Deans' Weblog: Dalhousie Graduate Studies

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

 

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

The Value of a Graduate Education - Part II

I kept Sunny's title from last week and will try to put the topic into a different perspective. I wager that Sunny's take on the topic is much more pleasant to read than mine.

I don't know how many of you read Bloomberg Businessweek, but for those who don't, it's February 7 - February 13, 2011 edition had the following headlines attached to its cover story by Peter Coy entitled "The Kids are Not Allright." "Youth unemployment is the global economies ticking time bomb" and "Youth unemployment is driving unrest in the Middle East and hollowing out societies from Europe to the US." The online version of the article entitled "The Youth Unemployment Bomb" can be accessed by clicking here. In my opinion, the charts on "the jobless young" not included in the online version may be worth paying a few dollars and getting the paper version.

In Europe, the US and even in China, "an economy that can't generate enough jobs to absorb its young people has created a lost generation of the disaffected, unemployed, or underemployed - including growing numbers of recent college graduates for whom the post-crash economy has little to offer." [In the US, the latter are called "boomerang" kids who move back home after college because they can't find work.]

In Egypt, Mubarak coped with the youth unemployment problem by expanding college enrollment, and even five years of economic growth weren't enough to keep the heat off him.

Of course, it is widely expected that eventually growth will resume as the after-effects of the 2008 financial crash diminish. This and the retirement of the baby boomers is believed to ease youth unemployment at most, if not all educational levels. Peter Coy put an interesting twist on this belief. "That's cold comfort to the young people who are out of work now. The short term has become distressingly long. Although the recession ended in the summer of 2009, youth unemployment remains near its cyclical peak. ... What keeps the numbers from being even higher is that many teens have simply given up. Some are sitting on couches. Others are in school, which can be a dead end itself. ... What's more, when jobs do come back, employers might choose to reach past today's unemployed, who may appear to be damaged goods, and pick from the next crop of fresh-faced grads."

One consequence of the weak academic job market is that graduate students, in increasing numbers, are delaying their graduation. Delays have often been the norm in certain disciplines, but the pile up of under- and unemployed Ph.D.'s nowadays has meant that new Ph.D.'s are finding far fewer employment opportunities than their supervisors did. Post-doctoral fellowships now often turn into dead ends and underemployed careers without any security and benefits.

The flooded market also means that departments now hire new faculty members for entry-level, tenure-track positions (if available) with the kind of qualifications that would have provided tenure to previous generations. Quite frankly, I doubt that Nobel laureates like Watson and Crick or Hodgkin and Huxley, with their publication records at the time they received the prize, would make the short list of an academic search these days.

In closing I think that whoever defuses the youth under-/unemployment bomb deserves the Nobel prize.

 

Dieter

Labour Market Outcomes of PhDs from Canadian Universities

The Economist in its Christmas Specials edition makes the case that pursuing a PhD is, at best, irrational. In "The Disposable Academic" (Dec 16th 2010), the author argues that:

".....there seem to be genuine problems with the system that produces research doctorates (the practical “professional doctorates” in fields such as law, business and medicine have a more obvious value). [Re. the latter, you may want to read an interesting article in The Wall Street Journal.] There is an oversupply of PhDs. Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings. Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things."

It appears that even employed PhD's do not enjoy much of a wage premium over people with a master's degree:

"…..British men with a bachelor’s degree earn 14% more than those who could have gone to university but chose not to. The earnings premium for a PhD is 26%. But the premium for a master’s degree, which can be accomplished in as little as one year, is almost as high, at 23%. In some subjects the premium for a PhD vanishes entirely. ..... Over all subjects, a PhD commands only a 3% premium over a master’s degree."

This is assuming that students complete the PhD once started:

".....drop-out rates suggest that many students become dispirited. In America only 57% of doctoral students will have a Ph.D. ten years after their first date of enrollment. In the humanities, where most students pay for their own Ph.D.'s, the figure is 49%. Worse still, whereas in other subject areas students tend to jump ship in the early years, in the humanities they cling like limpets before eventually falling off. [For Canadian completion rates, see the Completion of Graduate Studies in Canadian Universities report from the Canadian Association for Graduate Studies.] And these students started out as the academic cream of the nation. ..... Poor supervision, bad job prospects or lack of money cause them to run out of steam."

The article concludes that:

"Many of those who embark on a Ph.D. are the smartest in their class and will have been the best at everything they have done. They will have amassed awards and prizes. As this year’s new crop of graduate students bounce into their research, few will be willing to accept that the system they are entering could be designed for the benefit of others, that even hard work and brilliance may well not be enough to succeed, and that they would be better off doing something else. They might use their research skills to look harder at the lot of the disposable academic. Someone should write a thesis about that."

I read these articles with interest and posted some of the links on Twitter, but ultimately the main question always stuck in the back of my mind. Can one extrapolate these statistics from Britain and the United States to doctoral graduates from Canadian Universities? Timely for this blog, the Ministry of Industry yesterday released a research paper by Louise Desjardins (Statistics Canada) and Darren King (Human Resources and Skills Development Canada) entitled Expectations and Labour Market Outcomes of Doctoral Graduates from Canadian Universities. This report examined the outcomes of graduates by drawing from two different data sources that survey similar populations, but at two different points in time. The first is the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED), which has provided annual data on doctoral graduates at the point of graduation since the 2003/2004 academic year. The second source is the National Graduates Survey (NGS), which interviews a representative sample of graduates from Canadian post-secondary education institutions two years after their graduation. Thus, doctoral graduates in 2005 were interviewed at the time of graduation by the SED and again in 2007 by the NGS.

The data are presented under three headings and since I don't want to write a Mike-like essay, I'll only mention the highlights of each section here. Those who want the exact numbers and percentages will have to download the report by clicking on the link above and read all 60 pages for themselves.

Profile of 2005 doctoral degree graduates two years after graduation. [Two years after graduation, about 3,500 graduates from doctoral programs from the class of 2005 were living in Canada or the United States, representing 83% of the 4,200 doctorate graduates from Canadian universities in 2005.]

• Almost three out of ten doctoral recipients graduated in life sciences.
• Six out of ten women graduated from the life sciences and psychology and social sciences.
• Chinese languages were the third largest mother tongue group.
• More than six out of ten engineering graduates were members of a visible minority group.
• The vast majority of 2005 foreign-born doctoral graduates were naturalized of became landed immigrants by 2007.
• Half of doctoral graduates had a parent whose education was at least a bachelor degree.
• Two graduates out of ten did not hold a master’s degree before they started their doctoral program.
• Almost four out of ten graduates were working before entering their program.
• More than three-quarters of graduates had firm plans at the time of graduation.

Graduates who moved to the United States. [About one fifth of the 2005 doctoral graduates (21%) intended to leave Canada upon completion of their degree and most of them (57%) planned to move to the United States.]

• A much higher proportion of doctoral graduates lived in the United States in 2007 than was the case for graduates at the bachelor and master’s levels.
• About six out of ten doctoral graduates living in the United States in 2007 were Canadian citizens by birth.
• Life sciences and computer, mathematics and physical sciences graduates posted the highest proportions of doctoral graduates who left Canada for the United States.
• Most moved for work-related reasons and a majority were attracted by the quality of research facilities or the commitment to research.
• The vast majority of those who moved for educational reasons intended to take a postdoctoral position after their graduation in 2005.
• A job awaited the doctorate graduates who moved to the United States.
• A majority of movers intended to return to Canada.

Graduates’ labour market outcomes.

• Employment rates varied by field of study. [Excluding PDFs, the unemployment rate was 7% for all graduates. Graduates from the humanities, for example, reported an unemployment rate of 16%, which was twice as high as the next highest field, engineering at 8%. Humanities graduates also showed higher rates of part-time employment compared to graduates in other fields.]
• The median income for doctoral graduates in 2007, two years after graduation, was $65,000. [Humanities graduates who were employed full-time had a median income that was comparable to graduates from other fields of study.]
• There were differences in income between men and women, immigrants and Canadian-born.
• Graduates with postdoctoral intentions earned less in 2007 than those without.
• The majority of graduates were employed in educational services.
• The skill set of doctorate graduates is not being fully utilized as nearly one third of graduates did not require a doctoral degree for the job they were doing two years following graduation.One can only hope that with career progression, these doctorate holders may see the education-job skills match improve over time. This would have implications for both the economy and for the education choices that individuals are making.

Importantly, the addition of information on postdoctoral education to the NGS in the current report may, in part, help to explain why there is not a larger difference observed in the incomes of master’s and doctorate graduates two years after graduation. Finally, the data from the NGS has shown that graduates’ expectations from SED are a poor approximation of actual outcomes as reported in the NGS, which in many cases were better than expected.

Have a good weekend.

 

Dieter

 

"Making the Most of Your Postdoc"

"Postdoctoral positions are a common, and often necessary, interlude between graduate study and tenure-track life. The experiences and training gained from a postdoc can shape the rest of your career." I agree with the two authors of a July 15 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (from which I borrowed the title of this blog) that it can be challenging to find out even the most basic information about such opportunities. Thus, I hope that you will take the time to follow this link to the article and actually read it. There's lots of good advice in the article; it helps that it's actually written by postdoctoral fellows. The comments are also quite worthwhile reading.

If I were to add another piece of explicit advice, also use the time as a postdoc to prepare yourself as a scholar, a researcher, and a grant writer in ways that will strengthen the ideas behind your research, demonstrate that you have the wherewithal to carry out your project, and enhance your ability to communicate what hiring committees and reviewers of papers and grants are looking for. You can find excellent advice on how to position yourself as a scholar, a researcher and a grant writer in David Stone's article on becoming a successful principal investigator in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Mike mentioned a week ago that he has something in mind he wants to blog. Thus, don't be surprised if you get double blogged this week.

I'm out of here. Enjoy your weekend.

Dieter

“The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind'”

Mike is still sick and Carolyn is slowly recovering, while being overwhelmed with work at the same time. Thus, by default, the blog falls back to me. I started scrambling for a topic to blog on over the weekend and at the beginning of the week and hit a total blank on Monday morning, until Sunny came to the rescue. On Monday afternoon, he e-mailed “There is an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that is worth reading. It's about the problem of encouraging graduate students in non-professional programs when there isn't much to be encouraging about. I think the argument goes double for post-doctoral fellows.” Check it out; it’s truly worth reading; to do so, click on “The Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind’.” One sentence from this article really sticks to my mind; it's that kind of a sentence that has the potential to summarize an entire article. "There should be a special place in hell for the professors who - at the end of an advisee's 10-year graduate program with no job in sight - say, "well, academe is not for everyone." I’m putting this article up for debate and I would really appreciate your comments and suggestions from your perspective as Dalhousie's "highly qualified personnel (HQP)."

 

On a at first glance unrelated topic, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article on February 7, 2010 entitled "For-Profit Colleges Change Higher Education's Landscape - Nimble Companies gain a fast-growing share of enrollment" by Robin Wilson. In essence, this article concludes that “At a time when American public higher education is cutting budgets, laying off people, and turning away students, the rise of for-profit universities has been meteoric. Enrollment in the country's nearly 3,000 career colleges has grown far faster than in the rest of higher education - by an average of 9 percent per year over the past 30 years.”

 

Just look at the photo below and compare it to some of the buildings at public higher education institutions across Canada and the US. What a difference.

 

 

Photo by Noah Berger for The Chronicle of Higher Education

"The University of Phoenix's San Francisco Learning Center, in the financial district, offers information-technology, business, and other degrees. As of this month, the university's total enrollment is 455,600. It is now the second largest higher-education system in the country - behind only the State University of New York."

The real challenge now is to decide whether the trends described in these two articles are linked, i.e., whether the big lie about the life of the mind at least in part contributed to the enrollment gain of for-profit colleges.

Over and out.

Dieter

What belongs in the professional development program for grad students?

At the Canadian Science Policy Conference in Toronto this week, a senior science policy administrator asked me about the content of the professional development course we offer at Dalhousie for post docs and grad students. I mentioned the personal financial planning piece we were delivering  as part of the second year. She expressed surprise at this. She was also tactful.

"Just out of curiosity," she asked, "what is the rationale for this element of the program?"

A tactful and indirect challenge to its relevance to post docs and graduate students generally and scientists in particular.  My answer went something like this:

"If post docs and graduate students don't understand the consequences of getting compensation that is not employment income (i.e., their scholarships and fellowships are not employment), not to mention not getting the benefits that everyone else in every other field gets, they cannot make informed decisions about their career choices.  Most of them are making demonstrable economic sacrifices to participate in our community, so helping them get the most out of the money we do pay them seems to be the least we can do."

Her question caught me off guard. Financial planning advice is the kind of perk that valued executives get in the private sector, and it's something that most of us could use judging from the recent articles in the press about financial planning among Canadians in the face of pension problems.

We held a pre-test in advance of the session on personal finances. It wasn't nearly the disaster that it might have been although there is a large minority of post docs and grad students who really do need help on this front. Feedback after the class suggested that this was information they could have used years ago.  It's the old story - the best time to plant a tree was 40 years ago, and the second best time is today. 

So, is personal financial planning something that belongs in the professional development course for post docs and grad students? 

Who knows? But I suspect that universities that deliver this kind of material effectively are going to have a recruiting and retention advantage once the word gets out.  That's good enough for me.

Something to think about over Hallowe'en and All Souls Day.  Let's all celebrate safely out there...

Sunny

Postdocs Part II

This week an ad hoc committee met in Ottawa for another go at a national framework for postdocs. Last spring we started this discussion, prompted by CAGS and led by Sunny Marche. I think all of this got started as universities started to notice that post docs were there working away but no one was sure who, where, or under what working conditions (for the most part). So, over the past five years or so more graduate faculties have accepted responsibility for these scholars. Of course, this is not disconnected with the rising awareness of the need for professional development, beyond strict academics, for graduate students and post docs on our campuses. The catalyst for national discussions, however, has been the income tax bulletin on which fellowships are taxable and which are not. So out of confusion, perhaps will come clarity!!

So who is on this committee? We have representatives of the tri-councils, CAPS (Canadian Association of Postdoctoral Scholars), CAGS (Canadian Association of Graduate Studies), CAUBO (Canadian (of course) Associateion of University Business Offices), AUCC (Assoc of Universities and Colleges of Canada), and a couple of graduate deans. And as you can imagine a range of interests from career development, to tax and employment, to fair treatment, to professional development, to....

What did we accomplish? As with all difficult problems, the first step is understanding the language in use and the second is in stating the problem in a clear enough way that it can be solved. We engaged, successfully I think, on the first step in trying to prepare a concise definition of what we mean, in this discussion, by a post doc. Another way to look at this exercise is that we needed to narrow down from the quazillion people called and calling themselves "postdocs" to the criteria of the population we are interested in. So, here are the criteria we came up with for post docs: have a research doctoral degree, for a temporary period (i.e., not a career in itself), mentored, linked to a research institution, and acquire competency related to a research intensive career. The wordsmithed version will be released soonish but that is the essence.

A very interesting discussion was centered around the notion of transitions. The transition from PhD student to "trainee" researcher and the next transition from "trainee" researcher to "independent" researcher. This somewhat vague description becomes relevant when we address questions regarding the objectives of a given postdoctoral experience. So, more on this later!

What comes next? Before we can reach the second stage and identify solutions, we recommended that we engage in a national data gathering survey, encourage provincial and national registration of PDFs, work on formal differentiation of post doc and career research associates, and possibly standards for administration of post docs. Work to be done!

So, all in all interesting discussions but we are still a long way off from supporting our postdocs using best practices to ensure that this experience is an opportunity for academic and professional growth not just a career parking lot!

thanks for listening

Carolyn

Definitions

While doing some of the heavy thinking for my PhD, I came across the notion of "semantic analysis", the black art of determining what people mean. The notion was, and is, useful in the context of clarifying shared meanings in a way that advances organizational effectiveness. The term has evolved quite substantially since then and is now used in a variety of ways, but the techniques I use to co-create clarity have served me well over the years.

The thing that continues to amaze me is how often semantic analysis is necessary.  We all operate under the misguided notion that each of us uses language in the same way. The evidence is quite to the contrary. I make the same mistake in thinking every day. And then something comes along that reinforces the lesson.

A couple of years ago I taught a course that included some of the processes related to semantic analysis, and on the take-home examination asked the students to answer the question "what is a student?" One of them had the initiative to call the Department of Education for the answer, only to learn that they did not have such a definition. Now if the Department of Education doesn't have the definition of "student", then who does?

The answer is, of course, that we negotiate the meaning on a case-by-case, circumstance-by-circumstance basis. And so it was with the group who met in Ottawa this week to talk about the challenge of defining the phrase "post doctoral fellow".  The process consumed the better part of a day among over a dozen of the brightest and most experienced academics and administrators. And we have come up with something that we think is good enough to circulate among each other in draft, but is not ready for prime time.

Why so long, and why the need to spend even more time on the topic?  Because definitions have a fundamental relationship to purpose which then connects to action.  And having good definitions is fundamental to fair and effective administrative action. Whether in a university, teaching hospital research setting, or granting agency. 

Semantic analysis - a permanent feature of my life.

Sunny

Post-Doctoral Fellows

I know, I know.... It's the Faculty of Graduate Studies, not the Faculty of Graduate and Post-Doctoral Studies. Not yet, anyway.

So why are we worrying about Post-docs? And what does the notion of post-doctoral studies mean? Is it possible that a person who has successfully completed a PhD at a university might still need more training, more education after somewhere between 8 and 12 years of post-secondary education?

As it turns out, this is indeed the case. Anyone who has attended a Ph.D. defense in the last couple of years will learn that the dissertations can be very narrow in their focus. One defense I chaired involved molecular studies on a subset of a specific gene (among a number of potential genes) of a single celled animal. Such a detailed study is entirely appropriate for the Ph.D. But is not likely to be enough to score a research grant big enough to establish a lab, or to convince a university to hire a graduate. So the  Ph.D. graduate continues to extend her research competencies and experience by working in a research community typically led by a much more senior researcher.

The money she gets paid for this effort is usually described as a "fellowship". There is good news and bad news about this. The good news is that the federal government tax treatment has changed, and fellowships are no longer taxable. The bad news is that this is ONLY the case where the fellowship if primarily related to training and education. It is not tax exempt if the fellowship is simply to fund further research.

So that means the Faculty of Graduate Studies continues to wrestle with our new responsibility for managing this responsibility. We have a draft policy out for review. We are making interim decisions about which Post-docs look like "academic" PDFs and which ones look like "research" PDFs. And we will build course content for the professional development of PDFs for those who are "academic".

One thing for sure -- when I came to Grad Studies it didn't occur to me that my previous experience working with auditors might come in handy. And it certainly didn't occur to me that we might anything to do with administering Canadian tax policy! Never a dull moment.

Sunny