feeling like an irresponsible grown-up

After all the hooplah over the past year, this is what I feel like doing while at work these days:

• Playing Scrabulous! on Facebook
• Shopping for carpet, area rugs, washer, dryer, fridge, stove, and microwave/fan for the new house
• Making appointments for everything that needs to get done that is not related to work (e.g., car repairs, haircut, massage, annual eye exam, etc.)
• Shopping for a new dress for an upcoming summer wedding
• Booking the rental car for the upcoming out-of-state summer wedding
• Booking the moving truck for our move 9 days after the summer wedding
• Catching up on my subscribed blogs (of course!)

Note that these items do not appear on this list:

• Reviewing a manuscript for the third time (why, oh why, does the editor keep avoiding rejecting it? I think it sucks and am so sick of looking at it….)
• Starting one of my three new papers that I’ll work on for the next year
• Reading about stats I really need to learn for one of these new papers
• Finishing revisions to a paper I’ve been working on for several years
• Starting to draft syllabi for my fall classes
• Starting IRB application materials for my fall and spring pilot studies
• Finishing my postdoc work-related responsibilities
• Eating lunch (bad, bad Dr. Addled!)

Even taking my medication, I can’t focus worth beans or make myself do anything productive at work. All the  while I feel really, really super-stressed about it. I’ve taken three days off in the last three weeks but each of these days was spent in New City (e.g., house-hunting, faculty & student meetings, etc.). What weekend time I’ve had has been dedicated to early packing (!) and mortgage applications.

I think I just really need a day off that’s truly a day off…  I think I’m going to pick the day with the best weather forecast, stay home, turn off the phone and the computer, and take the time to read and relax, all in the name of better productivity at the office.

I feel like a grown-up!

It’s now official… I definitely feel like an adult. We put in an offer on a house last weekend, and I’ve spent the entire week trying to figure out which mortgage is the best for us, scheduling inspections, gathering paperwork for the aforementioned mortgage, filling out the application, harassing hubby for being so uninvolved in the decision*, and soon I will also call the moving company to schedule our move!

*Hubby is excited to pick out appliances and such (i.e., the small purchases), but not particularly interested in the largest part of the purchase itself (i.e., the mortgage). This is a bit ironic, considering that he was a business major in college…

Needless to say, I’m not exactly getting a great deal of work done these days. I will go to New City tomorrow for a faculty meeting and to meet students. I spent some time during the past week getting ready to have some discussions about my future research plans. Tomorrow is also the deadline for our mortgage application. If hubby needs to sign it, the only time he’ll have to sign it is Friday. If we both have to sign in person, he’ll have to come to New City with me tomorrow even though he’d rather stay at home and get a haircut.

I love our house, but it’s harder than I’d anticipated to make all these decisions. It’s going to be a long 6 weeks until we close and pack the moving truck.

when is it time to cut your losses?

I’ve worked on this one paper since 2003. I’ve submitted it & had it rejected once, and it’s been sitting in my “things to do once I have time” pile for the last year. I finally had time to work on it today, and can’t make significant headway on it. I now see how it falls short in making a potential contribution to the field. I could get it to do so, but this would involve a great deal of work and the focus of the paper would be dramatically different as a result (i.e., I wouldn’t be able to meet my original goals for the paper). As sad as I am to have wasted years of work, I think it’s just time to move on with more fruitful endeavors.

This begs the larger question… how can you tell if/when it’s time to cut your losses?

an update on my Chronicle piece

Months ago I blogged about my forthcoming Chronicle piece about having ADD & being on the academic job market. A few weeks’ ago I started to become concerned that I hadn’t heard anything from the editor since the article was accepted as a “First Person” piece. I sent a follow-up email, and as it happens, they hadn’t checked the email account used to send the acceptance email since sending the acceptance message months ago.

<sigh…. they expected somebody with ADD to reply to a different email address without specifying this in the message?!?!?>

Regardless, they are still interested in publishing an updated version of the piece. I did this and sent it a couple of weeks ago. I hope to add the link here someday soon!

the grim future of academia

“Higher education — which I had always assumed to have my best interests at heart — had become a kind of pyramid scheme with us at the bottom, the new academic proletariat.”

If I let myself think about academia’s grim future for more than a few minutes at a time, I wouldn’t be able to concentrate long enough to get anything done.

wanted: ADD-friendly statistical software

I really, really, really want a software package capable of running two analyses at once. I have spent the entire day running about 12 models. Each takes about 10 minutes to run because they are pretty complex. For the last hour I’ve been repeating the ones I did this morning with a minor tweak. All I need to do is check them to ensure that the story is still the same. But, since I can only run one at a time, it’s taking forever. What I really need is a software package that does multiple SEMs at once, or at least does them faster!

Head hurts… I made so little progress today, and the resubmission is due back to the journal in a month! This is going to be a stretch, even if the rest of the month runs smoothly. We have 4 reviews on this paper, and quite a few of them involve conceptual/theoretical implications. I’m the first author but am not all that invested in the conceptual side, as this paper is outside of my mainstream research interests. I did it mostly because my boss need a statistician, but I have a sinking feeling that I will end up making nearly all of the revisions, including the conceptual ones about which I couldn’t care less.

In better news, the top journal in my sub-discipline conditionally accepted an article I’ve been working on for 3 years. My grad advisors and I are very pleased with the decision, and the remaining changes shouldn’t take too much effort or time (i.e., they don’t involve running complicated stats models!). I’m much more invested in this paper, and expect it to get a good response upon publication. Yay for small milestones

a conclusion about reviewers

For the past year, when I haven’t been busy with job market stuff I’ve been busy submitting and resubmitting manuscripts for publication. Nearly all of these use an advanced type of statistical modeling known as structural equation modeling (SEM; I linked the wikipedia reference but be forewarned, the description is likely to put most readers to sleep). The gist of it is that it’s stats based on matrix algebra, and it’s really hard. Learning SEM pre-medication was a bitch. Learning it with medication was a snap, and I’m now pretty darn good at it, if I do say so myself. Not everybody in my field can do it, as it’s still rather new in addition to being hard. More “younglings” like me can do it than established researchers, who may not have the time or opportunity to receive training.  But I digress…

As I was saying, nearly all of the papers I’ve done in the past year use some form of SEM. Every SEM paper I’ve submitted in the past year has been designated “revise & resubmit,” which means I get to revise the paper in response to comments from peer reviewers and the journal editors. Without exception, every set of reviews has had some really, really, really dumb comments about basic SEM details. This makes me feel superior to so many other people in my field, but it’s also really annoying because the comments are incredibly stupid and sometimes don’t even make logical sense.

I’m revising a paper at the moment, and one of the reviewers asked for me to include a correlation matrix. If you’ve ever taken an Intro to Psych class, you should know what a correlation is. It’s a coefficient that indicates how strongly two variables are associated with each other. It’s super-basic, baby-level stats. Compared to what I’m doing on a daily basis (i.e., fitting models that are so complex it takes my new computer 30 minutes to crunch all the numbers), it’s insulting. It’s also annoying because now I have to make a correlation table for 18 variables so stupid reviewer A understands my work on a very, very basic level. It adds nothing to the story. They just don’t get it.  Now I will spend at least an hour trying to make all the columns and rows fit on a single landscaped page in 12 point font. Not going to happen!!!

Things shouldn’t be this way. It’s a problem in our field that our methods are changing so quickly that  only a few people are able to keep up with the changes. It’s also a problem that established, highly-esteemed researchers are so poorly trained, particularly since they are the ones who keep getting all the grant money (caveat: They then must use this grant money to hire statsmonkeys like me).

invitation for contributions

If you’re a reader who has an idea for a contribution, this is your invitation to contribute to this blog. Please contact me using the form on the “about me” page. Send me a brief outline of your idea, your desired contributor name, and an email address. If it sounds like a good match, I’ll set you up with a contributor login for this page.

The reason for this invitation: I have always wanted this blog to include more perspectives than just my own. I’m an early career social scientist. The viewpoints of a mid-career biological scientist or a graduate student in humanities could be very different than mine. Others’ strategies for managing their ADD might be different, too.  We should all be learning from each other, right?

job hunt is finally completely finished

I have a contract on my desk, and I’m ready to sign it. My postdoctoral supervisor has advertised my position, and hopes to bring on somebody new a few weeks’ before I depart this summer. These are good things, to paraphrase Martha Stewart.

But, now that my job hunt is officially complete, I just don’t know what to do with myself. I’m still used to having to search for new openings, and having to repeatedly check the academic jobs wiki for updates on interesting positions. Don’t have to do either of those any longer, so now what do I do with my time?

Try to get as many papers out as possible in the next few months? (Probably, although slowing down a bit would feel great!)

Leave my “postdoctoral campsite” cleaner than I found it? (Definitely!)

Start preparing next fall’s classes? (Hopefully…)

Start packing and planning to buy a house?

Now what?!? I have thought about little else but the job market for 8 months and can’t remember what it’s like on the “other side”…

an ADD moment at my conference

I had an “ADD moment” at my conference over the weekend.

By some misfortune, I was scheduled to present a poster at 8 a.m. Sunday morning. This is the *worst* presentation slot, and I’ve now had it two years in a row. I’m a good sport, however, and prepared in advance so I wouldn’t have to scramble on Sunday morning.

I didn’t know about daylight savings time until I arrived at the conference on Wednesday afternoon. But, I still prepared in advance, set several clocks so I wouldn’t sleep in and miss my presentation time, etc. I even woke up on time, had a cup of coffee, and made it to the poster hall early. I was really, really proud of this, because I am not a morning person.
Five minutes after I put up my poster, I realized I hadn’t taken my medication. So on top of being really, really tired, I could barely string sentences together because I was sans-ritalin.

The punchline: I still didn’t remember to take my medication, even though I’d carried it with me to the poster hall! The 1-2 times I remembered I needed to take it I ended up getting distracted. The bottom line… I was too tired to remember to take something that helps me function like a normal person even when I’m tired.

I’m not beating myself up about this too much, and in fact, I’ve been laughing about it ever since. Fortunately only a few people came to the 8 a.m. session (my supervisor was not one of them), and I didn’t need to do any real deep thinking at that point of the morning. Plus, I could joke about not being able to think straight because I was so tired, just like everybody else at the session.

I did experience a cool “first” at this conference: multiple people recognized my name! I was greeted enthusiastically at one poster by name (”Dr. Addled! It’s so nice to meet you! I really enjoyed your article on French pastry techniques, and would love it if you attended my symposium later on croissants!”), and another person purposely found me to tell me how valuable they found my research. This has never happened before, and it’s pretty darn cool!