Author Archives: Minerva Cheevy

February 17, 2012, 9:42 am

Once again, women reduced to their reproductive organs

In the days leading up to ScienceOnline 2012, a blogger who was irritated at the lack of childcare options at the conference tweeted something like the following (I am paraphrasing — except for the bolded part):

Scio12 needs to consider providing more child care so that more women and dads could attend.

Women. And dads. Not moms and dads, but women and dads. Because, you know, all women have children, right?

Similarly, just about every report I’ve ever seen on women in science/women in academia concludes that the best way to increase the number of women in science and academia is to provide better daycare and flexibility for mothers.

I agree that more family-friendly policies would benefit many women and help level the playing field between men and women. But there’s so much more to be done. For example, when the journal Behavioral Ecology instituted double-blind peer review,

February 1, 2012, 2:53 pm

How to appear competent in one easy step

By Minerva Cheevy

Manage your email inbox well. That’s all there is to it.

Not that kind of inbox.

I understand that there are faculty members and administrators who receive many, many hundreds of emails a day and find it nearly impossible to keep up with the volume. I wish them good luck. However, if you are a graduate student or postdoc, you do not receive “too much email.” You might think that you do, but you are wrong. I’m sorry, but it’s true. You are simply managing it poorly.

If you miss important announcements, if you regularly fail to respond emails from collaborators asking for input, if you can’t get things done in time because you “didn’t know” about them (because you didn’t see the email), you will be perceived as incompetent and a drain on more productive people. However, if you are able to quickly…

January 25, 2012, 11:19 am

Working It: Valuable Skills You Didn’t Even Know You Had

By Minerva Cheevy

Given my non-traditional, alt-ac position, I am often asked to give career advice, which still surprises me because I am in no way an expert. I sort of feel like I’ve just fallen into the jobs I’ve had. But there are a few things that I did differently from your average grad student or postdoc that probably helped me get where I am.

I frequently hear graduate students and postdocs repeat the oft-given advice that you should only focus on your research, to the exclusion of all other activities. That anything else will hold you back and delay reaching the ultimate goal of becoming a tenure-track professor. But focusing on your research and publishing like a machine is no guarantee of a tenure-track job. And following this advice can actually harm you if you are interested in any other kind of job – and trust me, even if you think that the only job for you is “professor,”…

January 17, 2012, 4:37 pm

What I hope to get out of ScienceOnline2012

By Minerva Cheevy

Tomorrow I’m heading to Raleigh, NC for the ScienceOnline conference – or “unconference,” I should say. I’ve never been to anything like this before and I’m not entirely sure what to expect. I also don’t really fit neatly into any of the categories that describe most of the people attending: while I am a research scientist, I am also the PR person for my center. I am not a science blogger per se – this blog here certainly isn’t about science – but I do maintain the center’s blog and solicit and edit science posts for the center’s blog.

I'm shy!

I also don’t know very many people who are attending personally. While the explosions of joy over the impending meeting over on Twitter (see #scio12) are cute [e.g. "OMG I'm so excited to see you all again"], it’s actually pretty intimidating. I’m kind of shy,…

January 12, 2012, 4:47 pm

Blogger’s Block

By Minerva Cheevy

When I moved my blog over here to The Chronicle, one of the things I was worried about was keeping up with expectations. What on earth was I going to write about? My fellow Chronicle bloggers are a pretty high-level crowd, always writing about Important Issues and stuff. I do that sometimes too, but sometimes I just want to tell you about a funny thing my cat did or post a cocktail recipe. Somehow, that just doesn’t seem right in this venue.

This picture has absolutely nothing to do with this blog post.

And so one thing didn’t lead to another, until I had full-blown blogger’s block. I would come up with vaguely interesting ideas, start drafting a post, and… well, that just seems too dumb. Or too short. Or dumb AND short. And now the blog has sat here for weeks, ignored and unloved. The best way to…

December 14, 2011, 3:49 pm

I finally have some free time… what do I do now?

By Minerva Cheevy

Cat surrounded by Christmas wrapping paper

I can do whatever I want? Wow, it's just like Christmas!

Ah, the day I’ve been waiting for has arrived at long last. The huge annual undertakings related to our funding agency are now completed, two of my latest manuscripts are in press, and three papers that I’m a co-author on are finally (finally!) in review. Finally, I can start to focus on some new research projects…

…and I have absolutely no idea where to start.

Does this happen to you too? It’s not that I don’t have any projects planned or any data waiting to be analyzed. I’ve got a pile of data from last summer’s field season just sitting there, and two collaborative projects with people who haven’t been answering my emails lately, and vague ideas for a new grant proposal. It’s just… I don’t have any revisions to do, no feedback to…

December 5, 2011, 5:44 pm

Academia vs. Roller Derby

By Minerva Cheevy

Thanks, http://fuckyeahrollerderbyotter.tumblr.com/!

Roller derby! It seems to be everywhere these days, and I couldn’t be happier. Derby 101 has begun at my local league, and I am learning to skate (in between all the times I fall down). I’ve started noticing some important ways in which academia and roller derby are similar — and ways in which they are really, really, different.

SIMILAR:

1. You’ll fall on your ass. A lot. And you just have to keep getting up over and over again. In academia, it’s metaphorical, but it still hurts.

2. Perseverance is much more important than innate talent. In academia, it’s been noted by many people that finishing your Ph.D. is more a reflection of your ability to keep at something until you finish it, and less a reflection of your intelligence. In roller derby,…

November 15, 2011, 10:12 am

The Unbearable Tiredness of Being… Introverted

By Minerva Cheevy

Continuing with yesterday’s theme (which seems to have upset at least one person already, oh my!)…

I’ve been thinking about what it is about my life that wears me out so much these days, and I realized that I interact with people all day long. As a graduate student and postdoc, I often had long stretches of time when I didn’t talk to anybody (sometimes for whole days!) and was able to focus on lab work or writing or whatever without having to deal with anyone else. Professors are often able to have days when they don’t come on campus at all, or at least have set office hours when students can see them, and other times when they can close the door. As an administrator, I have to be constantly available. I am on campus every day (except when I am doing fieldwork for a few weeks in the summer) and my door is always open and I always answer the phone. I answer work emails as quickly as …

November 14, 2011, 2:16 pm

So very tired

By Minerva Cheevy

Confession: lately when my friends with colds, the flu, or Lyme disease comment on Facebook that they are spending the day in bed with cats, television, and hot tea, I think to myself, “Oh, that sounds so nice.”

I’m tired. So tired that I am, bizarrely, jealous of my friends who are sick. And I feel guilty about feeling tired. I’m still relatively young, I don’t have children, I don’t work more than 40-45 hours a week. I should be able to find time to go to the gym, cook nice dinners, and go out and be social a couple of times a week. I should be able to keep my house cleaner. It’s not too bad, but sometimes it smells like dog, and my desk drawers are a mess. And there’s that one lightbulb in the kitchen that we’ve never gotten around to replacing. Don’t even mention the back yard.

Compared to other people in academia, I always thought I was pretty good at “taking care of myself”…

November 4, 2011, 12:41 pm

Reference formatting woes

By Minerva Cheevy

At this very moment, I am taking a break from making reviewers’ very minor revisions to a paper that I submitted recently. I am very pleased about just how minor these revisions are, but of course I can’t just leave it at that. I noticed that Reviewer #1, who was particularly enamored of the paper (thank you, Reviewer #1!) only made 5 tiny changes – three of which were in the bibliography and were errors caused by EndNote’s poorly defined style for that particular journal.

I am disgruntled.

This drives me insane. I have used EndNote for years, and I like many things about it. EndNote is one of the main reasons that I still use Microsoft Word for all of my writing. Well, also because I do a lot of collaborative writing, and if I were to send my colleagues a file in, say, Scrivener, they would think I had…