Not Dan Janzen.

What are good predictors of success and how do we use them to reach our life goals? One of the best pieces of advice I have received for success in academia came from Ecologist Extraordinaire, Dan Janzen. “Always be finishing something”.

So here’s the deal. An elite prep school and a charter school in New York both confronted the same problem. Students with every economic advantage and/or that were intellectually gifted would be admitted to elite colleges upon graduation but quit before they completed their college degree.

In a fascinating article in the New York Times magazine, Paul Tough reviews how both schools are turning to the work of U. Penn psychologist Angela Duckworth.

People who accomplished great things, she noticed, often combined a passion for a single mission with an unswerving dedication to acheive that mission, whatever the obstacles and however long it might take. She decided she needed to name this aquality, and she chose the word “grit.

Duckworth’s simple 12 question “grit” score has exceeded other, more complex tests, in predicting success. For example, West Point, the U.S. Army’s elite office training school, pitted their test against the Grit Scale. The simple Grit Test was better at predicting who will finish the arduous “Beast Barracks” that begins a students time at West Point.

Grit, apparently, is it.

Dan Janzen has grit.

Importantly, these educators believe, grit can be taught. And they are adjusting their curriculum to highlight examples of grit in history, literature, and civics. Moreover, they are monitoring student progress with a “character report card” that assigns grades in personality traits like zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity. You can imagine how many of those traits would be good ones to cultivate.

So take the Grit test. And for the more senior readers of this blog, post your score if you dare.

I scored a very respectable 4.1.  I suspect anybody scoring a perfect “5″ would be an absolute joy to share an office with.

Download the grit test here.

See also:

Will you earn your Ph. D.?

One more question: Since we were talking in class about minimizing the emails that you force other people to read, what are your thoughts on sending an email that simply says “Thanks” when someone responds to a request you sent them?  It seems rude to not acknowledge their response, but it does force them to open/delete another email…

Good question. You have three options when you receive a useful email.

1. Do nothing. The first rule of email etiquette is to do no harm. Let’s say that you, along with the entire department,  just received a useful email from the Chair. You, and the other 100 recipients, are not going to make her happy by sending a courteous message reading “Thanks, that was really useful!”.  If they are not reasonably expecting it, don’t send it.
2. Send an email using both subject line and text box. This is the old standby, but increasingly out of favor, as it not only takes up space in the inbox, but requires the reader to click on the message to make doubly sure nothing more is involved than a simple thank you,  for example
   

   Thanks!

   .

   .

   By the way, I ran over your cat. My bad. :-0

   .

   .

   Have a good one.

3. Use the subject heading only.  This is increasingly common practice, especially for a polite acknowledgements when someone has done you a favor. A simple
   “Thanks!  n/t”     should do the trick.

See Wikipedia’s List of Email Subject Abbreviations for a whole list of acronyms, from the mundane to the bizarre, that are now populating subject lines, including, the very useful

NT, meaning No Text. Also written as N/T or n/t. Used when the entire content of the e-mail is contained in the subject and the body remains empty. This saves the recipient’s time because she then does not have to open the e-mail.

The money quotes:

Its basic argument is that if you write on a schedule, rather than according to whim, you will be more productive and happier as an academic writer.

and

Writing projects (even whole writing careers) too often go off the rails when writers abandon their schedule and start waiting for inspiration. Or they never get started because they never consider the question of exactly when they will put all their great ideas into writing.

and, the de-mystifying

Silvia takes great pains to make academic writing seem like an ordinary, non-existential activity. “Academic writers,” for example, “cannot get writer’s block”.

This is wonderfully true. Granted, there are days when you are “on fire” and days when the mind is sludge, the hands cramp, and the heebie jeebies multiply.  On the former days you compose the Introduction and Discussion–easily the most literary parts of a scientific paper. On the latter days, work on your Materials and Methods, draft a figure, even type in your references.

Just write…every….day.  The currency of academia is still publications. And you want to leave grad school with pocket full of cash…

But there is a case to be made that certain more mind-numbing activities should be allowed to accrue until you have a day’s worth of emails to return, forms to fill out, and papers to grade. This is the argument made by Cal Newport in a nifty discussion of “best practices” by professors and graduate students.

The gem here is the notion of carving out one day a week (or one more likely, one morning or afternoon) for “Administrative Nonsense Day“. This can be anything from doing your monthly bills to updating your web pages. The point is you want to maximize your creative time, uninterrupted by the (oft seductive) siren call of the piddly stuff. If you know that stuff will get done soon, it’s off your radar screen and allows you to concentrate on the stuff that matters long-term.

This leads to the doppleganger of “Administrative Nonsense Day”– your “Big Idea Day” (sound of harp glissandos and angels singing). This is the day that you don’t answer your phone, hide at home and give yourself the luxury of a 15 hours of reading and sketching out the next paper, grant, or project. Nothing replaces large chunks of time to think. Nothing. You deserve them.

There is one more tactic that you may want to consider if you are one of the many grad students paying your way by being a Teaching Assistant. Say you are required to teach two (or, three) lab sections a week. Try to schedule them all on the same day. That’s right, the 9:00-12:00, the 1:00-4:00, and the 6:00-9:00 night lab. There is a good chance you will teach better (and be damned relaxed by the night lab) if you focus all your attentions on a subject in one day. If you maintain your proper balance of caffeine, water, Gatorade, and Cliff Bars, you will sail through.

Having done this myself at the ole UofA, the bonus comes with that gorgeous feeling of walking out into the cool desert air at 9:30PM, knowing that you have Big Idea Day waiting for you tomorrow and no teaching for six whole days.

Sweet.

The basic idea: combine strategic planning with a simple rule that guarantees you do stuff daily that promotes your long-term academic fitness. Its simple and professor-proof. Here’s the gist:

Step 1. Use a To Do List. I said it was simple. You need a file where you link your schedule to your goals, your tactics to your stratigery. I used to call this Trajectory, but that name was too dorky even for me. Now it’s called +Calender. It used to be an MS Word file, but now I use Omni Outliner (the check boxes are a great feature, and it doesn’t swallow up all my CPU). Any outliner with headers and subheaders will do.

Step 2. Divide it into a planning section… This is your strategic part, where you lay out the things you want to get done. I break it into my

remember–aphorisms that help me through my day. Private aphorisms…

habit of the month–if you do something for one month, it becomes a habit, right?

current writing tasks–writing is important enough that I highlight manuscripts at the top of my must get done list. These often overlap with my…

big goals–this is a laundry list of currently most important Group 2 activities (things that are not urgent but contribute to my long-term academic fitness). Group 2 activities require a sustained effort over days/months/years, but lead to successes that are truly important to you. As an academic scientist, this list tends toward papers and research, but also includes things like improving my running speed and endurance. Your list will inevitably be much longer than anything you can reasonably accomplish in a month. Get used to that. Finally, there is...

service– tasks like letters of recommendation and manuscript reviews that I’ve promised folks. These are my social contracts, which often can slip below the radar unless they’re staring me in the face every day.

Step 3…and a Weekly To Do list section. The second part of +Calender is the traditional To Do list. These are organized on a weekly basis. It also allows me to cut and paste each week’s events into a separate Archive file. Think of your Archive as your academic diary. I’ve been keeping yearly archive files now for about ten years. You never know when you need to reconstruct what you were doing 4 months or 4 years ago.

Step 4. Identify two items each day from your big goals, bold them, and put them at the top of the day’s list of things to do. Now here’s the critical thing: Do these Group 2 activities as early in the day as you can, before other crap gets in the way. These two items are the activities that, when completed, will let you fall asleep at night, serene in the fact that you’ve done something important that day. The earlier you do these each day, the better you’ll sleep, and the more productive you will become.

Step 5. Once a week, swap out your Weekly To Do List. Once a month, revisit your Big Goals. GTD and 7 Habits both emphasize the importance of regular review. This is where you look back on the week’s events, smile serenely as you check off one of those big goals, copy the week’s To Do List to your archive, and plan out the next week. The monthly review is a good opportunity to sip a cup of coffee or your favorite frosty beverage and think expansively: add to (or prune) your Big Goals list, change your habit of the month.

So there it is: two files, +Calender and Archive, keeping strategic separate from tactical, making sure that two Group 2 activities are bolded and done early each day, plus weekly and monthly reviews. That’s my system. What’s yours? Share the love, people.

But your advisor is undoubtedly the partner most responsible to help guide your way, protect you from egregious political crap, steer you from some mistakes (you will find ways to make enough the way it is) and basically give you the time and space to transform yourself. The advisor’s role is complex and may best be described as your academic parent.

This realization is hard for some, particularly those who just spent some pretty harrowing years discovering both the joys of puberty and that their parents were batshit crazy. But just as every set of parents is different, advisors come in every stripe. The problem is, it is often not clear at the outset what you are getting yourself into. The more considerate, literate, (and, by definition, not batshit crazy) professors go out of their way to lay out their expectations early on. These vary, obviously, but the most basic advice is timeless.

Toward exploring these issues, I present below just such a “Manifesto of Expectations” (repeat to yourself, “It’s all about M.E.”). The author is a colleague who wishes to remain anonymous. I will respect his wishes, save to say that his short-lived career as a left tackle for the Golden Buffaloes was plagued by scandal, not all of which was his responsibility. What follows is some pretty frank (and dead-on) advice. It is lightly edited (MK: and annotated) toward removing the author’s frequent and rather strained metaphors to offensive line play.

1. Work hard. I have incredibly high expectations for all of my students, but, above all else, I expect you to work hard. For some, this might mean working 60-70 hours a week. For others, it might mean working only 50. But for everyone, it means that I expect you to be continuously engaged in your science, whether that is by reading papers, analyzing data, writing papers and proposals, or discussing ideas with other ecologists. I will say that graduate school is not a 9-5 job. In fact, you shouldn’t even think of it as a job – hopefully it’s your passion. In essence, you’re getting some money to think about things that interest you, to spend time in the field, and to talk with interesting people about interesting ideas.

And impressions count. You’re not expected to be here from 9-5. But if you’re not, you should let folks (your advisor, fellow students, collaborators, and the rest of the faculty) know that you’re working. It doesn’t hurt to send out a late night email or an early morning email so that people will be aware that you’re working, even if you’re not at your desk. MK–this is true and clever. Send every update to your committee at 5:00AM, then go back to bed, if necessary.

2. Read. I expect you to be well read. That means being aware of essentially all current ecology, and the important stuff from the past 30 years (MK–you may wish at this point to get up, get a drink of water, and scream into a pillow. Don’t worry, we’ll wait.). You should read every current issue of Ecology, Ecology Letters, Oikos, and Oecologia. You should be aware of the relevant papers coming out in American Naturalist, Science, Nature, and PNAS. You should also read more specialized journals. If you work on insects, pay attention to Ecological Entomology. If you work on plants, the Journal of Ecology is a good journal. You should also buy and keep handy the following books: Primer of Ecological Statistics by Gotelli and Ellison and How to do Ecology by Karban. MK–Your primary responsibility in the first year of grad school is to train yourself to absorb the literature. It is a skill. Look at past posts here on the subject, and we’ll have more to say about this soon.

3. Talk. You should have a meeting with each of your committee members (not necessarily as a group) at least once a semester to discuss ideas, papers, your projects, and your future prospects. After the meeting, send the committee member an email summarizing the meeting and thanking them. MK–Holy crap! Every semester??? There is a fine line between being ambitious and being a pest. Meet with your advisor regularly, especially in your first year. Your committee’s good will is a renewable resource.

When someone asks you what you’re working on, you should be able to answer in 30 seconds, 2 minutes, 15 minutes (the length of an ESA talk), and 45 minutes (the length of a departmental seminar). The answer to “what do you do” isn’t “I work on ants” or that you’re doing something that’s never been done before. The answer always justifies your work in broad ecological terms. MK–Every time you talk about your work you are giving a presentation. Gauge the audience, take a deep breath, think about your entry point, then teach.

You should also meet with EVERY seminar speaker who comes to EEB who is remotely ecological. There are no exceptions. You can meet with them with one or a few other people in a small meeting,or at the bar. MK–Visiting scholars are there for you to learn from and network with. To my mind one of the single best predictors of success is the grad student who has the reputation for requesting her 30 minutes with a visiting speaker.

4. Write. You will apply for every possible source of funding that you can. This isn’t because we’re tight on money MK–its true, the author is flush. It’s because writing takes practice, and writing proposals helps crystallize your ideas. You will also write papers that will be submitted to top tier peer-reviewed journals. If you’re heading toward academia, the most important thing you can do is publish lots of good papers.

5. Collaborate. I expect you to collaborate with me, with the others students in the lab, with other folks in the department and at other institutions on interesting projects. This could entail writing review papers, developing experiments, or whatever. In the lab, it will also mean that I expect us all to help one another out during big pushes – maybe someone has a huge decomp experiment that needs harvesting. Well, then we should all help. MK: Pay it forward, establish 24 h buddies. In the world of academia, your lab members have your back.

6. Develop a toolkit. You’re going to know how to design experiments and analyze data and think broadly and synthetically about ecology. But you should also develop a toolkit to distinguish yourself from all of the other ecologists who can do those things. Your toolkit might include modeling or null model analyses or genetic techniques or specialized statistics. Just make sure you have one, and make sure everyone knows what it is. MK–make yourself unique and indispensable part of the group.

7. Set goals. Set goals each semester. Some of these goals should be attainable (e.g., read two books; finish manuscript). Other should be a stretch (publish four papers). Set goals each week. Set goals each day. And set goals for your entire graduate career. Write all of these goals down and keep them in a prominent place. MK–Lay out your goals across different time frames (daily, weekly..) and expect much of yourself. You will never be aware of what you can do if you don’t push yourself.

8. Have fun. Graduate school is fun, and ecology is even more fun. Don’t hesitate to go out for a beer (I’ve never hesitated…MK–so true, so true). Feel free to go on a vacation every now and then. Spend time with your family, friends, and pets. Go to meetings in interesting places. And pick a project that you actuallyenjoy working on. Remember – ecology should be a passion, not a burden. MK–A particularly apt dictum to live by: Work hard, play hard, nap strategically.

When I was thinking about easing back into the blogging thing, I thought it good to return to first principles. And what could be more first principlish than a set of fives–the first five things a grad student should add to her psycho-social-survival kit as she walks through those ivy-covered doors. So here goes…

1. The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People–Success in any enterprise starts with deciding on your strategy. What are your goals, what do you want to accomplish? Stephen R. Covey’s guide is still the best there is toward starting this part of your journey.
2. Getting Things Done–Once you know your goals, you still need to implement them. We all know folks who think big but never finish anything because they can’t seem to get organized. David Allen’s book is perhaps the best there is in setting you on the mindset toward being effective.
3. Bird by Bird–To succeed in science you have to write. For most of us, writing is hard. Think of it Anne Lamott’s short book as “Getting Things Done” for writers. It will change your life. Really.
4. The EEB Dialectic–In the 1970′s, two fellow grad students, Steven Stearns and Ray Huey, produced two documents that live on as the best introductions to the psychodrama that is grad school. Stearn’s “Some modest advice for graduate students” is a bit hard-edged (its first pearl of wisdom, “Always Prepare for the Worst”, sets its tone rather nicely). But all of it rings true. Huey’s “Some acynical advice for graduate students” begins with the not-so-opposite-as-it-may-sound premise “Always Expect the Best” then rolls on from there. This will be the most informative 20 minutes you spend in graduate school. Print this out and put it somewhere where you’ll encounter it every once in a while. I suggest the bathroom.
5. Your hipster PDA and a nice pen–’Cause you never know when inspiration will hit and you won’t have a copy of The EEB Dialectic to peruse.

Finally, remember to keep your perspective. Sometimes you have to laugh at the absurdity of it all.

ht Matt Groening

One of the basic variables of behavioral ecology is the GUT (Giving Up Time)–the amount of time an organism spends at one activity before quitting to do something else. The optimal solution to calculating an organism’s GUT is simple in principle: you quit one task when the opportunity costs–the costs of ignoring all the other stuff you could be doing–exceed the benefits of what you’re doing now.

That rodents are able to do these calculations with ease is a subject of much resentment among the scientists that study them.

But when do you stick with a project for the long haul? And what can you expect for all the effort? How do you avoid being an active participant in, gulp! an exercise in futility?

One answer is staked out in a recent article in the NYT summarizing the research of Andre Ericsson and colleagues. These are psychologists who study the correlates of expert performance. In other words, what does it take to get really, really, good at something? As their work is summarized in a 918 page tome, and I’m a wee bit behind in my reading the way it is, I will summarize the summary.

…the best way to learn how to encode information meaningfully, Ericsson determined, was a process known as deliberate practice….Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task — playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.

and…

“I think the most general claim here,” Ericsson says of his work, “is that a lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with. But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it.” This is not to say that all people have equal potential. Michael Jordan, even if he hadn’t spent countless hours in the gym, would still have been a better basketball player than most of us. But without those hours in the gym, he would never have become the player he was.

So before we get into a knicker-twist over genes versus the environment, the message of this work seems to be that if you want to get really good at something, you have to practice, practice, practice.

But genius = good genes x workaholism.

To me, the more interesting issue relevant to this blog is the question: What sort of deliberate practice, focusing on technique and not outcome, would make one a good scientist?

An artist may paint the same bridge over and over, a dancer may practice her Tai Chi, a guitarist will work on progressions until their spinal. But what should a young scientist do over and over, focusing on the skill and not the outcome? Sure, each profession has a skill set (for me, its fixing tiny ants on tiny triangles of paper attached to stainless steel pins, so as not to immerse said ant in a sarcophagus of Elmer’s Glue)

But what intellectual practice makes you a better scientist? Here are my fives for today:

Each of these, I think, yield progress measured in terms of years, not days.

1) Read the literature obsessively. Read read read. Then read some more. You will get better at it.

2) For each paper, dissect out the hypotheses. They are sometimes carefully hidden! Break the hypothesis down into assumptions, logic, and predictions. Come up with reasonable alternative hypotheses for any interesting results.

3) Practice summarizing to a friendly colleague a paper you just read. Convey concisely the paper’s question, methods, main results. What was the paper’s single greatest strength, and what data you would like to see next? The better you can do this, the better you can give a talk at a national meeting.

4) Think about your research as you fall asleep. Turn it into pictures, graphs, relationships that move about and interact. When you turn your research over to your subconscious, your giving your brain another chance to work on sticky problems.

5) Find a mentor who will challenge you. Everybody who is serious about climbing a steep learning curve needs a coach who can help you recognize, and work to correct, your weaknesses.

h/t to AA

I have visions of the “Church of Allen” sometime in the not so distant future, complete with special digital watches that incessantly blink your Mastery Number.

Reach number 100? Time for the fiery carousel.

An an academic, you need a system to effectively capture and curate your ideas. Such systems are infinitely flexible–part of the fun is playing around with different components until you find a set that fits you. That said, I suspect that the following components are pretty much universal in any such system:

you need a means of capturing an idea anywhere,

you need centralized, temporary storage,

you need an arena for right-brain and left-brain play,

you need long-term storage.

We’ll spend time over the next couple of weeks examining each of these in more detail; consider this the opening chapter.

OK, here’s my system in, of course, 5 parts:

1) You need a means of capturing an idea anywhere. Every academic needs an instantaneous recording device. In fact, one way of recognizing yourself as an incurable academic is the near painful nakedness you feel upon discovering out in the real world without anything to write with. Because you never know when an idea will hit. Let me reemphasize that.

You never know when an idea will hit.

Never. Driving to work. In the middle of the night. Sitting on the john. As a consequence, there are only a handful of scenarios where I can’t at a moment’s notice reach out scribble on my Hipster PDA–a bunch of 3×5 filecards clipped together–with my Pilot V5 Extra Fine. Sure there are other technologies, like real PDAs or voice recorders, but nothing is faster, simpler, and less costly to replace when it goes through the wash. (Yeah, I know what you’re thinking–”whatabout the pen?”. So far, the caps my trusty Pilot V5s have stayed on).

2) You need centralized, temporary storage–One insight of GTD is the importance of a physical repository for the paper that enters your life. I throw ripped out magazine pages, bills, journals, essays to be graded, and, of course, scribble-filled index cards, in my inbox. Since I have two desks, one at school and one at home, I have two inboxes. The goal is to process all items in the inbox by the end of the day. The reality is that it may take ’til Friday. But, and this is the important point, I know where my stuff is. Loose papers that need to be processed always pass through the inbox.

3) You need an arena for right-brain play– My Moleskine notebook, a high quality bound notebook, serves two functions. First, it is my upscale Hipster PDA. It goes with me to every seminar, faculty meeting, and waiting room–any place where I will be sitting for more than a 20 minutes. But it also serves as my analogue computer–a place to jot down ideas and connect them with arrows, to draw, to think visually and spatially. Every seminar/meeting/waiting room get’s a new page and heading (usually where I am, or a particular problem I’m trying to solve). The sequential nature of my Moleskine entries let’s me return to a where I left off and quickly get up to speed. When I’m working on a big project, the Moleskine sits (as it’s doing right now) between me and my keyboard so I can go back and forth, analogue and digital, right brain/left brain.

4) You need an arena for left-brain play–Thank gawd for intel Macs. I can now run my two PC-based programs, SAS and SigmaPlot, on a machine with an OS built by folks who understand how I work. I use one computer because my work is not CPU intensive–I don’t do a lot of simulations, and my graphics are simple and straightforward. Thus I can get by with a decent notebook computer and I don’t have the hassle of transferring files back and forth between my notebook and desktop.

5) You need long-term storage. Storage memory is incredibly cheap, your ideas aren’t. A notebook used in two offices allows you to effortlessly keep your backup’s in two places against the awful, finite probability that one of those two places will be obliterated (hey, I live in tornado country). I use LaCie backup drives because they look cool (I’m a MacHead), but the quality of backup drives is starting to converge on “pretty good” all around. Add a program like SuperDuper! (yeah, I know…MacHead) that does progressive backups (backing up your entire hard disk once, then only those files that have changed or been added subsequently) and you have as close to a guaranteed, painless system of protecting your data as is possible for about $200.

So that’s my system to capture and curate ideas. I’m pretty happy with it. Ultimately the system you use will be driven by your taste, budget, and work habits. But you need a system. We’ll be delving more into each component in the future. In the meantime, here’s your opportunity to share tweaks or hacks that work for you.