Junior Faculty Confidential

Recently I met someone who just started a faculty job fresh out of grad school, about 5 months ago. Sheepishly they said to me, "So, uh... how did you find your first year?"

Gleefully I replied, "It was terrible! But don't worry, it's terrible for everyone, then it gets really good."

The truth of the matter is this - until you have a solid group of trained PhD students, some grant money, and have taught a class more than once, the job feels incredibly stressful. All the constant demands on your time, and the constant rejection - grant rejections, paper rejections, low teaching evaluations, makes you wonder if you can possibly stand another day.

Honestly, in my first year, I wandered around muttering to myself the Peace Corps mantra, "The toughest job I'll ever love, the toughest job I'll ever love". At work I worked, and at home I watched an insane amount of mind-numbing television. I had family members ask me why I was doing this, and if it was worth all the work. Truthfully, I contemplated alternate careers. I remember saying once to my husband, "Wouldn't it be nice to be a barista? They don't need to worry about budgets, or teaching evaluations, or annual reviews. They just make coffee. I can totally do that! I practically earned a PhD in coffee during grad school!"

But then I received funding, and I was over the moon. My students blossomed into fine researchers, and began hitting home runs in their publications. I started teaching the same courses again, and my prep time became nothing.

I can't claim everything is easy, of course, but I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that anything is better than that first year, and it does indeed get better.

Acceptance Rates and Impact Factors

For those of you who do publish at computer science conferences*:

1) On your CV/Biosketch/Website/etc. list-of-publications, do you include conference acceptance rates?

2) If you do, what  is the threshold for you to mention it? (e.g., 50%, 30%, 10% ?)

For those of you who don't publish at computer science conferences:

0) Hey, why aren't you publishing at CS conferences? We're cool people, and we start counting at zero.  

1) On your CV/Biosketch/Website/etc. list-of-publications, do you include journal impact factors?

2) If you do, what is the threshold for you to mention it? (e.g., do you list IFs for startup journals)?

And for anyone willing to share their field / subfield, I'd be interested to hear that as well. I'm planning to assemble this information into a longer post on the topic in a few weeks.

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* This includes anything which has archival proceedings, like some workshops, symposia, summer/winter/fall/spring schools, etc. 

Happy Birthday, Ada! [CSEdWeek]

Today is the great Ada Lovelace's birthday. In case you have't noticed my icon, she has always been my favorite computer scientist, so I was delighted to see today's Google's doodle:

Ada's birthday celebration also helps kick off Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek) which, as a computer science educator (and friend of NCWIT), I am honored to support. CSEdWeek is a worldwide effort to increase interest and participation in the awesomeness that is CS. Lots of great resources on the CSEdWeek website, go check it out.

Finally, in other exciting FCS news, it turns out yesterday was Grace Hopper's birthday! Two famous FCSes were born one day apart. I think that's really cool. Any of you share birthdays with Grace or Ada? This is actually a fun math problem, and, indeed, forms the basis of a cryptological attack called the the birthday attack.

See! Not only is CS everywhere, but:

Seeing sexism in academia - moving up the ranks opens the eyes

A few years ago I remember reading an article about the fact that as women become more senior in their disciplines they start to encounter more sexism. For a long time I've been trying to figure out how that worked - was it that senior women encountered senior men more often, and were thus encountering old attitudes?

Recently, after a particularly upsetting incident, I realised what it is. It is that as we become more senior and have more experiences, we simply see sexism more. We are more aware. As junior women, when we encounter a microaggressive comment, it's just one papercut. Maybe it's one of those very subtle papercuts that you don't even notice until a few days later when you use rubbing alcohol.

But as you become more senior, you become more aware. You start counting these comments, and noticing them more and more.

"What's the big deal? Who cares what they say?" the well-intentioned male colleague says. The big deal is that at work I am Scientist first, Woman second. Men that treat my science as secondary (or even peripherally) to my gender insult my intelligence and insult my years of hard work to get to the place I am at.

Furthermore, the fact that these comments are unequally delivered is particularly infuriating. If, when my male colleagues had newborns, people said, "OMG! How will you survive as a professor??? How will you keep your research program afloat?! AUGH!!!", it would be ok. If, when my male colleagues wore colorful clothing, their senior colleagues stopped them in the hallway and said, "Please don't take this in the wrong way, but that shirt really brings out the color of your beautiful eyes.", it would be ok.

But it's not equal. Women-as-mother, women-as-sexulized-object - these take first place. Women-as-scholar, woman-as-professor is in the back seat.

So what do I do in these situations when they happen to me? First, my heart starts pounding. I think, "This is A Moment! I am supposed to Say Something!" Then, I stop. I realize this person is just clueless. They have no idea that they are saying all this dreadful stuff only to women and not men. They honestly have no earthly idea. Finally, I ask myself if this is a Teaching Moment or not. It usually is not, at least not right then. 

These attitudes are so ingrained in our culture, they are just a part of how many people think. Publically humiliating the offender will not suddenly make them change their ways. But sometimes I desperately want to.

Signal Boost: Help get GoldieBlox off the ground

This is absolutely, positively awesome.

It's called GoldieBlox, and is a new engineering toy marketed to 5-9 year old girls, developed by Debbie Sterling, a female engineer from Stanford. It's meant to inspire girls in the same way legos and erector sets inspire boys, and uses storytelling to do it. (Reminds me a little of Computational Fairy Tails, actually :-))

I think it's brilliant. I always hated the "pink aisle" at the toy store, and agree that we definitely need more toys geared toward girls that engage their spatial and problem solving abilities.

She has a KickStarter campaign to get her toy into production, and is 25% toward her goal. So go watch the video, then donate some money if you are able. Even $5 could go a long way.

And, Debbie - kudos for a great idea. I wish you lots of luck!

My how things change

Before you are a professor:

"OMG, I cannot believe the professor's slides have typos in them. And a boring PPT template. And looks like it was written in 1983. Oh, and, like, OMG, don't they know we don't use gopher anymore??"

After you are a professor:

Hmm... will they notice the mustard stain? 

Yeah. It's that bad, folks. I have typos! Spelling errors! Ugly slides that are from 1983! And despite my best efforts, large parts of my lectures are BORING!

My dear professors of yesteryear, I am sorry for judging. I get it now.

Houston, we have an image problem

I was at a novelty store a few months ago, and came across a board game called "The Mad Professor Science Kit". I noted that the mad science professor looks nothing like me at all.

I've written a lot about how journalists and artists and other media people need to get the memo about what professors and scientists look like, in order to help change images in the minds of the younger generation. 

Alas, we still have a ways to go. Here is my unscientific analysis.

Method: Clip Art Google Image search, Screenshot of page 1 of results.

Term 1: professor

Results: 8% owl, 92% male, 0% female. Only one person who may be of asian or latino descent. (Note: Page 2 has a whopping two female professors - wowie! And one person of color.) 

Term 2: scientist

Results: 80% male, 20% female. No owls. One person of color. Page two has owls, and a few more women.

Term 3: engineer

Results: Of 19 humans and gendered characters (Mickey Mouse), 90% male, 10% female. No people of color.

Term 4: "computer scientist"

Results: Of the three humans, 33% are women! And it's Grace Hopper, baby! No people of color, though we do have a link to "African Americans in Science and Technology", which is nice. An a Pi symbol, cat, Connect 4, and some cool geek pride T-shirts. 

"Software engineer" and "programmer" do not yield very positive results, but I am pleased to say "computer programmer" yields several women, including a woman of color and this awesome coloring book page: 

I know it seems like a silly thing, clipart, but a heck of a lot of people use it when preparing presentations.

Any artists out there want to start a revolution? Or maybe work on an NSF proposal? I think this would be a great STEM education thing. And easy as anything to do.