Professor Starter Kit

I am coming to the end of my tenure track period at UofL and part of that is making me evaluate my systems for professoring. I’m also talking to students how to set up your research. So inspired by all that, here are the things to set up before starting to professor. 

Personal Knowlege Management System

This is a first critical setup. Pick your system wisely. I had Evernote already in use partly because it has mobile app as well. Something that allows you to “capture” ideas for student projects, notes on telecoms or meetings and is searcheable! One spot for it all. One system. I keep hearing about others. Omnifocus or Roam Research. It’s worth spending money on. I use Evernote for all this but the phone version is sloooow. And some notes I could have sworn were there are not. As soon as you don’t trust a system anymore, chaos descends. 

A university is a large organization that hands you pieces of paper to ask you about much later. This is the system where scans of all this dead tree nonsense is going to end up in. Grab, scan with phone, stick in PKM and shred. 

Tenure Box

BEST piece of advice I ever got. Make a Tenure box folder in email. Grab a box and write “tenure box” on the side with sharpie. Anything that could potentially make you look good, stick it either in the email box or the cardboard box. No need to sort, you can do that later! 

Email

Inbox 0. This is the way. It’s the only way. Every possible request and task will show up as an email. So it’s best to distinguish between a few timeframes where you file ongoing email assignments and “done” (archived). Mine’s are today/this week/this month/someday/waiting. 

The waiting one is for stuff you’ve done your bit for but are waiting on others. After a while, go through that and send reminders. 

It does not need to get more involved than that but I file email more. Especially useful are folders for each grant application and each grant administered. Grants management at a university is chaotic at best. You can be the one providing structure. Optional folders are for each research student you have and each class you teach. Or not. 

Email is asynchronous. Unfortunately most of the University’s management will think of it as instant message or slack like, expecting an immediate answer. Students sometimes too. Disavow them from this notion immediately. Work email is from 9-5 on workdays. You can expect an answer within 24hrs if it reaches me during those times. IM it ain’t. 

State what action you need. I wish more people do this. The US army has a method for that: BLUF, bottom line up front. In brackets State what you need from the other person. So many academics come up to it sideways in a 3-page essay. The bluntness and utilitarian nature of bluf is appealing to my Dutch self. More of that. Start doing it yourself and ask others to do the same. The number of times I had to parse through several layers of forwarded emails with FYI to realize there was something I needed to do... rude really. 

Email is suck a timesuck that I started calling it “the churn” after the expanse. It still is and can be anxiety inducing but an organized inbox lowers anxiety levels substantially. Also: “meh I’m too late for that.” is also “done”. 

Task Manager

Email is NOT a task manager. Or tracker. You list for yourself what you need/want to get done today. I did paper todo lists forever and they are both demotivating and easily lost. I am trying a Bullitt journal and I’m liking it a lot. I’m working from home though so it’s easy to have this as part of the setup. There are electronic ones for todo lists. Fine. Pick one and stick with it if it works. 

Research structure

Parse your research ideas into projects for (a) you (in your rare spare time), (b) Postdocs and grad student projects and (c) undergraduate projects. 

The latter desperately need structure. So chuck every idle though with the latest data release from a survey into you PKM system. You’re gonna need those. Anything that just requires someone to read less than half a dozen papers and comes with a CSV file of data. Set up a dummy undergrad project: overleaf doc for the report, fileshare for the data, code, and papers. And a setup of the goals. 

Undergrad projects are a net time loss in most cases. The goal is not a paper. But with enough organization and clear goals you may come close to breaking even (it would have taken you just as long on your own). And let’s not compare here with professor-at-full-speed. 

Teaching and Service structure

These are time sucks. Teaching is fun and a primary responsibility and inspiring students is so rewarding yadda yadda. It’s a perfect gas of efffort and time, taking up every minute you’ll let it. 

Odds are that your colleagues don’t care. And underestimate the amount of time it takes to set up a new course. And all your courses are new. So ask about which of your friends has taught the course. Grab their stuff. Steal their slides, their assignments etc etc. 

Once you get there, see if there is a teaching track prof who taught this class. Get their take on the class. Buy them lunch. Steal their stuff. 

Service is often “light” because you’re on tenure track. But it’s considered “light” by those who have been at the place in question since forever. No one left a record on how to do the thing you’re supposed to do for the department. So you have your Task and since you’re the new guy it probably officially Sucks. Parse out what needs to happen. Pick the brain of the last victim and then write it all down in the order it’s supposed to happen in a google document. 

Your future self or the next hapless Service victim will thank you. Share. Make their life easier. Easiest favor ever. 

Grants Management 

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Another part of the University that will get mad at you for “not doing things the way we always do them” despite never telling you how to do them in the first place. Tip 1. Identify the grants you really want and identify a (tiiiiny) grant you don’t give a shit about. Do the tiny and/or bullshit grant proposal first. This is your tryout of the grants management system. How long does everything take? What’s a good padding before the deadline? Which parts of Grants Management are responsive to email and which only to threats of physical harm? How many different versions of the proposal clearance form does it take? Who gives you this year’s budgeting numbers? Build a note with how to do what and when. Use this forevermore but be prepared that GM will get revamped and renewed into something even more Byzantine and you’ll have to adapt once more. 

If you’re feeling animosity towards the GM people and their litanies of why laptops aren’t a real computer or why a student can’t have one, remember they are already working with the University and Funding agency’s budgeting management systems every day. They already are in hell. Possibly for years. Take the time to let them tell a story. Patience, politeness and a kind word will get you far far more than impatience and frustration, even if that is what you're feeling in great spades. 

You’ll identify the one person that actually knows what they are doing. This is your new friend. Ply with alcohol and gifts. Bribe outright if you have to. 

GM isn’t there to help you write a grant. This was a major realization of mine. They are there to ensure that the University gets its cut from your grant. Nothing else. 

Routine

Academia is chaotic. On purpose or not, it’s where all the noise of a large organization comes together with all the organizational skills of a bunch of people that never took even so much as a class on spreadsheets. So you need structure. 

Are you a morning or evening person? Do you have a family or no? There are a LOT of variables here and basically none are your employer’s business. You need to decide. With a family it’s pretty much proscribed: you need to get them to school. That sets the starting point to your day. And it’s finish. Do not let others pressure you into working long hours that you’re not optimized for or do that stupid burning of the midnight oil. Business hours are 9-5 people. Workdays from Monday to Friday. I took public transport for a while and it provides a wonderful excuse: “I need to catch the bus sorry.”

Decide when your day has a beginning and an end. Decide when they are. Or it will be decided for you. And then a STEM professor will end up telling you to work 200 hours a week because they’re so fabulous at maths. 

Ranting aside, by having a routine (check astroph, write for an hour) you can make steady and relentless progress towards the stuff you’ll be judged on. 

Design your rest and downtime

This goes with the above. There is an underlying “of course you’ll work 100 hours a week” attitude which guarantees just shoddy performance and sloppy work. You’ll be judged on the result and not the process. No one can really tell how long it takes anyone to do some on the things you do. Play up that they were “laborious” or “very hard”. Practice your “I’ve got so much to do rant”. Paint dark circles under your eyes. Academia is horribly toxic work culture. STEM doubly so. 

No one by you will say enough. Don’t let your body do the talking and set rest times and rest activities (like running or reading the murderbot books for the Nth time). Whatever restores. Saturday is off limits. Sunday is ok for some light reading or prep for class. 

And if you need a quip to shut the all-nighter people up: “I don’t work 70 hour weeks, I did it right the first time.”

JWST doesn't have a problem? Happy to be proven wrong.

I wrote a blog post in 2020 (that's SO last year) about my worry for the JWST. It came partly out of a place of frustration of the past semester. 

The deadline was...not at a great time. But I would be hard pressed to point to a time this academic year that would have been good. Or even okay.

So maybe it partly was a Lucy-with-the-ball problem? Would the deadline be postponed at the last minute? During the semester from hell, we were kinda hoping for it? And there was precedence for this with the last Cycle 1 deadline. So anyone strapped for time/focus/mental energy would think twice about writing a proposal from scratch. 

So there was a timing problem and a hype problem. 

Timing - well 2020. Pandemic. Some light sedition. It's hard to think ahead 1.5 years into the future and about science. Nothing really that the JWST project could have done. Well maybe not announce at the beginning of my semester, expecting a result at the end. Still. Act of Deity kind of situation. 

Hype -- there was some clear group think for a sustained amount of time that sort of hinted at a HUGE oversubscription of JWST in the first call. Big instrument, big science, lots of time already allocated. It made sense. One could point to C28 for Hubble where the rate went to 1:12. Not great for science since it becomes hard to gamble with the time and do something truly new. 

But this (mostly over twitter but also back when talking to people in person. I miss people. And talking science in person), was the hype that built. Not all of it came from non-JWST folks too. So to me, looking from afar (like hinterland afar) started to conclude that this was going to be intense. 

Part of the hype was a byproduct of JWST project doing its due diligence. No these were not HST proposals, yes you need to do more work upfront. Get on this now now now. 

So time to adjust the recommendations.

More lead time? If there is nothing else to be done, announcing at the beginning of a typical academic semester and expecting proposals at the end...yeah the call could open earlier. Oh who are we kidding? We know how astronomers work...we've seen the plot. It could work in theory.

Set expectations? Also not something the JWST project was super keen on. What if they low or high balled their oversubscription prediction. Still. 4:1 is fine?

Split phase 1 and 2. Honestly I still don't understand why this decision to combine was made. 

Rolling or mid-cycle proposals. 1.5 years till science operation is a long time. More science might happen. I might actually sleep well for a night (more likely after jan 20 for some reason) and come up with a decent science case. Either call it early cycle 2 or simply adopt the mid-cycle proposals. 

So the news that I am now seeing (still via twitter, still from a lonely hill in the hinterland) is that it was a solid cycle. 30% women PIs (comparable to HST C28) and a nice spread of geography and new users. Whether it included people from all career stages is something I am curious about. Also curious if it was all R1s or if there was a decent spread too. Not all my questions have been answered yet. But I clearly was too pessimistic last time. Hurray. Happy to be wrong. 

JWST has a problem all right

The stats of the James Webb space telescope cycle 1 proposal round came in the other day. In summary: an over subscription rate of 1:4. A little less even. 

There was immediate spin how the stats were a good thing. Enthusiasm from around the globe! So many investigators! But that does not change that the 1:4 oversubscription is a disappointment. If I were part of the project, this would and should worry me. 

Remember the collapse of the Arecibo telescope. Ran on a budget of 17m$/yr?  That also has a 1:4 subscription rate (source: egg.astro.cornell.edu › ugradPDFThe Arecibo Radiotelescope - Cornell University) a few years ago. If your shiny new telescope that hands out grants with their data has the same subscription rate as a 60 year old radio telescope that doesn’t, you have a problem. 

Let’s go over what the issues are. 

JWST has the Herschel problem: the lifetime is inherently limited by consumables. 11 years and change. So it is paramount all the science that can be done with it is envisaged now and proposed. The pressure is on. But the Herschel community only figured out what it wanted by cycle 3... this means there may be some science I can do with JWST but I don't quite know how yet. That's a problem for cycle-1 but should go away soon.

JWST has a hype problem: for years we now have heard it was going to be revolutionary. And soon. This led to predictions of an oversubscription rate of 20:1 etc. Especially since much of the first year goes to GTO! Better get ready! We tried. But apparently could not think of that much. 

JWST is a technical Matterhorn: The modes of the instruments are myriad and very complex. Instead of a science case (phase 1) and a technical (phase 2) it’s all combined. This makes every proposal an enormous time and energy investment. The project thought they could get around that by documentation and hype (see above). Get started early! Go to a workshop! But in the end the complexity made it similar to a radio telescope: only the initiated can realistically propose. This issue did not completely go away especially with the last problem.

JWST has a timing problem: oh hey there was a pandemic. Everyone is trying to do their normal work with 10-20% extra effort for every damn thing. So there was less time to work on proposals. But it also had the poorest timing: a deadline on literally the last day of everyone’s semester (ok in the USA) after announcing the opportunity effectively at the start of the semester from hell. And this was the second cycle 1 deadline. It’s getting harder to believe that the project will stick to the timeline this time. Most astronomers expected a third “cycle 1” deadline. After JWST slips even more due to the pandemic etc. It won’t be called that of course. It’ll be the first“mid-cycle” or something. But in reality it’ll be cycle 1c. 

The JWST project could simply not imagine that we did not have any science for it. It was the most amazing thing ever. So poor timing, making the proposals technically hard, a pandemic semester would all be overcome by the community. This is not unique to the JWST. You can always add to an academic’s workload. Until you can’t. 

This is also the reason I don’t expect the gender stats on cycle 1 to be released. Those will be too embarrassing. Men got to put them in but all the women had child care and school from home dumped on them. 

But it will get more competitive later! I hear you say. Different prediction from earlier. This was the first cycle. Much was taken up by guaranteed time and early science projects. Maybe. But when WFC3 was installed, demand for it peaked in the first cycle it was offered. True for every new HST instrument. And this is a whole package of cool new instruments. What gives? At this rate we could be done in year 4... ok some new ideas and follow up and barely end up filling the observatory's lifetime. If that happens...it might be time to update the resume. 

So what can JWST do to improve the numbers. 

1. Split phase 1 and 2. This was a lesson learned from the early Hubble proposals. ALMA want through something similar. 
2. Smarter timing. It’s not just your own internal capacity that’s in play here. Make sure your customers can do the work. 
3. Less modes. Honestly. Get me a spectrum of this thing over there. Don’t make it harder than that. More templates etc for phase 2. 
4. Stop thinking of this as an observatory. Despite all the instrument modes, it’s a much narrower science range. Does high redshift and planetary formation. Throw in some AGN science. That’s...sorta it? Spitzer wavelengths but high resolution is not as wide a field as Hubble covers. Maybe we'll get excited about brown dwarfs suddenly. 
5. Organize a legacy survey mode. No not the “survey” mode but legacy proposals like ANGST and PHAT. ERS is filing that niche but JWST is already the same amount of time away from end-of-mission as HST was when the call went out for legacy. Time to organize some conferences and think up must do science. Eg it’s pretty clear that all the nearby known planets will need to be done. And all the CANDELS fields. Just do them. Make scheduling all that less of a headache. 
6. Build up an archive. Ok I am biased here. But have this thing snap NIR high-resolution images whenever it can means there is something to scour for New Stuff. Something to combine with Roman or Euclid. 

All this comes from a place of worry for me. I like JWST and much more so the people working on it. I really want it to succeed. If it doesn’t hit the ball out of the park next cycle (which will still be pre-launch let’s be real here) it will be in big trouble. 

Literature Workflow

 Everyone has a workflow for a given process. Most astronomers it's work frantically against a deadline and collapse. I'm not a fan. 

For literature resources, you also need a workflow. The smoother the better. The less you have to think about where that paper was or how to organize your references, the better. It makes it much much easier to write the thing. 

So here is a short intro how *I* organized my literature. Eventually. 

It began with Ron Allen suggesting I'd pick a system. He was vague as to what system. His system involved a giant drawer in his office with physical folders. I got started that way. It devolved into a mess.

A better way is a reference manager some kind. I settled on bibdesk fairly quickly (this is back in 2000) but I made a new .bib bibtex file for each paper/project I was working on. This also devolved into a mess.

I need one file. One BibTex file to rule them all. 

So I made one. Bibliography.bib. 

That's it...that's...my bibliography file. I spent a day or so merging all the files and weeding out all the duplicates. Set up so that pdfs of the papers automatically go to a folder. Name+ last two digits of the year as the identifier and it works? It lives in my dropbox so I always have it?

I was quite happy with that for a quite some time. It's where I'd dump new astro-ph papers in (for later reading hahahah anyway) and so often I'd have the astro-ph already or I could refer to the most recent work. 

And then I moved to Overleaf. Aaaah. I *love* it. Version control? No problem! Every project tagged and searchable. 

But How To Do The BibTex?

Here comes my second to last trick: I have one project called Up To Date Bibliography Here.

Yup. I always upload my bibtex there. As a rule I export it in bib desk as "minimal bibtex" so that it's small. And then I can import or refresh it in the project I'm working on. 

And the last tip: there is a command line tool called ads2bibdesk and when I call it with an astroph number of an article identifier, it loads everything in...it's done. 

At the end of every paper there is just:

\bibliographystyle{aasjournal}

\bibliography{Bibliography}  

and it's...done. 

Pick a system, design the whole flow (from search/atro-ph to final document) and then...trust that system. 

Student paper accepted!

The paper by my undergraduate Shawn Knabel was accepted. I tweet stormed about it. I have certainly helped large swaths of it but I can say with absolute certainty it’s his paper. He responded to the referee entirely on his own. 

It’s an amazing achievement. It’s a very solid paper that looked at the aspects on how one identifies strong gravitational lenses in surveys using spectroscopy, citizen science or machine learning. And how little these three techniques agree. 

This brings me to the other pet of the process: how much of the struggle to get this thing out had nothing to do with the science. The grant that was supposed to pay for it ran out and could not allow for extensions, the referee kept finding new fault where there was none (the main result of the paper didn’t change over 6 referee reports. At some point it felt like hazing. If you were the referee and read this: I hold you in low professional esteem. 

And that brings me to the issue in the astronomy community: why is this considered ok behavior? The “I had to endure this as a grad student so...” attitude. The thinly veiled disdain for science done at state schools or undergraduates. Or horror of horrors both. 

But this success means I should keep pushing. A paper is an excellent equalizer for my undergrads that want to go graduate schools. I disagree that US graduate schools now effectively expect this but it offers a clear avenue for how to get my students into them. 

Sciencing in times of Corona

 I’m trying to get a science done. This is anything from getting grant proposals set up to telescope time proposals, helping students do their science projects and trying to finish the occasional paper myself. 

Let’s admit to ourselves at least here that this is very likely more than we could finish in a good year. And this is not a good year. 

Yet we feel that as a field, or tenure committee or whatever, there is a nonzero chance collective amnesia sets in and we all fear of being labeled “unproductive”. For 2020 and 2021 (this is going to last longer and take time to recover...). 

S lets see what I have in the hopper:

8 scientific papers at 50+% complete. Many almost ready to go to coauthors or with comments or referee reports. Yeah. That should go down. That’s too many. I should finish some. But...

5 student projects that could/should be papers. That’ll take more work but is very beneficial to these students. I should get cracking on those. But they are overwhelmed and so am I. 

I agreed to write a book a few months ago. There is a draft. For me it’s a challenge to stop writing about certain things apparently. Still. Need to wrap that up. 

NSF Astronomy & Astrophysics grant proposals. These are huge with lots of moving parts. Stressful to pull together and shepherd through the University and NSF bureaucracies. I’ve...Eh... started. 

Students count on me to get them funding for their phds. And support undergrads. Oh and myself and my family. Summer salary. Eish. 

The James Webb Space Telescope proposals are due on November 24. In a giant “don’t care” by this project they just put it on the last day of just about everyone’s classes. May as well write “for Ivy League use only” on the side of this thing. But I’m stubborn so... yeah preparing some. 

This is not only hard. This is functionally impossible. So time to pair down, punt and of course “good enough” all of this. 

Teaching in time of corona

I have no clever tricks to make this all easier. This is just a collection of my thoughts now that I’m halfway through the semester. 

I am teaching a 100 level astronomy class for a relatively small class (25) using our planetarium. And a 300lvl python/computing class in a well equipped computer lab. 

So I have well equipped classrooms. With microphones. And in one case already set up recording equipment that is pretty high end. 

First up: it’s exhausting. Accept that the room with social distancing and masks gives little to no feedback. And online classes even less. Pour energy in, wonder the whole time how it’s going. 

Secondly: ruthlessly organize. The number of moving parts has increased dramatically with a bunch of small tasks such as uploading recordings and slides, making sure pre/in-class materials are available to students. So set up a schedule and stick to it. Class equipment goes into the “teaching bag” together with spare masks and sanitizer. 

Thirdly: prepare and work ahead. A lot. I went in expecting to get sick by now or something else massively going wrong. I still expect it. So all the pre-class material was already in blackboard before the semester started. I’m uploading the 300lvl classes ahead of time. As soon as I realized that these were just going to be recordings...the asynchronous also applies to the preparation! Which is good because the end of the semester brings the crunch of JWST and NSF major deadlines. So I’m up to week 11 recording these and I plan to finish recording for the semester next week. I’m sure the building will burn down soon after. Or something. 

Expansion: the work-ahead approach was one of the main takeaways I had from the spring. The asynchronous part should not mean that students can catch up later but also allow for them to work ahead to fit their schedule. 

Not that I’m smug about this. I am doing this because I expect more things to break. Soon. 

Next: flexibility. Students are not doing so hot right now. Even if every class now takes 10% more effort, that means they are over-taxed. And that is before one or two of their classes started descending into pure chaos. So. Flexibility is key. Deadlines, how many assignments will get you full marks. Etc etc. Oh and extra credit assignments. Lots of them all over the place. 

Prepare for all online. This is part of flexible but basically build a completely online course (everything in one spot) and teach in person as long as circumstances allow. Weirdly. I’m still in-person. Ok. But ready to switch. 

Hybrid/Hyflex. No. Just no. It assumes perfect internet for everyone (ha!), No emergencies (Haha!), and that instructor can be in two places at once (oh haha very funny). It. Does. Not. Work. 

I noticed this when certain committees were online/in person mix and then it falls to the people in the room. 

Foregiveness: it’s ok. Oh the kids did not learn about that? Oh well. The foregiveness goes towards yourself too. Science is suffering badly (next post). It’s ok. 2020 (and likely 2021) are mulligans.