This article from the International Society for Computational Biology is really good and really worth discussing. Via 49%. She points to this article as well and it amazes me how different the advice is in both pieces from much of the anti procrastination advice given to people in the humanities, according to which we are to set our sights low and make peace with mediocrity.
Do you think this may have anything to do with the fact that scientists tend to be men and humanists, women? I must incorporate references to these pieces into my article on “procrastination,” sabotage, and block — because I think the diagnosis of “procrastination” and the advice on how to avoid it is, or are in fact a way to sabotage work.
I am still on strike, although I will return to writing posts of my own if I am ever paid. We will have Reading for Pleasure Wednesdays. We will wear white on Fridays. We will sing on weekends. I shall never again write posts about bargaining sessions with Reeducands, however, because I no longer bargain with these entities.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
As far as I’m concerned, all these points are as applicable to the humanities as they are to science. I have watched my husband over his long career in science that began when he was 12 and in which he is still engaged. I call him Mr. Science, because everything he produces is informed by his scientific outlook. He’s not an academic, because no one was hiring when he got his doctorate, but I think that he was lucky, because he got to pursue his deep interest in one aspect of physical chemistry and has seen the results of his work turned into display products. It’s been a good living for us, has permitted us to live abroad, travel, and get to know a lot of fascinating people.
Why these things should not be available to serious researchers in the humanities I do not know, but I know it’s so. I’m serious about what I do, but I can’t even convince the handyman that I have good ideas and have thought about things and worked on things all my life! As far as he’s concerned, I’m just a teacher, and everyone knows what losers teachers are!
I never go to any of the regular workshops on how to finish your thesis blah, because I know they are for a different type of person than I am.
If I have decided to do something, it will get done. That is all there is to it, for me.
But I’ve seen the courses on offer, and I’ve looked at some kind of powerpoint version of one online, and it seemed to try to use sociability in order to enhance motivation, as if intellectuality could be a simple flow-off from being more extraverted. Weird.
Thanks for these links; they’re helpful. I was especially heartened to see that, since I’m not a scientist over 25, my best work is not necessarily behind me.
“Leave the door open” is a good strategy, too. Since we don’t work in labs, conferences are the door for the humanities, I think.
A lot of our ideas about scientists are informed by the “genius” notion so beloved of the Germans. Most scientists I know are “creative pluggers.” They have great ideas and are constantly working on them and refining them.
Hamming’s original talk was hard for me to read…ugh he’s so judgmental and egotistical. That’s why I chose to link to the PLoS list instead lol.
I think a lot of the Good Scientist advice is authored by men who are assuming a mostly male audience. And yes, the scientist-as-loner-hero trope is alive and well (this article by a prof at Cambridge goes into more detail: http://tinyurl.com/m7eecd).
If anyone is interested, “Has Feminism Changed Science?” by Dr. Londa Schiebinger is a wonderful book that kinda changed my life. It covers the birth and life of the Western scientific establishment with a focus on female participation and the role of gender in shaping knowledge. More here: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/SCHHAS.html. Sorry, I have to plug that book every chance I get. If there is anything I’ve learned over the past few years, it is that SCIENCE IS GENDERED IN THEORY AND PRACTICE. It is advertised, portrayed and performed as a mostly male, extremely individualistic, ever-objective pursuit. I think this is why so many (not all!) male scientists have trouble seeing the inequities…
O GOOD, I’ll have to get the book and also re-plug it. Samia – one reason your blog fascinates me is that my college roommate, in the 70s, was an Asian woman in biology. The kind of harassment she had to go through trying to be a woman in science was mind boggling. She did succeed, is a geochemist at USGS, has a lot of papers and is well cited — but would have gotten further as a man and the harassment still goes on, although it’s not like what it was back then. It was bad enough that she *still* can’t face walking onto the campus where we studied, she’s too traumatized. What’s also freaky is that it’s taken me this long to fully comprehend what was going on. I knew her department graded on a curve whereas mine didn’t, so you had to worry about average raisers and this was rough; I knew the premeds were major saboteurs of others; etc. But I also thought a lot of what was going on was perfectionism and pickiness on her part, or that maybe she was forcing herself for neurotic reasons to be in a field that wasn’t really for her. It took actually getting harassed myself to realize what she had actually gone through and what it had been like.
Creative pluggers, very good point.
I actually did have my best ideas by 25, but didn’t have the archival work done by then, the maturity to work them out fully, or the perspective to write them up in a lucid way.
How to finish your thesis workshops, yes. I honestly think these are good for people who for whatever reason didn’t learn certain tips before, like work at your favorite hours, don’t work to exhaustion (as a rule, at least), get exercise because it makes your ideas come better, remember that as you work you may get ideas that don’t fit into this project, put those ideas in a box to use for the next project and don’t worry about fitting them into this one, ask your subconscious mind to work on your ideas while you sleep, etc., and for people who aren’t interested in their topic but must finish, and for people who don’t like writing but must finish. They may also be good for people who are isolated somehow (note that we all blog and Jennifer is posting pre writing and pieces of dissertation drafts to the Internet), because it IS fun to know that you’re not the only one working. What I don’t like about them is they assume you lack motivation and don’t know how to do basic things like goal setting and time management, which you MUST know if you have gotten this far in college and graduate school. So they are belittling and off point in those ways.
Science outside academia, yes. Belittling of humanities, yes. Belittling of teachers, yes. I’m about to post a couple of articles about these things to see what people think.
Prof Lady: I am VERY interested in hearing more about what obstacles your old roomie faced as an Asian woman in biology, if it’s anything you’d care to share.
Another great read: ‘Strangers’ of the Academy: Asian Women Scholars in Higher Education by Guofang Li, Gulbahar H. Beckett, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim. Also: Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity (edited by Thomas Nakayama and Judith Martin). The second includes essays written by some really brilliant East Asian/Southeast Asian women, including a professor who writes about how she perceives her race and cultural background affect the tone of the classroom environment.
Samia — you know, I don’t know all of it and I am also not entirely sure she knows all of it, because it is hard to imagine how easy DA WHITEMAN’S life can be / what it is like / a lot of the stuff gets so naturalized / and some of it is done to everyone.
But it was things like having people destroy her experiments; having people steal the xeroxed reading on reserve and cut the pages out of journals in the library it had been copied from (this was pre internet, everything was paper) so others couldn’t read them and yet they’d make it known that a small group of guys had them and was sharing it with friends; complaining to the professor about this and being told those were the breaks.
This kind of thing happened to all of us back then, in graduate school in the 80s there were lots of male professors who would write letters directly sabotaging female job candidates on principle and things like that. They would work to rule on women, make it all as hard as they legally could and not let you in on any networks or anything, and you wouldn’t even realize that men were getting all these breaks. So the same phenom was in the humanities but in those science labs it was a lot more aggressive and really cutthroat. Sabotaging and blocking so you will fail, quit, or break down. She, my roommate, can still barely talk about it, it’s as though she were some sort of torture victim, which I guess she actually is. I think there was a lot of direct verbal abuse too, and taunting, you’re not going to make it you’re not going to make it and it is in my power to prevent it.
Books: I’ve read great reviews of both of those, should get them.
Idea: my sister in law who is 40, so a bit younger, got a PhD in microbiology and then an MD. There were more women in it by the time she did it and the problems were never analyzed in my presence through the prism of sexism but I wonder if it is in response to this (and perhaps to going through it without realizing what it was) that she has the I’m going to the top and I don’t care what I have to do to whom to get there attitude she has. (All of this is pure speculation … and/but it also took me FOREVER to realize that how many of the subtler things that happened to me were gender discrimination.)
Also: the other thing about these 2 is that they are secretly arty, although interested in science / from science families and practically minded. I always thought part of their problem was this, they were studying their #2 talent not their #1 talent. BUT this I think now is a misdiagnosis — my roommate at least was dealing with sabotage and the way it pulls at you.
And: I was out of touch with this roommate for several years early in our careers, we were busy and moving around. When she reappeared she was and is this person who REALLY knows how to watch her back and fight. She has skills and information you just don’t get if you haven’t been through the whole wringer.