coldhearted scientist وداد

At Dame Eleanor Hull work is being done on two sets of questions. One set is on mentoring:

Do you feel you were well-mentored, ill-mentored, or just not mentored?  What was the best piece of advice you got from a mentor?  Where did one of yours go spectacularly wrong?  How are you/would you like to be different with your own grad students?  How would Present-you mentor your Younger Self, if you could send a message back?  How would you like to be mentored now?

The other is on renunciation. People are discussing what in their lives or in their presumably former identities they renounced in order to have an academic career or identity. I do not know because I set out on an academic path too early to have something else to lose, and also because I saw this as developing an orientation I already had. I was never really tempted by suggestions I should do something else. I would work in a different field or do a different kind of doctoral degree, yes, but I have never seriously considered being anything other than a research professional.

I have never renounced “life” the way some people feel they have or have renounced parts of, but I have on various occasions renounced research, for different reasons. It was always a strange, dissociative experience when not traumatic, because it always was, precisely, a renunciation of identity. One of these occasions involved a decision to focus on the advancement of our program. The rationale was that the obstructions to both research and rational teaching would have to be faced head on and removed first. It was true although we should have added a small amount of research to our plan was a small amount of anyway; we did get to conferences, to change our air and clear our minds, but we might have done better to do less expensive, less ephemeral things.

Some of the things we achieved were a reduction of teaching loads for all by one course, rational teaching assignments (everyone teach as close as possible to, if not in their own areas of expertise), functional scheduling, such that students could take courses in an order that made sense and faculty would get students who had had a chance to actually take the prerequisites for courses, and a greatly modernized curriculum. There was a great deal more but these were the core elements and the achievement really is monumental.

It was the only one of the times I renounced research that I did so in a fully conscious way, and the objectives were mostly achieved. Still it was very difficult to renounce research, because for me this is like a self mutilation, really.

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I find that research, in terms of finding things and reading them, and writing are both easy. Deciding what to think about what one has found is more difficult although that problem is of course resolved once one does further research. Creating an order for a project is not difficult if you have been taking care of it all along. Between deciding what to think about what one has found and creating an order for a project there is some ineffable, intermediate stage of designing ideas and this, I find, is where one needs a real life discussion group.

Axé.