How to be a successful scientist

http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/blog/posts/how-to-be-a-successful-scientist

Posted by Rachel Bowden on Jan 31, 2011

Darren Griffin's ten commandments for succeeding in academia

1. The only way to do good research is to get on with it
"There's no point having really good ideas if you don't put them into action," says Griffin. "Write those grants, write those papers."

2. When opportunity knocks, open the door
Be prepared to take risks with new ventures: "If there's an opportunity there for you and it's in your interests to pursue it, then get on and do it."

3. With good people you can do anything
Griffin says interacting with his team is one of the most rewarding aspects of his work, and he's not afraid of high achievers. "You should only take someone on if they can do something you can't," he says. "Your whole operation will only grow if you've got people who are better than you are, and you shouldn't be ashamed or insecure about that."

4. It's not about your knowledge - it's about imagination and ideas
Although a certain level of knowledge is essential, Griffin says you can always look up anything else you need to know - what you should focus on is coming up with new ideas. And as well as drawing on the talent in your team, you should also turn to your peers for inspiration. "Science is very much a social activity - you've got to get out there, network and have collaborators," says Griffin.

5. Always bring something to the party
It takes two to collaborate - if you don't have something to contribute, your partners will move on.

6. It's not the size of your gun, it's when you shoot
"It's a popular misconception that you just throw money and lots of people at an idea and it will work," says Griffin. Not always true, he says - you need to shoot at the right time to hit the target.

7. If the system doesn't work for you, change it, do something else or don't complain
Fairly self-explanatory, this one - be proactive and decisive, because "nobody likes a whinger".

8. Don't ask why, ask why not
"If you're a scientist, do not take no for an answer, because every no is one step closer to a yes," says Griffin. Be persistent and find out what you need to do to get that yes.

9. The journey is usually far more rewarding than the destination
So remember to enjoy the ride: "It's such a wonderful thing, being a scientist, because you're in the process of discovery, and that's a lot of fun."

10. Be nice to people
Of all the commandments, Griffin says this is ultimately the most important - not only because it's the right thing to do, but also because you never know when someone will have something that you want.

The Perils of Unleashing Students' Skepticism

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Perils-of-Unleashing/125926/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

By John Horgan

Don't always believe what scientists tell you. Be skeptical.

That's what I tell students in my history- of-science and science-writing classes. But some of them may have taken the lesson too much to heart.

I want to give my students the benefit of my hard-won knowledge of science's fallibility. Early in my career, I was a conventional gee-whiz science writer, easily impressed by scientists' claims. Fields such as physics, neuroscience, genetics, and artificial intelligence seemed to be bearing us toward a future in which bionic superhumans would zoom around the cosmos in warp-drive spaceships. Science was an "endless frontier," as the physicist Vannevar Bush put it in his famous 1945 report that paved the way for creation of the National Science Foundation.

Procrastination

Two excellent articles on procrastination

1. Confessions of a procrastinator

• Fabio Paglieri

Nature

469,

435

(2011)

doi:10.1038/nj7330-435a

Published online

19 January 2011

This article was originally published in the journal Nature

Everyone puts off big tasks with smaller ones, and the only solution is to fight fire with fire, says Fabio Paglieri

My work studying how people schedule various tasks over time (usually inefficiently) has shown me the error of my own organizational ways, and now I know the name of my terminal illness: procrastination. I am always struggling to stick to multiple deadlines on the most disparate jobs. For every project with a deadline that I manage to meet, there are two more that I am forced to postpone. I am a pathological procrastinator.

For some time I thought I was alone in my depravity, and I laboured to keep it hidden from family, friends and co-workers. Then it dawned on me: procrastination is no exotic malaise, but rather a pandemic virus, one possessed of alarming virulence in the research community. Colleagues never tire of mentioning 'bottomless to-do lists', 'overwhelming commitments', 'busy schedules' and 'pressing deadlines'. Such symptoms can result in students failing to deliver data, a co-author unable to complete a paper or a publisher postponing a manuscript's publication. Clearly I am in no position to judge, as I myself have committed similar misdeeds. I take some heart in sharing the guilt with so many others.

http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/2011/110120/full/nj7330-435a.html

2. Structured Procrastination

I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

http://structuredprocrastination.com/

The Shadow Scholar

The man who writes your students' papers tells his story

By Ed Dante

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/

Editor's note: Ed Dante is a pseudonym for a writer who lives on the East Coast. Through a literary agent, he approached The Chroniclewanting to tell the story of how he makes a living writing papers for a custom-essay company and to describe the extent of student cheating he has observed. In the course of editing his article, The Chronicle reviewed correspondence Dante had with clients and some of the papers he had been paid to write. In the article published here, some details of the assignment he describes have been altered to protect the identity of the student.

Few passages:

I've written toward a master's degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I've worked on bachelor's degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I've written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I've attended three dozen online universities. I've completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.

You've never heard of me, but there's a good chance that you've read some of my work. I'm a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can't detect, that you can't defend against, that you may not even know exists.

You would be amazed by the incompetence of your students' writing. I have seen the word "desperate" misspelled every way you can imagine. And these students truly are desperate. They couldn't write a convincing grocery list, yet they are in graduate school. They really need help. They need help learning and, separately, they need help passing their courses. But they aren't getting it.

For those of you who have ever mentored a student through the writing of a dissertation, served on a thesis-review committee, or guided a graduate student through a formal research process, I have a question: Do you ever wonder how a student who struggles to formulate complete sentences in conversation manages to produce marginally competent research? How does that student get by you?

Of course, I know you are aware that cheating occurs. But you have no idea how deeply this kind of cheating penetrates the academic system, much less how to stop it. Last summer The New York Times reported that 61 percent of undergraduates have admitted to some form of cheating on assignments and exams. Yet there is little discussion about custom papers and how they differ from more-detectable forms of plagiarism, or about why students cheat in the first place.

After I've gathered my sources, I pull out usable quotes, cite them, and distribute them among the sections of the assignment. Over the years, I've refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-word sentence in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of quotable text, and I'll produce two pages of ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph.

I've also got a mental library of stock academic phrases: "A close consideration of the events which occurred in ____ during the ____ demonstrate that ____ had entered into a phase of widespread cultural, social, and economic change that would define ____ for decades to come." Fill in the blanks using words provided by the professor in the assignment's instructions.

Following article is the response to the above and provides better insight into the problems with some outline for solutions:

Cheating and Academic Integrity: an International Perspective on ‘The Shadow Scholar’

By Francisco Marmolejo

http://chronicle.com/blogs/worldwise/cheating-and-academic-integrity-an-international-perspective-on-the-%E2%80%9Cshadow-scholar%E2%80%9D/27635?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Example:

University Ghostwriting Allegations Expand to Textbook Authors

http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/university-ghostwriting-allegations-expand-to-textbook-authors/28747?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

http://grassley.senate.gov/about/upload/Senator-Grassley-Report.pdf

Sabotage

"Postdoc Vipul Bhrigu destroyed a colleague's experiments (at University of Michigan) to get ahead. It took a hidder camera to expose a little-known, malicious side of science."

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100929/pdf/467516a.pdf

"This Paper Should Not Have Been Published"

Scientists see fatal flaws in the NASA study of arsenic-based life.

By Carl Zimmerhttp://www.slate.com/id/2276919/
The above article shows the ugly side of the academia, and bad competition. Would the competing group have not published it if they got it first? What about the small supply of nutrient that was neglected to give more importance to prove the use of arsenic as a nutrient?

"Too Asian" and hiring "International Faculty"

"Too Asian" by M. Ruse

http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/too-asian/30168

writes about his "concern" for too many Asian students at US and mainly Canadian Universities.

Few passages:

When they returned, one remark that went by without notice was that there seemed to be an awful lot of Asian students on both campuses. So, big deal. However, this is something which has rather blown up in Canada just recently. An article in the weekly magazine Maclean’s—the closest equivalent to Time magazine in that country—with the apparently provocative title that I used above, “Too Asian?” (Now changed on the Net to “The Enrollment Controversy”), has got a number of people very upset indeed, and questions have been asked in the nation’s parliament.

The article points out that some universities in Canada have a justified reputation for being heavy on Asian students—UBC, the University of Toronto, the University of Waterloo (in Southern Ontario and with a very well-deserved reputation in mathematics especially, as well as engineering). That this is out of whack with the general makeup of the population. UBC has over 40 percent Asian undergrads compared to a general ratio in Vancouver of just over 20 percent.

Not just Hitler but all of those distinguished white professors at Harvard who made very sure that the place was not overrun by the children of immigrants living in the Lower East Side of N.Y.C.

Hurdles to Hiring International Faculty

By David Evans

http://chronicle.com/blogs/onhiring/hurdles-to-hiring-international-faculty/27823

Few passages:

Many of our strongest applicants have not been American citizens. We have recently hired a noncitizen, and our current pools suggest the real possibility that we will do so again.

I understand fully that there are good reasons for preferring to hire American citizens in most cases. Moreover, the United States has made a series of public-policy decisions that drive us in that direction whether we want to go that way or not. While there are also very strong reasons to hire international faculty, I do not dispute the priority on hiring citizens.