Graduate Life Realities

Welcome to graduate school. The pursuit of a graduate degree is an intellectual professional and personal growth experience requiring assertiveness, tenacity, patience and innovation. The job description is simple: to deepen your major discipline knowledge and strive to become a subject-matter expert (SME) in one of the sub-disciplines. The goal is also simple: graduate, e.g., successfully complete a series of specialized courses in your chosen area of interest in your major discipline, conduct affiliated research in this specialized area and showcase these research findings in a written document (and possibly orally as well). The path to the goal is, by no means, a straight road -- it is dictated by factors within and outside of your control such as your personality, your prior knowledge and expertise in your field, your research advisor, your research topic, and your graduate institution's degree program.

Graduate student status comes with it a few realities some graduate students don't realize until it's late in their graduate degree program.

1. You are no longer a college student. Many graduate students act like college students who don't want to grow up. You are a grown up now, sorry. You and only you are responsible and accountable for successful completion of your graduate studies. Your research advisor can assist in guiding your research. The degree program's graduate coordinator can assist in navigating some of your graduate school's policies and operating procedures. Your graduate school and graduate degree program's websites are intended to outline major milestones. The quicker you switch that bit in your brain the more enjoyable this growth experience may be. What's your reasons and objectives in attending graduate school?
2. Graduate school is not an extension of your undergraduate studies. Yes, this tip is a re-statement of the first tip, but it needs to be emphasized. College is about making you a well-rounded college-educated citizen in about 8 semesters. Graduate studies is about your SME training. This training can be as long or as short as allowable by your institution's degree program. For MS, it's 3-4 semesters, for PhD, it's 4-6 years (typically). You have this time to complete appropriate coursework, conduct novel research, summer intern and/or co-op within your research interest areas and secure full-time employment. The number of semesters/years is irrelevant since completing your graduate studies happens when (and only when) the predetermined milestones are accomplished successfully. 
3. You are not the only smart person in the room. The minimum cumulative GPA for most graduate degree program admissions is 3.0. In a small number of special cases, an applicant can be admitted with a lower GPA (2.8 - 3.0) under a probationary period, usually contingent upon the receiving a ‘B’ or better in the first semester in the graduate program. In many cases, the incoming graduate student GPA from their undergraduate studies is at least 3.2. So, great and good grades in graduate school is the expected norm. The graduate coursework is the easy part since you are most familiar with it.
4. Take a research methods course ASAP. Research methods focuses on the how and why the empirical study and/or experimental evaluation should be done. The how and why are an open-ended process with no single right answer. This open-endedness can be very uncomfortable to many students, who may strive on structure. To some extend, you must throw structure out the window. You will discover that research requires several verification and validation approaches. Your research setup and implementation assumptions must be clearly defined. What are you trying to prove through these experiments and does your experimental design support your research hypothesis?
5. Once is never enough. Many graduate students think that performing a task once, e.g., reading related literature, conduct an experiment, etc., is sufficient. Nope. For each scholarly article in a related literature review, you can expect to read/skim/review the paper at least three times to comprehend the contents and determine if or how it is related to your own research. Experiment testing requires a certain number of iterations based on common best practices in your sub-discipline to ensure statistical significance of your results.
6. The learning curve is wide and deep. You have learned so much in a short amount of time. This immersive experience has exposed and broadened your understanding within your discipline. Your tendency will be to include all of your research activity into your final graduate research manuscript. You want to show how much work you have done to prove evidence of your worthiness to receive the graduate degree. However, every course topic, paper you read, experiment you design and implement or any other work product is not relevant to your MS Thesis and/or PhD Dissertation. Your final graduate research manuscript is not a record of your learning experience, it's a comprehensive synthesis of the research. 

For more details tips on conducting yourself with your research advisor, see the Setting Expectations post. 

Letter to the Postdoc

Originally posted on August 29, 2008 by PHD Comics

Postdoc status is a viable option for many newly-minted PhDs; however, you should be more aware of the job description, the employer's expectations, your responsibilities and what you plan to accomplish as a postdoc. 

The Job Description
It can be summed up in one word: TEMPORARY.

The Postdoctoral Associate/Researcher is wedged between the full-time graduate student classification and the full-time permanent employee classification. You are no longer a graduate student. Your conference travel scholarship eligibility is now nil. When you say you are a postdoc, the question wheel triad always includes: "when does your postdoc end?", "what do you want to do next?" and "where are you focusing your permanent employment search?" Ugh, in most cases, you don't know, but the questions still come. Also, you are not in a permanent employee in the faculty, industry or government ranks. You notice that your influence and impact factor within your postdoc position's organization is low at best. Plus, your direct supervisor is a permanent employee, who tends to be referred to as your postdoc mentor and serves as a pseudo-research advisor. On the bright side, a postdoc provides you 1-2 years time to close the graduate student life book and start the next book -- whatever your career ambition.

Job details

1. Perform specific contributions on aspects of your postdoc advisor’s research agenda
2. Submit and publish technical research papers
3. Learn grantsmanship
4. Attend professional development workshops and activities
5. [optional] Assist in managing the research projects of your postdoc mentor’s graduate students
6. [optional] Serving as the instructor or co-instructor

Goals and outcomes
In understanding this job description, you probably realize that it’s advantageous to be strategic in your postdoc appointment. You need to figure out your next professional step and obtain full-time permanent employment. I followed the academic life so I can only speak to it. The suggestions I provide  is geared toward successful tenure-track position attainment. Regardless, the postdoc life can serve as a preview of what may be in your future.

Build your technical and support network by connecting with postdoctoral-centric organizations, such as the National Postdoctoral Association or discipline-specific postdoctoral events. For example, there is the Academic Career Workshop for URMs in computing. I was mostly unaware of organizations and resources as a postdoc. I wish I paid more attention. Don’t be like me.

Research
Be productive. Shoot for quantity AND quality.

If you are fortunate to gain grant writing experience as a senior  graduate student, soak it all up. If not, a postdoc is a great opportunity to get started. Step 1 - request an NSF/NIH/DoD/etc ID and create your NSF/NIH/DoD/etc Biography.

Teaching 
If you are seeking an academic teaching position, do, Otherwise don't do.

Service
Don’t do it! DON’T DO IT!

Job Hunting
Computing Research Association - Job Announcements.
Chronicles of Higher Education - Job Search.

Your faculty position application includes cover letter, CV, research agenda, teaching statements, professional references and scholarly publication samples. When submitting your faculty position applications, you may want to provide your professional references draft letters of recommendation. As you write, you should strongly consider how the role of gender influences your word choices, phrases and statements. You can read J. Madera, M. Hebl and R. Martin's research entitled “Gender and Letters of Recommendation for Academia: Agentic and Communal Differences”.  Communal terms center on helping others (kindness, nurturance) while agentic terms center on influencing others (assertiveness, initiating tasks). Their studies resulted in two major conclusions “women were described as more communal and less agentic than men (Study 1) and (b) that communal characteristics have a negative relationship with hiring decisions in academia that are based on letters of recommendation (Study 2)” using a psychology department’s tenure-track faculty search.

Let's assume your application is well-received by at least one faculty search committee. You make it to the on-campus interview. Please consider interviewing your potential bosses (Department Heach/Chair, Dean, Provost, etc) and colleagues (fellow departmental junior and senior faculty) as they are interviewing you. Here are some starter questions and comments:

• How do assistant professors in the departments acquire graduate students? Is there a partnership between the department and some schools? What are the recruiting efforts?
• How long has the Department Head/Chair been is his/her current position? What is the Department Head/Chair's vision for the department? Most likely, he/she will not be in that position when you are seeking promotion and tenure in 5-6 years.
• How are teaching assistantships distributed? Does the Department Head/Chair or Division/College/School Dean allocate them? How does this process operate? For instance, the Dean of the College allocates number of TA position to each department based on faculty contact hours and the Department Head assigns these TAs to the faculty who are instructing those courses. Note: contact hours are some combination of class size and number of times the faculty is in front of the students. If you teach smaller classes, you will not be awarded a TA position.
• Is there a maximum number of trips you can take in one semester? Are there location restrictions e.g. domestic only?
• Comment: Google the Department Head/Chair to find out if he/she was an internal or external hire? This may indicate the department culture of mostly internal/external department-level administration.
• Comment: Investigate the research collaborations within the department. Who are publishing papers together? What are their respective faculty ranks? It helps to know who are collegial and who are not to junior faculty. Ditto for external funding activities.
• Comment: Identify which undergraduate classes at that institution are required for any student (grad or undergrad) to assist you in your research objectives? Ask specific questions about course topics (if you can speak directly with the faculty member who teaches the course, that would be optimal).
• Comment: Make no assumptions about what students know. Students may remember the term but have not used/implemented that concept.

Healthy "Freak-Out"

Another Independence Day holiday has come and gone ushering in the season of unfilled summer tasks. Instructors made grand plans back in mid-May including but not limited to:

• complete some series of tasks on at least 1 research project
• submit conference papers and/or journal articles
• conference paper reviews
• grant proposal writing for new or continuing research projects
• post-award management of existing funded research projects
• course modification e.g., review your previous course instance and update course materials as appropriate
• course development e.g., design new course offering or receive (new to you) course materials

Sometimes, you make strides toward your summer tasks list. Other times, you can easily and frequently caught up in some other tasks. You are in the middle of what I call a healthy freak-out. The freak-out happens first. Those other tasks consume and eat up your days while leaving your nights to agonize over the untouched no-progress to-do items. Those other tasks are not high impact to your career plan and growth, but you still elect to complete them. or a WOC STEM faculty member, the freak-out experience is exaggerated. Why? Because you, my fellow doctor-sister, are the bridge. Poet Donna Kate Rushin says it best.

The Bridge Poem
by Donna Kate Rushin

I've had enough
I'm sick of seeing and touching
Both sides of things
Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody

Nobody
Can talk to anybody
Without me Right?

I explain my mother to my father my father to my little sister
My little sister to my brother my brother to the white feminists
The white feminists to the Black church folks the Black church folks
To the Ex-hippies the ex-hippies to the Black separatists the
Black separatists to the artists the artists to my friends' parents...

Then
I've got the explain myself
To everybody

I do more translating
Than the Gawdamn U.N.

Forget it
I'm sick of it

I'm sick of filling in your gaps

Sick of being your insurance against
The isolation of your self-imposed limitations
Sick of being the crazy at your holiday dinners
Sick of being the odd one at your Sunday Brunches
Sick of being the sole Black friend to 34 individual white people

Find another connection to the rest of the world
Find something else to make you legitimate
Find some other way to be political and hip

I will not be the bridge to your womanhood
Your manhood
Your human-ness

I'm sick of reminding you not to
Close off too tight for too long

I'm sick of mediating with your worst self
On behalf you your better selves

I am sick
Of having to remind you
To breathe
Before you suffocate
Your own fool self

Forget it
Stretch or drown
Evolve or die

The bridge I must be
Is the bridge to my own power
I must translate
My own fears
Mediate
My own weaknesses

I must be the bridge to nowhere
But my true self
And then
I will be useful

    -from This Bridge Called My Back
             edited by: Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua
            New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983.

You are frustrated by more than your unaccomplished professional milestones, but you know that you can not afford to be paralyzed by it.

You feel a burden to do and to be for others before yourself more times than not.

Stop that.

The healthy aspect of your freak-out happens second. You must sanitize that toxic frustration to green and clean fuel. Let your frustration make you better and stronger. You need to re-focus your energies by finding your balance. There is a time for work, a time for play and a time to do nothing. All parts should be roughly equal. Every day. You can revise your summer task list by answering the following questions:

• What are the high impact items to progress your career?  (e.g., journal article submissions)
• Which task items have impending deadlines? (e.g., grant proposal submissions and conference paper reviews)
• What can you reasonably accomplish in the remaining 6 weeks of the summer?

Originally fount at http://bschoolbabe.com/post/87204327699/how-to-live-your-purpose-i-love-this-graphic)

The image above is one pictorial illustrating what it means to fulfill a purposeful life. Your passion helps you solidify your mission, then your selected profession and vocation goals become more clear. At the center is your ability to find this intersection of your passion, mission, profession and vocation. 

You can do it.

Now, go play -- start executing your revised summer task list in the morning.

Setting Expectations

As a faculty member, you have undergraduate and graduate students who contribute to progressing your research agenda. For those in departments with graduate degrees, you will spend a fair amount of time cultivating your graduate students. Incoming graduate students should realize the intent of graduate studies -- to train the students to be independent and critical thinkers and problem solvers. To increase the likelihood of receiving high quality work-product from your graduate students, you must set expectations of them and of you.

Research Advisor Expectations to Graduate Student Advisee

1. You should have successfully completed at least 1 data structures, 1 algorithms and 1 database management systems course (MySQL/Oracle) prior to becoming an advisee. You should have high programming languages proficiency in one of the following: C/C++, Java, Python.  
2. The advisee's funding through teaching or research assistantship is independent of the forward progress in both the coursework and MS Thesis/PhD Dissertation research responsibilities.
3. Your Plan of Study document should be completed within the first month of second semester of matriculation. It may change due to course offerings; however, you should have a plan of what skills you would like to enhance while in graduate school.
4. Be assertive by asking a lot of questions. This is crucial to make you a successful graduate of this program and, in turn, your career.
5. Weekly Meeting Scheduling: To be set-up by advisee (preferably the same day and time for the duration of the semester),  which will last 15-60 minutes.
6. Weekly Meeting Conduct: The weekly meetings are for the student and by the student. The advisee is expected to be in charge of the meeting. The advisee is expected to provide an agenda and email a copy to the advisor at least one hour prior to the meeting. The advisee has the responsibility to address all the task items outlined in the agenda. The advisor may add a task item that must be addressed in the next weekly meeting.
7. Be timely to all meetings. Unless otherwise discussed, all meetings will be in the advisor's office.
8. If a meeting must be cancelled, email the meeting invitees at least 12 hours prior to the scheduled beginning of the meeting. If it’s an emergency, please send a text message stating the following "emergency - no mtg" to my cell phone. Once the emergency is over, please provide greater detail either in person or via email, if necessary.
9. All written manuscripts submitted to the research advisor must be proofread, spellchecked and complete. Partial or incomplete documents should not be emailed or given to the research advisor unless requested. 
10. For Master's students, it is expected that you will graduate with at least 1 conference/workshop publication (submission acceptable, but paper acceptance preferred).
11. For PhD students, it is expected that you will graduate with at least 2 conference/workshop publications and 1 journal publication (journal submission acceptable, acceptance preferred).

Research Advisor Code of Conduct

1. Support advisee's career objectives. Many questions your coursework plans and research directions will be asked in order to ensure advisee's career objectives are understood and accomplished. 
2. Instruct advisee on improving technical writing skills. Technical writing is a learned skill. This skill can only be learned with many drafts provided to the advisor and in-person meetings. The advisor will teach these skills at the willingness of the advisee. Do not be discouraged if your returned manuscripts is filled with comments.
3. Be responsive to advisee correspondence. 
1.  For an email sent by the advisee, an email response will be given within 48 hours. This response may not answer all questions as answering can be lengthy.
2. For manuscript drafts provided by hard-copy or digitally, the advisee can expect written feedback on submitted text, graphs, papers or analysis within 5 business days.
4. In the case of an accepted publication, the advisor will attempt to fund the advisee's travel and registration to the conference. It would then be expected that the advisee would deliver the paper/poster presentation.
5. Be timely to meetings
6. If a meeting must be cancelled, the advisor will email the advisee at least 12 hours prior to the scheduled beginning of the meeting. If it's an emergency, the advisor will send a text message stating the following "emergency - no mtg" to your cell phone if it's provided.

To the Aspiring Black Female Scientist

Brandeis Marshall's childhood desk aka "study depot"

This week, Kyla's article listing 73 Black Female Scientists has ignited a conversation about Black women in STEM and our (lack of) visibility within the science community. Well, I received a question from an almost 4th grader, who I'll call Cali. How sweet and awesome is that?!? She asked for advice on how to become a Black female scientist and I'm sure she's not alone in her inquiry. This is for all the Cali's...
 


Dear Cali:

I was very happy to receive your email. Thanks for asking your question. The 73 of us have had our own path to scientist-status. First and most importantly, you should have good grades. Then, you should attend and graduated from college. I also strongly suggest that you consider pursing an advanced degree in your chosen discipline. Education can only help you achieve your goals. Be smart, confident and have a positive personality. Beyond that, let me share a few pointers. 

Reading. I love reading. If you love reading, then you would love learning everything from the mathematics and science to language and arts subjects. My summer vacations were spent reading fun books, such as the Sweet Valley High series, in addition to the summer reading books. I read everywhere. I used my at-home desk as my study depot that housed some of my fun books and school supplies. I encourage you to make your own "study depot" and read some fun books. 

Extracurricular Activities. To excel in any field, you dedicate your time and energies to learning your craft. It takes focus and balance. I love music and took dance lessons during elementary and junior high school. I also enjoyed sports - volleyball, basketball and track & field. I still enjoy dancing and watching basketball. Extracurricular activities help you stay active and healthy. They also build your teamwork skills, which you will use science project teams. I hope you have at least one non-STEM activity that you find fun and enjoyable.  

Next Steps. Science is a big field including biology, chemistry, computing, engineering, mathematics, technology and physics. You can exposing yourself to these different types of science so you can find the ones you like and the ones you don't. There are 1-day events to week-long summer camps for all K-12 grade levels. Check your local colleges for these events and camps. These programs usually have a cost for participation, but could have scholarships or discounted cost options available. Here's few examples to get you started:

• 1-day events: Black Girls Code
• 1-week programs: Purdue University Summer Camps for Kids, Spelman Imagine Computer & Information Science (ICIS) Summer Camps

Dream big, be positive and you will do some great things. 

Yours in STEM,
Dr. Marshall

Research Financing

To execute a funded grant is to manage its budget. My graduate studies experience didn't include project management training: personnel, project deliverables/outcomes, project timelines, budgets, etc. This academic research budget starter kit is intended to spark conversations with your advisor, mentors, advocates and/or colleagues. To provide some concreteness to these budgetary matters, I supply some rough numbers where appropriate, but be sure to check your institution's rates. 

Understanding the inner workings of a research project budget and which expenses can be allocated to which account is just another skill to learn as a faculty member. The NSF provides a proposal budget template to get you started. Each line-item in the budget allocates monies to a specific need for the proposed project. Here's some relevant terminology that if you don't know, you should make it a top priority to know.  

• PI: Principal Investigator, research project director
• co-PI: assistant Principal Investigator, research project co-director
• CY: calendar year, January 1st-December 31st
• AY: academic year, traditionally August 15th-May 15th
• Summer Salary: up to 10 weeks of wages and fringe benefits allocated to personnel during May 15th-August 15th
• FTE: full-time employee
• GA/RA/GRA: graduate assistant, research assistant or graduate research assistant
• F&A: Facilities and Administration fees

Depending on the NSF solicitation, the research team comprises of one PI and up to 4 co-PIs. The distinction between the CY, AY and summary salary may be obvious to some, but just in case it isn’t here are a few comments. CY is a more flexible allocation, in which you can expense the grant monies at any time during the grant period, while AY or summer salary are typically designated to the 9-month academic year or 10-week summer period, respectively. Department Heads (or Chairs) may prefer AY monies allocation. Why? Chairs are primarily concerned about the academic year budget, e.g., how each faculty member is drawing his/her salary from which account, AY teaching assistantship allotments (based on course enrollments), travel and equipment, etc. So you, through your grant, can pay for your own wages and the Chair could re-allocate what would have been your AY salary & fringe benefits to other departmental budgetary activities. Your Chair could hold back these “departmental budget savings” from the AY budget and dispense some of it directly to you as summer salary.

Course buy-out. Each institution decides the flat percentage of a faculty member’s AY salary and fringe benefits that is needed to deliver a course. Each department sets the semester course load expectation. I'm most familiar with a 2-2 teaching load, in which I'm expected to teach 2 of the department's courses per semester. So for the department budget, 4 courses a year means roughly 50% of your employee contribution and duties go toward classroom instruction. The other 50% should be  for mainly research activities and some service. Let''s suppose that your base 9-month salary is $100,000 and the course delivery flat rate is 12.5%. If you have a course buy-out for each year of the grant, the funding agency will pay $12,500 of your salary and not the institution. This $12,500 is used by the Chair, with the assistance of the faculty member, to select and hire a temporary staff member (an adjunct faculty, lecturer or instructor) to deliver that course. An institution may have a flat temporary staff member salary rate of $7,000 per course. Given our example, that $5,500 differential could be re-allocated at the Chair's discretion. Special note to tenure-track faculty: A course buy-out prior to promotion and tenure may be perceived negatively by your promotion and tenure committees because you would not be contributing to the departmental course delivery needs.

Summer salary.  A faculty member has the responsibility to cover their own summer salary. Due to U.S. federal regulations, an employer (institution) can not pay an employee (faculty member) more than 50 consecutive weeks. When grant monies are routed through an institution, faculty summer salary serves an extension of the AY payroll. Thus, a faculty member has a maximum 10-weeks of summer salary to be on the institution's payroll. The advice given to me, and so I give it to you, is to try to allocate a couple of weeks in the summer for every funded project. Most research projects can not be relegated to AY activity. By allocating the summer salary line-item, you can secure pay goes directly to you and guarantee continued funded research project progress over the summer. Assuming your base 9-month salary is $100,000, two-week of summer salary is $5555 (= (100,000/9)/2).  Special note to tenure-track faculty: I would suggest that you reserve some of your summer to writing and submitting your scholarly work to journals and conferences. Be careful of burnout.

Other project personnel. Other senior personnel salary include in your budget are postdoctoral associates, other professionals, graduate and undergraduate students and any support staff. Postdoctoral researchers and other support staff have 12-month position appointment while graduate students are traditionally semester position appointments. Let's take graduate student personnel as an example. A graduate student can be paid as a 0.25 FTE, 0.50 FTE or 0.75 FTE as a teaching or research assistant. At an 0.50 FTE, the graduate student research assistant is expected to contribute 20 hours to the research grant activities. An institution has a fixed semester GRA rate, say $7,000, but there is also graduate fee remission, say $7,000. Graduate fee remission is a form of salary compensation and insurance where graduate employees are not obligated to pay full tuition and fees. The graduate students directly receives the GRA salary while the graduate fee remission is charged by the institution and paid by the grant monies. 

Fringe Benefits. Fringe benefits constitute the institution's charge for staff employee healthcare and other benefits. For each staff employee, the fringe benefits rate, say 27%, is considered a direct cost within a research grant budget. Assuming a 1 course buy-out from your base 9-month $100,000 salary, the salary and fringe benefits charge is $15,875 ($12,500 salary and $3,375 fringe benefits).

F&A: An institution's facilities and administrative are indirect costs charged by the institution to the funding agency. You know, an institution's contribution to infrastructure support of the research, e.g., post-award office personnel, travel and expense management software, the office space, electricity, ethernet and wireless network connection, etc., needed to host the proposed research. At many research institutions, the F&A rate is high, say 54%. You have read that correctly…54%. For every $1.00 you request from the funding agency, $0.54 is requested from the institution. F&A eats into your workable budget, but it is necessary.

So for a budget that a PI/co-PI with a 9-month $100,000 salary requests a course buy-out, 2-weeks summer salary and 1 graduate student for a year, the salary and fringe benefits direct cost is $36,929.85 ($15,875 course buyout, $7054.85 summer salary and $14,000 for 2-semesters of a graduate student) and the indirect cost is $19,942.12. The total cost is $56,871.97.

Whew, and I didn't even talk about domestic and foreign travel for PI meetings/workshops and conference travel or equipment needed to execute the research project! There is so much to learn about the internal and external business operations of your institution.

Final thoughts:

1. Meet with your institution's pre-award grant office personnel
2. Meet with with your institution’s business office personnel
3. Meet with your institution's post-award grant office personnel 
4. Maintain a good working relationship with your pre-award, post-award and business office personnel

Scaffolding the Grant Writing Process

The grant writing and submission process is very much like the research process, e.g., "a meandering slow and fast, exciting and dull, frustrating and rewarding process over time and mostly in collaboration with colleagues”. The discussion of research grants can in no way can be handled sufficiently in a blog post, workshops, books or through human to human conversations. You only learn through experiencing it.

There is having a research project idea, there is effectively communicating that idea and there is receiving money to execute that idea. In the first year as an Assistant Professor, I was utterly blown away by the amount of time, brain-clock-cycles and knowledge about grant writing needed to just complete a proposal - let alone be awarded the funding. A flurry of questions swirled in my brain: How do I write a project summary or project description? What is appropriate to include in the project budget?  Why do I need to justify the budget in the facilities, equipment and other resources document? Is there a template for the biographical sketch? Can I see samples of biographical sketches, project summary and project description? Can I even do this? Who can mentor and guide me? I am just not prepared to do this. Why didn’t I learn these skills in graduate school or through my postdoctoral position? Was I just not paying attention?
 
Ok, OVERWHLEMED!
First, breathe deeply.
Second, continue reading.

I will speak on the National Science Foundation (NSF) funding stream given my familiarity with this government agency as a grant writer, grant awardee and proposal review panelist. NSF is divided into a number of directorates (or discipline-specific funding units), where computing falls into the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). CISE has 4 divisions: Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (ACI), Computing & Communication Foundations (CCF), Computer and Network Systems (CNS) and Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS). Each division manages grant competitions and funded awards through program directors and officers. 

For most grant writers, you are answering a call-for-proposal (CFP) solicitation. Now, I find NSF CFPs to be a cryptic read with some informative content. The General Information provides the list of program officers assigned to the proposal competition - a great point-of-contact to filter your proposal ideas to gauge the appropriateness of your proposal to the CFP. The Proposal Preparation and Submission Instructions tells you if a letter of intent and/or primary proposal is required aside from the full proposal and the associated deadlines. The Introduction and Program Description sections are intended to provide potential proposers’ insight into what NSF is aiming to address. The remaining of the CFP is all about process - award & eligibility information, proposal preparation and submission instructions, review procedures and award administration information. In total, an NSF CFP is about 10 pages with very small print and large side margins.
  IMHO, the grant writing process is akin to cooking. A recipe is really just a guideline, a suggestion of how to make food taste great (to the recipe creator). You have a recipe. Most people follow most of the cooking instructions. Most people use most of the ingredients.

Ingredients: 
1 very good to execellent idea
1 PI
Up to 4 coPIs
1-page project summary 
Up to a 15-page project description
list of cited references
Up to 5 PI and coPI biographical sketches
1 data management plan
1 budget document for project duration
1 budget justification
1 facilities, equipment and other document
(X) other personnel (post doctoral scholars, graduate students, undergraduate students, etc.)

Instructions: 
Regardless of if you are responding to an CFP or submitting an unsolicited proposal, successful research grants are about having the right people, addressing a timely problem and effectively executing a reasonable implementation plan within the funding timeframe. Start with talking to colleagues within and outside your discipline. People are so creative and discuss some very good approaches to open research problems. The plan can only be achieved when motivated, commonly goal-focused people decide to devise and then implement the plan. Does this sound difficult? Well, yes it is. The people-problem-plan triad is crucial to manage.   

The overall intent of the grant proposal is to supply clear and sustainable outcomes for your technical community while responding to this discipline’s science needs outlined by the NSF’s CFP and/or mission. The project summary has 3 parts: overview (mission and vision), intellectual merit (contributions) and broader impacts (sustainability). The project description is an expanded version of the project summary with a background, related work, research plan, tentative project timeline, evaluation & assessment, and qualifications of the research team. The budget, budget justification, data management plan and facilities, equipment and other documents are dictated by the NSF CFP, research team, project goals & outcomes. Consider incorporating the following components to your grant proposal: 

Godspeed!

To laugh (or cry) about one of my grant writing experiences, read Grant Submission: A Funny Story

Research, Teaching & Service: Let's talk research

Research is not a series of step by step activities, but a meandering slow and fast, exciting and dull, frustrating and rewarding process over time and mostly in collaboration with colleagues. Research has interlocking elements of publications, student completion rates and funding. High quality and quantity of your publications is evidence of your ability to contribute to your selected discipline. Your student completion rate can be an indication of your social good contribution by shepherding undergraduates and graduate students to degree completion with good quality research experience. Your acquisition of funding dollars shows your ability to financially support yourself, your research and your student researchers. All three are tangible metrics to evaluate your “success” as an academic. Quite honestly, it also serves as your professional currency and your value add to an organization.

Publishing takes a lot of time and resources from idea germination to *hopefully* the published paper, article, chapter and/or book. To create, implement and evaluate an idea worthy of novel contribution to your selected discipline takes effective thought, planning and execution strategies. You should be mindful of the publication venue. The acceptance rate of the publication venue implies scholarly quality to some, if not most, promotion and tenure committees. The lower the acceptance rate, the more valuable your research appears to researchers unfamiliar with the specific discipline.For computing in general, conference papers are the common and recognized mode of publication. However, when it comes to promotion and tenure (beyond the departmental level), conference papers do not tend to hold as much value as refereed journal articles. I’m emphasizing this rule because I completely missed this nugget of advice.

When you are a faculty member, your daily tasks are divided between research, teaching and service. One commodity at your disposal is your department, institution and external colleagues, e.g., former graduate studies classmates, academic colleagues at other institutions, government and industry collaborators. Depending on potential collaborators’ career path and aspirations, a research partnership could be a win-win situation by sharing resources and responsibilities toward a common goal.

Another commodity you must learn to leverage is the (undergraduate and/or graduate) student researcher. Publication production can be aided by having students perform some research-related tasks, e.g., prior works’ paper summaries, software coding, tables, graphs and figures. More students doesn’t necessarily mean that more of your research will be completed. You will need to manage each student’s progress, which may take more time initially than you just doing the work yourself. It is important to expect some trial and error since each student’s personality requires you to impart some of your finesse to meet their needs.

Suppose the research is ready for a conference paper submission in 6-8 months. The time lapse for a top-tier conference paper (submission to conference event) is 6 months. By now, you are already 1 year invested. Undergraduate and graduate students may or may not be still working with you due to course load conflicts, changing interests and/or graduation. Graduate students are a bit more pressed for a submitted publication since it may be a condition of their graduation. You have trained some students, but most likely you will have to train a new group of new researchers each year. Now, assume your conference paper is accepted. (Note: if you are a graduate student reading this post, conference paper acceptance is not guaranteed. You will likely receive more rejections than accepts). The peer-reviewed remarks are returned and the camera-ready/final version of the paper must be submitted.

Is that it?
Nope.

To ensure the conference proceedings include your paper, at least one author must register and deliver the oral presentation at the conference. The cost of attending a conference can be expensive including conference registration, travel expenses (airfare or mileage, ground transportation to/from airport), hotel accommodations and food per diem.

Who is going to pay for you and/or your student to deliver the research presentation?

Now we come to the real matter: funding streams. Your funding may come from your department by asking your department administrators, your startup funds, internal awards sponsored through other academic units at your institution and external awards through corporate sponsorships or gifts and/or government agencies. You should only serve as principal investigator (PI) or co-principal investigator (coPI), which indicates you are a member of the research project leadership team. Even though Internal grants can be less competitive, external awarded grants have greater value and impact on your academic currency since the research problem, proposed solution and implementation plan has the peer-review/SME approval. In year 1 & 2 of a tenure-track faculty position, your startup funds  and requesting departmental funds can support your research activities. From year 3 and thereafter, other internals and external funding streams are expected to supplement your scholarly endeavors.

Q. What do you need?
A. Money.
Q. How much do you need?
A. As much as possible. Enough to pay for your annual summer salary (10 weeks), conference travel expenses, journal article publication fees, computing equipment, graduate students (tuition, fringe benefits and stipend), etc.
Q. When do you need it?
A. Now.

Translation: to increase your likelihood of getting a grant awarded, you must be regularly writing and submitting internal and external grant proposals. Consider your institution’s perspective: How many times has Faculty A asked for financial support? Sooner rather than later, Faculty A should be able to support herself and her research through other means.

For more information:

1. Robert Boice. (2000). Advice for New Faculty Members. Pearson Publishing.
2. Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey Laszloffy. (2008). The Black Academic's Guide to Winning Tenure--Without Losing Your Soul. Lynne Rienner Publishing.  

Research, Teaching & Service: Let's talk teaching

We are familiar with what both sides want by the end of the term. The educators want the students to learn the course materials. The students want to receive an A in the course. These two desires are not always associated. But as the course instructor, you seek to correlate learning achievements with appropriate score outcomes. You aim to master the intersection among the instructional practice, identification of your classroom implementation and your teaching philosophy.

Instructional practice
Where did the idea that somehow a graduate student would magically know how to be an instructor as a result of completing his/her graduate degrees? Nevertheless, this notion is erroneous. The traditional graduate school experience does not prepare you for organizing, leading and managing a classroom of students. The priority in graduate school is in developing research scholars, where instructing and teaching assistantships serve as a mechanism to financially support your scholarly pursuits. Thus, the transition from graduate student learner to professor instructor is a colossal leap. 

You must learn how to teach for different discipline concepts, class sizes and student learning styles while also establishing your own teaching style.  The subject matter should be relatively easy since the topics appeared in your undergraduate and graduate studies. It is refreshing your memory about the course topics. However, constructing manageable learning modules for students takes study and practice. 

Teaching styles range from dull to exciting. Death By PowerPoint is the dullest of them all. A large set of dense slides. Students are overwhelmed with content, but instructors can easily execute. A blend of PowerPoint slides, individual/group problem sets and in-class discussions is one of the most exciting. Students are actively engaged in course topics, while course instructors must thoughtfully plan lecture activities. Check out one of many articles and resources on designing more effective lectures: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/how-to-build-dynamic-lecture-todd-finley. 

I have yet to cover teaching for different class sizes and student learning styles. Well, they will be covered in next in classroom implementation. 

Classroom implementation
Class size can be a contributing factor to which teaching style you use. Small class sizes, less than 25 students, allow for lectures to be more of a discussion and conversation that supports a personalized learning environment. Large class sizes, more than 100 students, trigger a structured learning environment with formal content presentation and small group problem sets/discussions that provide the course instructor informal feedback on students' learning. If you are unfamiliar with Bloom's Taxonomy, then I strongly suggest you take a look. Bloom's Taxonomy is an example of how to classify a student's learning (from the simple recollections to advanced abilities in connecting concepts). I find that undergraduate students are comfortable to receive knowledge and show some comprehension with some instances of successful application, while graduate students are more comfortable with application and analysis via showing some evidence in their ability in evaluation. Regardless of the class size, the course instructor should have mechanisms to uncover the class's learning gaps.  

The class composition can also influence the effectiveness of your teaching style. For example, college freshmen have a different level of emotional and intellectual maturity than college seniors. The same observation can be said for graduate students and undergraduate students. Undergraduate students tend to ask more detailed questions about format and presentation, e.g., response length, while graduate students ask more detailed questions about technical content, e.g., which method best suits a particular problem. Class composition includes the students' learning styles. The seven learning styles are visual (spatial), aural (auditory-musical), verbal (linguistic), physical (kinesthetic), logical (mathematical), social (interpersonal) and solitary (intrapersonal). You may wonder "how will I apply my teaching style to my class based on differing learning styles?" As the course instructor, you should conduct a mix of different exercises that benefit certain learning styles early in your term to determine the best universal construct for your class.

At the end,  you must accept one cold-hard fact: you can not make all students happy or satisfied with your teaching performance. You must stay true to your teaching philosophy.   

Teaching philosophy
Simply put, your teaching philosophy is an expression of your morals, values and ideals as it pertains to student instruction. The teaching philosophy evolves as your instructional practice broadens and your classroom implementation matures. Since your teaching philosophy is unique to you, I can only offer up an excerpt of mine as an example. 

My teaching philosophy is best described by Bloom's Taxonomy: striving for synthesis, "[to] compile information together in a different way by combining elements in a new pattern or proposing alternative solutions". Learning occurs within and outside the context of the structured assessment mechanisms of quizzes, assignments, exams, projects, etc. But in an effort to minimize subjectivity, these assessments are established to provide the student a gauge on their learning and growth. As a natural result, students associate learning and aptitude with their grade. 

I have seen  students struggle to understand (and accept) that every course concepts can not be segmented into measurable units.  There are many repetitive tasks in which there is no grade. For example, let us take learning how to washing your clothes. You learn how to separate your clothes based on color and fabric. You learn when you should versus need to wash your clothes. The larger, more applicable life lesson is about understanding responsibility, accountability and consequences. A classroom is truly no different. There are course concepts having surrounding contexts and effects. The high priority concepts are assessed and the other ones are their backdrop. You can not deeply know a course concept without comprehending the proper context. This context reveals a concept's benefits and drawbacks. 

It is the beautifully frustrating ebb and flow of learning.

Disclaimer: I'm not a computing education researcher. My comments here are the result of 8-semesters as a graduate teaching assistant and 12-semesters as an Assistant Professor. 

Research, Teaching & Service: Let's talk service

The three initiatives of a higher education faculty member are research (r), teaching(t) and service (s). Each institution has a particular weighed value structure assigned to each initiative, w1, w2, w3 respectively. It's best to consider it a simple linear combination:  

         S = w1*r+w2*t+w3*s where w1+w2+w3 = 1 s.t. wi > 0 and r+t+s = 1 s.t. r > 0, t>0, s>0

This post and next two posts will be dedicated diving deeper into a faculty's research, learning and service initiatives. Most institutions value research, then teaching, and lastly service. But, I'll discuss service first since it results in the most direct impact on an individual faculty member, and thus a cascading positive impact on your home institution.

External service, sometimes called engagement or outreach, is serving as an subject-matter expert (SME) reviewer for technical journals, conferences, workshops and industry/government funding agencies. To offer your expertise in reviewing papers and/or proposals is a great opportunity to keep up-to-date on the technical advances within your specific field. It is a donation of your time and expertise. It's also a bit of flattery for you to be asked to serve in this reviewer capacity. External service can be a distraction from promotion & tenure (P&T) focused activities, e.g., research. But, this is part of a time-intensive multi-year effort to carve your research niche, to academically brand yourself and to show consistent evidence of your good stewardship.  

What's your "reward" for this time and expertise donation? (1) you can providing tangible evidence of societal impact of your research and teaching efforts and (2) you have access discipline-specific colleagues e.g., research collaborators, P&T external letter writers, position reference letters and career opportunities. Essentially, the benefits are building your technical reputation and growing your professional network which outweighs the time spent reading and writing your reviews. SME reviewing is a byproduct of submitting grant proposals, publishing journal articles/conference papers and attending technical and professional development conferences.  As your good reputation grows, you will become the chair of workshops, conference and/or serving as a journal editor. 

Naturally, you may wonder how do you become a reviewer? (1) you must do good work, (2) you should publish it in a well-respected technical venue and (3) you should have at least one influential member within your field to introduce and advocate for you. To do good work, you must know the related literature, articulate your problem's scope, significance and motivation. Then, you must formulate a novel solution and conduct experiments that show the intellectual merit of your solution. A peer-reviewed, high-quality and preferably low-acceptance rate publishing venue is optimal for your research work. Your instructor or MS/PhD advisor suggest the publication avenue initially. If the research is accepted for publication and you are presenting the work, a seasoned member of the community, e.g., your instructor, MS/PhD advisor or co-author, can be a great gateway to meet others and could lead to more opportunities.  

For us #dataheads, data-centric publication venues and meetings are plentiful so I won't be providing a comprehensive list here. In fact, I'll direct you to the KDNuggets monthly list: http://www.kdnuggets.com/meetings/. As for me, I will be reviewing conference and workshop papers by serving on 4 Program Committees this summer:

• International Workshop on Big Data Security and Privacy 2014 
• International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics 2014 
• IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia 2014 
• IEEE International Conference on Data Mining 2014 

Internal service, sometimes called committee activities, is serving in your capacity as a member of your institution's faculty. The colleagues at your institution want to be confident that you care about and willing to contribute to your home department and affiliated academic units. Faculty committee work is a necessary extra responsibility. It show your level of collegiality. There is always a long list of committees from the department, school/division and university/college. Committee work offers you an opportunity to be an active faculty participant in shared governance. 

The advice typically given to new faculty is don’t say ‘yes’  or ‘no’ right away. You can say you have to review your schedule or you may decide ask follow up questions as to the amount of time and/or responsibility affiliated with the committee. Then you can make a better informed decision. The impact of accepting too much or less-beneficial-to-your-academic-career committee work may cause havoc to fulfilling your research agenda. 
 
I rank committee work impact and its time commitment (from most desirable to least desirable) for any faculty member as follows.

• high impact, minimal time, e.g., graduate applicant selection committee
• low impact, minimal time, e.g., e.g., faculty grievance committee,  
• low impact, exponential time e.g., faculty search committee,
• high impact, exponential time, e.g., departmental accreditation committee, curriculum committee, faculty senate/university senate (typically an appointed tenured faculty member)

Stay tuned...next week, it's all about teaching!