finding a sparring partner

These days everything is slow - at least that is how it feels. Days pass by and sometimes I wonder if something happened earlier today or already yesterday. It is somehow disturbing. From this blurriness a thought about work and how to improve my output came up. I've by far missed my goals for this year and I'm very disappointed of myself. Even though there are a lot of external factors involved in why I missed my goals. But it is not all external factors to blame. Often I just can't find this additional bit of motivation to do something right now. Especially with writing papers I seem to waste a lot of time on side tracks or it takes me a day to write five proper lines. 

When I was a teenager I could easily motivate myself for a lot of stuff. My schedule was full of sports and social events and I usually not only participated, but took over some organizational roles. I LOVED doing all that stuff and my parents sometimes had to stop me and keep my duties to a reasonable amount. While I think it is a teenager thing to be easily motivated (maybe not for school, but for a lot of other stuff) and to be emotionally involved in everything, I was wondering how I could get closer again to this base level of passion. 

The word that crossed my mind was: competition. Not super serious job competition, more like in a low level sports match. Or like the hidden competition when you try to match the speed of another runner in the park. I love playing sports, I love the temporal rivalry and I love to win. So maybe it would help if I'd have a secret sparring partner, an "enemy" team, someone on a similar level but with currently better performance to increase my day-to-day motivation. Trying to match his/her speed, then close the gap, then overtake.

But how to measure performance? H-factor is the first measure that comes to mind, but it depends on so much more than my own direct performance, like: are my collaborators productive and put me on their papers, are my collaborators people how are often cited,... . 

H-factor only of first-author publications might be an option, or - similar - how many first-author publications contribute to the overall h-factor. But then I'm already on a level where my students publish and I'm not first author anymore, but not necessarily last one as well. And the next level people are on the junior professor levels. So there the ratio first-author to non-first-author publications gets even "worse" and performance comparison with a sparring partner on that level would be even more difficult. And do I want to exclude all the other time consuming work I'm doing? Supervision? Teaching? It would get really messy if I'd want to include them.

Maybe I keep it very simple. The weak point in my CV is my low number of first author publications. This is what I want to increase. So I'll look for an "enemy" team (maybe even several people) on a similar level to mine and I'll try to match their number of first author publications. Time-frame depends on how many publications they are ahead of me. A long term goal will be to match their h-factor and the number of first-author publications contributing to it. 

Finding a proper sparring partner is a nice task for the last days of the year.

one experiment "too much"

In the process of writing up a paper I often come to the point where my data is not sufficient to proof or disproof the theory I have in mind. There are two options what to do. Either speculate on the basis of the data at hand and maybe the concepts available in the literature. Or going back to the lab and do an experiment that clarifies the topic. The last is certainly the better option from a scientific point of view. However, there is the risk that the experiment does not show what I expect. This might mean that I have to adjust my theory a bit and then the paper is good to go. But it can as well mean that my work turns out to have a bigger flaw and I have to chuck the paper, chuck the data and probably several weeks or months of work. From a scientific point of view it is certainly better to find out if the approach/methodology/sample is flawed before anything goes into publication. From the publish or perish point of view it can break your neck! Especially for early career researchers who don't have ten students working on different topics, it is crucial that the publication stream is steady and continuously growing. So from the science perspective there can't be enough experiments done. From the surviving-in-academia perspective it often seems to be necessary to publish first and then maybe do the additional experiment. Or to just move on to the next topic.

I had quite a few good discussions about the view that one can't publish negative data. Even though negative data would certainly help others to avoid mistakes and safe them a lot of time, money and nerves. But science is all about breakthroughs and world changing discoveries. At least it has to sound like that. In reality the breakthroughs are rare and mostly scientific progress is done in small steps. Digging into a topic until you own it takes time and mental space. The pressure to publish both high quality and a lot is counterproductive and certainly leads often enough to going for the speculative paper instead of risking to have to chuck the work.

This is a very big flaw in the scientific system: publish positive results or perish!

patience, patience, patience, breath!

A common post-doc contract duration in my discipline is somewhere between one and three years.

To develop a solid project that will make an awesome application for independent research group funding or that can convince a search committee giving away an academic position takes about 4-6 months.

Writing up said project idea into the awesome application - or better applications, considering the success rates these days - and handing it in takes 2-6 months depending on scheme.

Waiting for the outcomes takes a least 6 months, sometimes even a year or longer!

Academic folks, who wonder why so many post-docs drop out and look for other ways to earn their money: do the math! It is not necessarily that they are not good enough, not persistent enough, not resilient enough. Often it is just that the common post-doc contract duration is not long enough to wait for the outcomes of another proposal.

Why am I pointing this out? The waiting time for one of my proposals was just extended by four months! This does not sound much for someone on a continuous contract. But for someone who has timed all proposal such that the outcomes should be there at least half a year before the contract runs out, plus four months brings me close to gnawing on my fingernails!

the vehicles for the road to success

The question about what to do to become a successful and happy academic is one that pops up regularly in all kind of early career researcher seminars, mentoring sessions and blog articles. Being successful and being able to maintain a life outside academia is a balancing act that does not always work out as good one wishes. In the last few years I have been sitting in a number of "I tell you about my career" talks given by very successful people and I talked to a bunch of senior colleagues down the corridor about this topic. Some points always re-appear in these discussions - they seem to be the core of successful-senior-colleague-wisdom on the topic "success and happiness".

 1) Don't work your ass off

This is so against everything that everyday life in academia tells us. With funding rates going down, with job insecurity, with "publish or perish" it seems like everybody who does not work hir ass off, should better start to polish their resumes for non-academic jobs. But I've heard this sentence quite often and of course it is the key to whole-life happiness. Maybe it is easy to say that one should take time off on the weekend when you are the one with the Nobel-Prize on the shelf. But on the other hand it is essential to allow myself time to recharge my batteries and to actually enjoy my life today - this is not something that should be put on hold until I maybe have secured tenure.

2) Enjoy what you are doing and check once in a while if you are still enjoying it

For me as an ECR, this is the essential bit for my work in academia. With all the insecurity and the continuous search for funding, I better enjoy my work and the opportunities university offers. Maybe I'll become a professor and I can continue doing awesome research, maybe it'll not work out and I have to find something else that interests me and pays the bills. I don't doubt that I would. And if this happens it is better to not have regrets about the years spend in academia. It is easy to miss the point where you stop enjoying your work, because you just have so much on your plate and the piles on the desk don't become smaller. Taking the time once in while to reflect about what I'm doing and if I still like to be where I am, is a very good advice.

3) Be efficient and effective

This is a life-long learning process: tame the procrastination cat in you. Learn how to approach a task that you can finish it in a timely manner. How to not waste time on minor tasks. How to focus on the important things. How to get other people to support you work. Tons of books have been written about this - it's about finding the strategies that work for you and about applying them every day. Sometimes that works - sometimes it doesn't.

4) Have a bread and butter project and have a risky, exciting one as well

One of my super successful colleagues pointed out to me that the people who will be appointed on fixed term positions are the ones who work on the edge of knowledge and who dare to jump into the really unknown.But on the other hand nobody wants to hire a "crazy" person who is only looking for the Holy Grail. University wants to see solid publications, funding agencies - even though they claim that they want to fund novel ideas - want to make a safe investment and your colleagues will take you more seriously if you publish some not so far fetched ideas once in a while. 

5) Don't piss off your colleagues

Because you never know if you meet them again in the future and in which role. Maybe they will have to decide if your paper gets published or your grant gets funded. And even though we all should be unbiased by our personal relationship to someone, we are not. Even if we try. Especially not when the other one just pooped on your lawn. So it is better to choose which fights are really necessary - and some certainly are - and let go the other ones even if it would feel so good to just grmpf$%*.

6) Have friends outside your field or better even outside academia

That helps to see that the world is not evolving around your research niche. That other people have other priorities in life and still can be happy. That working in academia has a lot of perks and privileges. Getting your head off work is necessary to recharge your brain and having a hobby can actually be quite fulfilling as well, e.g. Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt owns a 4-star winery (to take one of the super successful people with super successful hobbies (= ).    

These points alone certainly won't make me a successful academic, but maybe a more happy and interesting one. It's good to realize that life happens now already and that it does not help to wait until an uncertain point in the future to start with being happy. And I go now and bake some cake, because that makes me happy on a Sunday afternoon!

quitting a job for the family

Just stumbled over an interesting blog post by Max Schireson, CEO of MongoDB, about him stepping down from his CEO position to spend more time with his family. He describes that his wife - a professor at Standford - often gets asked how she juggles her career with her family (three kids, 14, 12 and 9 years), but that he never got asked that question. So now he is stepping down from his "crazy full time" position to just a "normal full time" position and the comments to his post are full of applause and admiration for this decision.

It is a big decision, one not easily made and one that will certainly cost him a bag of dollars. And it is great that he wants to spend more time with his family and less with traveling between southern West Coast and northern East Cost of the US. But I wonder how one can even end up in such a crazy constellation. Three kids, a professor at Standford and a CEO of a super growing company - this sounds like a safe way to get a stomach ulcer and a heart attack before turning 50. My admiration goes mostly to his wife, who certainly did the large chunk of family work during the last years, while being a professor at the same time. Her career will speed up like crazy now that she has her husband around much more.

And I wonder what comments a female CEO would get if she'd decide the same way. A lot of applause and admiration? Not sure about that.

LinkedIn for academic job search?

This is what I'm wondering. I have profiles on all those 364 platforms for professional and social networking and of course the ultimate purpose is to use it to find a new job. Now that I have applied to a lot of PostDoc grants and subscribed to even more academic job portals I'm wondering if these non-specific websites like LinkedIn are actually any good to find a new academic job. A lot of my colleagues have profiles there as well, but I've never seen someone putting himself on the market through that. And I wonder if professors or uni HR people really use these platforms to find new folks for their faculty. Or does it look like I'm too lazy to apply for grants? Or not competitive enough? Or like I don't understand how the system works?

Is it worth to add a "I'm looking for.." section to my profile?

"don't leave before you leave"

About a year ago I saw the TED talk of Sheryl Sandberg's "Why we have too few women leaders". I then thought that she makes a lot of good points in her talk about actively taking job opportunities and promoting oneself. I had some long discussion with friends about this talk and the whole "leaning in" concept, about the level of responsibility the government or the society has to improve the chances for women to succeed in the work force and how much women have to contribute by themselves if they want to be successful (which can mean very different things for each individual). 

Shortly after I saw this talk I got pregnant. I started thinking a lot about how to combine my work with my pregnancy and how my career could "survive" maternity leave. The sentence out of the above talk that really stuck in my head back then was "don't leave before you leave" and I found it very helpful at that time. Especially during this awkward period where only my partner and I knew that I was pregnant. I got quite a few request for hosting students and starting collaborations during this time, which not only fell in the "being pregnant" time but as well in the "having a newborn" phase. At that time I did not know if I would have any maternity leave at all, because Australia's laws don't support paid maternity leave for temporary residents. And I could not ask anybody about it yet, because my supervisor did not know that I was pregnant and the risk that he would hear it through the grapevine was too high. Additionally, I thought about what would happen if I'd loose the baby. Then there would be no maternity leave period anyways and every project I would have declined until then would really be a setback. So I decided to not leave before I leave and took on every project and every student and every other chance that came along the way as I would have done without being pregnant. 

In most cases this has served me very well. I had two great exchange students during the last eight months, who have been very productive, I've been promoted and I got my pretty massive review paper accepted - all of which I am very proud.

Now my maternity leave starts and even though I have left the office I have not totally left work. This is certainly one of the disputable advantages one has in academia. I don't have to be in the office to do my work. I can equally well work from home. And so far I really like that! I can't even imagine how it must be for someone in a job that you can't take home with you, where you are truly forced to stop working. I'm able to keep up to date with all my projects, comment on paper drafts, do a bit of writing myself and at the same time enjoy the "being on leave" mood I'm in. This is certainly an advantage of my current position and funding situation and it would be very different if I would be in less secure position.

However, I could not keep up all the projects that I agreed upon six months ago. Some exchange students for this year have their stay scheduled at the end of my leave period and it would be unfair to them if their supervisor was not officially in the office during their stay. So the organizers had to find new supervisors for them and I'm not sure how many minus points I got for my decision on their mental scale. Some paper with collaborator will get delayed significantly  - again I'm not sure how much lower I will ranked by them in the future. (as a side note: I recognized that my American collaborators did not congratulate when I told them about my pregnancy whereas the European ones did - I'm not having enough statistics on that to state this as a cultural difference, but I thought it was noteworthy).

Overall, "Don't leave before you leave" has done a great service to me and I think I'm in a pretty good position now to take some time off and get the family business in order to then hopefully return back to office and lab in few months without a massive productivity setback on my CV. Fingers crossed!

WTF Nature?

Up to know I saw scientific journals as a medium to present scientific data to the scientific community. And "reading a journal" meant for me that I skim through the content of my usual journals to see if there is anything interesting regarding my own current research. The only journals I've ever read more in detail are the society journals I get in a printed version. And so I have only occasionally stumbled over a piece of "communication" covering lets say topics related to the scientific community rather than the science itself.

My perception of scientific journals has changed dramatically in the last few days starting with the discussions about the Nature correspondence piece on gender and publishing and my eyes kept widening when I read about the personal vendetta of Natures senior editor Henry Gee against Dr. Isis. Following the stream of links I fairly soon ended up at the "Womenspace" article, which just made me puke with all its stereotype-dripping "thigh-slapper" kind of "humor".

It is outrageous and disgusting that the decision makers of journals having so much influence on scientific careers think it is appropriate and  funny to publish "articles" like that. That it would be a valuable contribution to the scientific community. And it is even more outrageous that these people think it is appropriate to reveal the real identities of anonymous bloggers just because they feel like it. What does it matter if I know the real identity of a person who criticizes my work? The whole peer review process is based on not knowing who criticizes my work! This criticism  can be harsh and personal, but it is still expected that the person under critique is able to deal with it in a professional way. People working for scientific journals should be leading examples in this field. Revealing someones real identity without their permission brings no positive contribution to the plate - it is just done to harm someone in the worst possible way. The question came up how safe the anonymity of the reviewers for Nature are, if their senior editor is not able to stay professional and keep his mouth shut - and I think this is a very valid concern. 

I've never seen scientific journals as representatives of some kind of scientific community view of the world beyond stuff that is based on solid data. I've never seen them as a representative of my scientific self - but I don't feel very well represented right now. Quite naive it seems to have such a narrow view on what's going on in the glam world of journals. This will change as soon as I'm done chundering!

New Year status

2013 has been flying by like nothing. It totally does not feel like New Year again, I'm mentally still stuck somewhere between June and September. If I think about all that has happened this year, it seems to be enough to fill 12 months, but still my soul did not quite follow the fast pace of the passing days.

And even though it is just one day following another the turn of the year is always a good milestone to check the current situation and clarify the boundary conditions to make proper plans for the following months.

This where I'm at:

• The most important point on this list is of course my pregnancy, which will last another month or so. My private life has been very settled with quite a bit of nice routines and there was not much to worry about - which I totally didn't mind. This will certainly change when the LittleOne takes his first glimpse of Australian summer and a slight nervousness about his arrival has already set in. He will certainly not only turn our private life up side down but my professional life as well and then we'll see if all my preparations were enough to keep my science on a good track - between nappy changes and sleep deprivation.
• The second most important point is that I have used last year to work on my future career. I've started in Feb already to talk to people about different options post-Australia, about different fellowships or general employment and until August or so I was very confident that I'll have this sorted out until..... welll.... now! Which did not happen. I'm writing on a big fellowship application but at the moment I can't progress because I don't have enough technical information from my host institution. And as I predicted: if I don't get this information before Christmas, I won't get it until the New Year. So I am stuck and I'm really worried, if I messed up the communication with my hosts so badly at some point, that they are not willing to support me at the moment. At the same time I'm hoping that this whole mess-up has nothing to do with me but is just a bad coincidence of a lot of work and unis closing over Christmas. I'm starting to think about other options, even though I really want this project proposal to be handed in, because it is a great topic and it would be an even greater opportunity for me if it would get funded. But for my sanity I had to sign up on every academic job portal I could find.
• In the meantime while my project proposal is on hold, I am writing on another big paper. It's a summary paper of the huge project my PhD project was connected to and as my PhD advisor is too occupied to write it himself, he offered me to take over his part. This is a great opportunity for me and it prevents me from pondering too much about the messed up communication situation.
• Publication-wise I had the plan to publish at least 3 first author papers this year and in June this aim was still in reach. Finally, I only managed to publish one paper this year. But I finalized the "doomed project" and we might even get a cover page out of it. Even though it was not published with a 2013 stamp on it, this was a lot of work and a big achievement - and I will certainly not write such a big piece again any time soon!
• My PhD students start in their final years and while I am quite confident about the progress of one of them I am a bit worried that the other got lost on too many tangents that can't be properly tied together in a good thesis. I've learned a lot about how much guidance, how much pressure, how much freedom they need to progress well and now I have to use this knowledge to get them on the writing track and to get the focused on the gaps that need to be filled before they can finish. All while being on maternity leave...
• Mentally I am in a state that I really would like to move back home. Even though I know that coming to Australia has been the best choice for my personal and professional development and I used every opportunity my university offered me during this time. But here is not home and it is not even close to it. We came here with the plan to stay for a few years and even though everybody here told us that we most likely don't want to leave anymore after a few years, this has not become true for us. The time we had set for us to be here is over and now the longing for going back home becomes stronger every day. This is the main aim for 2014: to find a possibility to go back to our home country and if that is not possible then to reduce the traveling time at least significantly.

The New Year starts with a lo of open questions and besides the plan to move back I don't have any other specific plans yet. Too much depends on how easy-going the LittleOne will be and how long it will take to find our family rhythm. I'm very curious and a bit scared about all the things that will change this year. How we survive as a family, if I will be perceived differently in my professional context with a child, if we will find a new place to live and work that we both like, ...

Have a Happy New Year all you readers and bloggers out there, an exciting and fulfilling one, whatever that means for each single one of you!

pre-election science hick-ups

In most societies politicians or the people in the background of politics have a great influence on science. How much funding will go into science, what kind of research will be funded, how stressful and competitive it is to get funding, ... . Often enough these things might change when a new government is elected and the new responsible people have a different opinion about this topic than the former responsible people.

Struggling towards the election with all the more or less usual campaigning and political sandbox fights (see: Rudd vs. Gillard) Australia could be in such an "unstable" funding situation, but universities and research and science is actually not on their agenda. And even though it seems likely that we will get a change in government, nobody really expects great changes for the research funding.

However, the political situation still takes its toll on researchers. Endless amounts of hours have been sunk into writing grant applications at the beginning of the year. Usually the outcomes are announced in July or August. But for some reason the political situation hold up this process and right now nobody knows when the outcomes of the fellowship and grant applications will be made public - some time after the election, when the new government has warmed up their seats in the parliament. I'm sure all the reviewers and all the panel members already did their job and the decisions about who gets how much are already made. So why holding up the announcement? Because some not-yet-elected Minister of Science wants to give a press conference on that? Do politicians understand that other people's professional and to some extend personal lives depend on these outcomes? That they want to know if they still have a job at the beginning of next year or if they still can fund their post-docs?

I do think that Australia fosters scientific research very well and gives a lot of opportunities to get funding. But I really dislike the attitude of Australian politics to sometimes forget that their decisions have impact on people's lives and that giving them sufficient time to adapt to changes instead of changing the rules from one day to the other would create much more trust in the abilities of the government.

invited!

Whoot! Today I got my first invitation to a professorship job interview! That is quite amazing!

The non-amazing part is that they don't want to cover any costs related to this interview. Which wouldn't be a problem, if the interview was in Australia. But because it's in my home country this would mean I'd have to spend quite a bit of money for flights. And then it might be that I was just invited to fulfill their "invite more women" quota and I don't have a chance anyways.

But wouldn't both be an argument to cover my costs? Either they invite me because they actually are interested or they invite me to fulfill their quotas - both ways it would be a win-win if they'd really invite me!

the requirements for promotion

Promotion: the process where you have to wrap up your work, your achievements, your aims on a few pages and present yourself in the best possible light to climb on the next career step and be allowed to bear a new title.

This process is totally new to me. On the one hand, of course, because I am still a "newbie" and the only "promotion" I had was from grad student to post doc, but on the other hand because the process here is totally different to the country where I did my PhD. In PhD-country there are no titles like "Associate Lecturer" or "Senior Lecturer" - you are either a Postdoc or a Professor. And because of this there is no small-step promotion process - there is just the big jump to the Professor-level. In PhD-country the salary depends on your age and maybe on how long you have worked at uni and it is automatically adapted each year. In Australia we have the same system, but just within one salary group. As an Associate Lecturer my salary will increase up to highest salary within this group and then I have to go through the promotion process to the Lecturer level, if I want my salary to increase further. This is the situation I am in at the moment. I've been here for a while now and have a decent track record, so I thought it would be good to apply for promotion! There is a bunch of boxes I have to tick and I have to put a big application together which shows all my achievements since I am here.

Out of curiosity I had a look at the promotion policies of other Australian universities and it appeared that they vary quite a lot from each other.

I certainly didn't do a comprehensive search, but from my impression most universities have quite comprehensible promotion requirements.

For example the University of Technology Sydney has the following requirements for promotion from level A to B:

The staff member’s overall performance should:
(i) consistently exceed that normally expected of a level A academic
(ii) demonstrate the staff member’s capacity to perform at the level of Lecturer
(iii) demonstrate the staff member’s capacity to pursue a successful academic career as evidenced by, for example:
• the commencement of an academic portfolio. [...]
• the ability to achieve an appropriate balance between teaching, research and service over time
• the ability to make linkages between these three areas and understand how one can inform the other
• the ability to form productive relationships and work collaboratively and in teams
(iv) reflect at least competent performance across each of the three areas of academic activity (a)-(c) described below. .[....]
(v) demonstrate high personal standing in terms of workplace behaviour, including ethical and professional behaviour, respect for others, a collegial approach and support for equity and diversity in the University community.

So, to get promoted one has to be at the top level of the Associate Lecturer cohort and show promise to be able to perform well on the Lecturer level. Sounds feasible.

The University of Sydney gives a little table to explain their threshold levels for promotion, which for Research focused promotion (there is teaching only and research and teaching combined as well) looks like this:

The explanation for the different levels is the following:

Exceptional - An applicant whose achievements are Exceptional should demonstrate highly significant achievements and contributions in relation to the criteria at the level for which the applicant is applying.

Outstanding - An applicant whose achievements are Outstanding should demonstrate achievements and contributions which clearly meet the criteria at the level for which the applicant is applying.
Superior - An applicant whose achievements are Superior should demonstrate highly significant achievements and contributions in relation to the criteria at the applicant's current level.
Satisfactory - An applicant whose achievements are Satisfactory should demonstrate achievements and contributions which meet the criteria at the applicant's current level.

So, at the University of Sydney one has not only to be at the top of the current level, but one has to show significant contributions compared to the people in the level above. This is a significantly higher hurdle to take compared to UTS. 

But the most specific promotion requirements I found for the University of New South Wales. They give a neat little table as well, giving the option to go for research focused, teaching focused or combined. But they are much more specific about on what level they want an applicant to perform. Here is the table:

 

 

And the abbreviations mean: 

Outstanding Plus is expected standard at the top quartile of level above current appointment (O+)
Outstanding is expected standard between the midpoint and the top quartile of the level above current appointment (O)
Superior is expected standard at the midpoint of level above current appointment (Sup)
Sustained is expected standard for the bottom quartile of the level above the current level of appointment (S) 

Not Sustained is a level of performance that is no higher than at the current level (NS)
Acceptable level of performance requires evidence of engagement with the university in both teaching and service (A)

To get promoted on the research focused track your research achievements have to be above the midpoint of what people in the level above you have achieved. So, you have to perform in the upper part of level B for at least some time while you are still level A, to be able to be promoted to level B. Which means you must be as good as or nearly as good as the people who plan to become promoted to level C, for which the same criteria are in place. This sounds to me like a crazy strategy to ensure the quality of each level is constantly increasing (which is not a bad thing per se). And what happened to the people in the lower two quartiles of a certain level? They must have started off somewhere above midpoint by definition. And where is the upper limit for this "quality increasing" strategy?

environmental guilt

A while ago I had a short conversation with a student, which made me thinking about my job from a different perspective. The student studies environmental engineering and did some internships with companies to improve their environmental standards. He seemed to be pretty enthusiastic about his studies. But after a couple of beers he mentioned how tired he is to live and work in this constant atmosphere of guilt and that he is grown-up and smart enough to estimate the impact on the world climate if he once in a while drives a crazy fast car. And sometimes that's just what he wants to do without feeling guilty.

Talking, reading and thinking about environmental impact and "how to save the planet" has become an everyday topic. It comes and goes in the major news but it's always present and I'm sure a lot of people have it in their heads - even if just for complaining about a bunch of politicians flying around the world to meet in Doha for the Climate Change Conference and there doesn't seem to be much change afterwards. Still I don't have the impression that the majority of the people actually cares very much about the footprint they leave in their everyday life. So I was surprised about this outburst of "feeling guilty". I'm not sure if feeling guilty is the best starting point for planet saving activities, but it's certainly better than not caring at all.

When reading through blogs of scientists, the topic about the importance of attending conferences pops up frequently. Being present and visible, meeting people, starting new collaborations, presenting your work, pushing your career and with this your science. The science we do is meant to be for the greater good of our society. We do research to expand knowledge and develop a better world for everybody, so everything (within certain ethical frameworks) that is necessary to achieve these goals is well invested. Right?

I usually attend two international conferences each year. My boss is more in the region of 6 or more. From Australia these travels can only be done by long-distance flights, but no matter where your home university is: conferences involve flying most of the time. So even if my private me takes great care of her carbon footprint to keep it small, my professional me just smashes all efforts. And estimating from the amount of time my boss spends in planes, it will get worse.

This is a part of my job that actually makes me feel guilty and I'm thinking a lot about if it’s really necessary to attend conferences. Are the outcomes of a conference for my research high enough to justify the travel? Or was it just nice to meet the science crowd again? Are there alternatives to keep and get in contact with other researchers and be part of the community - we live in such a well connected world! Or would my chances to have a career in the research world just vanish quickly if I'd reduce my attendance rate on conferences?

Are there people seriously thinking about this problem, which not only affects researchers but a lot of employees of international operating companies? Besides fossil fuels a lot of money and time could be saved... Are there possible solutions proposed or already in use? And can we really justify to drive a crazy fast car?

impressive

My current professor and my former professor are setting up a grant proposal together. In this context I was reading through their CV related documents today to do a bit of typo-checking. And I must say, that even though I knew already what amazing careers paths they both have, I was once more impressed by it. They are both very impressive chaps (imagine that I put a lot of respect in this word), each one in his own very special way.