is the title of a book I bought just last week, written by Federico Rosei and Tudor Johnston from Université de Quebéc, Canada, a.k.a. mexico North. From the blurb at World Scientific, "This book provides young scientists, from physicists through to sociologists, the counsel and tools that are needed to be their own agents and planners, to survive and succeed, hopefully even thrive in science. Making a good career based on peer-reviewed science means navigating many stressful phases from graduate school through to permanent employment. Performing artists pay agents to help them in this effort. In effect, this book is designed to allow you to act as your own agent. You are counseled to analyze yourself deeply to know clearly what you want and whether you can live with it, how to make career choices and what you should then keep in mind, when to fight and when to yield. The unwritten rules of the “science game” are explained, including how to become published and known, the pitfalls of peer review and how to evade them, papers and posters, job interviews and getting your science funded. Interspersed with this are illustrative anecdotes and a fair amount of humor."
Looked like a winner to me, as it held the potential to be both entertaining and to perhaps provide me with some guidance from scientists from not-that-distant fields who have traveled this road before me. There was humour involved alright. More specifically, the joke was on me for buying this book in the first place.
What was disappointing was the economy of content displayed in the book; there was VERY little new information presented here which was not clear to me in my first year of grad school, like how it is important to publish in journals with high impact factors so as to get a higher potential number of readers and thus increase the odds for citations, that going to conferences is more about networking than gaining knowledge, that it is important to get along with your advisor because he or she is going to write letters of reference, etc. Holy obvious, Batman.
Moreover, the book adopts what in my opinion is a fallacy, that it's all about puttin' in hours, and that the more you work, the better the odds of getting somewhere in academia. According to the book, you can overcome lots of limitations and work around scientific talent if you just put in those 60+ hour weeks all the time. I've got plenty beef with this assertion. Even though I'm not as experienced as the authors of this book, I've definitely put in the ultralong hours during my PhD and post doc, and I've gathered some experience with more moderate (but still long) hours. My conclusion is that there are some bottlenecks inherent to science which cannot be traversed more rapidly by putting in more hours. This might be true for labwork, where there is a direct correlation between the number of hours you put in and the amount of data you get in the other end, but it certainly does not hold for the more creative aspects of the job, like writing a paper, interpreting data and setting up ideas for new projects and grant proposals. If you're writing a paper and you're struggling with formulating a section, spending more time with it might not help at all - trust me: I've tried. Spending more hours writing is probably gonna get you more words in the document, but the wordcount is hardly correlated with quality when it comes to scientific articles. Neither is it necessarily of any use staring into code, reading the same lines of code over and over again in hopes of finding the reason why the damn thing doesn't compile. Ditto for poring over your graphs trying to find new physical interpretations for the new data set which doesn't follow the same trend as the previous.
Sure; you've got to put in long hours and work hard, but you've also got to remember that you're in this for the long haul if you choose academia (or vice versa). Carving a legacy in science isn't a sprint, but a marathon, and few things are sadder than the professor who has no life outside of the lab.
If I run into the first author at a conference or something, I'm gonna get my money back, and I don't accept Canadian currency.
Looked like a winner to me, as it held the potential to be both entertaining and to perhaps provide me with some guidance from scientists from not-that-distant fields who have traveled this road before me. There was humour involved alright. More specifically, the joke was on me for buying this book in the first place.
What was disappointing was the economy of content displayed in the book; there was VERY little new information presented here which was not clear to me in my first year of grad school, like how it is important to publish in journals with high impact factors so as to get a higher potential number of readers and thus increase the odds for citations, that going to conferences is more about networking than gaining knowledge, that it is important to get along with your advisor because he or she is going to write letters of reference, etc. Holy obvious, Batman.
Moreover, the book adopts what in my opinion is a fallacy, that it's all about puttin' in hours, and that the more you work, the better the odds of getting somewhere in academia. According to the book, you can overcome lots of limitations and work around scientific talent if you just put in those 60+ hour weeks all the time. I've got plenty beef with this assertion. Even though I'm not as experienced as the authors of this book, I've definitely put in the ultralong hours during my PhD and post doc, and I've gathered some experience with more moderate (but still long) hours. My conclusion is that there are some bottlenecks inherent to science which cannot be traversed more rapidly by putting in more hours. This might be true for labwork, where there is a direct correlation between the number of hours you put in and the amount of data you get in the other end, but it certainly does not hold for the more creative aspects of the job, like writing a paper, interpreting data and setting up ideas for new projects and grant proposals. If you're writing a paper and you're struggling with formulating a section, spending more time with it might not help at all - trust me: I've tried. Spending more hours writing is probably gonna get you more words in the document, but the wordcount is hardly correlated with quality when it comes to scientific articles. Neither is it necessarily of any use staring into code, reading the same lines of code over and over again in hopes of finding the reason why the damn thing doesn't compile. Ditto for poring over your graphs trying to find new physical interpretations for the new data set which doesn't follow the same trend as the previous.
Sure; you've got to put in long hours and work hard, but you've also got to remember that you're in this for the long haul if you choose academia (or vice versa). Carving a legacy in science isn't a sprint, but a marathon, and few things are sadder than the professor who has no life outside of the lab.
If I run into the first author at a conference or something, I'm gonna get my money back, and I don't accept Canadian currency.
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If I run into the first author at a conference or something, I'm gonna get my money back, and I don't accept Canadian currency.
Throw hands outside the 7-11 again now, are we?
...Oh it's ON.
If he doesn't show up before 7 PM, I'll start without him >:(
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