When you do your PhD, you‘re not completely on your own, you have a supervisor. And then maybe a PhD committee and a second and a third reader and so on. However, during the process of developing your research question, diving into literature and possible approaches, making discoveries, and finding a place for your future academic persona, you primarily interact with your PhD supervisor. He or she should act both as a coach and as a mentor to support you on your academic adventures.
Interestingly, in German speaking academia, your supervisor is still rather called „Doktorvater“ (doctoral father) or „Doktormutter“ (doctoral mother). Which implies a more family-like relationship. And which also is in line with the traditional notion of not studying somewhere at a certain university, but to study with someone, i.e., be the (graduate) student of a specific professor. And thus become a member of a specific „school.“ In the old days, the members of an academic family stood together, supported one another, helped with getting promoted, etc. Which is what you would actually also expect from a mentor. So the role somehow fits.
By the way, how are the PhD students called, I‘m not aware of a label as „Doktorkind“ (doctoral child). You are the „Doktorand“ (male) or „Doktorandin“ (female) (doctoral student) of someone. However, this is derived from the present participle of the verb meaning „to do a PhD.“ Which means, after the defense of the thesis, the label doesn‘t fit any longer. You might be a „former PhD student“ of someone, but this person doesn‘t turn into your „former PhD supervisor“ or your „former Doktormutter.“ He or she keeps the label and thus probably also the role, even after dozens of years.
Surprisingly with this family notion, at least on the side of PhD students expectation grows that these ties will last for longer — you cannot get rid of fatherly or motherly duties — and that mentoring or coaching support also will last for longer. So they tend to get disappointed when mentoring-like support stops, no information on (future) projects or even jobs are passed on, no reference letters are written any longer, and so on. Of course, one could argue that during your PhD you should also find your own way, stand on your own feet, and leave your supervision family to start your own. And of course family relationships aren‘t always positive, there is abusive behavior which is hard to report and will stay within the family. And as long as everything looks great from the outside, nobody will believe that the inside isn‘t as bright as current incidents at the ETH show.
Another aspect seems to be gender, actually. And maybe more on the side of the supervisor. Female supervisors (so the „Doktormütter“) seem to be more protective and more supportive, at least they report such actions on social media and they even use selfdescriptions as „mama bear advisor“ and the like. And from what I see (which is obviously a very small snapshot), more female supervisors state how proud they are when their current or former PhD students report success stories (an award, a talk at a prestigious venue, a good job, another grant, etc.). Male supervisors also show success of their PhD students, but with much less emotion, they rather mention this as a success story of their lab/institute/project. Which fits stereotypes of motherly and fatherly support within families, so the German terms actually are apropriate, don‘t you think?
Showing posts with label career. Show all posts
Showing posts with label career. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 30, 2018
Saturday, April 14, 2018
Back where I started
So, we have 2018 and I'm an e-learning specialist at a university of applied sciences in Switzerland.
Last week I found my old business cards when I was looking for something else in my desk drawers. And I realized that exactly 10 years ago, I also had business cards as e-learning consultant of a university of applied sciences in Switzerland — in 2008, I was at the School of Social Work at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (HSA FHNW), today I'm with the Bern University of Applied Sciences (BFH), at the Competence Center for Higher Ed Didactics and E-Learning. And the fun thing is: exactly 10 years after, I now have a 50% permanent position as I had then, I do similar things — although I'm not on my own as I was 10 years ago but a member of a wonderful team — , and even my salary is the same (yes, I also found old pay slips when looking for documents needed for the 2017 tax declarations).
So, what did I do in between — and was it worth it when I end up almost where I started? Let's look at the business card circle (the current card is at the top, the starting card is the one right to it and the circle goes clockwise).
The e-learning job at HSA FHNW wasn't my first one, but the first outside the University of Zurich (and I even had an e-learning job there from 2004 to 2008). After that I held various positions and did various things as senior researcher at the University of Basel, as acting professor at the University of Konstanz (I blogged about that experience and most of the posts are still quite relevant, I guess), as postdoc and scientific coordinator at the University of Stuttgart, as scientific coordinator and later as senior researcher at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim, as guest professor again at the University of Stuttgart, and as researcher at the University of Bern. All of those activities where related to my other live as computational linguist and writing researcher — I used e-learning activities and tools for my teaching, but I wasn't active in that area during that time.
I had left the e-learning business in 2010 for a chance to pursue my scientific career and to become a professor one day. Turns out, I didn't succeed.
Yes, I published a lot, yes I finished and defended my thesis (so at least I have a different academic title on my current business card), yes I grew an international network, yes I founded two workshop series (both of them have fallen asleep because of decreasing interest), yes I edited various proceedings (oh, and yes I know a lot about publishing and “added values” by publishers now and I do have anexpletive explicit opinion about those and their work flows), yes I was what's called “an active member of the scientific community” (I founded and still run a doctoral consortium, I'm co-leader of a SIG, I was a newsletter editor), yes I was active in various scientific areas (computational morphology, writing research, document engineering, corpus linguistics), yes I taught a lot (as acting and as guest professor I did the usual German 9 hours per week (so 3 to 4 courses per term) teaching load and I taught one course per term at the other places), yes I have been acting professor, yes I reviewed for various prestigious conferences and journals — all those activities you find listed as recommended or even necessary on your way towards professorship. But I'm still not a professor.
However, I grew older.
And last year when I got the chance to “go back to e-learning” I decided to no longer actively pursue the scientific career road — my chances will not increase. I will not apply for grants any longer, I will reduce reviewing activities, I might continue publishing but will carefully chose where and how (considering issues of access and submission formats). I hopefully will continue teaching and I hopefully will get chances to do small scale research at the intersection of document engineering, linguistics, and writing research. I will not apply to scientific jobs — my list of rejected or even unanswered applications is long enough now. I'm not sure whether all of this equals “I'm leaving academia”, but time will tell.
So the question remains: was it worth it? I guess so. I got chances to do research, I taught a lot (and I didn't know that I actually enjoy teaching before!), I could present my research at various places I wouldn't have visited otherwise, and last but not least I got to know a lot of people with similar interests, some of whom I call friends today.
Last week I found my old business cards when I was looking for something else in my desk drawers. And I realized that exactly 10 years ago, I also had business cards as e-learning consultant of a university of applied sciences in Switzerland — in 2008, I was at the School of Social Work at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (HSA FHNW), today I'm with the Bern University of Applied Sciences (BFH), at the Competence Center for Higher Ed Didactics and E-Learning. And the fun thing is: exactly 10 years after, I now have a 50% permanent position as I had then, I do similar things — although I'm not on my own as I was 10 years ago but a member of a wonderful team — , and even my salary is the same (yes, I also found old pay slips when looking for documents needed for the 2017 tax declarations).
So, what did I do in between — and was it worth it when I end up almost where I started? Let's look at the business card circle (the current card is at the top, the starting card is the one right to it and the circle goes clockwise).
The e-learning job at HSA FHNW wasn't my first one, but the first outside the University of Zurich (and I even had an e-learning job there from 2004 to 2008). After that I held various positions and did various things as senior researcher at the University of Basel, as acting professor at the University of Konstanz (I blogged about that experience and most of the posts are still quite relevant, I guess), as postdoc and scientific coordinator at the University of Stuttgart, as scientific coordinator and later as senior researcher at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim, as guest professor again at the University of Stuttgart, and as researcher at the University of Bern. All of those activities where related to my other live as computational linguist and writing researcher — I used e-learning activities and tools for my teaching, but I wasn't active in that area during that time.
I had left the e-learning business in 2010 for a chance to pursue my scientific career and to become a professor one day. Turns out, I didn't succeed.
Yes, I published a lot, yes I finished and defended my thesis (so at least I have a different academic title on my current business card), yes I grew an international network, yes I founded two workshop series (both of them have fallen asleep because of decreasing interest), yes I edited various proceedings (oh, and yes I know a lot about publishing and “added values” by publishers now and I do have an
However, I grew older.
And last year when I got the chance to “go back to e-learning” I decided to no longer actively pursue the scientific career road — my chances will not increase. I will not apply for grants any longer, I will reduce reviewing activities, I might continue publishing but will carefully chose where and how (considering issues of access and submission formats). I hopefully will continue teaching and I hopefully will get chances to do small scale research at the intersection of document engineering, linguistics, and writing research. I will not apply to scientific jobs — my list of rejected or even unanswered applications is long enough now. I'm not sure whether all of this equals “I'm leaving academia”, but time will tell.
So the question remains: was it worth it? I guess so. I got chances to do research, I taught a lot (and I didn't know that I actually enjoy teaching before!), I could present my research at various places I wouldn't have visited otherwise, and last but not least I got to know a lot of people with similar interests, some of whom I call friends today.
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Professor for one year (week 43): Will there be research after your PhD?
This week, the new Rektor of the University of Zurich started his job. There were several articles and interviews in various newspapers, where he announced what he wants to do next and what his long-term goals are. In one article in the NZZ am Sonntag, one sentence struck me: "Wirklich geforscht habe er zuletzt als Doktorand" (The last time he did serious research was as a doctoral student). And he apparently regrets that.
This statement made me wonder: What's your task as postdoc or as professor? When it's not research, is it about writing grant and project proposals for other people only? Is it mainly about teaching (looking at the workload, you could think so, I will comment on that in a later post)? Or are your days filled with more administrative stuff, the higher your professional rank is?
There are several indicators that in fact, postdocs and professors acquire the money to then hire some doctoral student(s) to carry out the research the applicants have a genuine interest in. For example, with the Swiss National Science Foundation, postdocs cannot submit proposals where they actually would carry out the research themselves (except for the Ambizione program, but that has specific requirements and is part of the career track, not of the project track). You can submit a proposal and then hire someone -- but the proposal will be evaluated against the applicant's research profile. The DFG (German Research Foundation) recently introduced an instrument where you can apply for a grant for your own position as postdoc. So this looks a bit better.
On the other hand: As a doctoral student, you are not eligible to submit proposals, so you have to find a postdoc or a professor who submits a project proposal you can then carry out.
Given that proposal writing is a serious but tedious task, there is of course less time to actually do some research. Some universities in Germany have decided that some professors (rank W1 and sometimes even rank W2) cannot negotiate about academic personnel -- there simply will be no academic personnel, you have to write proposals to hopefully acquire third-party money to hire a teaching assistant or a doctoral student. Isn't that weird? Public universities are funded by tax payers, so shouldn't that cover all costs to run a university including all personnel needed? Third-party funding today makes up almost a quarter of the budget of German universities. On the one hand, it's a good sign: researchers find people who think the proposed research is worth funding it. But it's also a bad sign: The state is only able (or willing) to fund three quarters of universities' budgets. But that's more of a political discussion, I think.
However, there seems to be the general perception, that after your doctoral studies, there will be no time for serious research. I recently heard the conversation of two PhD students: A just submitted his thesis and told B that he would have liked to investigate a slightly different topic, but his supervisor told him not to do so because of the risk of failure -- his research could have produced negative results. They both agreed that this would have been more interesting and even more fun than to do something one could somehow even predict the results. And then B concluded: "Only doctoral students do real science, so why don't they let us do risky things? After your dissertation, you will not be able to really investigate something anymore." Isn't that weird? It seems to be widely accepted that your scientific life won't include research after you defended your dissertation; at the same time, it is assumed that you can only do "real" research if you've obtained a PhD, i.e., submit research proposals ...
I really have some research interests in computational morphology, computational phraseology, and writing technology where I would appreciate the help of master students or doctoral students, but where I would also like to explore some things myself -- even if this includes tedious annotation or hacking. That's fun and only this way you can really discover something new. I definitely aim to facilitate research by coordinating and managing projects, but I would still like to be part of the actual investigation.
This statement made me wonder: What's your task as postdoc or as professor? When it's not research, is it about writing grant and project proposals for other people only? Is it mainly about teaching (looking at the workload, you could think so, I will comment on that in a later post)? Or are your days filled with more administrative stuff, the higher your professional rank is?
There are several indicators that in fact, postdocs and professors acquire the money to then hire some doctoral student(s) to carry out the research the applicants have a genuine interest in. For example, with the Swiss National Science Foundation, postdocs cannot submit proposals where they actually would carry out the research themselves (except for the Ambizione program, but that has specific requirements and is part of the career track, not of the project track). You can submit a proposal and then hire someone -- but the proposal will be evaluated against the applicant's research profile. The DFG (German Research Foundation) recently introduced an instrument where you can apply for a grant for your own position as postdoc. So this looks a bit better.
On the other hand: As a doctoral student, you are not eligible to submit proposals, so you have to find a postdoc or a professor who submits a project proposal you can then carry out.
Given that proposal writing is a serious but tedious task, there is of course less time to actually do some research. Some universities in Germany have decided that some professors (rank W1 and sometimes even rank W2) cannot negotiate about academic personnel -- there simply will be no academic personnel, you have to write proposals to hopefully acquire third-party money to hire a teaching assistant or a doctoral student. Isn't that weird? Public universities are funded by tax payers, so shouldn't that cover all costs to run a university including all personnel needed? Third-party funding today makes up almost a quarter of the budget of German universities. On the one hand, it's a good sign: researchers find people who think the proposed research is worth funding it. But it's also a bad sign: The state is only able (or willing) to fund three quarters of universities' budgets. But that's more of a political discussion, I think.
However, there seems to be the general perception, that after your doctoral studies, there will be no time for serious research. I recently heard the conversation of two PhD students: A just submitted his thesis and told B that he would have liked to investigate a slightly different topic, but his supervisor told him not to do so because of the risk of failure -- his research could have produced negative results. They both agreed that this would have been more interesting and even more fun than to do something one could somehow even predict the results. And then B concluded: "Only doctoral students do real science, so why don't they let us do risky things? After your dissertation, you will not be able to really investigate something anymore." Isn't that weird? It seems to be widely accepted that your scientific life won't include research after you defended your dissertation; at the same time, it is assumed that you can only do "real" research if you've obtained a PhD, i.e., submit research proposals ...
I really have some research interests in computational morphology, computational phraseology, and writing technology where I would appreciate the help of master students or doctoral students, but where I would also like to explore some things myself -- even if this includes tedious annotation or hacking. That's fun and only this way you can really discover something new. I definitely aim to facilitate research by coordinating and managing projects, but I would still like to be part of the actual investigation.
Thursday, April 24, 2014
Professor for one year (week 42): Ich hab Vertrag
OK, the title of this week's post is a quote or a reference to German soccer speak. Mostly it's used to express that one has an ongoing contract. However, I can now officially announce that I signed a new contract this week for when my year as substituting professor ends.
I will join the Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS) in Stuttgart on April first (this is hopefully not a bad sign!). It's only a 18-months contract, but I hope there will be a possibility for an extension. I will do some teaching, coordination work for the Stuttgart CLARIN-D center, and I will continue research on phrasemes, morphological components, and writing technology. At least, that's the plan.
What is most important: My academic adventures will go on after March 30, that's really good news. But there is a catch: We have to move. But this is a different adventure.
I will join the Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS) in Stuttgart on April first (this is hopefully not a bad sign!). It's only a 18-months contract, but I hope there will be a possibility for an extension. I will do some teaching, coordination work for the Stuttgart CLARIN-D center, and I will continue research on phrasemes, morphological components, and writing technology. At least, that's the plan.
What is most important: My academic adventures will go on after March 30, that's really good news. But there is a catch: We have to move. But this is a different adventure.
Sunday, December 8, 2013
Professor for one year (week 32): Postdoc programs
In 2012 and 2013, I could take part in the PostDoc Program (PDP) of the University of Zurich. Eighteen postdocs had been chosen in a competitive selection process. We met for six workshops during these two years. Coming from several disciplines, such as film studies, forensic medicine, politics, biology, linguistics, and computational linguistics, we couldn't share experiences and knowledge on a scientific level, but rather our experiences about being a postdoc in general. Some of us had experiences in interdisciplinary research, some of us had experiences in highly structured environments like chemistry labs. And all of us had good and bad experiences with supervisors and research assistants.
Being part of this program meant meeting people with very different backgrounds but a common goal: to become a professor in the near future. The program is meant to help participants to estimate and increase their success in academic careers, to find ways to promote themselves, to understand and play by the rules of academia, and to get to a point where they can successfully apply for professorship.
We talked about different perspectives on teaching and research and about strategic decisions concerning the next career steps. Each of the two-day workshops was a sometimes welcome, sometimes disruptive break in our daily routine. Some of us had to answer calls and e-mail messages during breaks or return to the office immediately after the workshops.
However, without the workshops, I would not have sat down for a few hours to reflect on my career as it had went until today or to plan which steps to take and where to invest in order to gain new skills. We could discuss strategies and tactics for moving towards professorship and try out interview situations and trial lectures. The six workshops on application training, funding, leadership, career paths, publication strategies, and competencies and skills where lead by experts in the field -- professors, coaches, members of the ERC review board, etc. And all shared their knowledge and encouraged us to ask everything what we always wanted to know.
Of course you could find most of the information by searching the web, but without the course context, I wouldn't have invested the time to do so. On the workshop days, we could spend the whole day on "daydreaming" a scientific career and got to know what happens behind the closed doors of search committees or funding boards. And with every workshop going by, I got even more convinced that this is exactly the career I dream of: self-determined research and teaching, leading a research group, advancing the field and the scientific community, and being part of the academic discourse -- with the "field" referring, in my case, to Computational Linguistics and Writing Research.
The program finished in September 2013, but we managed to maintain regular meetings as a group. I really hope we can continue do this for quite some time, even if some of us start moving to other universities in other cities and countries.
If you ever have the chance to attend a workshop on career training or even a whole series, don't hesitate to apply. It may seem a lot of time to invest (and you need all the time you can get to publish, don't you?), but it's totally worth it!
During the program I also found a mentor, supporting me in strengthening and polishing my application documents. He isn't a member of "my" scientific community, and although it felt a bit odd at the beginning, I really enjoyed those meetings -- I was forced to think about wordings and he helped me to look at my achievements from an outside perspective. I really appreciated this mentorship! If you have the chance to engage in a mentorship relation, I totally recommend it. My mentor even told me that he chose to act as mentor for junior scientists because he had made this experience as a mentee before and he liked it a lot. That's a great attitude, and I hope that one day I myself can support mentees on their way towards an academic career.
Being part of this program meant meeting people with very different backgrounds but a common goal: to become a professor in the near future. The program is meant to help participants to estimate and increase their success in academic careers, to find ways to promote themselves, to understand and play by the rules of academia, and to get to a point where they can successfully apply for professorship.
We talked about different perspectives on teaching and research and about strategic decisions concerning the next career steps. Each of the two-day workshops was a sometimes welcome, sometimes disruptive break in our daily routine. Some of us had to answer calls and e-mail messages during breaks or return to the office immediately after the workshops.
However, without the workshops, I would not have sat down for a few hours to reflect on my career as it had went until today or to plan which steps to take and where to invest in order to gain new skills. We could discuss strategies and tactics for moving towards professorship and try out interview situations and trial lectures. The six workshops on application training, funding, leadership, career paths, publication strategies, and competencies and skills where lead by experts in the field -- professors, coaches, members of the ERC review board, etc. And all shared their knowledge and encouraged us to ask everything what we always wanted to know.
Of course you could find most of the information by searching the web, but without the course context, I wouldn't have invested the time to do so. On the workshop days, we could spend the whole day on "daydreaming" a scientific career and got to know what happens behind the closed doors of search committees or funding boards. And with every workshop going by, I got even more convinced that this is exactly the career I dream of: self-determined research and teaching, leading a research group, advancing the field and the scientific community, and being part of the academic discourse -- with the "field" referring, in my case, to Computational Linguistics and Writing Research.
The program finished in September 2013, but we managed to maintain regular meetings as a group. I really hope we can continue do this for quite some time, even if some of us start moving to other universities in other cities and countries.
If you ever have the chance to attend a workshop on career training or even a whole series, don't hesitate to apply. It may seem a lot of time to invest (and you need all the time you can get to publish, don't you?), but it's totally worth it!
During the program I also found a mentor, supporting me in strengthening and polishing my application documents. He isn't a member of "my" scientific community, and although it felt a bit odd at the beginning, I really enjoyed those meetings -- I was forced to think about wordings and he helped me to look at my achievements from an outside perspective. I really appreciated this mentorship! If you have the chance to engage in a mentorship relation, I totally recommend it. My mentor even told me that he chose to act as mentor for junior scientists because he had made this experience as a mentee before and he liked it a lot. That's a great attitude, and I hope that one day I myself can support mentees on their way towards an academic career.
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Professor for one year (week 27): Conference season
In the first half of September, I had my conference tour: From a private visit in Paris, I flew to Berlin for two workshops, than back home to Zurich for one day, and than to Florence for a conference. As I had had no time for writing something to submit to ACL, NAACL, and RANLP, I did not attend conferences in August and unfortunately did not meet with some colleagues.
However, I was invited as speaker at the workshop Corpus-based historical linguistics (CBHL) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. I talked about challenges and solutions for retrieval and annotation of German phrasemes in heterogeneous diachronic TEI corpora, i.e., what I implemented for the OLdPhras project to help phraseologists search phrasemes in Early New High German texts when no linguistic annotation is available.
The next day, together with Michael Piotrowski, I organized the Third International Workshop on Systems and Frameworks for Computational Morphology (SFCM 2013) which also took place at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. We had seven interesting talks and an additional invited talk (also with a publication in the proceedings).
Although both events are labeled "workshop", there is a huge difference: The first one was a linguistics workshop and the latter one a computational linguistics workshop.
When I came back after these two exciting weeks, I actually was a bit exhausted and needed some days to sort ideas, links, papers and papers, and catch up with e-mail messages and other deadlines. However, this is how conference season ends, it's part of the game.
However, I was invited as speaker at the workshop Corpus-based historical linguistics (CBHL) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. I talked about challenges and solutions for retrieval and annotation of German phrasemes in heterogeneous diachronic TEI corpora, i.e., what I implemented for the OLdPhras project to help phraseologists search phrasemes in Early New High German texts when no linguistic annotation is available.
The next day, together with Michael Piotrowski, I organized the Third International Workshop on Systems and Frameworks for Computational Morphology (SFCM 2013) which also took place at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. We had seven interesting talks and an additional invited talk (also with a publication in the proceedings).
Although both events are labeled "workshop", there is a huge difference: The first one was a linguistics workshop and the latter one a computational linguistics workshop.
- For CBHL, all speakers had been invited by the organizer who set the topic and attracted the audience. Each speaker gave a longer talk of about 50 minutes and then there was some time for discussion. So a "workshop" is more something like a place for getting to know various research, it's not a place to actually work on something together as it might be the case in rhetoric and composition. There will be no publication, so this is only for the "Talks" section in your publication list. Sometimes, somebody arranges for a special issue in a journal or an edited volume in a book series and asks participants to contribute to this publication. So maybe you write an article about the things you presented and some years after the workshop, your contribution is published.
The work we presented at the Conference on New Methods in Historical Corpora in Manchester in April 2011, finally has been published some weeks ago in a volume of the series Korpuslinguistik und interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf Sprache (CLIP). Meanwhile, the project for which we announced how to proceed, is finished. - SFCM 2013, and workshops in NLP in general, are more small-scale conferences: There had been a call for papers (full papers of 10 to 20 pages according to LNCS style, not 300-words abstracts!) to be reviewed in a double-blind fashion by the members of the program committee. We accepted seven of 15 papers to be published in the proceedings of the workshop and to be presented at the workshop (acceptance rate for workshops is usually higher than for high-end conferences, where you have a 20 to 25% acceptance rate). All authors got elaborate feedback from at least three reviewers; for accepted papers, authors had to revise their papers considering reviewer comments to submit a final version compliant with given style guidelines 10 weeks before the workshop. We (the organizers) then edited the proceedings: writing a preface, creating author indexes and table of contents, fixing style violations, rearranging tables and figures -- i.e., creating a camera-ready version of the proceedings. Everything was then shipped to the publisher who sent galley proofs to all authors and the editors two weeks later. And one week before the workshop, we received the printed volumes. So as organizers, there is no work left after the workshop and participants and everybody else can read about the work presented. It's a very fast process and it helps to make recent research available almost immediately.
So here, "workshop" is also a bit misleading in general. However, for SFCM we incorporate a bit of the literal meaning by having a two-hour demo session where participants (no matter if they gave a talk or are listening only) share recent developments, can get help with implementation issues (in 2011, the invited speaker Lauri Karttunen helped fixing some bugs in XFST scripts) and maybe prepare collaborations.
When I came back after these two exciting weeks, I actually was a bit exhausted and needed some days to sort ideas, links, papers and papers, and catch up with e-mail messages and other deadlines. However, this is how conference season ends, it's part of the game.
Sunday, October 20, 2013
Professor for one year (week 23): Repositories
In today's scientific community, it's all about publications, journals, and impact factors. So you not only publish your research in a high-ranked journal or via a high-ranked conference, but you keep track of your publications, make lists, allow others to access your publications, and hope to get cited.
For me, the best place to store and maintain publications is CiteULike:
I have full control of what is listed here, I can store full papers, and I can extract the publication meta data as BibTeX data. This also means that available categories are consistent with usual BibTeX categories, i.e., article in proceedings, book, edited book, book chapter, thesis, technical report, etc.
CiteULike is also the place I store all bibliographic information of papers and books I read (or I want to read) and the papers itself. I put quite some effort in this: if the paper is available online, I upload it and add the link, if it's from a paper-only publication, I scan it and then store it there. So for almost all of the seven hundred and something papers in my library, I can access the paper itself. I add abstracts and keywords. I can export the meta data as BibTeX and thus use it for referencing stuff when writing an article myself. It's consistent and up-to-date. There is very convenient feature: the Post-to-CiteULike button you can add to your browser. In most of the cases, I can add a reference by using this button and then maybe correcting some information.
The only drawback with CiteULike I encountered over the years: I cannot download all the stored papers at once. It would be very convenient to have off-line access to all data when writing an article -- however, abstract and keywords are included in the BibTeX export, this already is quite nice.
I also have a ResearchGate account I try to maintain:
There are some odd things with ResearchGate: Look at the very first entry, it refers to the proceedings of SFCM 2013. I'm one of the editors of this book. Yes, it's an edited book and/or "conference proceedings (whole)." However, ResearchGate lacks both of these categories: if you choose "book", you have to input "authors." After exchanging quite some e-mails with them, they were finally able to list the publication at all. But it now has authors and editors and those are identical. Very annoying.
Next, ResearchGate tries to find your publications in the Web. When creating an account, this is somewhat convenient, you don't have to input all your publications by hand -- uploading a valid BibTeX file as exported from CiteULike doesn't work properly. However, as publications are listed at various places, sometimes with different (wrong) meta data, it also finds incorrect data. And it comes up again and again and again proposing to add this data -- it's impossible to stop this. Oh, and the number of citations is wrong.
However, it's a nice place to be informed about recent publications of colleagues. I also had an eye-opener some time ago: When you list the people you follow, their names, ResearchGate score, and impact factor is listed. I follow some linguists, some computer scientists, some psychologists, and some computational linguists. And it's very easy to recognize the computational linguists -- they have very low impact factors or none at all. A very nice empirical confirmation that journals (and moreover: indexed journals) don't play a big role in computational linguistics.
I also have a Google Scholar account I try to maintain:
Google Scholar doesn't come up with suggestions to include incorrect data and I can add information myself. The citation number seems to be somewhat realistic, although you never know about the missing citations (except your self-citations).
I also have an account with Microsoft Academic Search I try to maintain:
Here, incorrect information is included -- I'm not into Chemistry, although I did my secondary school written exam in Chemistry, but how should Microsoft know about this? You can try to edit and add data, but it takes a long time until it finally appears. The number of citations is incorrect, the list of conferences, too.
I put most of my publications in ZORA, the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, hosted by the University of Zurich:
I don't maintain this list anymore, so publications there stop in 2011.
I list my publications on my website:
Here the order is by type of publication (journal articles, edited books, book chapters, conference/workshop papers, other) as usually done in the humanities. If possible, I give the link to the full paper, i.e., to a repository (most of the time it's ZORA) or to the original article if published as open access.
And of course I need a list of publications for job and grant applications. Here I order them by year and mark the topic (linguistics, NLP, e-learning, writing research). Additionally, I list the publications "in press" with the date of submission of the final version.
And yes, publication number 32, final version submitted in October 2011, still is "in press".
Oh, and some of my publications are listed in the catalogue of the German National Library and in the ACM Digital Library.
I seem to have an account with Academia, which I don't maintain:
The only reason for this profile: I wanted to download a paper from there following a provided link. But I had to click through a dozen of pop-ups creating my own account before being able to do so. I never access this site and so it includes invalid information, most importantly: No information on co-authors is given. Actually, it seems to be impossible to list co-authors at all.
I still have an account at ResearcherID:
I don't maintain this account. The interface is ugly and maintaining the list is annoying -- you have to use an online version of EndNote, which is slow and not very user friendly at the same time. I think I also lost the password, so I cannot delete this account.
I also had an account with Mendeley, but I managed to delete this one some months ago. It was as user friendly as ResearcherID, I never used it.
That's a lot of places. But wait, I also added some publications to the Konstanzer Online-Publikations-System(KOPS) and some to the Uni Basel Research Database (those publications that had been published when I was employed at these places -- and yes, some publications appear at both places, some because I had been employed at both places at the same time, some because the co-authors belong to different institutions):
I used to list my publications also on the website I had at the University of Zurich and at the University of Basel -- I don't maintain a website at the University of Konstanz, there is only a link to my private-professional website. And when I start a new job at another institution, I will probably link to my CiteULike list of publications only.
But maybe the perfect repository is still to come?
For me, the best place to store and maintain publications is CiteULike:
I have full control of what is listed here, I can store full papers, and I can extract the publication meta data as BibTeX data. This also means that available categories are consistent with usual BibTeX categories, i.e., article in proceedings, book, edited book, book chapter, thesis, technical report, etc.
CiteULike is also the place I store all bibliographic information of papers and books I read (or I want to read) and the papers itself. I put quite some effort in this: if the paper is available online, I upload it and add the link, if it's from a paper-only publication, I scan it and then store it there. So for almost all of the seven hundred and something papers in my library, I can access the paper itself. I add abstracts and keywords. I can export the meta data as BibTeX and thus use it for referencing stuff when writing an article myself. It's consistent and up-to-date. There is very convenient feature: the Post-to-CiteULike button you can add to your browser. In most of the cases, I can add a reference by using this button and then maybe correcting some information.
The only drawback with CiteULike I encountered over the years: I cannot download all the stored papers at once. It would be very convenient to have off-line access to all data when writing an article -- however, abstract and keywords are included in the BibTeX export, this already is quite nice.
I also have a ResearchGate account I try to maintain:
There are some odd things with ResearchGate: Look at the very first entry, it refers to the proceedings of SFCM 2013. I'm one of the editors of this book. Yes, it's an edited book and/or "conference proceedings (whole)." However, ResearchGate lacks both of these categories: if you choose "book", you have to input "authors." After exchanging quite some e-mails with them, they were finally able to list the publication at all. But it now has authors and editors and those are identical. Very annoying.
Next, ResearchGate tries to find your publications in the Web. When creating an account, this is somewhat convenient, you don't have to input all your publications by hand -- uploading a valid BibTeX file as exported from CiteULike doesn't work properly. However, as publications are listed at various places, sometimes with different (wrong) meta data, it also finds incorrect data. And it comes up again and again and again proposing to add this data -- it's impossible to stop this. Oh, and the number of citations is wrong.
However, it's a nice place to be informed about recent publications of colleagues. I also had an eye-opener some time ago: When you list the people you follow, their names, ResearchGate score, and impact factor is listed. I follow some linguists, some computer scientists, some psychologists, and some computational linguists. And it's very easy to recognize the computational linguists -- they have very low impact factors or none at all. A very nice empirical confirmation that journals (and moreover: indexed journals) don't play a big role in computational linguistics.
I also have a Google Scholar account I try to maintain:
Google Scholar doesn't come up with suggestions to include incorrect data and I can add information myself. The citation number seems to be somewhat realistic, although you never know about the missing citations (except your self-citations).
I also have an account with Microsoft Academic Search I try to maintain:
Here, incorrect information is included -- I'm not into Chemistry, although I did my secondary school written exam in Chemistry, but how should Microsoft know about this? You can try to edit and add data, but it takes a long time until it finally appears. The number of citations is incorrect, the list of conferences, too.
I put most of my publications in ZORA, the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, hosted by the University of Zurich:
I don't maintain this list anymore, so publications there stop in 2011.
I list my publications on my website:
Here the order is by type of publication (journal articles, edited books, book chapters, conference/workshop papers, other) as usually done in the humanities. If possible, I give the link to the full paper, i.e., to a repository (most of the time it's ZORA) or to the original article if published as open access.
And of course I need a list of publications for job and grant applications. Here I order them by year and mark the topic (linguistics, NLP, e-learning, writing research). Additionally, I list the publications "in press" with the date of submission of the final version.
And yes, publication number 32, final version submitted in October 2011, still is "in press".
Oh, and some of my publications are listed in the catalogue of the German National Library and in the ACM Digital Library.
I seem to have an account with Academia, which I don't maintain:
The only reason for this profile: I wanted to download a paper from there following a provided link. But I had to click through a dozen of pop-ups creating my own account before being able to do so. I never access this site and so it includes invalid information, most importantly: No information on co-authors is given. Actually, it seems to be impossible to list co-authors at all.
I still have an account at ResearcherID:
I don't maintain this account. The interface is ugly and maintaining the list is annoying -- you have to use an online version of EndNote, which is slow and not very user friendly at the same time. I think I also lost the password, so I cannot delete this account.
I also had an account with Mendeley, but I managed to delete this one some months ago. It was as user friendly as ResearcherID, I never used it.
That's a lot of places. But wait, I also added some publications to the Konstanzer Online-Publikations-System(KOPS) and some to the Uni Basel Research Database (those publications that had been published when I was employed at these places -- and yes, some publications appear at both places, some because I had been employed at both places at the same time, some because the co-authors belong to different institutions):
I used to list my publications also on the website I had at the University of Zurich and at the University of Basel -- I don't maintain a website at the University of Konstanz, there is only a link to my private-professional website. And when I start a new job at another institution, I will probably link to my CiteULike list of publications only.
But maybe the perfect repository is still to come?
Monday, September 2, 2013
Professor for one year (week 18): Don't call us, we call you
Over the last months, I've applied for several positions as assistant professor or research group leader at different universities in different countries. All applications were rejected.
Addendum September 30: Oh, and I almost forgot that I applied at the TU Braunschweig -- no comment until today, but their website lists the invited talks to be given by August 26 and 27 this year (i.e., one month ago). Thank you very much for not informing me!
No, wait, that's not quite true:
My application at UT Austin, TX, was rejected three days after submission -- that was fast!
I applied for two positions at Saarland University, the rejection for the second application was sent out two weeks after submission; for the first application, I asked about the procedure three months after submission -- the answer was something like "Oh, we did send you the rejection some weeks ago, you should have received it." No, I hadn't.
I applied for a position at the University of Tübingen, they sent a detailed schedule when to expect which action and which week was planned for interviews. When I hadn't received any information the Friday before this week, I called and was told: "Oh, we sent out the invitations three weeks ago, if you haven't received one, your application probably has been rejected." Aha.
I applied for a position at the University of Zurich. Two weeks after submission, I saw the list of invited candidates to give a public talk in a newsletter. No, I hadn't been informed officially that I was not on this list -- I could see it in the newletter, after all. When I asked about the formal rejection, the contact person appologized and made clear that she hadn't liked this procedure anyway, but the professors in the commission had told her to not send rejections to the non-invited applicants and that she was not aware that I subscribed to the newsletter.
I applied for a position at the University of Amsterdam. Half a year later I asked about the process and got a message saying: "Oh, we did send you the rejection some months ago, you should have received it." No, I hadn't.
I applied for a position at the University of Bern. Some months after submission, I got an invitation to send my best publications. Some weeks later there was a message that the whole process was on hold and that I would be informed about the next steps -- in the meantime, I could see on their website that I was not on the list of invited candidates for a talk that already had taken place. No message came, but there is now a welcome note for the new professor on the institute's website. When I asked about the formal rejection, they appologized and admitted that it was a bad idea to not send rejections to the non-invited applicants.
I don't get it: in the job descriptions for these positions, they ask for excellent people, they look for the elite. And then they treat you like a beggar.
And of course all the rejections had nothing to do with me as person and I would be perfectly qualified for these positions and they wish me all the best for further applications.
Addendum September 30: Oh, and I almost forgot that I applied at the TU Braunschweig -- no comment until today, but their website lists the invited talks to be given by August 26 and 27 this year (i.e., one month ago). Thank you very much for not informing me!
Professor for one year (week 17): The magic 6 years
For several years now, Germany has some rules concerning fixed-term contracts in academia. Roughly speaking, you can be employed for 6 years after you got your degree in order to work towards your PhD. And then, after obtaining your PhD, you can be employed for another 6 years. In this second part, you should work on your "Habilitation" or, more generally speaking, towards a professorship. Most of the time, people get fixed-term contracts for two or three years (Maybe that's not even true: according to the union GEW, most of the fixed-term contractors in academia are employed for only a few months at a time) and then maybe these contracts will be extended until the 6 years are completed. If you go to another university after having worked towards your (still uncompleted) PhD, let's say for 4 years, you can only work another 2 years at any other university in Germany to complete your PhD. Of course, there are some possibilities to extend these periods when you have kids or when you have to look after your parents and the like.
On the one hand, these rules (especially concerning the first 6 years) could be seen as in favor of PhD students: supervisors know that the PhD student has only 6 year's time and they should support their students to finish their theses within this period. Before this rule applied, some (or most?) PhD students weren't able to finish their theses within a reasonable period; they had so many tasks at the institute that there was almost no time left for their own research. Surprisingly, this habit of exploiting assistants hasn't changed much. The only consequence: PhD students finish their theses while being unemployed, because their 6-years period has finished -- or they emigrate to Switzerland. One could of course argue that this is intended and part of getting a PhD ("Lehrjahre sind keine Herrenjahre" -- you have to pay your dues); young researchers thus face the fact that staying in academia is not easy and they should think carefully about how to proceed their career. You are in your early 30s and there are still many options to get a good job in "the real world," so you benefit from your studies and from having a PhD.
It's worse with the second 6-year period. Maybe you even could extend this time because you have the average 1.39 kids and you even could acquire a grant for yourself, so you stayed 9 or 10 years at university after your PhD -- of course, you had contracts at two or three different universities. But after this? You may be qualified for professorship and maybe you could interview for some positions, but you haven't gotten one yet -- only a very small percentage of all students get a professorship, there still is no tenure system. You cannot stay at your institute, but now being far in your 40s, never having worked outside the Ivory Tower, who will offer you a "real" job in the "real" world? And you face a de facto professional ban in academia -- unless you find one of the rare unlimited positions or you emigrate to Switzerland.
Germany has no real tenure track system, but some years ago, they invented "Junior Professors." You can be a professor without a habilitation, and you can get this professorship after only a very few years after having completed your PhD. Sounds good, right? But the magic 6 years are involved as well.
To acknowledge that people have different educational paths and maybe decided to study after having completed an occupational training and may have worked even some years in their profession, we now have a certain age (i.e., your real age) and an academic age -- the years after a certain degree. So two PhDs can be in their second postdoc year, but one is 29 and the other 39 -- there shouldn't be any discrimination. Usually, with the academic age, you refer to the most recent degree.
But that's not how the rules for Junior Professors work: You can get a junior professorship only within 6 years after you finished your studies and you have to have a PhD and a good publication record, be recognized as researcher in your community, etc. So for me, the moment I finished my PhD, I was too old -- after my studies, I worked for 6 years (yeah! 6!) as e-learning consultant, I got my PhD 10 years after I got my M.A. In Switzerland, the MA is considered the regular degree -- every BA student has the right to enter a MA program, parents are obliged to support their kids until they finish their MA. In Germany, the BA is considered the regular degree -- if you have Abitur, you can enter (almost) every BA program, but to enter a MA program, you have to meet strict criteria. This is obviously a different understanding of the Bologna process, but that's not my point here.
Up to now, the rule "6 years after you finished your studies" refers to the MA degree -- that's what you find as explanation. But when the BA is the "regular degree," this would actually mean that you only can apply for a junior professorship within 6 years after your BA. Which is rather unlikely -- you need two more years for your MA, which you need to be qualified for doing a PhD, for which you need another three years. And when you are a "real" humanities scholar, you probably haven't published anything until then and it will take you three more years to even have your dissertation published in a series of a "recognized" publishing house your supervisor happens to be an editor for.
On the other hand, universities increasingly see this junior professorship as another form of a "senior assistant" -- the position for a postdoc working towards their Habilitation or professorship. And if you look at the salary, that's true. The only difference is that for a regular postdoc position, you have 6 years after your PhD, whereas for the junior professorship, you can apply within 6 years after your first degree.
Brave new world.
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Should Switzerland be more like the US?
In a Swiss newspaper article (NZZ), one of the prorectors of the University of Zurich (Ottfried Jarren) argues that Swiss universities should have more assistant professors. These assistant professors should be with tenure track to be more attractive. In particular, these jobs should attract Swiss researchers. Ottfried Jarren is asked about Swiss and German professors and he answers that at universities, most of the research positions below professors are part-time jobs (50%), making such a job not very attractive to Swiss junior researchers, but very attractive for foreigeners and for German junior researchers in particular.
He is also asked how to fund these new assistant professors. And then he answers that universities should be perhaps more like in the US, where five or six professors would "share" one secretary. So his proposal is -- taken to an extreme -- let's fire secretaries and hire junior professors instead.
It's a bit odd reading statements from a German professor on how to help "our Swiss junior researchers". But he got Swiss citizenship some years ago (it's stated at the very bottom of the article), so he can make such claims. However, I know he comes from Germany and also his name is not very Swiss, so for me he still is "a German".
Of course, I would like to pursue my academic career, and yes, I would like to be a professor at a Swiss university. So if available, I would like to apply for such a job as assistant professor. However, I'm not quite sure if I'm the intended audience: I'm German, I studied in Germany, but I got academic training in Switzerland, startet my academic career in Switzerland, and got a PhD from the University of Zurich. On the one hand I am the bad foreigner, on the other hand I am an alumna of the biggest Swiss university and I would expect some support from my Alma Mater.
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