Engineering Science - Home Comments

Comment on 'Fixing the NIH grant-making process' by ez

2007-12-11T23:25:31Z

As someone just starting at the Assistant Professor level, I'm for anything that makes it easier for more inexperienced PI's to get a better shot at a grant - at least, the first time. Some institutes already have a policy to this end (adding 5% points). In theory I like the idea of basing the funding more on the PI than the proposal, but this would obviously hurt young investigators more - unless, they took into account "pedigree". Oh, he trained at Harvard, etc. That wouldn't be fair either, since plenty of smaller institutions produce brilliant people. Limiting the number of proposals would be arbitrary. Streamlining (shortening) the grants might make the review process go faster, but in many cases those extra pages are crucial to getting your ideas out there. If anything, I think shortening the proposals would help the "elites", simply because they can point to their past work in the form of papers. For us younger folks, who may not have as many pubs, we need the extra pages to cram in preliminary data. The only thing that would really help the grant making process is giving the NIH more money, so more grants get funded. Anything short of that is a stopgap measure until we get a president who cares more about science.

Comment on 'White House Round Table Views' by Ivan Greene

2007-12-04T00:51:51Z

...With so many different individuals giving their impressions of where we are and should be heading, it's not surprising that many of us are left scratching our heads.

I would respectfully suggest that one issue with the current policy debate is that the stakeholders are making a value judgment and stating their positions. There are academic, industry, student, research community, and policy foundation representatives, all from very different perspectives, all very well respected professionals, are stating their positions. This debate would be more informed if the participants would state their interests. What are the real interests of the academics, industry, students, research community? Once authentic interests are clearly and concisely communicated a well informed debate may indicate patterns of common interests and lead to a substantiative and practical public policy...

Comment on 'White House Roundtable' by Peter Lee

2007-11-16T18:42:47Z

This is an excellent summary of the roundtable -- thank you!

On my blog, at http://csdiary.org, I've also posted an article about this. I chose to focus very specifically on the concept of supply-and-demand that was such a big part of the roundtable discussions. In a nutshell: I don't believe that supply/demand framework is a good one when thinking about graduate STEM education (or, at least not at the Ph.D. level). Yes, it is almost certainly a good idea of Ph.D. programs to do a better job with industry experience/internships, more formal exposure to career options, etc. But I don't believe that workforce arguments are all that informative at the Ph.D. level.

You can jump directly to the article on my blog at http://csdiary.org/2007/11/08/graduate-stem-education-roundtable/.

Thanks again for posting your summary. Very useful.

Comment on 'White House Roundtable' by Peter Fiske

2007-11-15T07:53:00Z

We are inviting the participants in the Roundtable to add their comments to this blog. We will also post copies of the presentations as we get them.

Comment on 'Breaking radio silence' by Pedro Beltrao

2007-10-14T13:33:46Z

Congratulations on the new job. Please try to understand why Google does not develop further Google Scholar :)

Comment on 'Universities and the money fix' by JS

2007-09-26T14:32:51Z

There are insufficient 'feedback loops' linking the production of biomedical researchers to the availability of resources to support them.

Is there any significant restraint on growth other than the availability of funding? Immigration caps are the only potential factor I can think of. Lab space isn't a constraint except in the very short term.

Comment on '100% effort? 100% confusion' by BioScientist

2007-09-23T04:51:16Z

As someone who is currently waist-deep in post-graduate education here is my two cents:

None of these proposals matter, nor will any changes or improvements to them. The bottom line is that as long as there are too many scientists present the competition to stay alive will be intense and therefore conditions will remain poor. NIH/NSF proposals like this attempt to legislate behavior without recognizing the realities on the ground.

The lack of attention to graduate/post-graduate training is borne from two areas: 1) PIs are pushed by the system to extract every bit of effort possible effort from employees. The penalty for not doing so is a loss of funding and the end of a career. 2) As long as there are multiple applicants for every scientist/PI position there's less need to insure development of most individuals. As an example, one can simply ignore the bottom sixty percent of CVs to no ill effect when considering tenure-track positions. Those that remain will no doubt be pretty impressive. In this respect, post-graduate training is less an education than it is a 'selection' process in the biological sense. Put another way: why bother training postdocs, when most of them will fall out of the "system" anyway? The best will claw their way to success on their own and the rest are irrelevant. (This is a sentiment I've heard multiple times from faculty at my current Tier-I, top-20 research institute.)

Until the supply of PhD scientists comes back into line with demand working conditions will remain poor, salaries low, and hours long. In absence of a solution to the supply/demand imbalance all attempts to solve the resultant phenotypes will fail.

Comment on 'Junior Faculty Satisfaction' by Geoff Davis

2007-09-18T20:02:23Z

I agree about non-monetary factors being quite important in career choices - if money were the primary consideration, I'd be at a hedge fund right now.

If you look into the numbers in the original report, you'll see that the differences between public and private institutions are pretty small. Much more interesting to me are the university / college differences, which are a lot bigger than the public/private differences. Universities don't fare so well in a lot of areas.

I spent most of my academic career at Dartmouth. Though technically it's a university (there are a few small graduate programs), it's probably a lot more like the colleges in the study population than the universities. The quality of life there was one of the primary reasons I chose it over university alternatives.

Comment on 'Junior Faculty Satisfaction' by evan

2007-09-18T18:54:44Z

In the first paragraph, it says, "Early-career faculty at public institutions also expressed greater satisfaction than those at private institutions with work/life balance." That seems like a win for public institutions. I don't know about everyone else, but for me money was not the driving factor for my career choice.

Comment on 'H-1Bs back in the news' by Geoff Davis

2007-09-18T15:39:31Z

Interesting. From a little googling around, it sounds like the Blue Card will be more like an H-1B: targeted at higher-skilled immigrants and non-permanent. It seems weird that the EU (and the US) would not want to try to grant permanent status to skilled workers.

Comment on 'H-1Bs back in the news' by Victoria McGovern

2007-09-16T22:10:36Z

Did you see the Europeans are creating a Green Card equivalent?

(Pressing forward with innovation and bold imagination, they're calling it a...Blue Card.)

Comment on 'Employment Trends in Biomedical Sciences' by Geoff Davis

2007-08-23T18:13:30Z

Yes, I missed the medical schools only label. However, I still think it's true:

Take a look at slide #33 in Paula Stephan's presentation. For biomedical PhDs, most of the growth in academic positions from 1999-2003 was in medical schools, not in non-medical schools. From eyeballing the graph, it looks like maybe 4,000 new med school positions and maybe 1,000 new non med school positions. Compare that to the ~9,000 new MDs in clinical programs over the same time period (the raw data for #45 in the FASEB presentation is available at http://www.aamc.org/data/facultyroster/reports.htm)

Comment on 'Employment Trends in Biomedical Sciences' by JS

2007-08-23T16:35:12Z

Almost all the new positions created during the NIH doubling period were MDs in clinical departments

Which slide are you getting that from? #45? If so, that seems to be med schools only, not universities, unless I'm misunderstanding.

Comment on 'Are you autistic?' by Elia Diodati

2007-08-19T00:26:58Z

So where do chemists and biologists stand, eh?

Comment on 'Are you autistic?' by Ginny

2007-08-18T01:36:04Z

It probably won't surprise you to find that as a biologist who's good at remembering phone numers I scored a 15...

No wonder my Dad was so disappointed in my math ability!