How to get ahead in academia

After years of bitter struggle, I finally have a toe--nay, a nailhold on terra firma (i.e., I've been in a tenure-track job for about three months), so naturally the ego-bubble has risen straight to the cranial vacuity and I now feel secure enough to rotate 180 and shower my opinions on the masses of grad students, postdocs, and adjuncts who are still dragging their intestines up the jagged slopes of Mount Employable. So listen up.

5. Give good, memorable talks.
I have given, lessee, eight posters at SVP. I reckon that each one ate up about four times as much time and effort as any talk I've ever given, including my hour-long job talk. And I still get the occasional compliment for talks I gave years ago. If you're just trying to convey data then posters are probably just as good or better than talks, but this post isn't about conveying data. It's about getting ahead, and that means not just conveying data but getting yourself recognized as a competent, confident conveyor of results. Give a poster or two to get your feet wet but then switch over to talks and don't look back. Use the time you save to write more papers.

I won't waste your time with a lot of specifics about what makes a good talk. Go see a few and you'll quickly figure it out. The best talks make you feel smarter by helping you figure out something that you didn't know before, or possibly that no one knew before the talk started. They are packed with content and arresting images. I don't have tons of data in the numbers-and-statistics sense; I'm a morphologist. So my talks are crammed with anatomy, pictures of real animals and their parts, as much as I think I can get away with. Not horribly complicated stuff that looks like wiring diagrams, mostly gee-whiz stuff that does double duty by both (a) telling the necessary story and (b) hopefully blowing people's minds just a little. Whatever you've got, deploy it to maximum effect: hopefully just one and never more than four big, easy-to-read images (per slide) that fill the available space. Now is not the time for your avant-garde experiment in the esthetics of negative space. Beat 'em to death with pictures. Just not too many at one time.

Also, don't waste any of your finite space with some cool-looking PowerPoint theme or school emblem or research group logo on every slide. That's your space that you're using to basically brand your talk as someone else's. If you are hell-bent on using that Nike crap at all, put it on the title slide and never bring it up again.

4. Write papers that people want to read.
You probably think that's about subject matter, but it's not. It's about presentation. Richard Fortey got me to choke down several chapters on Precambrian algal slime mats and like it (in the book Life) because he made me care. The bottom line is, if you can make your audience care, you can tell them about whatever you want, no matter how esoteric or superficially uninteresting. And if you can't, all of the venomous feathered coelocanths in Liaoning won't save you.

Easy, right? But how do you make people care about worm tracks or the third principal component of variation in embryonic rat skulls? The answer is two-pronged: harness your own enthusiasm (and if there's none to harness, work on something else), and explain how your results are relevant to something that others care about. I know I theoretically have an advantage here because I work on a sexy system in sexy animals, but I have seen loads of sauropod talks and megatons of dinosaur talks and they suck about as much as all other talks, on average. And I have myself given talks that sucked, talks where I know I lost half the audience because they got up and left before I was halfway through (not at SVP, thankfully, but it was no less painful when it happened). I may tell that whole sordid tale here another time, but the upshot was that I forgot my guiding principles and led the audience into a swamp of irrelevant detail, and they promptly marched back out--right out the damn door. The fulcrum here is 'irrelevant', as in to whom? That swamp of detail looked like a garden of delights to me, but I was the one giving the talk, not an audience member suffering through it, and I got the perspective exactly wrong. Put yourself in your audience's shoes and act accordingly (or get used to failure).

3. Produce a lot.
Give lots of talks and write a lot. I didn't say "write lots of papers" because other kinds of writing can be just as useful for developing your abilities.

But this is not some b.s. peptalk about how writing and speaking a lot will help you pick out what works and incorporate those golden devices into some special personal toolbox that floats in the Realm of Ideas and is lined with the down of unborn swans. When I give a talk that I know works, I go have a beer and rarely give it another thought (seriously, and for reasons that will shortly be explained). The point of giving lots of talks and writing for others is to increase your n, which will increase your number of failures. If it doesn't, it doesn't mean you aren't failing--either your friends are too chicken to tell you that you sucked, or you are too dim to perceive it. And if you have the courage and humility to poke through the wreckage and figure out why you failed, you will actually learn something useful. Mostly more humility, but also real nuts-and-bolts stuff that will make your future efforts better. It's not that success can't teach you, it just isn't a very good motivator (hence my post-victory beer and forgetting). You will learn a lot more from a punch in the nuts than from a pat on the back. Mostly, you'll learn how to avoid getting punched in the nuts. If it happens enough times, you'll either get better or quit.

2. Consume a lot.
Watch lots of talks, and read lots of papers. I would say "especially bad ones" but the world being what it is, you'll get more of those than the good stuff anyway. Every time you find yourself staving off slumber in a talk or wishing the author would jettison the circumlocution, jargon, and superfluous adverbs and get to the damn point, you are learning what not to do in your own work. And every time you bounce out of a talk or put down a paper with a little edifice of understanding newly erected in your head, you are learning how to grab your audience and actually teach them something meaningful and useful. Talks outside your subject area are especially helpful because they help you dissociate the good and bad habits from your enthusiasm for whatever it is you work on. As for papers outside your subject area--I'm assuming that you, like me, don't have time to read the papers within your subject area, so let's not fool around. But all of the reading that you do--novels, comics, monthly progress reports--has the potential to teach you what to do and what to avoid. He who has ears, let him hear.

1. Teach.
This the meta-advice hiding behind everything else. Teach. Teach a lot. Teach your ass off. Every time you get up to give a lecture or a demonstration, that's a little talk. Every time you write an outline or lab handout, that's a little paper. Nothing else will pump up your n the same way, and give you so many exhilarating successes and crushing failures from which to learn.

Even in the classes closest to your heart you will have to teach about stuff that you don't particularly care about or like, and once you've gotten a room full of freshmen to pay attention through DNA methylation, getting a lecture hall full of your peers to care about your research will be easier. Not easy. But easier.

Other than maybe collecting and cranking your data (and sometimes even then), everything you do in academia (and in lots of other aspects of life) boils down to effective communication. That means empathizing with your audience, meeting them on their level (whever that may be), figuring out how to make what you have to say relevant and interesting to them, and never wasting their time. It does not mean dumbing down your message, pandering to their expectations, or especially deciding that "you don't need to know that" when the slide is already up on the screen. It doesn't mean meeting them halfway. Frequently it means going all the way over to them--and then slamming a hook through their mouths and dragging them all the way back to your side, so you can teach them. I'm guessing that you've been hooked that way at least once in your life, so you know it can be done.

It is conceivable that there is a better way to learn how to communicate effectively than to teach a lot, but I don't know what that might be. It would have to involve talking and writing for lots of groups of people and offer lots of opportunities for both success and failure, so whatever you called it, it would probably look and smell a lot like teaching. From what I've seen, the people who teach early and often give better talks, write better papers, do better on their qualifying exams, produce better theses and defend them more successfully, and score better positions than those who don't. All too often the people who are looking to give you an award, grant, or job just look at your research and publication record and assume that teaching will handle itself. What you had better realize is that teaching will not handle itself, but if you can get a handle on it, you can elevate your entire game--and get ahead.

Mindset
Realize I am not speaking from any position of sinlessness here. There are talks that I would ungive, and papers that I would not just rewrite but unwrite. Evolution is a process of killing off the unfit, science is a process of falsifying hypotheses, and presenting is an attempt to avoid failure. Hewing to a progressive ideal sounds nice but avoiding the Reaper is more profitable in the long run.

That may sound overly grim, or pessimistic, or like a glass-is-half-empty matter of taste. It's not. If you don't allow at least some part of your brain to consider the possibility that all of your work sucks and then let it do triage to find and remove the suckiest parts, you won't push yourself hard enough to be as good as you could be.

But also, if you don't allow some other part of your brain to exult in your successes and recognize your own awesomeness without any contamination from false modesty, you will be miserable and you'll never dare enough to be as good as you could be.

Now, go forth and rock.

More glittering gems from my outbox: finishing the dissertation

I don't update this thing very often, but I'm on e-mail all the time, and the profound wisdom and sparkling wit just comes jetting out of me like one of those lava fountains in Iceland. So I'm going geothermal here.

A recent correspondent asked me about dissertation stuff, and this is part of my response:

-------------------

....The most honest and useful advice I ever heard about dissertations came from Darren. I wrote to ask him what finishing was really like (this was when I was still a few months out). Tragically I've lost his original reply, but the gist was, "Eventually you will realize that you can't finish by treating the dissertation like a day job. It is a godforsaken monster that will continue to ruin your life until finally you've had enough and you just decide to kill it. After that, you may put in impossible hours and push yourself right to your limits, but you will finish. It's the only way I know to do it." [Darren, if you have the original thing you sent, please feel free to resend it or post it as a comment. UPDATE: Darren just posted it in a comment, below, and as I suspected it's much better than my paraphrase.]

That was certainly true in my case. The only thing that finally made me face finishing was my committee's insistence that I needed to get it done that semester. And even then I spent the first half of the spring of 2007 treating the diss. like a day job. It wasn't really until the final month and a half that I went into overdrive, literally staying up past my bedtime every night and gradually letting every other concern in my life slide. It sucked, bigtime. And after I filed I didn't look at the diss. at all for about three months. But I did get it done and filed.

It might be possible to just decide, "Okay, I'm going to finish my dissertation now," no matter where in the process you are, but I doubt it and I wouldn't recommend it even if it is possible. I think it's more like trying to climb Everest when there's a storm coming. There is some point up the side of the mountain when you are close enough to the summit to make a dash for it. There's no point in starting the dash until you're that close; otherwise you'll just exhaust yourself and possibly die of exposure. So for now just keep grinding away, a little here and a little there, until you are (a) sick to death of it and (b) close enough to make a run on the summit.

I read some books on writing when I was trying to write my diss--possibly more displacement activity--but none of them were worth a damn. The book that I wish I'd had then but only discovered recently is Steven Pressfield's The War of Art, which I cannot recommend highly enough. It's shelved in the Self-Help section at the bookstore, which strikes me as perverse. It's not really that. It's more like a personal philosophy on how to think about your work and all the things that keep you from getting it done....

------------------

I do recommend The War of Art, to everyone. Jarrod put me onto it. It's a short read, but pithy, and decidedly non-lame. I put it up there with Paul Graham's essays in terms of great writing about how to do useful stuff in the real world.

Dr Vector lives up to his name

As a vector, that is.

I suck at responding to memes. Darren gave me a Thinking Blogger award back around the Kazanian and Julia gave me another one in the mid-Aptian, and I haven't even publicly thanked them, let alone passed it on. So thanks, you two. You're both much better and more productive bloggers than me. Much love.

I'll pass that award on soon, I promise.

But in the meantime I'm going to leapfrog to a newer meme, for which I was also tagged by Julia, called the Writing Meme.

The rules:

1. List 3 writing tips
2. Tag 3 people whose writing style you admire
   

Julia wrote, "I want Matt's sauropod-paper-writing insights", so here goes:

1. Strive to produce not Least Publishable Units, but Most Publishable Units. Don't approach your manuscripts with the attitude, "What could I cut out of this to send somewhere else", but rather ask, "Is there anything else I could put in, either to give this paper more lasting value or because I know it's not worth writing up by itself and I may never get a better chance to say it?" Admittedly that's a tough row to hoe, and I feel like I only properly followed it once (in my Acta paper), but it's a noble goal.

2. In contrast to what I just said, if there is something short and sweet that you could knock out in one shot, don't make excuses and don't wait for the muses. Just go for it. I wrote the first draft of this paper in a single six-hour session. It's a shorty and, as before, it's my only example for this tip, but it felt great at the time and doesn't feel too bad now, either.

3. Write as informally as you think you can get away with (i.e., without sacrificing the science). Your papers will make better reading and more people will read them. There's a reason people still read The Origin for pleasure. Here's a simple heuristic: if reviewers aren't criticizing you for being informal, your prose is too stilted. Reviewers frequently knock me for being too informal, and that helps me find the balance. YMMV.

What the hell, I'm going for four. Memes mutate, right? This is the one that you're most likely to have heard before, but it bears repeating.

4. Play Frankenstein. Don't be married to the structure that you had in mind when you started writing. Feel free to move sentences around in paragraphs and paragraphs around in papers. And by "feel free" I really mean "steel yourself to the abhorrent thought of cutting up your beautiful rainbow children". Because they're not beautiful rainbow children. They're just words. And the sooner you Get Over It and learn to rearrange them in the order that best suits the goals of the paper (not your goals as a doting prose-parent), the better your writing will be.

And as long as I've broken the rules, I might as well go for broke. Here's the one you're least likely to have heard before, but it's something I feel strongly about.

5. Accept the fact that you are going to get things wrong. If you're not wrong at least occasionally, your science is boring (HT). You're not working close enough to the bleeding edge. There's a larger point here, too, which is that science only progresses by discovering new stuff, and that process inevitably means that some old stuff gets modified or reversed. As long as you are participating, that will be your fate at least once in a while. Don't be sloppy; don't invite error; but when it happens, don't kill yourself. I can't think of a single established scientist that I respect that hasn't been wrong about something. Admitting it and moving on is part of being a professional, and a grown-up.

My three tags are:

1. Brian Switek at Laelaps--I want to know how he writes so damn much all the time. It's embarrassing!

2. Mike Kaspari at Getting Things Done in Academia--He already writes a lot about writing, but in particular I'd like his thoughts on what makes for good collaborative writing.

3. Mike Taylor. His prose always seems to flow like water, and I'm not just buttering him up because he's my brother and co-blogger. Read his papers and see for yourself. He doesn't have a blog of his own, but maybe he'll co-opt an SV-POW! post to impart some wisdom (with the obligatory sauropod vert picture thrown in just to keep the letter of the law).

How to Draw Heterochrony

A big part of science is presentation. You can have a kickass idea or a really cool discovery, but if you disguise it with enough jargon, or hide your important results in the middle of long descriptive work, or just send your papers to sufficiently obscure journals, you can still have almost no impact. So: a good chunk of science is communication, and communication is all about clarity.

It is worth taking a few minutes to leaf through a biology or anatomy textbook and think about what you see. Most of the figures will be redrawn from journal articles. And the illustrations that are chosen for this peculiar form of immortality are the ones that are so clear that even freshmen can understand them. My guiding light in making figures is to aim for something that is clear enough to be included in a textbook. No luck yet, but the wheels of academia grind slowly. My day may come, and if it does, you'll hear all about it right here. And if it doesn't, textbook clarity is still a good goal to have in mind when drawing figures.

Heterochrony is the rearrangement of development. Not just recapitulation, in which development resembles an evolutionary parade, or neoteny, in which adults look like big goofy babies (think axolotls, or Kirsten Dunst), but a change in the order of developmental events. At least, that's how it should be. Some people include recapitulation and neoteny and any other change in developmental timing as kinds of heterochrony. Other people say that makes the term so broad that it becomes meaningless; everything is heterochrony and nothing is heterochrony. See? Already we're about knee-deep in the swamp of I've Already Lost Interest.

Here, like a breath of fresh air, is Florian Witzmann's figure showing the order of appearance of bony elements in salamander monsters from the dawn of time (a.k.a. temnospondyls). In the future, if anyone asks me what heterochrony is, I'm going to pull a photocopy of this out of my pocket, hold it up in the air, and say, "This."


Many thanks to Florian for giving me permission to post his figure. It is figure 6 from:

Witzmann, F. 2006. Developmental patterns and ossification sequence in the Permo-Carboniferous temnospondyl Archegosaurus decheni (Saar-Nahe Basin, Germany). Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 26(1):7-17.