As a professor, journal editor, reviewer, and mentor, I review a lot of writing. I come from a long tradition of mentors who focused on writing — during my PhD, I often heard stories of my grand advisor returning his students’ work covered in red line edits, and then I […]
The mammoth is actively contemplating — perhaps a bit too much!– but as you can see, this blog has been a little neglected since I started my faculty position last fall. I’ve got a nice series of posts lined up, but to kick things off again, here’s a great contribution […]
A month after last January’s State of the Union Address, in which President Obama called for an increase in STEM graduates, The Atlantic published this piece on the “Ph.D Bust,” lamenting the decline in academic job placement rates for scientists. The latter has been making the rounds again, coincident with […]
Maybe you’ve always know you’ve wanted to be a research professor in wildlife ecology. Perhaps you’ve just taken a course on fungi and stumbled into a whole new world of career possibilities. Either way, getting past the first step– your undergraduate degree– and onto the academic path isn’t easy. Academic culture isn’t […]
Last year, I crowd-funded my attendance to ScienceOnline2012, an un-conference for people communicating about– and doing– science on the internet. In exchange, I offered to interview one attendee for every $100 I raised. In the lead-up to ScienceOnline2013, I’ll be sharing those interviews. Based on feedback from Twitter, I decided […]
Last year, I crowd-funded my attendance to ScienceOnline2012, an un-conference for people communicating about– and doing– science on the internet. In exchange, I offered to interview one attendee for every $100 I raised. In the lead-up to ScienceOnline2013, I’ll be sharing those interviews. Based on feedback from Twitter, I decided […]
This is a quick update to say: I defend my dissertation tomorrow! I have a lot of thoughts about this, most of which I am unable to articulate because I am literally eating, breathing, and dreaming my dissertation, which means I’m finding it difficult to articulate anything that isn’t about […]
Things have been rather quiet on this blog in the last month or so as I’ve been working hard on #phd2012, and I wanted to give a brief update lest you thought this particular mammoth had gone extinct. I’ll be defending my dissertation on July 5th, and am planning on […]
This post is part of the Diversity in Science Blog Carnival on Imposter Syndrome, hosted by Scicurious over at Neurotic Physiology. When I started graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, I felt like an imposter. I thought that all of my fellow grad students were more together, had more […]
As a young undergraduate, I remember researching my first term papers and take-home exams, flexing my new-found research skills to find the absolute best references. At first, I equated “best” with “newest.” This wasn’t necessarily a product of my training; my undergraduate advisor teaches ecology from Foundations of Ecology, which […]
The Contemplative Mammoth 