Remembering Tom Taylor

I found out the other day that one of my graduate school professors had passed away. Tom Taylor was a paleobotanist at KU and member of the National Academy of Sciences. When I arrived in KU in 1999 as a starting graduate student, Tom was the department chair of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. My advisor Steve Ashe (probably realizing how "green" I was) recommended that I should take a class offered by Tom called "The art of becoming a professional scientist". To this day, I do not think any other activity as a graduate student influenced more my trajectory as an academic. His class really helped me and dozens of other students over the years to realize what it takes to be a graduate student, to start networking with colleagues (as an exercise we had to send five reprint requests per week), and to start publishing early and consistently.

There were many times in my graduate career that I barged into Tom's office to ask him questions [and remember this guy was the department chair] and he was always welcoming. I remember one particular afternoon in my third year that he spent a good hour talking with me [without scheduling a meeting with him] about career and life in general, trying to help me in a particular difficult spot in my life. I look back now [with a better understanding of time constraints and work load] and I am both surprised and grateful of how open Tom was to impromptu meetings like that.

I do not know how well liked Tom was as a department chair; the few departmental meetings that I attended as a graduate student were     l e g e n d a r y. But I have come to realize that no department chair is ever liked by his/her faculty. And I know many graduate students that found their footings in their professional life because of Tom's class and I am deeply grateful for the impact he had in my life. 

Surviving the pre tenure years

I am taking a small break from rove beetle posts to talk about something that I know very little about:  how to survive the pre tenure years. I recently (one year ago) got tenure and Pröf-like Substance had a post today soliciting opinions on how people “cleared the bar”. I am not claiming that my approach will work for everybody in a similar situation but below is what I found useful. For clarification, I work at metropolitan Master’s University with ~11,000 student enrollment. Some departments in my University have low or no research expectations but in my department it is expected that people will have an active research program.

1: Don’t be an asshole. To your students, to other faculty, to administrators or administrative assistants. Simply. Do. Not. People are willing to look the other way if you are marginally under the bar and you have been a decent human being but they will come to hunt you if you have behaved otherwise. Although I have seen assholes getting tenured in my University, it is always much harder to do so. Do not start personal vendettas with other faculty, like the year you are going up for tenure. Seriously.

2: Find out what works for you and your students in teaching and stick to it. Some faculty want to change how they teach every semester and this is not really a good idea in the pre tenure years. Find a teaching style that gets you good (or even better: excellent) evaluations and stick to it until you get tenure. Changing teaching style every other semester will result in fluctuating teaching evaluations and this is rarely seen as a good thing.

3: For the love of FSM, do research. In a primarily teaching University like the one I am working it is very easy to spend all of your time teaching, advising students and participating in committee work. Close your door, hide, turn off your light if you have to, but keep those papers coming out. And by the way, research = papers published. Invited talks, conferences, "reports" etc are nice but they do not cut it.

4: Apply for grants. Even in a undergraduate institution, having an externally funded competitive grant will go a long way towards getting tenure.

5: And finally: when I was a graduate student E. O. Wiley told me that “one shoud always try to get tenure and then solve the problems of the world”.

7/3/14 update: And if you have to talk at faculty meetings during the first years, follow the Silent Bob model: when you speak make sure it matters. 

Sometimes at a teaching institution you are an island

I wore this awesome t-shirt at work today designed by Ainsley Seago (@americanbeetles on twitter)  and nobody got the joke. Some of my colleagues looked amused and a couple of my last semester General Entomology students looked like they understood there was a joke somewhere, but nothing more than that. Yes, perhaps you need a Ph. D. in insect systematics to get it*, but that's not the point. The point is that in a primarily undergraduate teaching institute chances are your colleagues will not have a clue about your research. I am not saying this as a negative thing about my colleagues; each one of us is doing his/her own thing but because of the particular institutional circumstances it is rather rare that two faculty will have the same research interest. For example, there are a number of systematists at UTC but nobody else does insects. Sometimes I really miss working in an entomology department or/and a museum...


* On the t-shirt there is a picture of a male Strepsiptera, known as a the twisted-winged parasites. In the 90s there was a lot of controversy regarding the sister group of Strepsiptera (whether they were related to Coleoptera or Diptera) and their phylogenies were used as a prime example of long branch attraction. 

Biology related music

We all get feedback from students and frankly this two way communication is one of the best perks in the job. During the Spring semester, I was talking about conifers in my Principles of Biology II class. Specifically, I was taking about the bristlecone pines (Pinus aristata) found in the western USA and how some of those have been around for several thousand years.

One of my students later emailed me saying that my lecture reminded her of the song "Bristlecone" by the "The New Empires".  It is a lovely song and you can listen to it here. 

The value of teaching collections

When I first arrived at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga five years ago, I did not expect to find much in the form of an entomological collection. To my surprise, our little Natural History Museum had a descent teaching collection (~48 drawers) with many of the families of insects found in the Southeast. Like most teaching collections, specimens are collected by students, identified (typically) to the family level and the locality labels can be problematic (e.g. on non-archival paper, with non-archival ink) without enough details. I bet most specimens in the collection have labels in the following format:

TN: Hamilton Co.
Chattanooga, date
collector.

Yet despite these problems, teaching collections can contain real gems. Last week we had a visitor from Alabama (Steve Krotzer) who wanted to examine our collection for tiger beetles. Tiger beetles are particularly hard to collect and if you don't care much about them (let's say you study rove beetles) you don't collect them, so our research collection did not have any. The teaching collection contained 31 specimens (10 species) and among those they were 13 new county records (!): ten from Tennessee, one from Alabama, one from Georgia and one from Florida.

Anybody else want to examine specimens?