Deans' Weblog: Dalhousie Graduate Studies

So, FGS has a new Dean, and I’m him.

(a plethora of yawns ….)

Right!  I would be the first to admit that, in the day-to-day lives of graduate students, PDFs, and faculty, the Dean of FGS is not the first person on anyone’s mind.  In fact, not in the top 3.  (OK, not in the top 10.  And please don’t ask me to embarrass myself further.)  But that doesn’t mean that the holder of this position and the actions he/she takes don’t have some real consequences to graduate life at Dalhousie.   But before getting into that, who exactly am I?

I came to Dal about 23 years ago, as part of the wave of NSERC-funded University Research Fellows in the late 1980s.  We were all waiting for real, tenure-track jobs to appear.  (Sound familiar?)  Before that I was a graduate student at Texas A&M and Yale Universities.  In fact, I spent an inordinate amount of time as a graduate student; I really did (do) like to learn.  I was also a post-doctoral fellow at BIO, across the Harbor for a couple of years.   My research has involved understanding what happens in marine sediments after they have been deposited on the seafloor.  (Something happens, you ask?)   

So, why is a dean relevant?  In the first week of my job, I have signed all the forms that authorize the disbursement of the second round allocations to each department with graduate students.   This amounts to some $3.14M to 58 Departments, and this money partially pays for the fees and living expenses of some 950 students.  (Judie Pepper does a terrific job working this all out.)  The fees for your next lab or you’re next slice of pizza may just be covered by me.  Only the dean has the legal authority to sign these forms. 

I have already been hit by a couple of student appeals, as well as grievances and complaints.  The people involved in these actions need an (hopefully fair) arbiter, and they count on me as the dean.   To these individuals, the Dean is, indeed, very real.  

Most programs at Dal function wonderfully, but a few do not.  It is in the Office of the Dean where the latter programs come for examination and diagnosis.  Dr. Dieter Pelzer (the Associate Dean) and I have long discussions about these problems and what to do; we meet with the Directors/Heads/Chairs and try to figure what will save or sink a program.  That has some very real implications to the students who are in those programs or who would like to enroll in them in the future.

And I’ve only touched the surface, because I have only begun.  I hope that I can be the best dean you and Dalhousie deserve.   I look forward to meeting as many graduate students and post-doctoral fellow as I can in the next 5 years.   

Bernard Boudreau

Dean of FGS

"Vacation vs. Stress"

Finally, after weeks of endless PhD defences, grade reassessments, academic integrity issues, appeals, planning for the future, etc., etc., etc., I'm supposed to start a two-week vacation on Monday. Hurray, relaxation time. But wait. Reality check. By the looks of it, it appears that I may have to spend a considerable amount of vacation time catching up with unfinished work. That said, I envision my vacation to be similar to that of most PhDs and PDFs, as illustated in Jorge Cham's vacation vs. stress graph below. It seems, PhDs, PDFs and Deans have certain things in common.

Enjoy the rest of the summer, while it lasts.

 

Dieter

Required Readings for Postdocs and Senior Doctoral Students

As said last week, I did not plan to write a new blog before next Friday. However, tonight, I came across three awesome contributions to naturejobs.com that I wanted to share with you without delay. There's nothing wrong with exceptions to the rule, I think.

All three articles were originally published in the journal Nature.

The first one addresses mentoring and professional development. It's underlying principle is that "principal investigators can show their postdocs how to make the most of their job search." (Nature 474, 667–669 (2011)).

Because last year's budget clarified the rules for tax credits, removing the 'student' loophole that gave some postdocs tax-free salaries no longer applies in Canada, the perception arose that the status of postdocs in Canada is generally 'undefined'. As the author of Oh, Canada... (Nature 474, 533 (2011)) says "Oh, Canada! Country of maple syrup, lumberjacks and mounties! You could have got it so right. But you didn't. ... Taxes are fine if they mean you get certain benefits ... . Unfortunately, Canadian postdocs now find themselves paying full staff taxes, but still ineligible for these benefits."  Here, I just want to note that postdocs at Dalhousie University are now eligible for benefits, thanks to the efforts of our postdoctoral society, FGS and especially, to name just a few, Adrian West and Mike Lee.

The third article (Nature 475, 257 (2011)) argues that "a heavy administrative burden keeps top academic scientists from doing science." As a consequence, the author (a PhD candidate in synthetic chemistry at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia) fears that he "will become an administrator of scientific tasks rather than an investigator of scientific truths." In my opinion, this assessment is dead on. That said, the job of administrator of new tasks will require a completely new skill set, which closes the loop to one of the top FGS priorities, professional development.

Lots of food for thought. On all three issues, we're at Dal are underway, but not quite there yet. There's still a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done.

 

Dieter

 

Advice for Graduate Students and Faculty in Tough Economic Times

The transition in the FGS Deans' Office is proceeding smoothly. Bernie and I today had the first real chance to talk about the future of the Deans' Weblog. As of September, Bernie, I think, will be firmly committed as a co-blogger. The idea we're floating right now is to post our blogs on a bi-weekly basis.

Between now and September, I will be manning the blog fort alone; from now on, I will be posting also on a bi-weekly basis. The posts won't be the essay-type posts, you've seen from Mike in the past. For today's post I decided to rely again on Jorge's PhD comics. In a funny way, this comic covers a serious topic, which, years later, still is a worldwide concern.

Have a great weekend. I'm looking forward to blogging to you again in two weeks.

 

Dieter

Goodbye and Farewell

..... to both of you, Mike and Sunny. It has been my priviledge to work with you as part of a terriffic team. We shared a great deal in these past years, success and laughther as well as setbacks and frustration. Whatever administrative day-to-day live threw at us, we dealt with it in good grace and as a team and in the process became friends. Thus, remember:

"Don't be dismayed at goodbyes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetime, is certain for those who are friends."  ~Richard Bach

Sunny, after a well-deserved vacation, will return to the School of Business Administration for six months before enjoying the rest of his sabbatical, which he so generously interrupted to step in as the Acting Dean. That said, I'm sure he will continue two of his passions and strengths, professional development for graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and junior faculty and tweeting. If you ever run out of ideas for a professional development session or a tweet, here are two best-practice examples by Jorge Cham.

The first one on professional development was published in "Piled Higher and Deeper - PhD Comics" on 2/23/2009.

In case, Sunny, you ever run out of ideas for Tweets (which I doubt), you may find some inspiration in Jorge Cham's advice from 7/13/2009.

Mike is finally on sabbatical as off July 1. I don't know what he's exactly going to do, but I know to what he's looking forward to do almost immediately (see Jorge Cham's comic strip from 1/29/2007).

In Mike's case, however, it won't be the phone he's looking forward to disconnect, but MeetingMaker.

Good luck to both of you and stay in touch. You will be missed.

I hope you all enjoyed the first real (long!) weekend of summer in Nova Scotia.

 

Dieter

So long, farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, adieu...

... to you, and you, and you.

This is the last Friday of June as it turns out even if it's only the third full week of the month. Technically this is the last Friday blog of June, although Dieter will likely write one for the last week of June and post it on Thursday, or alternatively release it on the first day of July. Whatever the case, it will be my last blog in this space.

Next month, Dalhousie University welcomes a new Dean of Graduate Studies - Dr. Bernie Boudreau from Oceanography. Speaking from personal experience, he will have an interesting "learning curve"! Of course he will have the same advantage as I had on my arrival in Grad Studies 5 years ago - an excellent team of folks to support him. Grad Studies is a happy place. It's meaningful work that contributes directly to the success, happiness, and well-being of best and the brightest of the next generation.

The very worst thing I could say about Grad Studies at this university, and likely at many others, is that it is easy for the institution and its participants to overlook or take for granted the kinds of value FGS consistently delivers.I don't know what we can do about this. Maybe it doesn't matter, as long as FGS continues to deliver value and is a happy place to work. I wish Bernie every success in his new role helping this team make progress.

In the meantime, I've taken this opportunity to look back over the history of this blog. Much to my astonishment, we have been producing it weekly with very few exceptions, posting 255 times in 6 weeks shy of 5 years (the 5th of August will be our anniversary, so to speak).  My own contributions run to over 40,000 words on topics running from academic writing, academic integrity, the interdisciplinary PhD program, defending your dissertation, and the writing made visible initiative WHIPS.

Writing a blog has its challenges, beginning with the question of audience. We know there is an audience, because we get the stats. But who that audience might be is something of a mystery. So who should the blog be aimed at? 

My answer is simple - I aim it at me. The blog is my opportunity to think through for myself some issue related to the life of FGS and being a Dean. The outcome is, to quote one fan, that this blog "puts a human face on academic administration". I count this as worthwhile. So your tolerance of this modest effort has been encouraging, and helpful.

My last public thought from this perch in Grad Studies is how privileged I have been to serve with members of Faculty Council, the many FGS committee members, and most especially the committed staff of FGS. "Thanks" is simply not enough, but it's the best I can do here in this my last blog.

 

 

Sunny

Plagiarism - the Never Ending Story

It didn't take long for the story to get around the world. For his convocation speech, the Dean of Medicine at the University of Alberta apparently used extensive material created by an American professor last year, without attribution. The Edmonton Journal reported that a number of students had read the speech last year, recognized it immediately, and were able to download said material to their phones in mid-speech.

Most, but not all, of the smoke from this fire cleared away by today, and the Dean has resigned his appointment but not his position. In other words, he is no longer the Dean but he still has a job. One of my colleagues said he understood the professor in question was going on administrative leave for a couple of months, which seemed odd to him.  Our workshop on paraphrasing and citation practices is, at most, a half-day.

My colleague is one of those Academic Integrity Officers (AIO) at his university, you know, the ones that hear the original allegations made by professors of their students re: questionable integrity, the most common of which is plagiarism. He works exclusively in a graduate setting so the bar is set rather higher than it might be for undergraduates. He said he had noticed a pattern at his university in that there were a disproportionate number of complaints directed at PhD students who had earned a Master degree from a particular faculty and school on his campus.

"I'm tempted," he said, "to go to the library and randomly grab a dozen Masters theses from that program."

"That's a lot of reading," I pointed out.

"Oh, I'm not going to read them," he smiled. "I'm going to digitize them and then turn them in to turnitin.com."

This approach invites some really exciting results. The rule at this university is that if we find significant integrity violations after someone has received the degree, we rescind it.

Take back from the graduate.

It doesn't happen often, but it does happen. As a matter of fact, we are in the process of identifying the rescinded degree recipients of the last 20 years now to make sure that their submissions are pulled from the permanent record held by Libraries and Archive Canada (LAC).  LAC is in the process of digitizing their own collection, hence the concern. This digitization is going to increase the likelihood that plagiarism will be much easier to find in the future.

That's something to think about. Imagine - you get out of university with your PhD, where you cut a few corners getting done. Ten years later, you're running for public office, and someone discovers exactly where you cut the corners. As has been noted before in this blog, that is exactly what happened to the Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg and he paid a heavy price for it.He resigned and his chances for Chancellor seem very slim now.

When I wrote my Master thesis lo-these-many-years-ago, it was bound and put in the library too, where it languished, save for 11 people who checked it out over a 25 year period. If I had cut corners, discovering it 25 years later would have been impossible.

Not today with digitization. Not even for a document 25 years old.

But I digress. Back to my colleague about to test his implied theory about the qualtiy of teaching and supervision on the research front in the program I haven't yet identified, by randomly testing theses from ten years ago.

"And what happens if you find half of them have serious problems that warrant further investigation?" I asked him.

This line of argument gave him serious pause. The role of AIO is painful, time-consuming, and dispiriting enough dealing with what is happening today, without dredging up the past.

"That would create a serious ethical problem," he said. "But of course, that fact I have these suspicions also creates a moral dilemma too, whether I can ethically choose not to act."

There doesn't seem to be an obvious answer to the implied question, does there? It just seems to me that his life would be a lot simpler if he weren't quite so thoughtful.

 

Sunny

INSIDE HIGHER ED: Advice for Graduate Students

On June 6 and June 8, Stephen C. Stearns, the Edward P. Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, wrote two colums in Inside Higher Ed entitled "Advice for Grad Students" and "Advice for Grad Students -- II." The first column offered advice on non-writing issues such as being prepared for the worst, knowing why your work is important, managing your advisors, etc. (Advice for Grad Students). The second column focussed on writing issues for science graduate students (Advice for Grad Students -- II). Both pieces triggered a lot of comments worth reading.

When it comes to writing issues, my ultimate advice is that whatever you write should be good. Quality (content-wise, presentation-wise) is what matters. There are two many crappy papers appearing in the literature already.

That was easy. Enjoy the weekend.

 

Dieter

Intercultural Communication

The Faculty of Graduate Studies serves all graduate students and post docs (at least the ones we know about!) here at Dalhousie University. Most of the time we deal with them indirectly, through the routine administrative systems handling applications, admissions, scholarship applications, grade results, convocations preparation. For many of the students, the only time we actually see them face-to-face is at convocation. And that's usually a good thing, not because we don't enjoy contact with students, but because it means that everything has gone as planned.

Of course, not everything goes as planned. As the old proverb has it, "man plans; God laughs". When a graduate student's program goes off the rails, or there is confusion about requirements, that is when the staff on the team come to a renewed understanding of educational administration as a contact sport. More contact than sport, really.

Today all of the staff of FGS got together as a group for a professional development session. A trained facilitator collected data before the meeting on where we are regarding our understanding of the challenges of intercultural communication. Then she took us through some theory and practice. An interesting business, to be sure.

It's easy to dismiss these kind of sessions as nothing more than a mildly amusing morning out of the office away from the phone and email. After all, something in the order of 80% of our students are Canadians. And when you reflect on the contact we might have in a year with the other 20% of the students, the vast majority of the communication is respectful, straightforward, and apparently successful on both sides of the exchange. I have nothing in the way of empirical data apart from my own thoughts about overhead conversations between staff and students, and the regular exchange of information we have as a team. But if I had to guess, well over 90% of the exchanges are non-problematic, probably over 95%, if we include email. Problem intercultural exchanges are probably less than 1-2% of them.

So what's the big deal? Why invest any time improving the effectiveness of intercultural communication?

There are a couple of reasons that spring to mind.  First, there is a trap in the phrase "apparently successful". This is not quite the same thing as "successful". Second, we have a special obligation to the international students - the ancient (and some would say sacred) obligation of hospitality. Third is the question of simple human compassion in the context of our mission to support students in the search for success. We have invited these students to study with us, notwithstanding the obvious and not-so-obvious challenges. Fourth is the question of risk management.

Risk management?

Yes. My good colleague Jack Duffy (professor emeritus from the biz school) and I have done research on the serious risks to Canadian faculty members. One of the patterns that emerged is the increased risk of threat where there are serious differences in power, high levels of frustration, cultural disconnects, and high stakes. Failing out of graduate school as an international student is, for some cultures, higher stakes than even for North Americans.So getting the communication right for the small number of students with serious problems (and those that aren't so serious) pays off.

 

Frankly, there are other reasons to give us pause to think about how to anticipate the possibility of a misunderstanding in intercultural communication. Improving our skills in this area by suspending judgment, thinking about alternative ways of understanding the situation especially from other points of view, looking for variety of solutions before coming to judgment - this has got to be good for communication with people we don't normally think of as coming from a different culture.

Say someone like me, from Alberta. Or someone from Cape Breton.  Or Toronto. Or an accountant, a lawyer, an engineer, an economist, an actuary. All different cultures. Each culture presents  opportunities for mistaken judgments enabled by communication disconnects.

I used to have long drawn out painful arguments with a business partner, Brian Harrington, who was not at all shy about telling me I was wrong. After 18 months of excruciating exchanges, he finally said to me: "you realize I'm an engineer, don't you?"

"Of course," I replied, "what has that got to do with anything?"

He patiently explained. "When an engineer says you're wrong, most of the time it means that he didn't understand what you said."

A major intercultural communication barrier evaporated.

So the big lesson for me today was one I already knew. The most common thinking mistake there is, and likely the most important one in terms of impact, is rushing to judgment before exploring.  It's an easy thing to forget when your in-box overflows with requests for judgments, and as soon as possible. And that improving intercultural communication might just improve communication period.

That would be a good thing.

 

Sunny

 

Steps to Success in Graduate School and Beyond

The CAGS guiding principle #12 in “Guiding Principles for Graduate Student Supervision” states “students have substantial responsibility for managing their own graduate education.” The paragraph concludes, “The University, graduate department and supervisor are responsible for providing an appropriate environment for high-quality graduate education, but success is ultimately in the hands of the student. It is therefore essential that universities inform students of their responsibilities, and provide them with the information and support that they need to carry out their responsibilities.”

Graduate education provides advanced knowledge in a field of study that is characterized by specialized training in the discipline’s theory, research methodology, and critical analysis. Specialization, however, is not narrow or limited. Specialized training means concentrated learning in the depth and breadth of the discipline. Since graduate education is concentrated, learning is by default more self-directed, and also involves more individualized instruction and mentoring than does learning for an undergraduate degree.

The following is a list of skills that all successful researchers have developed. Without these skills, you cannot expect to succeed in research. If you fully develop your abilities in each of these areas, you will lay a strong foundation for the rest of your research career. The responsibility for the development of these skills is entirely your own. Your research advisor can provide guidance and assistance, but your graduate education is in large part your personal responsibility.

The following list of skills is meant to serve as a personal barometer for you to analyze your strong and weak areas.

WORK

Develop a sense of urgency and the habit of working hard at solving problems. Execute a project, master the difficulties, debug your theory.

THINK

Understand, explain, and interpret your results. Continually ask how far you can push and extend your idea. Be contrarian. Do not blindly accept claims and conclusions, but rather question whether they are really true and whether they can be extended or applied in new contexts.

READ

Investigate your area. Learn its history and context, understand its technical foundation and background. Learn to read technical papers with a critical eye, and with the expectation of being able to duplicate and extend what is described in the article. Follow your field by reading current journals. Know who did what in your field as well as related areas. Broaden yourself. Become familiar with other theoretical fields and application areas. You never know when this knowledge will come in handy.

WRITE

Write concise and focused papers and reports. Write a larger and more comprehensive document (i.e., your thesis). Practice. Learn how to write proposals. Learn word processing and text formatting appropriate for scientific documents.

SPEAK

Discuss your ongoing research with peers, colleagues, and visitors in an informal setting and at conferences. Learn how to make a well-organized, coherent, and engaging presentation of your research results in front of an audience. Understand the differences in speaking to a general audience versus a technical audience. Cultivate professional contacts and associations.

MANAGE

Time: Develop a sense of how long any specific task will take you to execute. People: Develop successful working relationships with the people you work with. Research: Develop a research program, not just a number of disconnected projects.

C0NTEMPLATE

Anticipate where research is going in your area, both your own and that of your colleagues. Become a generator of research ideas. Learn to be able to judge when an idea is feasible and when a research direction is important or impacting. Keep track of ideas, perhaps in a research diary. Search for connections between ideas.

Good luck. I hope this helps a bit on your road to success.

 

Dieter