STEM Minorities

Having some experience with programs designed to promote participation in the STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) disciplines by underrepresented groups, I did not want Black History Month go by without a comment on why members of underrepresented groups should consider careers in the STEM fields.

The scientific method is the great democratizer.  It does not matter what your gender, race or creed is.  If you come from poverty or wealth, in the STEM fields it only matters that you have uncovered truth.  Not objective truth, but verifiable truth.

Do you wish to be judged by the content of your character?  Then study in the STEM fields where your contribution becomes part of the foundation upon which the future is built regardless of who you are.  

Will it be hard work?  You bet it will.  But when you are done you will be capable of engineering, chemistry, biology, biochemistry, physics, or mathematics.  You can make the things you need to live and live well.  What you get for your work is entry into fields that promise at minimum a middle class life.

What communities are mired in poverty, which communities are underrepresented in the STEM fields.  If you can see that connection, you can see the trends upon which scientific theories and laws arise.

If you think you are held down by the man, or by men, a STEM life is one where your skill, and your knowledge will have to be acknowledged simply because you have used it to discover objective truth and use that truth to build something. 

Sage Advice

In a comment in one of my recent posts, Lizzy uses a quote to paraphrase a story I told my research students.  The story Lizzy refers to comes from my days as a graduate student.  

My PhD advisor was in the lab on one of his daily checks to see how things were going.  In the course of the conversation he told one student who was blue about how badly things were going that "When things are tough you have to work harder in order to get through the bad times."  About a minute later after being told how my work had turned a corner and was going well he advised that, "Things in the lab don't go well that often, so you need to work harder during those positive times to take advantage of the up cycle before it is gone."  Being even more brash then I am now I burst out laughing.  In response to my mentor's scowl over my response to his sage advice, I pointed out that in a couple of minutes he had made the case that there is no time in which the graduate student should not be working harder.  (As a faculty member I now believe he was right, but that is beside the point.)  

It is embarrassing to consider the nuggets of wisdom your students will carry forward.  For someone who cares deeply about the skills I pass to my students I shake my head when I discover what they have carried away.

Several years ago I was in communication with one of my earliest students.  He claimed that the best advice I ever gave him was,  "When preparing for a career, strive to master a set of skills that can't be duplicated by trained chimps." 

While I wish I could say I never said such a thing, it may be something I said.

Why Teach at a PUI?

It was a rough week in the lab last week, not so much because of the lab work itself but because of all the distractions that hold up lab progress.  In days like this I must remind myself why I do the work I do. 

Faculty members come in many flavors.  Some faculty at PUI's are there because their particular genius was not recognized by the research (RO1) institutions who were looking for junior faculty.  Some faculty at PUI's are there because the one thing they know is college, and they have no greater ambition than to spend the rest of their days lecturing and doing an occasional experiment.  

Many PUI Faculty, including me, chose a PUI career.  I did even before starting my PhD studies.  In a research active PUI the faculty get to work in the lab directly with students during the students earliest development as a scientist.  If it is true that when the pupil is ready the teacher will come, then the PUI faculty member gets to be that teacher.  In those college years with all the searching to build their own identity many students are ready.  As a faculty member you can guide muddled minds into the mind of a scientist ready to achieve success in a career or in a graduate school.  In another time we celebrated lines like "You come in here with skull full of mush and you leave thinking like a lawyer."

I must admit that I am a lab rat.  I love solving puzzles and designing experiments to solve puzzles.  Those reactions that give unexpected products that must be identified make my day.  Well, at least the day that I figure out what was formed and develop a reasonable mechanistic explanation as to why.  There is power in discovery and research scientist get to discover on a regular basis.  

For me the next best thing to discovering something myself is leading someone else to discovery.  If I give my students one, or two, or many tools that they can use to find success in their lives and careers, I have done something that gives my life value.  

The output of laboratories is measured in papers and citations, but in the PUI world the output of students should be equally important.  Unfortunately, there are no citations to demonstrate the quality of product produced in the PUI laboratory.  It would be a good thing if employers and graduate faculty would provide feedback to the undergraduate research mentors of their new employees or graduates students documenting the quality of product produced. 

Will My MLB Career Interfere with My Opera Career?

Just when I promised myself to be more positive and to rant less comes today's NYTimes and the article titled "Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes".  (The Times does set the bar high, I expect tomorrow's front page to have the Headline, "Wife's Expectations Cause Husband to Sleep in Garage."  But, I digress.)

Within the article can be found the following quotes:

A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.

Nearly two-thirds of the students surveyed said that if they explained to a professor that they were trying hard, that should be taken into account in their grade.

One young scholar provided the following quote:

“If you put in all the effort you have and get a C, what is the point?” he added. “If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be getting an A like their effort deserves. If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher’s mind, then something is wrong.”

This certainly explains the complaints on student evaluations that grading expectations of faculty are too high.  Actually requiring skill attainment appears to demand too much when wanting skill attainment or "trying hard" should be enough.  Maybe we could add a few questions to the faculty eval that allow students to indicate what their expectations are.  Of course this would only tell us what we don't really want to know from those customer satisfaction surveys.

OK!  I get it.  In the spirit of disengagement from reality, if today's reactions don't work I am submitting them to JACS anyway!  Damn it, the reviewers should recognize how hard I worked to try to prove my hypothesis, how much I wanted it.  Following this I will be submitting grant applications to NSF, because I will try hard to prove that the correct incantation will yield chirality.  And how dare they not publish my papers and fund my grants.

To put it in terms outside chemistry, I have always wanted to play in major league baseball, in the NFL, and sing opera.  The fact that I can't hit a curve ball, I am over 50, and my mother told me I can't carry a tune in a bucket should not matter.  All that should matter is that I want it and I try hard.  Skills be damned.

Be it professional sport, Survivor, or American Idol (two shows my students love) we have no problem judging people by their skills rather than their effort or desire.  We do ourselves no favors when we allow the next generations to disconnect success for skill.

Whew!  I think I need a cool compress (or perhaps a cool drink).

Funding Undergraduate Research

My friend the gaussling, who hosts the blog Lamentations on Chemistry, posted a link to one of my earlier posts drawing the following comment from a reader.

"Maybe undergrad research should be funded by the colleges as part of the cost of education."

In a perfect world this would happen, but there are several factors that complicate the issue.

1)  The National Study of Instructional Costs and Productivity shows that training people in the sciences and engineering already cost more than training people in other fields.  Since most institutions use a flat rate tuition structure the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields may only be a break even proposition with the little support for research they provide now.  This is particularly true if the school is an underfunded and low tuition public institution (not that I know any of these).

2)  Schools make budgets based on the number of students impacted.  Specific faculty members research needs only touch a small number of students per year, so setting up and maintaining a research group is not viewed as cost effective.  We can try to use the equipment provided for teaching, but training STEM students in current techniques requires research grade equipment which is much more expensive and requires much more maintenance that the stripped down, often ancient, equipment we use in teaching.  In many cases modern technique also requires equipment well beyond that used in teaching.  Since research is not viewed a part of the education of students, resources to support purchase and upkeep of this higher end equipment is not available in the university budget.

Undergraduate and the bastard stepchild MS research should be supported.  It would be nice if colleges would do it, but they don't to anywere near a viable level.  Groups like CUR and NCUR do great work trying to spread the word on the needs for support.  Unfortunately, increasing pressure to find external support meet low and shrinking levels of funding.  We need to be creative and find new avenues to support what may be the most important activity of PUI and MS faculty members. 

Transformative Synthesis Funding II

Continuing on the topic of the last post . . .

If we can agree for purposes of this discussion that 1) the non-academic stake holders value the training of BS/MS students in organic synthesis and 2) non-RO1 institutions are generally not in a position to internally support synthesis research, even if it is a component of the training of graduates, how can we create a system that serves everyone?

Industry folks often indicate in conversation that there are questions they would like someone to answer because they might provide some useful incites, but which are not necessarily patentable or of sufficient value to expend the money it would cost to pay someone in house to undertake the work.  

Organic synthesis MS programs have students to train who get paid rather little and faculty who are hungry to do meaningful chemistry that supports training  their students.

So, industry folks have got questions and academic folks are dedicated to using questions to train their students.  

Offer you questions to us.  Lets start a regional site where the faculty can go find the questions you would like addressed.  Groups like the Philadelphia Organic Chemists Club or a regional university could provide the site.  It could be somewhat like the innocentive challenges, only the faculty are proposing the seek a solution in exchange for support rather than finding the solution on their own dime and trying to sell it to you.

The faculty member would write a brief proposal offering to tackle the problem in exchange for support for the research.  Support could be in the form of providing fellowships to BS/MS degree candidates and some reasonable costs for chemicals, consumables, etc.  Depending on the challenge and faculty member it might be worthwhile to provide some money so the faculty member can buy out some classroom teaching in favor of working on the problem with the students.  I think you will find it cheap compared to in house work on non-patentable studies.

But what, do the industry folks get?  Their questions get answered and new organic synthesis BS/MS graduates enter the pipeline.  This is a group of graduates who, if they don't move to graduate school, generally don't want to travel too far from home.  So by working with the schools in your region you train your own workforce on your questions.

It's just an idea.  It might even work for everyone in part of the country where there is a strong synthesis community.  It could also be translatable to biotech or other fields where there is a need to train BS/MS researchers but few resources.

Transformative Synthesis Funding

In recent years, a number of research institute/research university folks have come through my office during visits to give seminars.  A common comment from them is that at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUI) and terminal MS granting programs, a research program focused on synthesis is a fools errand.  

By the time an undergraduate or MS student has the skills to produce, purify, and characterize something they are gone off to a PhD program or a job as a research associate.  Given the constant need for the faculty member to start from scratch on lab skills development with the next student the pace of progress is glacial.  Given the emphasis of funding agencies on transformative research, which has made funding for synthesis harder to obtain, the combined challenges can make organic synthesis in PUIs and MS programs a career dead end for the faculty member.  While there are notable exceptions, in most cases those exceptions tend to groups where there are postdocs who, regardless of where their names appear on the authors list in papers, tend to carry the weight of the research progress.

The general assumption is that training students in advances skills is part of their college education and why we pay taxes to support higher education.  Unfortunately it does not work that way.  For instance in California public higher education institutions there is no allocation in the funding formula even for research space in campus buildings to support undergraduate or faculty research.  Only graduate students generate space under the formula.

With increased pressure on faculty at PUIs and MS programs to get external funding to support research programs, the synthetic chemist faces the prospect of loosing lab space and/or resources from the university.  So, while the slow rate of return makes it difficult to get grant funding for synthetic projects, the university increasingly demands that programs be self supporting, make such programs a risk to ones career development.

Oddly, graduate programs appear to value the training synthetic organic students get.  I also somewhat regularly hear from pharma where they can use all the well trained synthetic organic people I can send them.  So, we have one of those fundamental disconnects that plague society.  We produce something of value, but no one wants to pay the cost of production.  

So, how can we support training undergraduate and MS synthesis?  

Damn, got to get back to the hood, so you will have to wait for my ideas.

Trust but verify

On another note, things are progressing, albeit slowly, in the lab.  I have spent most of my time so far purify materials and trying to make sense of my students notebooks.  I have managed to purify a few compounds that based on my student's NMRs clearly were not pure before.  I got one nicely crystalline compound that is in the x-ray as I write.  

Working with undergraduates and MS candidates can be trying.  Partially because my students chaff under demands that they show me notebooks and spectra and partially because I want them to take ownership in their projects I try to treat them like the professionals they strive to be.  I ask them if they have documented work, determined yields, made sure compounds are in a pure enough stated and sufficiently analyzed to pass muster with JOC reviewers and always get an affirmative answer.

Unfortunately, in my career I have had to go into the lab and redo every experiment my students have done to get it into publishable shape.  Much of what I am doing, my students should have done.  Perhaps they did but their notebooks contain less detail then found on the average public restroom wall.  

It is at these times that I think of the public humiliation of faculty members when seemingly important work has been withdrawn when it could not be repeated and was found to be false.  While it is the research mentor/primary author's responsibility to verify all data, one does want to trust there students or postdocs.  

So, when your "bad boss" micromanages your work, cut her some slack and recognize that in the mentor's mind needing to redo work wastes resources and delays publication.  Incorrect or false reporting sends people down wrong paths and ultimately reduces funding potential.  Bad lab work and bad reporting of lab work make, or at least contribute to making, bad bosses.

Faculty Evaluations II

In the last post I wrote a bit about evaluations of faculty members and promised to write about what in my opinion is a proper faculty evaluation by students.

As noted in the previous post, I don't believe that students in a course are in any position to evaluate the educational quality of the experience.  They are in a position to evaluate if the faculty member followed the syllabus, was prepared for class, and returned graded assignments in a reasonable time and with evaluative comments that could aid learning.  These are universal experiences for all student in the class.

Some, but not all students are in a position to report if the faculty member kept office hours or not.  Since only about fifteen to twenty percent of my students ever come to see me or send e-mail with questions, I find it curious that greater than ninety five percent of the students evaluate my keeping of office hours.  Can we couple this with a question as to were my office is.  The results might be interesting.

The above type of questions could, and should, be asked near the end of the semester.  But no evaluation should be given without one question that is missing from most student evaluations.  "What grade do you think you will get in this class?"  

Every time I hear or read about someone reporting that there is no correlation between student evaluations of faculty and grades I laugh.  I once taught at an institution that asked some version of my question.  They also used plus/minus grading.  So, I took five years of grades from sections I taught.  I calculated the average class expected GPA and correlated the average score students gave my on the question, "How do you rate this instructor as a teacher?"  Result >98% correlation between class expected GPA and rating of me as an instructor.  

But, I digress.

The questions that basically ask if the instructor can teach, or did teach are, IMO, best left until after the student has moved on to the next course or to a job.  This is were the student finds out if they got the education they needed.  Ask the student about the previous course instructor as they work though the next course and you will likely hear a different story then at the end of the semester.

If you ask folks in the military about their drill instructor (DI) before and after they go into combat you might find a similar effect.  In the military, you can only ask the survivors, but they again, percentage of survivors is a type of evaluation in itself.