I am Here.
And I am freaking out. My stuff is supposed to get here Saturday. I don’t think there’s any way my piano or my loveseat, which are rigid objects in funny shapes, are going to fit in this elevator. But I’ll wait. And I’ll let the professionals figure it out. But I can’t seem to stop panicking.
My friend convinced me to keep my car for another couple of days to go shopping. So I’m going to do that. I am highly, highly stressed with little or no proper outlet. But I slept last night. Mostly.
Why don’t I play the violin?
It Begins.
I write this as I await my movers. They should be here within an hour or so. I slept for a good six hours last night, with periodic interruptions. Things bother me. My old job owes me travel reimbursement they haven’t paid me yet, and now that I’m separated, I don’t know if there’s going to be a problem. It’s my own grant money that’s supposed to pay back conference expenditures, to the tune of about $800. It’d be nice to see.
But the very fact that I write about that right now should be some kind of an indicator of where my head is. I’m exhausted, confused, and under caffeinated. I have coffee and a coffee maker, but I’ve packed the filters. I got McDonalds coffee, and a horrible sausage biscuit. I have no food at all in the house, and rather than eat a tin of beeswax lip balm I figured I had better put something with calories into myself so that I don’t freeze up and make bad decisions while I’m directing the move.
I’ve managed to do all the things on the St. Louis end. There are a couple of rugs and pieces of furniture that are staying behind. My lodger is happy to keep them. And now the packing woman is here. Gotta go. I’m starting.
Emotional Exhaustion.
About 8 months ago, my big sister moved to Mexico for a year. She is one of those people with astonishing reserves of emotional energy. Raising three girls, two of whom are little, and running a homestead farm, she and her husband (a Mexican national) decided to uproot for a year and go live in Oaxaca with her in-laws. They bought a plot of land in the outskirts of the city, and are preparing it for when they eventually retire. They’re homeschooling the little girls. They wanted to, in my sister’s words, raise them bi-culturally, not just bilingually. The aplomb with which she has handled the drastic shift of locations, cultures, and circumstances is an inspiration to me. It’s a much bigger change than I’m making, and with the responsibility for multiple people. By comparison (and it’s not a contest) her move is much more difficult and alienating than mine.
I am exhausted. Making a move like this alone is surely easier in many ways. But I also don’t have another adult to help me with plans and take some of the load. I confess it would be nice to have help. I’ve already detailed all of the things I’ve done. No point in rehashing the process of a move. Suffice to say, at this point, I have done a lot of things. And I’m almost, but not quite, done. Basically, I have to handle the Post Office, and the actual moving day. The thousand mile drive. Selling my car. Surviving with no stuff for a week or two. Praying my piano survives the movers.
To tell the truth, this feels like the kind of thing that a normal adult should have been able to handle with minimal disruption to their daily life. It takes me a lot of effort to act normal. I feel like I’m not as capable or as effective as most people. Ordinary tasks are exhausting. These past six months I’ve done something totally normal for a grown-up to do: look for and accept a new job, and prepare to change cities to do it. I have dozens of friends who’ve done that, many of them multiple times. Some who’ve changed countries at the same time. With spouses and children. I know I’m being a bit dramatic about all of this.
For whatever reason, I feel like I wasn’t born with the emotional reserves that normal people were born with. All I know is that by putting my best efforts forward, and planning to do what I can, when I can, I got all the things done. So far. And I get to be tired. I get to be sad about leaving the city I’ve called home for more than twenty years. My friends and family and the damp basements full of old drunks who have lived through hell and walked out the back door of it.
I will miss this place. I tear my roots from this soil, and I will bury them in new ground.
The Saga.
I know a lot of my readers have been science-nomads for decades, moving between cities every few years for college, graduate school, post-doc, post-doc, assistant professorship, and fall-back gig after being denied tenure. That hasn’t been my experience. After growing up in Seattle, I moved to St. Louis a few weeks after my 18th birthday. I’ve been here ever since. I went to the same university (Washington University in St. Louis) for college and graduate school. I was hired by a local medical center as a health care engineer and then as a PI. When I got the job, I felt reasonably secure that I might be in St. Louis forever.
Then, I had a good contact with Saint Louis University, and it looked like I would get an assistant professorship there. I was approved by the faculty. And in the meantime, after winning a grant and an innovation award, I thought that I would be safely ensconced at my medical center, with a joint appointment between the hospital and SLU, and that would be my career. I would research health care delivery systems. I’m good at that. I would be happy doing that. I had a plan.
Red tape held up my faculty appointment. My follow-up grants weren’t funded. I started to run out of money. My hospital administration held firm to a “Zero Cost Policy” for research: they would invest nothing at all. And they had no interest in using my skills to support the quality improvement department, despite manifest – published! – success there. They would let me work on those projects, but they would not pay my salary to do so. Without new grants, and without my appointment at SLU, I was suddenly looking at unemployment. It looked scary.
So I started applying to universities, schools of public health, for assistant professorships. My resume is thin for that. What I have going for me is a small history of funded grants. A big name university behind my education. But my bibliography is thin at best. I got two interviews, on the phone. Both went well. One led to a campus interview, the other to an enthusiastic request to resubmit my application when the position was upgraded from non-tenure-track to tenure-track.
But the idea of being a professor terrified me. I don’t know if I could teach classes and do research. I don’t have the constitution of an assistant professor, I don’t think. But it is the position I’d sort of been groomed for over the past four years, writing papers and grants. It was the next place to go. But a professorship wasn’t what I truly wanted.
I’m an engineer. I want to do work that has direct impact in the world, right away. Science takes decades, sometimes, before the impact of new research is felt. In my field, systems science in health care, results sort of gradually move the zeitgeist until policy makers end up trying to make basic changes to policy intended to influence the behavior of the complex system of public health and healthcare delivery. It’s agonizingly slow and often doesn’t have the effect it’s intended to. And even when it does, it comes with side effects. I want to improve people’s lives right away.
So I talked to a friend at a software company. I was thinking that they might have consulting work for me because they do health care software work. Instead, they put me in contact with PECMC (Prestigious East Coast Medical Center). They were looking for an engineer like me. Someone who can do health care delivery engineering, with experience guiding projects from conceptualization to completion. They don’t care much about the research aspect of it. Even though PECMC is a major research institution, the Quality department doesn’t normally do that kind of thing.
I interviewed, and I told them that I wanted to go there. But that I wanted to publish as well, framing the work as research so that we can simultaneously improve quality at PECMC and disseminate results in the literature. They were very receptive. They flew me out. I gave a talk. People were impressed. I was offered a job. I accepted it. I start next month.
I began the long slow process of separating from my current position. Getting another PI to take over my project. Negotiating the incredibly complex obstacle course of renting out my house, moving, getting a place in ECC (East Coast City). Utilities. Inspections. Leases. Credit checks. Thousands and thousands of dollars spent. And now I am almost at the finish line of my time in St. Louis. The movers come Tuesday. The gas company comes out to blow out the pilot lights. I sweep up, and I get in the car, and I drive east.
To pick up the keys to my new apartment, on the eleventh floor of a glass tower in downtown ECC. For a new life. I’m nervous. I’ve had a headache for two straight weeks. I ruminate in the early morning, instead of sleeping. My heart has that lurching feeling of lightness and terror that accompanies the plunge from a cliff into deep water.
But that’s ok. I’m a strong swimmer.
The Last Men’s Meeting.
Last night I went to my last men’s meeting. It was a strange feeling. A couple of the quarter-century crew weren’t there, so I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye. Frenchie’s wife had taken a bad turn with her chemo. There was a new guy. He’s got 90 days sober. Hopefully he’ll keep coming back. I didn’t get to talk until the end, so the meeting wasn’t about me.
Part of me was disappointed in that. I like to be the center of attention. If I had been the first person to speak, then the rest of the meeting would have been a big goodbye to me, and I’d have felt nourished and loved and that would’ve been great. but I was one of the very last to speak, so people had forgotten that this was to be my last meeting there. Nobody mentioned it.
That’s ok of course. I’m not saying that because I’m insulted or anything, I’m not. In fact, it was a good reminder to me: it’s not all about me. AA meetings are about getting sober. Staying sober. For many of us, me included, that means cultivating a sense of humility and circumspection. It was good to be reminded that whether I’m there or not, that meeting will go on. People will come and go. Sobriety will continue to be the focus.
One of the things we say in AA, in fact, the twelfth of the Twelve Traditions, is that AA is about principles, not personalities. It’s not important who says what, or how I’d like the meeting to go. What’s important is that we come together, and adhere to the principles of the program, so that we can remain sober together. No person is the heart of a meeting. If someone is, that meeting is sick. It’s not about the people. It’s about the program.
It’s also an exhibition of the vaguely stoic sentimentality of men. No tears. No maudlin tribute. Kenny told me to give him a hug. Most of the rest shook my hand. Rusty is going to be painting my house, so he just said: “I’ll be in touch.” And that’s right. There’s no need for a sad goodbye: my departure is a good thing. I’m going to ECC for good reasons. I’m not dying or being transferred against my design. I chose this. So they say goodbye and wish me well. And that’s as it should be.
AA is full of these spectacles for me. How to be a grown-up man. How to stay focused on what truly matters: sobriety. How to live in a strange and often hostile world. How to live. Full stop.
The Tenure-Track Phone Interview.
I write this post with the naked ambition of being linked in @doc_becca‘s Tenure-Track advice aggregator. But also to impart the little bit of wisdom that I can based on my own experiences as a Tenure Track professorship applicant. I read an enormous amount of advice on writing my CV, and on my research and teaching statements, and on all kinds of issues about job-talks and interview etiquette. The one thing I didn’t find any information on was the phone interview.
I don’t know how common it is. I submitted about 25 faculty application packages. I heard back, so far, from about 10 schools. About 8 rejections and two requests for phone interviews. I was not offered a single on-campus interview without a phone interview first. In fact, I ended up with one request for an on-campus interview, and one request to submit more information for additional consideration, after my phone interviews. The latter was clearly leading to an on-campus interview (they were very enthusiastic about my candidacy), but I suspended my job search when I got my post at PECMC.
But clearly, the phone interview is a way of making a long-list into a shortlist, weeding out candidates who can’t think on their feet and answer questions, before spending a couple thousand dollars on flying them out, putting them up, and getting a whole bunch of people into a room for a job-talk and a chalk-talk.
The phone interview will be with the selection committee, or a subset thereof, and lasts about half an hour. They ask who you are, what you do. It will give you the impression that they haven’t actually read your research statement or your teaching statement. Maybe they haven’t, maybe they’ve read so many that they blur together. Maybe they just want to make sure that you’ve read your research statement. Keep this brief, but informative. They want to know, it seems, that you can talk about your research cogently, in a little bit more detail than an elevator pitch. Mention someone in the department doing interesting research you’d like to work with.
Next, they will spend about 20 minutes asking you questions. There was some cursory attention given to my modeling methods, but the conversation very quickly turned to funding in both cases. They were clearly impressed when I could quote NIH and AHRQ open request for applications (RFAs) relating to my work, and talk meaningfully about the recent funding lines at the agencies to which I’d be applying. They clearly were interested in someone who knew the details of pursuing funding. It was also important that I had applications under review already. I would strongly advise any faculty application to have a submission as PI, even a small foundation grant, under review while interviewing.
After establishing that I knew what I was doing with respect to a grant application, one school asked me about teaching philosophy, which I was prepared for. I had been coached on twitter to ask about teaching if they didn’t bring it up. And then I was asked if I had any questions for them. I asked about path to tenure, start-up, how the position was currently funded, and so on.
My overall impression with the phone interview was that I was being given the opportunity to take myself out of the running. I think @proflikesubst mentioned this first to me. That people will remove themselves from consideration if given the chance. So, to have a successful phone interview, write down people’s names so you don’t forget who’s talking, and then simply describe yourself, your plans for the next 5 years – specifically including how you intend to fund yourself – and how you think you fit in the department. They asked you to interview because they like what they saw on paper. Your job is simple: don’t convince them they’re wrong.
I Am Enraptured.
Another winter drive from Middle America to the East Coast awaits me next week. The beginning of a long pause for breath between professional engagements. Midwestern winters are enthralling from the road. Break-wedges of Canada geese aloft on frigid updrafts. Raptors in solitary vigils alongside the long highway. All of Nation Aves mustering against the cold. Everything brittle with ice, an impossible world of frozen things glittering.
I am in the middle of my life now. I feel I am now, finally, poised to begin my life’s work. To inhabit a place where I am capable and where the expectations of me align with my expectations of myself. Where my creativity and ambition will be nurtured by an institution dedicated to bold grasps at excellence. Where I can contribute to something large and meaningful with enthusiasm untempered by systemic despair. Where I flourish by applying experience to new challenges.
In my life, I have hungered to find a home. Walls to define a space where I belong, but not confine me there. A lattice of friendship in which I am both supported and supporter. Where I take the wrist of the man next to me, and together, in the multitude, we are a web that has no weaker links; when any fail, the remaining absorb their weight. And now, I have that. I have it twice.
There will be uprooting-trauma as I forge forward. I must remain in contact with my senses; my tendency to shrink and isolate. I must step out. Move forward. Engage. I will live in building made of glass and steel. I will work in another one. But I will breathe the whole breath of my new city. Of my new life. Of all of this new life.
Posthumous Honor (Well, Sort Of).
Now that my job search, a thing that seemed to have a life of its own, is dead and buried, I feel like it’s worth reflecting a bit. What I’ve learned is that once again, who you know is more important than what you know. Even places that were interested in the type of systems research that I do rejected me without even a phone interview, when it seems like the fit would’ve been strong. But the one place where I was introduced by a friend who knew my skills hired me. However, I was not wholly ignored by the academic world.
I found out yesterday that I was offered an in-person interview for an Assistant Professorship in Health Policy/Management. A mid-sized public university on the Atlantic Coast in Dixie. The job would be heavily teaching. They told me that it’s a teaching/research position with a 2-2 teaching load (2 classes per semester, 2 semesters per year), which is a lot if they expect you to get any research done. But the University is a historical teaching school, and much of the faculty has no real research experience. I get the feeling that if you publish occasionally and teach well, tenure is on the table.
I wrote back a polite note saying that I had accepted another position already, thanking them for their interest, and wishing them well in finding a good candidate. And the department head wrote back to me after that telling me he’d be open to collaboration, etc.. So I feel like there was a decent chance I’d have been offered that job if I gave a good job-talk. I obviously made a fairly short list.
But I just want to stop again and attribute this success to where it belongs. Yes, I deserve some of it. I’ve done good work the past four years and published some fairly interesting stuff (that no one has paid any attention to), and won a couple of grants. That’s what I did. It’s not nothing. It’s enough to make me vaguely interesting to at least two universities looking for healthcare delivery researchers. It’s enough to have PECMC offer me a job.
But vastly, vastly more credit goes to AA, and to the online community. Without AA, I firmly believe I would be dead. I had no ability to do anything other than drink. And drink for obliteration and waste. I drank until I fell down every night. I sat in the bathtub with diet 7up and vodka, a useless lump. I smoked and drank and cared about smoking and drinking. That was my life, even though I was married. Even though I saw a shrink. Nothing mattered but my ability to check out of life by getting drunk. I went to rehab, but without AA there’s no way in hell I’d have stayed sober. I owe AA my life.
And I owe the online science community an enormous amount too. Through my interaction with other scientists and engineers, I discovered a whole world of interests, ambitions, and causes that I’d never have discovered otherwise. I learned about what it means to be an academic, how to write, how to compete for grants (though, both my major funding successes came before my involvement on twitter). I learned incredible amounts about how to compete for professorships. And I learned, most of all, that I was worthy of competing for them.
I never thought that I had any value, academically. I drank my education. I don’t remember my math, not like I should. I will never be qualified to be a professor of engineering. But I am qualified, and useful, in the world of health care delivery. I have something of value to contribute there, at the level of a professorship. If it weren’t for the online science community, I wouldn’t. I’m a better academic because of you.
So, as I bury my job search, hopefully for decades, I am finding myself just profoundly grateful. I’ve now been offered an interview for a tenure-track professorship, even though I won’t compete for it any longer. I have found communities that buoy me and sustain me. That aid and support their members in the things that matter in life: relationships; careers; connections. And now I get to be a part of giving it back. What an astonishing privilege for a useless drunk like me.
Hurtling Through Time.
Things are happening very, very rapidly. I feel like time is compressing. Each hour that passes in my mind, three do on the clock. I am aging in the mirror. In an attic somewhere, a picture of me is handsome and robust. I wither. I feel a bit like garbage because for the past week I’ve been eating garbage. That’s always the way when I travel to conferences. Somehow, I just can’t make myself eat well. I try. It doesn’t work. And my excercise has dropped off as well, though I’ve still been getting some walking in. On the whole, I am simply astonished and terrified and baffled by everything that’s happening.
But I have accomplished a lot. The movers are almost here. A week and a half until they arrive and pack up all my things and disassemble my piano and wrap up all my glassware and haul it all to ECC and disgorge it into my new apartment. I’ll be ready. There is so much that has to be done. But for the most part, I have done it. All my utilities except water are being shut off. I’m a little concerned a cold snap could damage the pipes, so I’ll probably close the valve and drain the house. It’ll be a pain in the ass for my renter to refill all the pipes, but that’s better than discovering the place has incredible water damage because of a freeze.
I’ve scheduled utilities for my new place. Unbundled my phone and internet. Set up my new internet and cable. Turned off my satellite dish. Scheduled the gas company to turn off the service the same day I move. There’s just an incredible amount of stuff required to make a house work. I remember someone once calling a house a “large, decaying object.” That’s about right. Walk away from your house for a couple of months, and it’ll fall down. I can’t wait to have an apartment. Hopefully soon, a condo. Of course, that’d mean another move in a year. I’m shuddering and sweating just thinking about it.
I’m trying to deal with human resources at my current, ending, job. There are a few people there who know what they’re doing, it’s true. But everyone takes their sweet time about it. I don’t have a lot of sweet time left to wait for their lollygagging. Especially not now when every day that passes is actually like three days. But I’ll get two more paychecks from my current job. A regular one, and then one that has only one day on it but which has the payout for my unused vacation time. Which will end up being about a paycheck and a half, unless I use some more next week, as I will have about 110 hours of leave saved up. And then, nothing until my new job cuts me my first paycheck in early April.
I’ve done all the things. I can’t begin to fathom how people do this without taking lots of time off, and spending lots of money. I know they do. But I lack that gene. Maybe I’m just lazy? But I have never figured out how to move without taking lots of time and spending lots of money. I am, for an engineer, not accustomed to a great deal of thoroughness. Not when it comes to my personal hobbies and ambitions. I’ve never become a very good pianist, despite a reasonable amount of talent, because I don’t have the discipline to do it. That’s been a confounding factor for me in many things in life.
I’m feeling nervous because I haven’t talked to my supervisors at my new job much at all. I can’t seen to get them over email. I don’t know if they are just busy, or maybe aren’t supposed to talk to me before I am officially an employee, or what. But it makes me nervous. I picked a later starting date than they wanted me to pick, because I know that I need a vacation and a chance to settle-in in ECC, and frankly, when am I going to get 35 days in a row off again in my adult life? But not hearing from them makes my brain start buzzing: what if they feel like they made a mistake? What if they don’t want me? What if they’re annoyed with me? Why haven’t they contacted me about the project they wanted advice on? What am I to do now?
The answer of course, is: it’s not personal. Life is going on for me and for them. All is well. And I don’t need to worry. If something were wrong, if they didn’t want me, they’d tell me. This is my own stupid paranoia having its way with me. They have committed to investing a lot of time, effort, and money in my work. They want me to succeed. They believe in my capabilities, and are looking forward to my work. Thought is my enemy.
Things are proceeding. This will go well. In 12 days, I leave for ECC. What a world.
Research Support.
There is a lot going around the science blogosphere right now about how to restructure the NIH, and by extension other large federal funding agencies, like NSF and VA ORD. As usual, the heavy hitters over on twitter are on it. If you’re interested, you should read Michael Eisen, and Kate Clancy and several posts by Drugmonkey. I don’t have a great deal to say on the subject personally, because my position at PECMC is hard money. I won’t be being asked to submit and survive off of grants. But I have opinions of course.
My opinion is that the system, the Complex System that is the research apparatus of the United States, is expressing features of the way it was designed. Unintended features, yes. But these are consequences of how we built the system that are now entrenched. Complex systems can be extraordinarily resistant to global level change. Consider the solar system: it is regularly bombarded by enormous perturbances. Meteors hit planets, cosmic radiation, comets collide with gas giants, and yet, here we all go circling the sun as usual. Consider economies: real estate bubbles and stimulus and taxes and banking crises, and the differences we see are confined to a few percentages change in growth, up or down, acting over years. Individuals may be devastated. The system goes on.
One of the first problems, which arises from a noble ideal, is the federal funding of science. It is indeed a good thing that governments, with their vast wealth, should dedicate some of that to research. No other entity can marshal the resources that a government can. However, it took essentially no time at all for universities to discern that this meant that they got to stop paying for research. Most universities will give startup packages and a few small internal grants. But for the most part, science professors must get external funding, usually government funding, or they lose their jobs.
This means that professors are required to spend a great proportion of their time seeking funding. Professors earn jobs based on how good (or how prestigious) their science has been as a graduate student and a post-doc. They retain their jobs based on how good they are at getting grants. Thus, professors cease, almost immediately, to be scientists. They become managers and grant-writers. Their graduate students and post-docs do most of the science. So one consequence of federal funding is to take some of the greatest scientists in the world, and relieve them of their scientific duties. We built this.
Federal funding is apportioned, many will say, according to the quality of the science in the proposal. But this isn’t true. Or rather, it’s not completely – or even close to completely – true. Grants are scored on many criteria which vary from institution to institution. One of the criteria, for example, is Investigator. Many people use journal quality as a proxy for article quality when evaluating an investigator they don’t know. So, this creates a scrum for the “best” journals. Niche journals that will publish good work in a particular field are often eschewed by authors because it’s far better to get a paper into Cell, or Science, or NEJM, or The Lancet. This leads to all sorts of glamor-publication problems that result in a lot of great science going unpublished. (Ask Michael Eisen what he thinks about this for a long, well-informed lecture.)
Another criterion grants are scored on is Environment. While this is supposed to describe the collaborative environment and quality of the facilities that will be used to conduct the work, what it often comes down to is University. Again, quality of school is used as a proxy of quality of intellectual environment. The same quality investigator with the same collaborators in an identical laboratory, but one is at Washington University and one is at the University of Missouri St. Louis? Guess who’s getting the higher score.
And with federal funding so scarce now, where perhaps 10% of grants which receive scores (already only about a third of those submitted) are funded, many, many fine scientists are leaving science. Either because they become discouraged and aren’t willing to accept low pay and terrible job security, or because they lose their jobs when they are unlucky in the grant review or glamor-publication lotteries. And they are lotteries. Excellent, excellent science is being rejected for nothing but luck. The difference between a score of 5% and a score of 15% is meaningless. It’s random, or based on false signals. Or on old-boys club politics.
The only solution I see is for universities, especially the big private universities which are absolutely swimming in money (In the past 10 years, hundreds of millions of dollars of construction has gone on at Washington University. Opulence that reminds me of a despot’s palaces.), to return to supporting the professors. There need to be more internal grants. There need to be more endowed chairs that can be got at the associate level. There need to be paths to tenure that don’t include federal funding. Or even external funding at all.
Success at the university is driven by one thing above all others, and it isn’t (quite) money. Prestige. And external funding has been exalted as the highest marker of prestige. “Good scientists win federal funding.” “Good scientists publish in the best journals.” “Good scientists graduate the most PhD students.”
It’s all bullshit. Good scientists discover exciting things that change the way we see the world, the way we interact with the world, and the way we live. Good scientists develop actionable hypotheses and then design experiments to test and confirm or refute those hypotheses. Good scientists disseminate those results as clearly and broadly as possible, so that engineers and other developers can implement improvements based on a deep understanding of nature.
The system, as we’ve designed it, is an impediment to science. It was built with noble intentions. It was built on good ideas. But systems are bigger than the intentions and ideas and even the components of which they are constructed. And if we want to change the global behavior of this system, we need to disrupt it entirely. Many good ideas are being floated, like the Public Library of Science and BMJ Open. These efforts have their own problems too, in my opinion, which I’ve discussed before. But they are at least bold, large-scale efforts to make fundamental changes to the dynamics of the system.
Something about university-conducted science is going to change, and soon. Universities, with their aggressive expansion, abandonment of the student-professor dynamic, and total reliance on borrowed money (whether federal or student-loan), are in a bubble that cannot help but pop. There is going to be a disruption in the American higher education system. The question is, will it be a negotiated and guided change, led by competent people with a vision for the future, or will it be a catastrophic failure that results in the extermination of many fine institutions? The way it looks now, I’d bet the latter.
Infactorium 