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.

Dear fellow researchers... (this is a rant!)

... it is quite normal that after spending hours/days/months in the lab/in front of the computer/scribbling notes and equations on paper, we have the desire to show the world the results of all our hard work (and of course because the next funding agency we apply to needs to be impressed was well). And of course we are all busy and writing a publication can be a tedious task.

But if you think it is good style to toss all your data of all the 38 systems you've found in your drawer in one confusing graph, that it is enough to describe details of these graphs that can't actually be seen in the text and base your conclusions on them without providing proper evidence and that this huge mess will then be published, you just missed a very important point. You should not be writing to increase the length of your publication list! Surprised? You should be writing to make your research progress available to the public or at least to the science audience. You should write in a way that the story of your research is easy to grasp for the reader. He should not be forced to decipher from 20 different data sets presented as black lines, which one is the double dash dot one. Nor should it be necessary to read up 5 other publications to be able to follow your conclusions. Trying to wrap up your research in a concise and maybe even (gasp!) interesting way is certainly a skill that needs to be practiced, but it is as well a courtesy to your audience to at least try. And in general it is always a good idea to have a good think about the reviewer comments, before you reply something along the line that you don't give a shit. I dearly hope you will not be able to find reviewers who let you publish this mess!

Rant: stop!

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!

my different stages in student supervision (for a particular student)

I have a very difficult student at the moment. Difficult because hir is just very, very slow and has the ability to ignore deadlines up to a painful limit. I went through various emotional stages during supervision and it has been a constant decline.

I started with "Enthusiastic", because the student seemed to be smart and motivated and hir spoken English is pretty good. I like hir project a lot. It was a neat little project that allows the student to peak into a few experimental techniques, but not too much stuff to do for the time frame given.

After the first weeks in I realized that the student had some self organization problems and that hir might need a bit more hand holding to get through the initial stages than what I would usually expect from a student on this level. 

Being enthusiastic dropped to being motivated. I thought, maybe that's just ignition problems and when hir gets to do some experimental work the going will get easier. Well, the way towards getting clearance for doing experimental work was long and stoney and plastered with continuous reminders from my side that hir needs to do the clearance paperwork ASAP. Nothing happened. Literally for months! My motivation dropped continuously.

I had a short caring phase in between this decline of motivation, where I tried to figure out why, Why, WHY is hir just refusing to get hir shit together. Does hir have too many classes during the week? No, not the case. Does hir have a stressful job outside uni? No to that as well. Are there personal/family/friends issues holding hir back? No, everything seems to be sunshine.

Then at some point clearance happened. I still don't know how, but suddenly the experimental work could get started - after more than half of the thesis time was over. I started to hope and tried to motivate the student to keep up the tiny bit of momentum and maybe even accelerate, because the deadline was looming already at the horizon. My student was not impressed - or maybe hir was overwhelmed by the fact that now doing more than one task per week was expected. And the work was still not done at a pace that could lead to a successful finalization of the project. 

At this point I got angry. Not because the student was going to fail the thesis, but because hir expected that everybody else involved (technicians, colleagues, me) would put in all effort to make stuff happen for hir. As if we are just sitting in our offices the whole day, doing nothing, just waiting that hir comes along and gives us something urgent to do. And all because hir was not able to start work a bit earlier.

I had a day where I was so angry it distracted me from doing my own work completely. Which of course made me even more angry. I slept over it and decided to not care anymore. I still care about the project, but in the long run it does not depend on this particular student. I do my job to support the student, but I won't bend over backwards anymore to make stuff happen for hir. I'm sort of indifferent at the moment - which is quite sad. I love to be emotionally involved in the progress of my students, to celebrate their progress and to motivate them through dry phases. But this student brought me to my limits. There seems to be no not even tiny spark of motivation and willingness from hir side and I really wonder why hir came all the way to this theses project. Maybe I am the wrong supervisor for this student, but maybe hir just studied the wrong subject all these years. So right now indifferent with a hint of sad!