Academia can be a wonderful place to work, but it has its issues.  On this page we've compiled random bits of helpful advice, perspectives and humor on issues faced by some or all members of the lab.  Of course, just about anything you might want advice about you can find by searching the Chronicle of Higher Education online, but here are a few gems...


Why is Graduate School so Hard???
Graduate school will test your self confidence constantly as you jump through the hurdles of classes, qualifying exams, proposal and paper writing and defense of your dissertation.  It is inevitable that a graduate student will reach a point where they question the decision to pursue a PhD and question their own ability to make it to the finish line.  Here are a few perspectives that may help graduate students cope...


and its important to keep a good sense of humor and perspective... here are some funny commentaries on the life of a PhD student

Other People's Better Complilation of Advice for Graduate Students 

This page of advice for graduate students put together by Dr. Spencer Hall at Indiana University is really comprehensive with the latest articles on applying to and succeeding in graduate school, writing papers, getting grants, giving talks and getting a job. A truly great website.

Dealing with Writer's Block

Everyone struggles with the writing process, it can be hard to start writing a proposal or paper, but its even harder to decide when you have finished.  Here are some good resources. 
  • Several years ago our whole lab group read Josh Schimel's new book "Writing Science: How to Write Papers that Get Cited and Grants that get Funded" This is an excellent guide to writing that has helped all of us think more analytically and strategically about our writing.
  • The Online Guide to Scientific Publication supported by the Commonwealth Foundation provides some excellent pre-writing strategies for scoping your manuscript as well as  good advice about reaching your target audience and dealing with paper criticism and rejection 
  • Gopen and Swan (1990) published a paper on the Science of Scientific Writing in American Scientist.  This paper gives good advice on how to structure your scientific prose most (and least) effectively.
  • In a 1967 paper in Science, F.P. Woodward worried that "communication between scientists will degenerate into chaos and scientific thinking will decay into a haze of fruitless intuitive feeling" without more attention to training young scientists in scientific writing.  His main thesis is that clear writing is key to clear thinking and he rails against "fashionable foundationese".  A great article that provides an inadvertent introduction to many lesser known adjectives.
  • Here's a nice article by Cahill, Lyons and Karst from a 2011 ESA Bulletin entitled "Finding the Pitch in Ecological Writing".  One of the main points of this paper is to help ecologists navigate the space in between 2 important rules of thumb: 1) A high-pressured “sell” won't work in scientific writing and 2) A paper without pitch won't work.

Assessment - what makes a good scientist?

Good ideas, hard work and great papers, right??   Well, that's the idea, but in actuality there's a lot of other parts to the job.  Posted here are a collection of interesting articles about how faculty (and future faculty) are assessed.

Collaboration - Trials and Tribulations

Working on research questions as teams is necessary but hard.  Here are some useful tools.

"What is research collaboration?" by Katz and Martin is an excellent 1997 article in the journal Research Policy about the costs and benefits of collaboration for science and scientists.

The most important aspect of any collaboration is the need to talk openly and frequently about individual responsibilities and plans for authorship. Since multi-author papers are the currency by which a successful collaboration is judged while lead authorship is a necessary CV builder for junior scientists - there are inevitably significant tensions within collaborations over authorship. There is a lot written on this topic. We like "A New Standard for Authorship" by Paul Friedman as a simple set of rules of thumb.

The Two Body Problem

(by E. Bernhardt) I had never heard this phrase until I was a postdoctoral scientist getting my first interview offers for faculty positions.  As I prepared for my interviews, one of the most important issues I had to resolve was whether to tell anyone about my academic spouse, and if I did tell anyone who should I tell and what should I say. This is the "2 body problem" - the issue that many academics find themselves partnered with another academic, and finding two jobs for two people in the same place can be incredibly challenging.  My husband and I met and married in graduate school and we are both ecologists - we now both have tenured faculty positions at Duke.  I often get asked by graduate students and postdocs - how did you do that?  The truth is we were lucky in our timing and our faculty colleagues at Duke were supportive of both of us and interested in making things work.  Here I have posted links to some of the most useful commentaries and analysis of this important topic.  All of these resources have good advice about job hunting with an academic partner and about work-family balance.

Work-Life Balance

How can you manage an academic career and a family?  This is a question that is often asked about women in science, but which in truth everyone in academia struggles with to some extent.  The structure of the typical academic career can make it difficult to find the right time to start a family and to find a way to be both an involved partner/parent and a successful scientist.  Once you get tenure, academia offers enormous flexibility, but en route to that goal there are a lot of constraints.  Here are some helpful articles and essays on the subject.

"Women in Science: in pursuit of female chemists" from Nature (18 Aug 2011)
"Housework is an Academic Issue" time invested in housework/childcare commitments  varies greatly with gender in dual career couples (where at least one partner is a scientist) by Londa Schiebinger and Shannon K. Gilmartin, posted on "Academe Online"
"The Door in the Dream" is a 2000 book that summarizes the authors conversations with female members of the National Academy of Sciences. It is interesting (and comforting) to learn just how varied the paths these trailblazing women took to prominence in their fields.

Diversity and Inclusion in the Academy

What can you do to diversify the perspectives and the people that make up the academy?

The most important work we can each do to diversify the academy is to learn about the challenges that underrepresented groups face. We can never really walk in another person's shoes, but we can listen and begin to understand better some of the systemic challenges that women, people of color and LGBTQ scientists face as they attempt to pursue a really challenging career path. 

Read about Diverse Perspectives:

​"What is faculty diversity worth to a University" by Patricia Matthew in The Atlantic in November 2016. In this article Dr. Matthew talks about the "invisible labor" that many faculty of color do in service of the diversity goals of their University but without recognition or reward for these efforts.

An earlier article in the Chronicle for Higher Education "The invisible labor of minority professors" by Audrey Williams June discusses the "cultural taxation" on minority faculty that results from having the undergraduate student body diversifying far faster than the faculty called upon to mentor and teach these students.

Be proactive
You can be intentional about who you nominate for talks and awards, who you solicit when you are recruiting, and who you call upon for reviews or cite in your papers. The Diversify EEB for faculty and Diversify EEB Grads are part of an awesome effort to connect ecologists and evolutionary biologists who care about diversifying the academy with women and minority scientists in the field. If you are from an underrepresented group in EEB sign up! If you are not the site is really useful to you because the idea is to use these lists to come up with more diverse speaker lists, award nominations, reviewers, etc., etc. The list can also be used for recruiting applicants into job searches. A great idea from Gina Baucom and Meghan Duffy. There are a lot of really wonderful discussions of why EEB is not more diverse and why women are not winning prizes on the Dynamic Ecology blog that Duffy writes together with Jeremy Fox and Brian McGill.  

Be an ally:
If there were no barriers to men’s participation, we would all be doing it: a unique perspective on how to be a male ally to women in ecology - Dynamic Ecology post by Jeremy Fox