Monday, July 27, 2015

2-year TT review

I am up for 2-year TT review in the coming weeks. Technically I have been on this job for only 1 year and 6 months. This is my first such review.

I am not sure what the committee looks for, but I am going to try to show the following:

Research
1) Established an active research program; got a larger space from the department and established a college wide center

2) Am supervising PhD, MS, undergrad and high-school students. Of course none of them have graduated till now. PhD people cant since it has been only 1.5 years for me to be here. MS will hopefully show more progress in this coming semester

3) Wrote a ton of grants. And by ton I mean 19 !

Now that I am writing it this seems to be a larger number. In my defense not all of them were complete grants (Like NSF 15 pages and NIH 12 pages). Some were smaller ( 1 or 2 pages) and some were collaborative (where again I wrote 1 or 2 pages).

Out of these I was successful in 5. This looks like a small number. In my defense 2 of the successful ones were NSF grants.

4) I was able to make my last year paper productive by finishing up the papers from my postdoc ( and since I didn't had a lab and/or students there was nothing much I could do). This makes up 4 papers.

This year my lab (with me being a senior author) have been able to produce papers. This number is 3 but 3 more papers are ready to be submitted (in 4 weeks hopefully).

Teaching 
1) I think I did good in teaching. Got decent reviews from my undergrad class. Taught 2 grad classes and the reviews were mostly positive. I am not sure what else to add here.

A collegue of mine adds up the stats from his reviews. Another adds up comments as well. May be I will do a combination of these two.

Service
1) Did a ton of service for conferences, journals. Was an editor for 2 special issues and 1 in progress. Also chairing 2 conference workshops.
2) did service for the department as well as the college.


What else would they look for? Am I missing something?


Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Students insulting professors

The title is not misleading.

A student comes to my office and is visibly upset since hir paper has been rejected. I take the following steps:

1) Offer my insight on why the paper was rejected.
2) Pointed out that one of the reviewers had a valid point
3) we should look at the valid point and try to revise the paper accordingly
4) we should do more experiments ( that I have advised you to do in the previous hundred meetings)

The students looks at me for sometimes and then offers hir insights.

a) The paper is fine but I am going to revise the grammar n stuff
b) the experiments that you are talking cannot be done (I know for sure that they can be)
c) the reviewers did not understand the paper and one of the reviewers was discriminatory towards me ( though the reviews were mixed and there was no indication atleast on paper that this has happened; plus the reviewer had a valid point)
d) I think that we should involve other researcher/professor who knows about research and can get me to write the paper that can be published (because of course you are no at par to this task).

I have heard points a,b,c before but the last point stuck to me. I have a PhD from a large R1 university, years of postdoc at a national lab and papers that are close to 30 in number in well-respected journals and conference proceedings.

I am sure that I know how to write up a paper that can get published. But you the student sure do not know how to even write a paragraph without making 10 grammar mistakes. Ofcourse is hir sight it is all my fault that I have not been able to make hir write a paper that is worth publishing despite spending enormous amount of time editing his papers to make it readable.

I am just wondering though is it only me or does this happen to everyone (atleast the junior faculty?) I have another colleague (female tenure track) who has experienced this sort of thing. So may be it is a junior faculty thing or this 40 something student is that naive (btw I am in my very early 30's)? but this has been weighing on me since yesterday. I know it shouldn't but I cant believe what I am hearing.