing (conferences), serving on editorial boards for journals, being a member of or chairing national committees, and so forth. University service involves serving on committees: admissions, recruiting, search, etc… for students, faculty and administrators.

The two types of service have different objectives. Research community service makes you more accountable and visible to your invisible college. Institutional service makes you more accountable and visible to your local academic community. When I decide what service to take on I think about these different objectives. I use my vita, where I record all my service activities, to help make decisions about my “portfolio” of service.

* Account for time. Service changes over time, you review papers and attend program committee meetings before you are asked to run one. (You’d like to see a few meetings before you run one, I promise). I try to visualize service as paths along which I walk. What I do reflects that path.

University service is more complicated. Some types of service may follow the same arc of research service. Being responsible, reliable, reasonable and successful may lead to more opportunities. Other types seem, in my mind, to require a different perspective on time, one of time management. Some types of service I manage as a temporal activity, how much time should I spend doing that particular piece of work.

* Theme. When I joined the academy, I was given advice to theme my service, I chose graduate programs. It took me several years to learn how the University thinks about graduate programs. I’m now pretty sure I know what the minor requirements are, and I pretty much can provide all the requirements to the HCC Ph.D. program. I also know the one thing that we have left to specify. By focusing on graduate programs in their many aspects I feel over time I’ve become something of an expert, and that means I am able to be a more effective at service. That said, I am now searching for a change, since I’d like to learn about other aspects of the Institute. My point is that themed service helped me organize it and do it well and time-effectively.

* Balance. In addition to understanding the balance of service within the realm of service (balancing external and internal with respect to your vita), I’ve also tried to be careful about balancing it with respect to teaching and research. Sometimes I’ve done something less than perfectly because I needed time for research or teaching. It can be hard, I don’t think of myself as a perfectionist, but I don’t like to do a bad job. But, research and teaching matter, and my hunch is that they matter more.

*Crown Jewels. Some years ago someone suggested to me that I try to focus on service related to the archival tracks of a conference, whether it be paper reviewing, being an Associate or Papers Chair and so forth. When a community trusts you with their crown jewels, that’s a good thing. Of course, there are other valuable activities that need service support, but I’ve tried to balance towards the crown jewels. I think this maybe true of institutional service too. You may be able to help make something that you do service around a crown jewel, and there are some committees which are very important to do well. Again, I try to ask myself, is this important, if I take it on and commit to doing a good if not excellent job, in addition to it being done I will have the respect of my colleagues?

* Reviewing for the NSF. This is extremely valuable and important. It’s important because it’s the business of helping the NSF get reviews for the myriad of proposals they receive each year. It’s valuable because you get to see the NSF reviewing process and understanding that can help with grant writing.

* Quality. For each new service request I ask myself if I took it on would it cause it or anything else I am currently doing to suffer in terms of quality. If so, my answer is usually no.

350 years of the Royal Society

The Royal Society is celebrating 350 year anniversary. Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society was published in 1667, just five years after the Society received it’s Royal Charter. Sprat’s history, included a description of  Science as being driven by experimentation rather than the reading of historical texts. Practice not theory, perhaps.

[The Fellows] never affirm’d any thing, concerning the cause, till the trial was past… for whoever has fix’d on his Cause, before he has experimented; can hardly avoid fitting his Experiment, and his Observations, to his own Cause, which he had before imagin’d.

Francis Bacon’s novel, The New Atlantis (published posthumously in 1627) argued for research focused not just on the physical world, but on improving society. I am struck by how central that remains… not a day goes past where I don’t hear arguments that turn on how knowledge improves society, science is an economic driver (and economic drivers are the key to societal uplift), and more recently about how science should solve important global problems (the environment).

Something else that struck me reading these early histories was the differences in the practice of science then and how. We talk about interdisciplinary research a lot nowadays. One of the founding members of the Royal Society, was Christopher Wren (the architect of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London). As a scientist, influenced by William Harvey who was a physician who challenged convention by arguing that blood flowed round the body, Wren decided to experiment with a transfusion on a dog. He was also a professor of Astronomy. Of course science has become more specialized, but this gives me a feel for how much more specialized science has become.

The Royal Society was a Gentlemen’s club, a rich gentlemen’s club. A woman asked to visit the Royal Society, and in 1667 she became the last woman to visit the Society’s meeting rooms until the 20th century. The Royal Society was a closed society.

There is so much more that could be written, but for me this anniversary has been a personal opportunity not just to learn more about something that is a part of my national heritage, but also something that is a part of the business I find myself in 350 years later.

Dear Sir…

For some time, I did think that Dear Sir emails were just a confusion about appropriate address, and that address forms were actually gender specific. But, I kept all the messages that I received addressed Dear Sir, and now I have a corpus to examine. And while it is definitely true that some of the corpus might be attributed to English as a Second Language skills, it doesn’t explain the entire corpus.

Specifically, I’m beginning to notice that some of these messages go on in very good English. Good enough that Dear Sir seems out of place in the message.

Some of them also write to me and my colleagues as part of a group spam asking me for paid positions to work on research that I am clearly not interested in. As a result of these I edited my website to include a picture of me, actually two, which I think make it pretty clear that I am female. I also wrote about appropriate forms of address on my website. And yet it persists. I receive emails that are well worded, but just don’t address me according to my gender, even some that otherwise show careful attention to my research and well worded descriptions.

I don’t think it’s intentional (“I refuse to believe that she’s woman faculty member”). Instead I wonder whether it’s the result of not being exposed to enough women in the sciences in academia. Does that lack of exposure lead to forgetting that you might encounter a woman? I know this is dangerous territory for a blog. I am not anti-men. I am not even suggesting that this is harassment (I’ve discussed that before without including this). I am however, increasingly wondering whether Dear Sir is an echo of being in an environment where the expectations are that Doctor or Professor = Man. This message is another attempt to explain a) why it shouldn’t occur and b) why I find it bothersome.

Email: How do you manage it?

I was just recently asked how I dealt with my email. That’s a great question. Here’s what I do in no particular order, what do you do?

* I take reassurance knowing that others clearly can’t cope with their email. I don’t mean that to sound harsh, rather I mean it to be about setting my expectations for coping realistically. I have a colleague who described being an academic as a permanent state of graceful failure.  So, don’t beat yourself up on top of everything else.

* When I think its going to distract me, I quit my mail application. This prevents me from using the fact that new mail has arrived to cease whatever it is I am supposed to be doing. I do worry that this violates the implicit expectations that email will be dealt with fairly quickly.

* When reading email I try to decide whether a task can be completed more quickly than it would take me to either ignore the email and re-read it later or to craft a diplomatic response. Sometimes this has actually led me to agree to do something when I might otherwise have said no, because the time spent crafting the gracious “no” message is longer than actually doing what is asked.

* I have gotten better about asking myself whether it is my responsibility, and if so what should I do. I am better about asking others to help me if I think they can. I have gotten better about deciding that someone else is responsible for the email and another will be generated when I am more immediately required. Sometimes I respond with a question about responsibilities, in order to get clarification on whether what I am reading is a to-do or informational.

* Using my website to communicate some of my email policies. I now routinely delete all email that comes to me addressed as “Dear Sir.” I am glad that I have clear policies about recommendation letters. The hardest thing in my experience has been to enforce them, but through enforcement comes consistency.

I have thought about

* Using my email sig file to communicate a different set of expectations about when I deal with email. Mainly because I think we may have gotten to a point where a more immediate response is expected.

I aspire to

* Not sweating my email policy

What do you do? Lets share some tips!

Micro Management

I don’t like being subject to micromanagement, but that’s not what I want to write about in this post.

In my continuing search to try and explain why I am so busy, I want to discuss micro management instead. I am a micro-manager, a very small business operating within the University. The business that I am the manager of is the one that is associated with my grants and the research they support. One way to think of this business is the business of academic supervision that culminates in Ph.D., M.S., or B.S. degrees. That’s the intellectual way to think about this business, also known as “the fun part.” But there’s another way to think about this business, one of financial management. I have great support in this from people who understand this financial business, but I remain its manager.

At the front end, I am responsible for writing grants and proposals.It’s what happens when they get funded (hooray!) that I want to focus on, because there’s a whole new set of things that I have to manage kicks in. This is all the non-intellectual work associated with my micro business of which I am the micro manager.

Each semester I have to decide which grant what student is going to be paid from. The first decision is of course whether it’s appropriate to pay a particular student from a particular grant. That’s the easier part. The next part is to see whether those grants have the appropriate resources for hiring people. One reason why this is non-trivial is because budgets are estimates, salary computations for labor are made at the start of a proposal (which can be a year before the grant comes to fruition) and so there is possibility for the estimated salary to not quite match the actual salary at the time of the grant. Of course we plan for salary increases, but this is inherently a business of estimates.

Another piece of decision making turns on the future. For example, if I support this semester and that other grant doesn’t come through, I may have to ask the student to TA. It also includes deciding how many students can be supported on a single grant, which gets more complicated if the grant is shared with another Principle Investigator. All of this determines who else can be hired, although some (all?) NSF grants offer a supplement especially to support undergraduate students, so that can sometimes factor in to some hiring decisions. Finally with respect to hiring there is the question of whether I get hired. Most academics only get paid for the nine-month academic year, so there are three months in the summer where an academic is required to support themselves out of grants. (At least three months, but that’s another message).

Then there’s travel, equipment, miscellaneous purchases and so forth. Just the other day, some computer memory was required, and I have to make the decision not just what to purchase, (something I can ask the student to do, thank you), but also which grant I should charge that cost on. I’m in the loop on every single decision, whether it’s a matter of a few dollars or several thousand. The latter seems sensible, the former are a part of life.

Another area of micro management is the fascinating thing about money in academia. Not all types of money are the same. All though all money is in the U.S. dollar, in academia not all money is the same. $1 does not always equal $1, because it depends what type of dollars we’re talking about. In the University, there are rules associated with the expenditure of different forms of money. These rules exist because of the sources of that money. Contract research, for example, follows the rules of contracting. Government funding, resources that stem from the tax-payer, follows a set of standards of appropriate expenditure. And foundation, a category of money that is a donation, follows a third set of rules. So, for each spending decision, I have to pay attention to the rules of the source of the money. Some of the rules are relatively simple, but of course there are “special cases” that defy any particularly obvious logic. I am the sort of person who likes to follow financial rules, which I find easier to do when I understand their logic. This slows me down at time. So I have three sets of rules in my head, and a decision about that $27 bill, and the help of fabulous staff who make sure I haven’t completely botched up the odd cases.

And then there’s the accounts themselves. I’ve been very lucky to have a variety of sponsorship (thank you sponsors). Over time that’s turned into a reasonable list of different account numbers. Yes, each different source has it’s own account number, so that it can be accounted for. That makes sense, until you see the list of course. I micro manage a list of numbers, each with a title that is either extremely reflective of what that money was for, or a bit more ambiguous (I have one that is so unidentifiable to me that I remember it by a process of elimination actually). One thing I try not to think about is the sheer number of account numbers that must exist when considering the faculty as a whole. And of course, my list also includes access to numbers that belong to another faculty member. Anyway, it’s just more time spent micro managing.

I don’t think I can think of a way to organize this system that would make any more sense, while simultaneously observing all the rules associated with anything that involves money. On the other hand, I also see this as being part of my role as the head of a micro business which requires my micro management.