Lab (Cleaning) Party
I find the weeks around the September Equinox fascinating and especially important for me. At this time of year, change is evident, and rapid, and significant. The weather shifts from sultry, to sunny, to stormy, and maybe back again a few more times. The academic semester is now in full intensity: the students are busy with multiple assignments submitted, which of course affects my workload as I try to grade them. And of course, my birthday is a personal milestone event, with greetings and connections to family and friends.
This year was an especially important and life-defining birthday… no, wait. The calendar marks a date. But, my sense of where I am—in my career, in the life of the lab, about my own experience—is defined more by how I feel in the morning during tai chi and while eating breakfast than by a focus on how many revolutions around the Sun the Earth has managed since I first appeared. So, last week’s big lab event to mark my birthday? A party. A lab party. Well, actually, it was a lab cleaning party. Boxes of unnecessary and outdated materials were sorted and removed. Non-functional computers were disconnected. Tables were rearranged into a new and more functional configuration. This was a very helpful meeting.
Hold on. Are you telling me that GROUPER is just about room arrangements? Of course not. There are five research projects going on right now. There’s two PERCH projects (pharmacist-based information flow for congestive heart failure patient prescription filling; patient information flow and expertise using electronic medical records); a SMELT project (alignment of learning outcomes for first- and second-year engineering courses); and a new DOPHIN / CORAL project looking at information presentation to control room operators. The fifth project used to be looking at information concentrations and dynamics of information- and task-based elements of emergency responder situation awareness and event response. This could be a great idea for simulation-based human factors engineering. Except for a few tiny details. It’s a non-equilibrium decision making and performance task. With multiple scales of information dynamics. And the requirements for several years of data that aren’t available. Although there are examples of dissertations that had unexpected complexity or challenge, I believe it is one of the advisor’s responsibilities not to allow (or worse yet, intentionally create) a situation where the student finds themselves caught in a bad project. As the Zheng Lab students say, “I want to graduate in less than 5 years… I want a job and I want to be free.” So, let’s make an environment that helps that happen. (And let’s shift an impossible dissertation to just a challenging and interesting and valuable one.)
Somewhere along the way, I came to believe that a university should be about people working together to explore what has not yet been seen, and translate it across disciplines and times for others to understand. An advanced degree is not just about working on a more obscure detail for some research area that no one else cared to study. It’s not about following exactly the same program areas as everyone else, because that’s the “hot funding area” or because “everyone in the field is working that problem”. What do we really mean when we say that we want a PhD? The humor, but too often the true experience, suggests that it’s just about “Piled Higher and Deeper”. (You’ll have to wait for us to talk more about how GROUPERs learn from robots on Mars.) But Ph.D. means Doctor of Philosophy. One who teaches how to think, and think different.
But, back to the birthday, and the lab party. This group is coming together. The lab looks and feels better, more ready for the year’s work. There is lots to do, and I am thrilled to recognize that I feel more engaged and enthused to do it. The trajectory of one’s life and career is often described in a particular way, and the most recent birthday is often associated with dirges and black crepe and funereal humor about negative second derivatives regarding hills. (Okay, they don’t really say it that way.) However, the fun of the lab party is that it was one of new preparation. New opportunity. We’re just getting started. Chronological age aside, the past two weeks have been about a joyous recognition. Since I’ve now spent a dozen years in Indiana (another recent milestone), it’s easy for me to hear John Mellencamp songs on the radio and in my days. But one is certainly appropriate here: Your Life is Now
It is your time here to do what you will do…
In this undiscovered moment,
Lift your head up above the crowd.
We could shake these worlds,
If you would only show us how…
Your life is now.
Thanks for the cake, folks. The frosting was delicious.
grouperlab 
November 29, 2012
Inputs and Outputs
It’s not a great time to be a student–end of semester exams, project papers, and completing all of that work that seemed infinitely manageable back in October. It’s not a great time to be a faculty member–thesis drafts to read, letters of recommendation and proofreading students’ research statements fall on top of grant proposal deadlines and all that grading. So, it seems reasonable to be both a bit gentle, and a tad more explicit in clarifying the difference between “nice to have” and “required”. Some extra data, or a couple more days to work on that draft of the term paper is nice to have. What’s a challenge at the end of November is recognizing what is required, and how to get to all that is necessary in the too-little time available.
Most academics want to get grants to do their research. That’s not an easy process, and the competition grows in complexity and sources of frustration. Whether it be a development contract from a company, or a research grant from a governmental funding agency, the folks reading the proposal want to know “Who Cares” and “Why Should I Spend the Time to Read This?” They don’t know about what you meant to say, and they probably aren’t in your field. It’s your responsibility to communicate what’s so cool and new and shiny to you, to other people who may not even care until you show them why it’s valuable and critical and efficient to help them in what they do every day. A challenge at the best of times; a burden worthy of Atlas if you’re trying to write five proposals in two weeks to different types of organizations. Faculty usually talk about funding as an input measure (“Congratulations! You got the grant! Now what are you going to publish, which students will graduate, and what new things will come out of that lab that other people also want to use?”) . It’s also an output measure, of course: “I wrote nine proposals, and two of them got funded! I’m a star!” (Actually, that is kind of true. Funding rates for proposals from the most competitive agencies are often described as being in the 6-12% range. Hitting on 22% of your proposals would be good. Like Ted Williams in baseball, hitting on 40% of your tries would make you a Hall-of-Famer.) Either way, there is a big lag between the pain of creation and the success of the award. (Maybe just long enough to forget how much it hurts.)
But faculty have another set of inputs and outputs: their students. There was a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the evolution from being your professor’s advisee to being his or her peer. I was able to send this to the current GROUPERs, and even to my five most recent PhDs. I’ve even gotten a reply already–the start of a thread. This helps me feel good about the students as outputs–but I can still gloss over the importance of inputs. Not just the students as inputs (you need good material), but what we can do to get the student where they want to go.
Unfortunately, Natalie is leaving us in a few weeks: she’s graduating with her BS. Although an undergrad, she’s been one of the more experienced members of the lab for the past two years, helping to keep us aligned and sequenced (she’s been the project management software goddess). Student as input, student as person needing inputs, student as providing inputs… (that’s also modeling project we’re working on as well, within the SMELT stream). The greatest reward though, was the news we’ve gotten over the past week or so. At the HFES Annual Meeting back in October, I met a researcher from an organization doing research on human factors in healthcare. Have I got a student for you, I said. She’s already developed her own research study. She is fantastic as part of my lab. She wants to work in this area. And now, Natalie gets to announce that she got a job! And then she said that being part of GROUPER was a large part of how that happened… as well as my work that went into it.
GROUPER is an input into the students’ lives and professional evolution? What I’m doing is a transformation that gives someone a better outcome, a stronger trajectory, a more favorable future? OK, maybe that is worth it, and a great reward that turns into inputs for the next cycle. That, and a few extra hours’ sleep. And maybe some visits by the proposal writing muse.
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