Supervision: Teaching More Than Science

I just came across a link on google+ (my new favourite place for all things sciencey) to a nice piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education regarding professors failing their students when it comes to career preparation. Here are a few excerpts:

To be sure, my clients tell me that advising occurs—endless advising of "the dissertation project." As if that project, and its minutiae of citations

That's one good-looking flow chart you've got there

I do love a good flow chart, and this one of the top 100 Science Fiction / Fantasy books is pretty impressive. I may use it to decide what to read this weekend.

Well done, SF Signal

Random geekiness: 100th visitor!

Adventures in Academia rustled up it's 100th visitor today! In honour of this occasion, I... worked on my job applications. Because that's pretty much all I ever do anymore. I'm really looking forward to that happy day in mid-November when the bulk of my applications have been sent in. Although then I'll be anxiously waiting to see if I get interviews, which might be worse. We'll find out in six

Teaching evaluations

I spent some time last night going through my old teaching evaluations so that I could put some information about them in my job applications. Here are some of the best responses to, "What do you consider to be the strongest and weakest features of the instructor, as a teacher?"

Positive comments are usually pretty similar, just variations on "great teacher." But occasionally a student will be

Pirate science

In honour of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, here is a pirate-themed paper from PNAS.

Gordon, V. D. (in press). Shiver me timbers: Pulsatile contractility in model tissues. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA.

Ok, the science actually has nothing to do with pirates, but the title is awesome. Yarrrr!

It seems so simple when you put it in a chart

from I Love Charts

How to kill a grad student's love of research: Step 2

Quite often when students complain about their supervisor, they start off with, "I really like him, but..." or, "He's a really nice guy, but..." And it's true - many of these "bad" supervisors are really awesome people to grab a beer with. Often, one of their most frustrating attributes is that they really do mean well and are trying to be nice, which brings us to...

2) Killing the lab with "

Timely...

Like what I said yesterday, but in funnier comic form.

How to kill a grad student's love of research: Step 1

Now that I am in the midst of applying for faculty positions, I spend a lot of time thinking about the kind of supervisor I want to be when one day (hopefully soon!) I have my own grad students. Although grad school was hard work, and I am very happy to never have to write a dissertation again, on the whole it was a positive experience for me. My supervisor was really excited about research and

Random Geekiness

The other day while discussing the relative merits of red vs. green laser pointers with a colleague, I got to thinking, "you know what would be cool? A sonic screwdriver laser pointer. I would totally buy that."

I have managed to find instructions on how to make one from a laser pointer and a sonic screwdriver flashlight, but it seems like there are a lot of people discussing how to make these

Welcome!

I started setting up a blog a handful of years ago as a means of procrastinating from writing my dissertation, but I never quite got around to posting anything. Now that I have a handful of manuscripts to procrastinate from again, I thought I'd give this blogging thing another try. Ahhh, procrastination!

My goal for this blog is to share interesting science as well as some thoughts about