Deans' Weblog: Dalhousie Graduate Studies

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

The Janus Moment

One of the challenges of the English language is that some of the idioms don't work in key circumstances. Take for example the phrase "two-faced" which we use to communicate a sense of deceitfulness. But the Roman god Janus has two faces and he is not at all about being deceitful. Janus, namesake of January of course, looks forward and backward at the same time, but the intent is insight, not trickery.

Any discussion about Janus involves talk about beginnings and endings, a natural thing to consider at the end of one year and the beginning of the next. I prefer to think of Janus as the god who is skilled enough to use his ability to look back to the past and into the future whenever it is useful during the year, and not just at New Year's.

Reflecting on the past and anticipating the future (or better yet, shaping it) is the heart and soul of the first two phases of strategic planning - 1) strategic assessment and 2) strategic options. But the act of looking to the past and to the future is not just for planning. The act is a fundamental practice of the examined life, whether the life we are talking about is institutional, personal, or both.

It is a good thing to pause, to take stock, and to re-envision the future as we approach the New Year. But limiting our embrace of the spirit of Janus to January is a lost opportunity. It may be the single biggest lost opportunity in post-secondary education - letting students pass through the system without them developing the habit of mind for multi-directional reflective thinking beyond New Year's Day.

 

Sunny

Tough Decisions Ahead

The British House of Commons yesterday approved a steep increase in undergraduate tuition at English Universities. The tuition fee cap in England is set to rise to £9,000 (or $14,000) well over twice the current levels starting in the fall of 2012, after a close vote accompanied by vast student protests. The increase will transform many English universities into the most expensive public institutions in the world. [The average tuition and fees at public four-year universities in the US for the last academic year, by comparison, was $7,020.] For England, the move marks a radical transformation for a system that did not even charge tuition until 1998. Despite a “soft cap” of £6,000 (or $9,450), most universities will have to charge an average tuition of close to £7,000 to maintain current revenue levels in the face of sweeping government cuts. For better coverage of the tuition increases in Britain, please read the most recent articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed.

"As cuts hit European higher education hard, students and professors take to the streets," The Chronicle of Higher Education also reported yesterday. As expected, the largest demonstrations have been in Britain, "but a similar sort of anger has also manifested itself in Bulgaria, Ireland, Greece, and Italy. The direct spark for student ire in each country has been unique, but the tinderbox of issues that has fed the flames of their anger is the same across much of Europe. With a few notable exceptions, European university systems are being squeezed by the twin pressures of expanded enrollments and budgetary constraints." Because of the latter, many European "universities are finding themselves on the front lines of national austerity measures, as deficit-slashing governments cut education spending."

Closer to home, ineffective and low-enrollment undergraduate and graduate programs at a considerable number of public US universities are in danger of being scaled back or eliminated as these institutions of higher learning seek to save money in the wake of the economic meltdown and the drying up of federal stimulus money (see recent blogs).

So far, Canadian universities in general and Dalhousie University in particular have been more or less sheltered from the worst consequences of the global turmoil in higher education. The question now is whether academe in Canada and especially in Nova Scotia is an oasis sheltered from worldwide financial realities. Likely not. It never was and it never will be, and the implications for Nova Scotia universities may be significant in the not-too-distant future (see the Nova Scotia budget 2010-2011 and the O'Neill report). For Dalhousie University, the pension deficit resulting from the global recession will pose a significant financial challenge. Even with solvency relief, the university has to start payments of approximately $8.4 million on the pension deficit beginning April 2011, and continue for nine years. The uncertainty as to the ultimate $ commitment from the Province of Nova Scotia to its universities in the new MOU, in light of the Province's buget deficit, does not add much to allow Dalhousie University to confront the challenges ahead with greater assurance at present.

How do we best prepare/plan for potentially tough times? Well, there are several options that could be considered alone or in combination to secure resources in a difficult financial climate at the Department, Faculty and University level. The following is my executive summary of 1010-Diagnostic, the October 2010 issue of Higher Ed Impact Monthly Diagnostic, published by Academic Impressions.

• Advance with a defined sense of purpose: Don't strive to be all things to all people, but rather focus resources on missions and programs that can be accomplished with distinction. Use an overarching mission as a guide to prioritization. Set strategic objectives that can be measured.
• Identify academic inefficiencies: Audit your curriculum for unnecessary duplications and under-performing areas. Help students graduate faster. Rely on data such as student learning outcomes and retention rates.
• Prioritize academic and administrative goals: In tough times, a significant source of financial resources will likely not come from tuition increases, provincial funding, or alumni support, but rather from the reallocation of existing resources. Most academic institutions, faculties and units these days are investing in academic and administrative programs that are not critical to their mission or their market position, and that in fact drain their financial resources and limit their ability to generate more resources. Thus, an important step toward strategically reallocating resources is to determine which academically sound courses/programs are most important to the unit's, faculty's and university's mission, market position, and financial health.
• Most importantly, when planning and prioritizing allocation of limited and hotly contested resources, manage the process in a way that generates trust by involving broad participation. Broad participation is critical to the success in building trust and maintaining transparency.

It is my understanding that most of the above is to be achieved by strategic planning. That said, allow me to close with an observation by Bob Dickeson, published in Prioritizing Academic Programs and Services (2nd ed; Jossey Bass, 2010) and to caution against such an approach.

"Strategic plans have become purely additive. ... These plans tend to assume several things: (1) the status quo as a given, with all current programs composing the baseline, (2) all programs, goals, and objectives are to be “maintained” or “enhanced,” but rarely diminished or eliminated, (3) if resources are mentioned at all, they are to be enhanced by hiking tuition, increasing enrollment, securing more appropriations or grants, or raising more money, or all of these, and (4) all planning goals are equal in weight and importance and thus lack priority. This is neither planning nor strategic."

In conclusion, academic life was a lot easier for me some time ago, when I indeed believed that academe was an oasis sheltered from financial realities. Today, I (as many of my colleagues, I assume) often feel like a "one-legged Tarzan" (thanks for the idiom and the link Mike), trying to find the best possible way through a jungle of past perceptions and new realities.

 

Dieter

 

Oil and Water / Management and Academics

It's been a long week, what with the return trip from China on university business.

It turns out that 18 hours encased in an aluminum capsule travelling across 12 time zones does not improve the cognition. China is a long way away - virtually on the other side of the globe. And their developing commitment to research and education seemed to be a natural topic for this blog.

And it was. Right up to the point where Dieter came into my office this afternoon with an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

For those of you not interested in wading through the original post and the 40+ comments accompanying the article, the basic argument is straightforward. Universities have to make difficult resource allocation decisions that can (and likely should) involve getting rid of some courses, possibly some programs, and possibly some faculty positions.

The article partly makes the point through a comparison of the fictitious but presumably credible teaching load of the Spanish program in contrast with the teaching load of the Serbian program. The development of the argument then drew an inference between Serbian as a choice and German. Needless to say this logic drew the ire of a number of academics who demonstrated their critical thinking competencies by launching a variety of ad hominem attacks on the author and the institution he represents.

I may regret the following thoughts, but...  Perhaps he should not have made the contrast with a living European language (i.e., German), the language of great philosophers, mathematicians, musicians, etc. Perhaps he should have compared it to the various university courses featuring Klingon. I assume there would have been less vigorous defence; perhaps not.

The point (that there are hard trade-offs to be made) seems clear and totally obvious to me, but then I spent most of my life outside of the academy. The notion of active management does not produce an automatic knee-jerk reaction of horror for me the way it seems to among some of my academic colleagues.They often mistake the noun phrase "expensive unnecessary redundant institutional bureaucracy" with the verb "manage".

Folks at this university once asked me to give a presentation to cancer researchers on management in the research setting. My first question to the assembled multitude - "how many people here signed up to be researchers?"  All of the hands go up.  My second question - "how many of you signed up to be managers?".  None of the hands go up. So great was the horrified look crossing a number of faces, it seemed as if the question had been "do you abuse small animals for amusement?"

My next step was to introduce a working definition of management, my own attempt at the trade off between completeness and succinctness. "Management is the art, craft, and science of acquiring, allocating, integrating, deploying, and sustaining constrained resources to get the best possible outcomes." The next 75 minutes we examined the particulars of the constituent phrases, beginning with "the best possible outcomes".  This phrase necessarily requires someone to have thought about strategic intent, about aims, goals and objective (to use Edward de Bono's construct), about what purposes the institution intends to serve, about what is important compared to what might be interesting.

At the end of 75 minutes comes the last question - "how many of you are managers?"  All of the hands go up.

So it is for every one of us in the academy. We are all managers. We each have an obligation to recognize the limitations of the resources which others will allocate to us, and to consider how to manage those resources as effectively as possible. Whatever the list of competing demands (from a wide variety  of competing stakeholders, including individual faculty members who will have personal intellectual interest to pursue), there will NEVER be enough resources to pursue them all effectively.  At some point if we want to do something new or if we want to do something better, or if we want to do  more of something, we may have to stop doing something else.

The notion we can continue to add to our opportunities and responsibilities incrementally without making hard choices is the thinking we expect from children. So let's make the choices intelligently and act like grown-ups. Getting the best value out of the resources that others give us is a moral obligation, however difficult it might be to measure "value". One other thing deserves careful note. We have an obligation to communicate the value of what we do in an ongoing way in order to get the resources we need to do our work.

And if anyone thinks they might benefit from the the 90 minute articulation of "management in the research setting", let me know. The presentation is ready to go.  In the meantime, wise people will remember that a man will stand on the top of a hill for a long time with his mouth open before a roast duck will fly in.  In the academy, we'd better work hard at demonstrating our value.

 

Sunny

Speed up

 Here I am in San Francisco attending the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) conference. An event with about 800 graduate deans, yes all in one room. Much of the discussion is revolving around making North American programs more competitive.

It seems that much of the discussion revolves around speeding up the educational process. There are some obvious approaches. First, of course, is the Bologna 3 year degree and implications for master's degrees. Do we accept these as equal to our 4 years, etc, etc. This continues to be batted around with no clear consensus, but it is early going on that. Second, the post bachelor PhD. This is normal for many countries, like Australia and UK and growing in Canada, at least in the sciences. The third approach is to simply designate the length of a program in a very practical way, after 1 year or 3 years your funding is cut off, so get moving! The other, more interesting, theme is a move to beef up (not sure what the politically correct vegetarian term would be) undergraduate/graduate combinations. This means that a student decides by second year to do the combination so that core and electives set them up and they can complete the masters part in one year. Typically defined as a summer, fall, winter, and possible summer sequence. This has been effective not only in decreasing time to completion put but in higher completion rates and as a recruitment strategy.

What is not being addressed to date, especially in the context of international recruitment, is the determination of when a 3 year degree is just a 3 year degree and when it can be adequate for entrance into a masters degree. These decisions, of course, depend somewhat on the master's degree and the undergrad institution but we also have an obligation to ensure that a student who has been accepted into a masters program at our institution has a reasonable chance for success. It may be that a 3 year degree applicant in the end takes longer to complete than if we had simply set up a bridging or transition program at the beginning to ensure the right kind of preparation for the graduate program. This, I think, can be accomplished by the same planning that goes into combined Bach/Masters programs. What actually is the core? This differs, I suspect, from the core we each think is "absolutely necessary" for our particular program!  expectations for students starting graduate work. It may be time to begin to deconstruct some of our program ideas and build modular building blocks that are multipurpose and will provide some of the flexibility that we will surely need as we go forward in a global context.

My parents were right not to name me Patience!

Next stop Beijing

Carolyn

The H1N1 Virus and Academic Continuity Planning

A new strain of the H1N1 influenza virus was identified in the spring of 2009. Referred to as pandemic H1N1 influenza virus, this virus has never previously been identified in humans. The World Health Organization raised the pandemic alert level to Phase 6 on June 11, 2009. This was in response to continued spread of the H1N1 flu virus around the world. This means that the H1N1 virus is being transmitted easily among humans in more than one continental region and that the outbreak is now global. It is important to note that it does not reflect the severity of the illness, just the spread of the virus.

In Nova Scotia, there have been 17 hospitalized cases and one death associated with the H1N1 virus since the outbreak started on April 26. No cases of influenza were reported in the week ending August 29, 2009. Recently, the Public Health Agency of Canada has issued new advice for those with H1N1. As of August 20, Nova Scotians are being advised to stay home and minimize contact with others until they are: symptom-free, feeling well and able to resume normal day-to-day activities. The Provincial 811 Telecare Nurse Line has H1N1 information protocols established and this service is now available for all Nova Scotians; nurses are available to answer calls/inquiries and provide health advice by dialing 811.

Useful information on H1N1 including prevention measures, early identification of illness, caring for the ill as well as answers to frequently asked questions in a post-secondary education setting can be found in the Nova Scotia Health, Health Promotion and Protection presentation entitled “H1N1 Presentation to Universities” as well as in the Influenza Tool Kit for College and University Administrators, 2009-2010 Issue 1  published by Nova Scotia Health, Health Promotion and Protection.

In anticipation of a potential escalation of the pandemic H1N1 influenza virus, work is underway to plan for its impact on academic activities across the University.  As a component of the University’s Communicable Disease Preparedness Plan an Academic Continuity Planning Group, with representation from each Faculty, has been organized. The mandate of the group is to develop a plan for academic preparedness aimed at minimizing the impact on students’ academic progress due to a H1N1 pandemic. I’m part of this group as the representative of the Faculty of Graduate Studies. Working on this group has been and is a double-edged task. On the one hand, all members of this group spend an enormous amount of time planning for an event that everyone hopes will never take place. On the other hand, we all realize that academic programs and their students are in dire jeopardy, if the event occurs and the institution does not have a solid plan in place to deal with the challenge. Thus, we continue to identify options for academic continuity contingency plans. Our first task has been to develop academic continuity principles to guide decisions and actions in relation to supporting a University commitment to academic continuity. In addition, we provided input on a H1N1 influenza advisory regarding academic continuity at Dalhousie University. The finalized “advisory” has been distributed to the broad university community by the VP Academic and Provost and will be posted on Dalhousie's Flu Prevention & Care website. Make sure that you bookmark this website for regular updates affecting the Dalhousie community.

Students, staff and faculty who have an acute respiratory illness either before leaving Canada or while abroad should delay travel to reduce the risk of spreading the virus. Some countries have put quarantine measures into place for people traveling from countries reporting cases of H1N1, such as Canada. The Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade provides information and assistance for Canadians traveling abroad, who may be subjected to quarantine measures.

Stay calm and carry on! Nevertheless, please always keep in mind that having a Plan B (and potentially a Plan C (who knows)) is key to academic continuity.

Over and out. Stay tuned and enjoy the long weekend.

Dieter

PS: I am indebted to Susan Spence Wach, Associate Vice President, Academic Programs, for her support with assembling the information for this blog as well as for her proofreading, correcting and approving its final version. She would make a terrific guest blogger.

Setting Priorities

This week I have been grappling with a brief to the Finance Committee in which I am supposed to identify three issues of great importance to Graduate Studies in Canada, figure out how much these would cost, and then convince everyone that this is in their interest to do. All in 5 pages, including the executive summary, so 4 pages!

Well my wish list is way longer than 3 items, all of which entail serious money, and I only have 4 pages!

So here are my top contenders, in no particular order:
1. Increase funding to the Tricouncils. This makes sense, because they actually lost money in the last budget but more to the point the Tricouncils are the biggest source of government funding to graduate students. Students are funded not only through individual scholarships but through faculty research grants. So increases in research spending always means increased spending for graduate students.

2. Address the balance of basic to targeted funding. The previous budget introduced targeted funding at the individual student scholarship level with scholarships targeted, in particular, to business related areas. While there is rationale for such an approach at some level, at ground level there exists a disconnect with the students available and established research contexts for conducting this research. Furthermore, short term targeting does not necessarily produce long term research productivity if faculty cannot ramp up appropriate projects fast enough.

3. Step up to Professional Skill development. For graduates to be competitive in a strained job market and for the economy to maximize the benefit from a more highly educated workforce we need to collectively provide students with skills that will let them be  successful in the transition from student to employee. There is growing recognition that universities need to step up and provide opportunities for students to gain competencies in professional skills such as project management, grant writing, managing research, business plans, commercialization, cv writing and interviewing. There is not, however, am acceptance of where this particular buck stops! There is an argument that if this is to be truly a benefit to the Canadian economy then the Canadian government will need to step up to provide federal manpower initiatives either through the Tricouncils or directly.

4. Increase funding for Postdoctoral Fellowships. The recent economic downturn has resulted in a collective holding of the economic breath and related tightening of the budgetary belt in virtually every university. Since it takes, on average, 5 years to produce a PhD graduate it is not possible to either stop the production or start production on a dime. So we have a double problem. How to make the best use of the PhDs graduating in a time of hiring freezes and how to make sure we have the best and the brightest available when the hiring thaw begins?  I see two avenues for addressing this problem (i.e., if I were the government). First, provide new funds to the Tricouncils specifically to increase the number of postdoctoral fellowships awarded, possibly over a certain period of time. Second, develop a fund, like the MITEC funds that would encourage more cost sharing with private and public sector to get postdocs involved in nonacademic workplaces, where about 50% will actually end up.

OK There are four. Now, your turn! Email me or post below if you have a preferred priority or, even better, other priorities. I can really use your help. Anyway, what else can we be doing while we wait for summer to actually kick in??

Carolyn

Things to Do to Write Great Grant/Scholarship Applications and Papers

Last week, during the Faculty of Medicine’s Graduate Student Research Day, I was fortunate being able to attend the special presentation "What it takes to become a successful scientist,” given by Dr. Roderick McInnes (Program of Developmental Biology, Research Institute, The Hospital for Sick Children; Departments of Pediatrics and Molecular and Medical Genetics, University of Toronto; Scientific Director, Institute of Genetics, CIHR), a Dalhousie alumnus. The McInnes room in the DSU building, where Rod gave this presentation, is actually named after his grandfather. I was fortunate in a dual sense; first, Rod’s talk was enjoyable and informative, and second, I had the topic for my blog. In his presentation, Rod focused a great deal on things to do to write a great grant or paper, two of the key ingredients to becoming (and remaining) a successful researcher. His take home message was that writing good scholarship/grant applications or papers is formulaic, and a learned skill. As he said “some people are naturally better at it, but you can learn to be just as good. It's not magic or inspiration at midnight.” Rod’s formula to writing a good grant or paper was simple. Start writing early, write daily, write well, write for your audience, and write efficiently. Obviously, as Rod admitted himself, one can successfully deviate from this formula, but “it is a formula that works - so it's a great beginning.”

The following are excerpts from the Guidebook for New Principal Investigators - Advice on Applying for a Grant, Writing Papers, Setting up a Research Team and Managing Your Time, written by Roderick McInnes, Brenda Andrews and Richard Rachubinski, which summarize the highlights of Rod’s presentation. These slightly modified and largely abbreviated passages are not Principal Investigator-specific and apply equally well to graduate students and post-doctoral fellows in all disciplines. Obviously, these tips aren’t universal rules. However, since they come from highly successful senior scientists who are extremely familiar with applying for grants, publishing high-impact papers, managing research teams, and running research laboratories, it would be foolish to ignore their suggestions. For those of you, who are interested in reading the guidebook in its entity (a truly worthwhile endeavor), you can do so on the CIHR Institute of Genetics website.

Things to Do to Write Great Grant or Scholarship Applications

Start Writing Early
Start the preparation for your scholarship/grant application well ahead (months!!!) before the deadline by writing the overall research goal and specific research aims. Why so early? Doing so focuses your reading and thinking, and allows you to plan, seek advice, and identify topics you need to read up on. You can't do many of these things well in the last weeks before the deadline – at that late point, you will be concentrating on the writing. It is very likely that your initial specific aims will change as you continue to write, and an early articulation of them forces you to focus and to think clearly.

Write Daily
In preparing a scholarship/grant application, it is a good idea to commit to writing part of the application every day. Researchers who write daily, even 30 minutes/day, are much more productive and successful than those who leave it all to a last-minute cataclysmic effort.

Finish the "Junk" in Month One (but not only the junk)
All the accompanying documents and forms - CV module, references, etc. - take a lot of time to obtain or complete, and generally much more time than you think. Get them done early. Put the references into EndNote^® or Reference Manager^® right from the start.

Tips for Good Grant/Scholarship Writing
Write an application that the reviewers will enjoy reading. Aim for nothing less. Remember, the reviewers are wading through tons of other grant/scholarship applications, so make yours clear, thoughtful and interesting. Good writing reflects clear and precise thinking. In fact, writing generally forces clear and precise thinking.

Unconsciously Imitate Great Style
Before writing a grant or scholarship application, read a couple of successful ones from friends or colleagues in your area (obviously they likely are really well written) to pick up the 'rhythm' of excellence and clarity.

Get it down! Don't be a sentence "caresser!"
Word processors encourage the endless reworking of a sentence, to get it 'perfect'. Don't do this. It is a time waster that creates the illusion of effective progress. To generate a well-written grant or scholarship application, follow the following four steps: 1. Get it down, even rough, ugly, too long and incomplete. 2. Get it right (factually correct, balanced). 3. Get it pretty. Now is the time to do some sentence caressing. 4. Get it out!

The Inverted Pyramid Structure
Good expository writing has two predominant features. 1. Begin each paragraph with a great lead sentence. A strong lead sentence is interesting and says what the paragraph is about. It is worth spending time on, even in the first ugly draft, since it defines the rest of the paragraph. 2. The remainder of the paragraph should elaborate on the topic defined by the lead sentence. Thus, a good paragraph has an inverted pyramid structure. A very common error is to have a rousing concluding sentence that is often, when slightly reworked, a superb lead sentence.

Who is the audience?
Almost all review panels are generally very heterogeneous. Therefore, you are usually writing for intelligent researchers who are not expert in your area, except for maybe one or two who will know more. You have to write with simple clarity for the majority, but also convince the one or two experts that you really know your stuff. "Who is my audience?" is the number one issue in grant/scholarship writing, just as it is in giving a talk. Here, the bottom line is: give the big picture, don't drown the reviewer/audience in details, and state rationales.

Use illustrations
Use illustrations, figures and boxed texts to help the reader easily see the big picture. Nothing is more depressing to a reviewer than to see pages of dense text unalleviated by something visual. Illustrations help the reviewer grasp background information, be convinced of the strength of your preliminary data, and acquire a quick overview of your research plan.

Things to Do to Write Great Papers

Writing a good paper involves much of the same principles/techniques as writing a good scholarship/grant application.

Apply the Tips for Good Writing from above

Unconsciously Imitate Great Style
Before writing a paper, read a couple of papers that are really well written, in the journal to which you intend to submit your manuscript.

Write Every Day
When they have papers to be written, the most productive researchers write daily as an integral part of their research life, even if only for 30 minutes each day. Writing every day is not only a lot more fun and stress reducing (i.e., "Wow - I've actually started!"), it also produces a much better product. In addition, for those who do basic biomedical research, clinical research, quantitative research or qualitative research, if you begin to write months before you plan to submit your manuscript for peer review, you often identify problems or gaps in your data that should be addressed.

Order of Writing the Various Parts of a Paper
Overarching guideline: You are telling a single story. Everything you write should be built around that story line. For basic biomedical research, clinical research and empirical research, write the paper in the following sequence:

Figures, figure legends and tables
Always do these first. If well done, the figures and their legends will present the story almost without the rest of the text!

Results
The Results should be a written presentation of the information that is illustrated and documented in the figures and tables, and not a lot more. The text of the Results section should be able to stand by itself, even without the reader looking at the figures and tables. A common error here is to put Discussion in Results. This is to be done only rarely, and only if you are not going to discuss a relatively small point in the Discussion.

Discussion
In a first brief paragraph, it is often useful to summarize your major findings, but do so in language that is usefully different from the abstract of the paper. In the rest of the Discussion, discuss each of the Results, from two points of view. First, discuss the data itself - what does it mean, what does it allow you to conclude? Second, discuss each result in terms of the bigger picture of the field.

Introduction
In the first paragraph(s), introduce the big picture underlying your story. In subsequent paragraphs, introduce the specific issues that each of your major results addresses. Sometimes it is difficult to decide whether some background information should go in the Introduction or in the Discussion. In the Discussion, you will often want to provide more context on an issue than you were able to present in the Introduction or in the Results.

Abstract
To write a great abstract, it is very useful to read a few great ones from a current issue of the journal to which you are submitting the manuscript. That is all the guidance you need. Writing a good abstract takes at least one day. In the PubMed^® era, your abstract may be the only thing that most people will read, so devote at least a day to it, look at it again a few days later, and have it vetted by a colleague who is not intimately familiar with the work in that manuscript.

Methods
It doesn't much matter when you write the Methods. Just don't pretend that you have accomplished much by getting them done. You haven't!!! Refer to previous papers for details, when possible.

Other Important Issues

• Never, ever submit a sloppily prepared manuscript. You will have lost the battle before you have even started.
• Submit to the correct journal. If it's a lovely paper for a lower-impact journal, don't send it to Nature or Science. However, aim high.
• It is foolish to submit a paper without having a colleague look at it first.

Extending Rod’s suggestions to thesis writing will surely avoid your thesis encountering a similar fate than that of Jill Samoskevich.

Over and out.

Dieter

It's all about balance

As I'm sure I mentioned earlier, I have been thinking a lot lately about graduate studies at the national level and, in particular, the impact of government policy on our part of the universe. It is difficult to make sense of the world when we look too closely. So trying to make sense of funding for graduate students by looking at an individual budget or an individual policy is not really enlightening. But trying to make sense of the big picture in the midst of an economic downturn is not any easier. So I have to make do with trying to understand the issues that arise in the long term in the support of research and graduate student support. My assumption is that there should be some sort of direction to policies that over time get us to objectives. In this case, the objectives would include innovation and highly qualifed personnel to drive the economy. OK that is a bit lofty but there you have it!

There has been much said of late about the need to provide support for people, research, and research infrastructure and not robbing "Peter" here to pay "Paul" (whoever they are). To put it crudely, funding students or researchers to do research but not providing adequate facilities is a waste of money. To fund structures but not people is pretty much the same. Recognizing that there is not enough money to provide everything to everyone leaves us with some issues that need some thinking and rethinking.

One such issue is the balance between targeted and broad research funding. In some sense targeted funding initiatives often come after problems are identified while broader research agendas allow us to be ready for the unanticipated. Second, but not unrelated is the balance needed between applied and basic research. To this I just say, what will we have to apply in 5 years if no one is doing any basic research! Next up is the balance between disciplinary and interdisciplinary research. Clearly to move our understanding in most areas of knowledge we need expertise of a very significant type. Just as clearly, the large problems of our time, poverty, sustainability, global warming, if tractable at all, will require interdisciplinary approaches. What to fund?

Finally, a balance needs to be considered in the matter of who the funding is directed to. From a researchers perspective, it is better to fund projects and the projects then provide scholarships to suitable students. The other perspective is to provide scholarships directly to top notch students and let them be responsible for finding projects that suit their talents and needs. Swinging too wildly one way or another just brings uncertainty.

How to find the sweet points for these inter-related balances, now that is the question! But for sure, we need to engage in these discussions within the context of an emerging national strategy.

Over and out
Carolyn

The Hopes of a New Beginning

One of the big advantages of academic life is the frequent serendipitous confluence of seemingly disparate events producing productive outcomes. In other words, there are many happy accidents when things come together in surprising and useful ways.  For example, at the beginning of December, some search engine or other coughed up a reference to an article in the September 2002 American Psychologist entitled "If at First You Don't Succeed", authored by Janet Polivy and C. Peter Herman. That the article came to my attention at the time of year when I reflect on my own goals was perfect.

The title is the first part of a traditional American proverb from around 1840, but it is the second part of the proverb that has really entered our consciousness - "try, try again." The subtitle to the article belies this encouraging thought - the authors explore the notion of "False Hopes of Self-Change".  I can recommend the article in its entirety, on the basis that it is founded on credible research. It is also very clear and accessible (in marked contrast to the first sentence of this blog!). Unlike most academic articles, it has a number of useful ideas about to make change more likely and more effective.

Polivy and Herman quote many studies on New Year's resolutions (the usual suspects- quitting smoking, losing weight, getting fit, etc.) the vast majority of which show that such intentions to change consistently fail at extremely high rates.  The prospect of near certain failure year after year does not seem to deter us from making these resolutions either, hence "false hopes of self-change." Our limited success to make meaningful self-change year after year does not deter us from buying self-help books either. In fact there is evidence that the number, size, and commercial value of diet books is almost exactly the same as the number, size, and commercial value of cookbooks.

I digress.

There are a couple of things that occurred to me while reading the article. First, some people do make successful changes for the better in their lives.  Second, the time to make a change for the better is not on some arbitrary date such as New Year's Day or on a birthday.  The time to make a change is the day you realize a change would be beneficial. This point comes under the heading of personal kaizen, to use the Japanese term for continuous improvement. Of course, continuous improvement is the responsibility of every professional.

Third, the key to continuous improvement is to undertake incremental change that is achievable, sustainable, and is expressed as positively as possible.  As an example, I imagine it is technically possible for me to get my weight to where it was when I graduated from university the first time.  But my wife will tell you if I set that as a goal, the attempt would be doomed to ignominious failure. It is not likely achievable, and if achieved, it will certainly not be sustainable.  Many of you will know about the SMART acronym for goal setting - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bounded as another way to look at the third point.

I'm planning to implement these insights in my personal and professional life right away.  At least, that's what my New Year's resolution is....

Sunny