Thank you all SOOOOO much for all of the ideas for while I'm gone. I've done a combination of all of them, basically. Now, I need to spend some time actually preparing for the work I'm supposed to go do in the field... oof.
On a separate front...
Last week, we had a tenured faculty meeting in my dept to review the case of a guy who is up for tenure. The great thing about it was that he's a superstar and it is a slam dunk case.
The bad thing? I think that just about every single one of us felt bad after seeing his file.
11 papers per year on average during the tenure review period
5 major grants from federal granting agencies
400+ manuscripts peer-reviewed
12 graduate students, or more, each year in his lab, plus 1-3 postdocs
outstanding teacher awards out the wazoo
is that really, humanly possible?
Here's the math applied to my style:
I spend about 6-8 hours reviewing a paper. That would mean, for me, over a solid year of reviewing one paper a day and nothing else.
I spend about 1-2 hours a week interacting with each graduate student in my lab. That would mean that I'd be spending 20 hours a week on the care and feeding of graduate students.
Now add on all the paper writing, the class prep, the proposal writing and logistics. (I averaged about 3.5 peer-reviewed, solid papers (i.e., not counting book reviews or non-peer-reviewed stuff) published a year in my tenure review period, and I felt like I worked my ass off.)
How the hell does someone do this? AND, may I add, he's got a 4 year old. Granted, his wife is not of the academic sort but she does work almost full time.
And to top it off, he's a really nice guy. I want to hate him. I want to think that maybe there is some dubious thing going on here. But in reality, even if you consider that virtually all of those reviews were through his role as an associate editor for a journal, or that he was the lead PI on just two of those grants, it is still a fuck of a lot of work he's done.
Me is envious. And baffled. You ever seen such a thing?
On a separate front...
Last week, we had a tenured faculty meeting in my dept to review the case of a guy who is up for tenure. The great thing about it was that he's a superstar and it is a slam dunk case.
The bad thing? I think that just about every single one of us felt bad after seeing his file.
11 papers per year on average during the tenure review period
5 major grants from federal granting agencies
400+ manuscripts peer-reviewed
12 graduate students, or more, each year in his lab, plus 1-3 postdocs
outstanding teacher awards out the wazoo
is that really, humanly possible?
Here's the math applied to my style:
I spend about 6-8 hours reviewing a paper. That would mean, for me, over a solid year of reviewing one paper a day and nothing else.
I spend about 1-2 hours a week interacting with each graduate student in my lab. That would mean that I'd be spending 20 hours a week on the care and feeding of graduate students.
Now add on all the paper writing, the class prep, the proposal writing and logistics. (I averaged about 3.5 peer-reviewed, solid papers (i.e., not counting book reviews or non-peer-reviewed stuff) published a year in my tenure review period, and I felt like I worked my ass off.)
How the hell does someone do this? AND, may I add, he's got a 4 year old. Granted, his wife is not of the academic sort but she does work almost full time.
And to top it off, he's a really nice guy. I want to hate him. I want to think that maybe there is some dubious thing going on here. But in reality, even if you consider that virtually all of those reviews were through his role as an associate editor for a journal, or that he was the lead PI on just two of those grants, it is still a fuck of a lot of work he's done.
Me is envious. And baffled. You ever seen such a thing?
:)
ReplyDeleteYeah, there are people like that. I collaborate with one. I don't know about the 400 paper thing, as you said, being an associate editor accounts for that, but it's still 80 per year (assuming he's been there 5 yrs now) or about 1.6 per week.
I was actually amazed that he kept count of how much he reviewed; I would have no idea. I do full review of maybe 1 per week, or maybe 3 per month.
As for papers per year, it scales with the size of the group. Seems like postdocs maybe 2 per year (on average 2 postdocs, 2*2 paper per year) and students on average maybe 0.5-1 per year (so 6 total if at 0.5), so it does come to about what he has, right?
I like to use the metric I just decided I could call PYG (number of Papers per Year and per Group member). In my field, if you plot this number as a function of group size, it's about 1 or over until you start hitting the group size where it's more than one postdoc and then you delegate much of the supervising, so the PYG number drops. Of course, this number can be very high in groups that have disproportionately more postdocs than grad students, but I consider these groups to be an abomination at universities as they shun the actual education aspect of being at a university.
We see output of this kind in our chemistry department, where groups are huge and a large percentage of people are funded on TA's because they teach service courses to the whole university. Can't have stratospheric output without a lot of people.
The question is whether you want to have a lot of people. I have 1 postdoc and 7 grad students, and that's all I can handle because, like you, I actually work with each one of them. I have colleagues with groups of 20-30, with multiple postdocs. They spend a lot of time fundraising and they basically meet only with the postdocs. They don't necessarily have a higher PYG than me, because the grad students are markedly less productive on average than those of mine who are closely supervised, but there are more postdocs...
How was that for rambling? :)
I know how you feel. I feel like that around my electric bunny, super accomplished male collaborator (he's single and crazily well networked). Byt my collaborator is a bit of a dick, and yours is nice. So this is what I would tell myself: take a deep breath, tell yourself that it's great your department has such an accomplished young faculty member, and go out of your way to nominate him for awards and do good things for him. I have found out that doing good things for people I envy, but who have really done nothing wrong, makes me feel better about myself all around.
Luck, organization, connections, and intelligence. Enough from each category and it's possible.
ReplyDelete