Education Matters

So, what are you doing this afternoon? Why, you’re listening to Midrats, of course!

Set you alarms and adjust your schedules for a 5pm EST/1700R/2200Z showtime. Our special guest this week will be Mackenzie Eaglen, Research Fellow for National Security at The Heritage Foundation.

Join me with my fellow USNIBlog contributers and co-hosts EagleOne and Galrahn for a review of the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) we haven’t seen yet (though we do have a predecisional draft to ponder).

The final draft is due out tomorrow – but why wait – what is the fun with that?

You only get this chance every four years – don’t miss it. The first half hour will be a panel discussion based on the 20 JAN 09 HASC Seapower and Expeditionary Forces Subcommittee meeting’s questions, and then we will bring in our guest for the second half of the hour.

To top it off, we’ll try something different and take callers the entire hour – so no need to wait to get a word in edgewise. Our call-in number will be (347) 308-8397. Hope you can make it, but if you can’t – you can get the archived shows from either the showpage or just do a search for our podcast “Midrats” in iTunes.

When I first came to the land of liberty, I discovered something rather quickly. There is a ton of “junk” here in this country that is perfectly good and useable, and which would be very valuable to lots of people around the world.

This astute observation was made on my second day in the States, when I was in the balcony of my apartment, observing the trash dumpsters visible from there. Two college kids were moving out of their apartment, and by the time they left, they had left behind an old (but working) television set, two excellent lamps, an old (and working) microwave, and some still useable furniture. I was astounded by the fact that these seemingly useful things would just be left behind. No one threw away furniture or *gasp* a television set. If you had an old TV and wanted a new one, you took the old one to the store, and the store owner would take your old one and give you a new one with a 15% discount. That was how you upgraded electronics.

And that was when I learnt one of the first rules of living in a consumer paradise. In order to live the American life, one had to buy lots of stuff continuously, but remember to upgrade constantly, and get rid of the old stuff. There is a sequence to getting rid of the old stuff as well. First it goes into the closet, then it moves into your garage, and finally it goes into the dumpster.

Not too long after that, I learnt that there was a corollary to this rule. If you happened to forget to clean out your garage, and kept your old stuff really long (say till you had grandkids), that stuff (actually useless in the modern world) would suddenly become valuable.

Only, instead of calling it junk, you would now call it a “collector’s item”, and you could sell it on eBay for a small but tidy fortune. What’s more, you can pass of just about anything as an antique or even better, a classic, on eBay. There are actually people here who will pay m-o-n-e-y to buy your old trash.

And this means there is a slim chance that I might have a fortune in my hands. And I have to thank my dad for this. Here’s why. My father had always been an enthusiastic adopter of technology, and eagerly bought the latest and best in electronics in the ‘60s and ‘70s. In his possession are 30 year old typewriters made by Brother, or a fine collection of LP record albums, or better still, an 8 mm and 16 mm film projector (and 8mm films), or a spool audio recorder. And all of them have been used but stored in perfect working order in their original packaging. The last time I looked, people were selling “vintage” 8 mm film projectors for $125 or thereabouts. The typewriter sold for $50 or more.

Add all of these together, and there’s a small fortune waiting for me, all tucked away in some shelf somewhere in our home back in India.

There used to be a time when I made fun of my parents storing their old and used electronics. I take all of that back, and hope they keep it safe and sound so that I can sell them all after another 10 years, by which time they will be absolutely and completely useless, and worth a fortune.

Competition for graduate school can be stiff. Everyone who is planning for grad school needs to be prepared to work hard to get in, especially if you have a particularly prestigious school in mind. Good grades and recommendations are important, of course, but there are other things you can do to help improve your chances of getting into the grad school of your choice.

1. Plan ahead. If you’re planning to go to grad school right out of undergraduate school, start looking at where you’d like to go and getting a handle on what you have to do to get in. Keep your grades up and start preparing early for tests like the GMAT, GRE, LSAT, etc. Give yourself time to attend a prep class for these tests and to take them more than once if necessary.
2. Apply to lots of schools. Though you may know where you really want to go, you should have some backup options, too. Most experts recommend that you apply to six schools to be certain you’ll have a place to go, but many people apply to as many as twenty schools.
3. Visit the schools you’d most like to attend. Graduate school admissions are completely different than getting into undergraduate school. While undergraduates are admitted by an admissions board or office, graduate students are generally chosen by the professors in the various departments. If you visit the schools, meet the professors and let them know that you’d really like to study with them, you’re more likely to get admitted. If you have friends at schools you’d like to attend, enlist them to help you get introduced to professors in your chosen major. Talking to them in person can help you convey that you’re a good student, sincere about your choice in schools and that you would be an asset to the program.
4. Get published. Graduate school is all about writing and research, so having a published paper or article in your field will impress the professors who are choosing who to admit. Be certain to include any such work in your application bundle. It shows you’re a good student and shows that you can handle graduate work.
5. Consider applying for the doctoral program. If you’ve even considered getting your doctoral degree, it might be wise to go ahead and apply for that program now. Many professors give preference to students who apply for the doctoral program over those who simply express interest in the master’s program. Once you’re admitted, you can usually switch back to the master’s program without a problem, so you still have time to consider which you’d really like to pursue.

Graduate school is a whole different ballgame from your undergraduate education. You’ll need to show that you’re smart, dedicated and capable in order to get into the school of your choice. But with some work and planning, you can ensure that you get your graduate degree from the school you choose.

Phyllis Zerkle writes about how to obtain the best masters degrees for any career.

This isn’t a review, but there are some spoilers here. Hopefully nothing here will hurt your movie experience, but perhaps give you some food for thought.

I’ve often thought that the best thing George Lucas did was not making Star Wars or Indiana Jones, but setting up a dedicated “special effects” computer group. This little group would go on to become Pixar, the studio that redefines animation and graphics while still telling great stories. With every movie of theirs you wonder what could be better and yet (almost) every time they manage to deliver cinematic classics. From monsters in the closet to lost fish, wannabe normal superheroes, rat chefs and now an amazing robot, they continue to spin visually incredible yarns that defy imagination and dare you to expect more in the next installment. With Wall-E they’ve done it again, and have really gone where no robot has gone before. The movie is breathtaking, brilliant and pushes the boundaries of what is possible on screen when you have a great story, scriptwriters and brilliant animators.

Now, one of the great things about Pixar is that along with the story, they take serious pride in the thoroughness of their research, and their content is impeccable. Where ever there is some actual science or detail involved, they invariably try to get it right. This was on particular display in Nemo, and every frame of every scene at the bottom of the ocean was painstakingly created to real detail. It wasn’t just the general feel of it, but Pixar had taken the effort to determine exactly which species of fish or crustacean or mollusk or coral or anemone could exist in that particular ecosystem, and then the drawings of each of those were perfect. It wasn’t just the sharks who were drawn right.

There were plenty of brilliant bits in The Incredibles, but that was a superhero flick, so there could be plenty of liberties with science (while trying not to break all the laws of nature at once). But with Wall-E, Pixar has gone back to its Star War roots, and classic science fiction. Here’s the movie in a nutshell. Humans have made the earth uninhabitable, so they leave and live somewhere in distant space on a giant starship. The earth has robots (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class, or Wall-Es) to clean it up, but all of them have now been inactivated. All except one, our hero Wall-E. He is some kind of self-teaching and constantly learning robot whose primary job is to pick up trash, compact it and pile it up. 700 years after humans have left the planet, a scout robot (Eve) comes to earth looking for signs of recovering life, meets Wall-E, sparks (literally) fly, and we have a delightfully eccentric intergalactic robot love story. But even as I left the cinema thoroughly satisfied, the scientist in me started talking in my head. Had there really been a robot named Wall-E left behind on earth, while people spent their time on a starship in space, what would things be like? Could it really be like the movie?

First, the earth itself. Now, in the movie the random abandoned city on a plant-less earth is depicted in dusty reddish hues (perhaps a little tribute to Tatooine, and a somewhat Martian landscape). There are plenty of dust storms to go around. But here’s my thought. If the world is good enough for cockroaches (as the movie says it is), it may not be good enough for us or other large animals, but it certainly will be good enough for microbes. Gazillions of them. And where there’s life on earth, there will be some photosynthesis. This means even if there aren’t too many plants around, there will be photosynthetic microbes. This in turn means the world wouldn’t just be a dry, dusty brown, but would have some shades of green, with polluted water all around. Wouldn’t it?

Then there’s Wall-E himself. I loved the way the creators of the movie made little things about Wall-E plausible. He needs energy, and the sun is the obvious inexhaustible source, so he has nice retractable solar panels (much like the Mars rover) to charge up when he’s running low. And the city is littered with tons of decommissioned Wall-Es, so Wall-E can go to any of them for spares or repairs (from new “eyes” to new caterpillar tracks). Obviously, he’s going to have wear and tear over 700 years. But how does his memory/cpu work perfectly for 700 years. My desktop has a habit of dying every couple of years, so clearly Wall-E wasn’t made in some low-cost mass fabrication plant. Either that, or Wall-E needs to be able to repair and replace his own memory or cpu by himself, figuring out a way to backup and retransfer all the data (so that he remembers he’s the Wall-E and not just some generic wall-e). How does he pull that off?

The world of instant gratification on the starship had massively obese people shuttling around on their little pods, and communicating exclusively through the virtual screen. Obviously, centuries of living without any walking would result in massive obesity. What was far more delightful was the description of massive bone loss and bone shrinkage from the limbs of these people. But how much bone would we loose if we don’t walk for 700 years? Will we (as the valiant captain of the ship does) even be able to lift our body mass, leave alone walk? And, ahem, if people never physically interact, how do babies come? And here’s a question for you. Can you use a fire extinguisher in outer space to propel yourself forward? And how long will a plant survive in the frigid temperatures of outer space?

Finally, most of the imaginary technology on display in the movie was brilliant. The details on the starship were spectacular, and those little pods which the people lived on were fantastic. But why did Wall-E, back on earth, have a betamax VCR and a cassette (Hello Dolly!) from the 60s? Wouldn’t he have an abandoned DVD player or something instead? There must be some story behind this, so will one of the creators of the movie tell us?

There are only a few movies out there which have scenes in them filled with such lush detail of imaginary worlds, but Wall-E enthralls you in almost every scene, leaving you to ponder a thousand little questions. Perhaps that’s why it isn’t surprising that this is the first movie in a long time that left me with so many thoughts after the movie.

If you haven’t seen it yet, go see the movie, and come up with your own questions.

Life in science isn’t a bed of roses, and being a postdoc is hard enough as it is. So it is important to keep one’s spirit up, particularly during the long phases of hard work without successful (read “publishable”) results. As in any other workplace though, your general contentment level is influenced by the people around you, especially your peers. Postdocs come in all shapes, sizes and characters, but there are a few character types you want to avoid hanging out with (even if you are one of them), in order to remain sane and content. Surprisingly, like most normal people, postdocs too fit into some characteristic groups (including those you want to avoid). So here are some of the classes of postdocs whom I do my best to avoid (and hope never to become).

The arrogant prick: Unfortunately, this class of postdoc isn’t too uncommon.
This class has two subtypes, (a) the “publication snob” and (b) the “research snob”. The publication snob is the person who thinks anything published in journals other than Cell, Science or Nature is worthless, and tells you exactly how worthless it is every time you see them. This is even if you have just published a very nice piece of work in a “lesser” journal, and (s)he knows about it. Yet, worse than journal snobs are research snobs. These people think the only interesting/important/cool/spectacular research in the world is being done in their lab, and more importantly is being done by them. Everyone else is just wasting taxpayer resources and chemicals. The research snob talks to you with a condescending sneer, and feigns politeness when you talk to him/her about your work, pretending to listen, and then shrugging in a knowing manner while asking you what the big deal is. There is only one person worse than a research snob. That person is a journal AND research snob, and, unfortunately, there are plenty of those as well.

The radiator of negativity™: This class of postdoc must be avoided at all costs. If you see one of them, turn and run the other way. If they see you turning and running, pretend you have forgotten something or have to get back to an experiment (use a timer), and still run. Because, if you spend any time conversing with them, they will effortlessly leave you suicidal. These people ooze out negativity, making everything around them miserable even if you’ve been feeling perfectly happy before seeing them. Here’s a hypothetical sample conversation with a radiator of negativity™.

“Hey, what’s up? Things going well? How’s research and the job search?”

“Not really. I’m stuck working on some papers for publication”

“Isn’t that good?”

“No. They aren’t going to be Cell papers, which means they won’t get me a job, which means I’ve wasted the past five years. This area of research has no future.”

Now you get defensive and worried and say “That’s not really true, is it? You can do good work that isn’t published in Cell and still find a job”, and wonder about that postdoc’s area of research (which you think is pretty hot).

“Not really. Even if the work is good, it doesn’t matter. The system sucks, and there aren’t any jobs out there. Anyway, no one here helps you get a job. What’s the use of working for a famous PI if I can’t find a job. But they don’t help you find a job at all.” moans Negativity, thus in one single stroke making you feel your work is useless, hate your chosen job, your research area, your boss, your institution and also filling your mind with dark thoughts for the future. You are convinced that there is no future and you should have become that doctor your parents always wanted you to be. Meanwhile, Mr/Ms. Negativity walks away without the slightest hint that those words have left your mind in a maelstrom.

The irrevocably depressed: This class of postdoc is only a little better than the radiator of negativity. This person has a naturally depressive personality, and is him/herself easily depressed. It hasn’t helped his/her cause that the past 3 years of ceaseless toil have yielded poor rewards. Which means this person is perennially suicidal. A conversation with this person will be something like this:

“Hey, what’s up? How’s work?”

Deep sigh. “It’s tough. This project isn’t going anywhere. But the boss wants this work done right now. But what’s the use of doing this? It’ll get me nowhere. It’s too late for me now. I don’t know what I’ll do. I can never get a job.” Pause. Another deep sigh. “But you’re ok. You are still young.”

You are left feeling absolutely terrible for that person, and then panic sets in as you start worrying about yourself.

The insane workaholic: This class of postdoc is pure intimidation. This postdoc works 16 hour days seven days a week, juggling 6 experiments every day. His/her eyes are bleary, with dark circles around them. You don’t know when (or if) he/she eats or sleeps. Wears the same sweatshirt almost everyday. One day he/she mentions to you that his/her weekend was very relaxing. It was the first weekend in three years that this person had taken off.

And you wonder if that is what’s needed in order to succeed. Is life as a successful scientist really that hard?

There’s plenty of pressure as it is in being a postdoc. There’s no need to be in any of these classes, making every one around you unhappy. Some people hate happy campers, and wonder how some people can remain reasonably happy always, through ups and downs at work. But I love them, and wish more postdocs were like that. A dash of positivity, a little bit of humility, the ability to laugh off mistakes, and finding time to relax. Just give me enough of that and the postdoc life will remain a lot of fun.