Student Pathways I

When I interviewed for my current position one of my future colleagues warned me that it was "impossible" to get BS/MS students to participate in synthetic organic research.  This was because other research areas "require less commitment" in order to get a table of results.  His feeling was that synthesis was "too much work" and the rewards were too slow in coming to attract today's students.  While I can't say that I have had that much difficulty attracting students into my group, I do notice that the students who come in and stay in tend to have a different commitment to their research than those that move on.  

Those that move on tend to be the middle-skill scientists who would be perfectly happy in a QA/QC lab, or who will move out of the lab and into some professional capacity that may or may not take advantage of there science background.  In the Student Pathways II post I will get on the topic of the "professional science" degree, which might better serve these students than the traditional BA.

The students who have the passion for the science and are willing to put it high on their priority list will go into synthesis.  The same passion will guide them to graduate school.  The secret, if it is one, to finding students to participate in synthetic organic research is to find those who's passion and interest could make them graduate school candidates.  The faculty member can't wait for the student to come to them though.  Most students don't know much about graduate school and where it can take them.  It is incumbent on the would-be mentor to open to world of possibility to the students and show them how graduate school can lead them to this promised land.

T.S. Hall

 

Can a Mechanism be Known?

In a comment on an earlier post the commentary by Allen Buskirk and Hediyeh Baradaran and reviewer response commentaries in this month's issue of the Journal of Chemical Education was brought up.  The commentary raises the issue of if a mechanism can be known, and if we should teach mechanisms as known in the traditional one-year organic course.  The commentary is provocative and worth reading and thinking about.

One issue raised was the idea that, by teaching students that a mechanism can only be proven to be in error and not be proven to be correct, we discourage them.

We fear, however, that the idea that mechanisms can never be proven or even supported by evidence will discourage students from using all the tools at their disposal. 

My experience has been the opposite.  The idea that not all is known and that what we think we know may be in error ignites the imagination of many students.  When we suggest that they might add to our understanding or invent the new tool that will help us get a clearer picture of what is happening is just the tonic needed to inspire more students to enter careers in the sciences.

Personally, I believe that it is a good thing in general to teach people that there are no absolutes.  All "knowledge" is biased by the perspective of the observer.  Remaining open to the possibility that we are wrong, questioning why we believe, and seeking a more universal truth is at the core of science, and would serve us well outside the lab.  It is the belief that we know absolute truth already that keeps us from using all the tools at our disposal to make a better world.

T.S. Hall

University Staff

There is some hubbub in the academic ranks over the last week or so about a study from the Center for College Affordability that shows over the last twenty years the growth non-instructional staff of colleges and universities have out striped the growth in instructional staff and students.  The instructional staff are up in arms over this, feeling that the increasing number of instructional staff should come first.

I am in favor of increasing the number of instructional staff.  The number of students in my lectures has more than doubled over my nineteen year career and has only stopped growing because there are no larger classrooms on campus to herd the students into.

Over the same nineteen years I have seen the concept of shared governance erode as faculty avoid committee work in favor of having administration and staff members run the day-to-day operations.  Universities "professionalize" advising by hiring staff to take over for faculty.  Likewise as universities have increasingly pushed externally funded research technical staff are needed to maintain increasingly sophisticated equipment.  The push to on-line learning and paperless libraries make it necessary to have IT departments that did not previously exist.  Students and their parents demand career councilors, and directors of study abroad programs, and expanded health facilities.  All these are staff positions.

The problem with higher education funding is the same as the problem with funding the government.  We want the latest technology and the best services, but we don't want to pay for them.  Too many faculty think they are they only ones who count at the university and that everyone else is overpaid and under worked.  In reality, the staff do the jobs faculty walked away from.  If you want more faculty and less staff you need to go back to doing the work the staff do.  And don't forget, you claimed to be able to do it better.  So, back off!

Oops, slipped into a rant there.  Better see if the pub is still open.

T.S. Hall

In Defense of Ignorance

The NSF has a press release out today about students and the environment titled, "Students Least Informed About Environmental Science Are Most Optimistic".  I ended the last posting with a shot at ignorance, so in an effort to be fair here is a contrarian view.

Experience can make us jaded to the point where we loose our youthful enthusiasm.  This is in part due to our accumulating enough experience/wisdom to recognize our own limitations and those of the world around us.  

The researcher is a bit of an odd duck in that we must ground our work in the real world, but our true calling in to change the conditions of the world to the point where we can do the "impossible".  The funding we depend upon to perform our research comes from the optimism of the donors and taxpayers who believe that we can cure cancer or seek new life and new civilizations going where no man has gone before.

When the pundits become old cranks they complain about how little they have got in return for their investment in research, yet they many times got a great deal.  It's just that our results did not match their youthful optimism.  We got to the moon, but no one lives on mars yet.

Some will say we over promise, and perhaps we do, but we are human too and those that lose their tendency for optimism can't stay in this game of research for very long.  The crushing defeats in the lab will chase them from the field of play.

T.S. Hall

Listening to the Molecules

No! Not that kind of listening, although I suppose readership might improve if it was.

I have been puzzling over a couple of issues in the NMR of the molecules I have been making.  The NMR person agrees that the observations are both real and that he has never seen such a thing before.  This makes me wonder if my molecules are showing me something about NMR that is either an example of a concept we organic folks overlook, and perhaps this concept might have some value beyond being a curiosity.  I doubt any reviewer will look closely enough at the spectra to see the issues, so can publish the work.  But I still hear the molecules trying to get me to listen to what they have to say beyond moving me closer to my target.

As synthetic and methods development chemists we sometimes see unexpected behaviors from the reactions we run or the molecules we produce.  In training future scientists it is important to guide the student toward seeing and thinking about the meaning of these unexpected results.  Too often students will just accept whatever happens without asking why they did not see the behavior they should expect based on the lecture material.  This make them technicians and not scientists.  And, as I have noted in prior posts, technicians run the risk of being replaced by smart robotic systems.

The technician training mode of education places emphasis on running experiments in lab courses and is generally concerned about the yield of the desired product or the desired spectrum only.  It is important that we engage the student in the type of inquiry that moves them from technicians to scientists.  Participation in research can do this for a student, but being a scientist should not be put on and taken off as we enter and exit the research lab like a lab coat.  If your to be a real scientist you are always aware of the unexpected and always ready to address it.  

There are faculty members and departments who believe in the concept of inquiry based learning across the curriculum.  True inquiry based learning can't be done at a distance or in canned lectures.  It takes face-to-face interaction with the real system and guided inquiry to develop a scientists mind.  It's expensive which we don't like, but a someone smarter than me once wrote, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance".

T.S. Hall

Campus Myths

I was just in the elevator on my way to submit x-ray samples and a couple of students got on.  They asked me where in the basement the nuclear reactor was, as they were on their way to see it.  On most of the campuses I have been on there is a strongly held belief that there is a nuclear reactor in the basement of a science building.  This put me in mind of other strongly held beliefs of college students that I have never found any justification for.

The time scale for how long you have to wait if the instructor is late for class before you bail.  Non-PhD Lecturer vs. PhD Lecturer vs. Assistant Professor vs. Associate Professor vs. Professor.

The idea that even if the taxpayers of the state pay the lions share of the cost of a public college education the faculty work for the students.

That all that stuff faculty tell you about studying daily and practicing the skills of the course isn't really necessary to gain true mastery of the material.

That all organic faculty are extremely good looking and endowed with a superior intellectual skill and sense of humor.

OK, maybe there is some truth in some myths.

TS Hall

Peripheral and Tailings Mining

It is difficult to engage in truly "transformative" research at a PUI or Masters Comprehensive University (MCU).  If you are successful, you either find yourself on track to the RO1 world, or the RO1 folks pick up your "transformative" thread and you find yourself a footnote as one of the people who initially explored the area, if you are lucky.

Often what we do is either peripheral mining of the "transformative" veins being explored by others or tailings mining of the debris pile left behind as the miner who opened the vein went for the rich ore.  Often different people will disagree as to what type of mining you are engaged in, but it is important in terms of your standing in the community.

Peripheral mining demands that you think a few steps ahead to where a vein might lead and sink a shaft out beyond the boundaries of the current work.  This has challenges and risks.  If you misjudge where the vein will go you sink resources into a shaft that comes up empty.   If you get too close to the current work you can come into conflict with the current work.  I have received reviews that essentially indicated that the area I proposed to explore belonged to a specific RO1 researcher who had never shown any inclination to move in the direction I was going, but since my synthesis utilized their methods the reviewers declared the field off-limits to me.  (I have explored the field without funding and slowly moved forward, never being in conflict with any other miners.)

Tailings mining by my definition is the me-too research that some journals specialize in.  We have all seen this stuff.  Chiral amino alcohols influence the stereoselectivity of additions of organozinc species to aldehydes.  When the tailings miners come in they pick every aminoalcohol that exists or can be made and run the reaction.  Their publications only show the amino alcohol and the yields and selectivities, but make no attempt to add to our understanding of the science.  In this specific case there are scores of papers in this area and dozens more come out each year.

Mining the tailings can help get that minimum number of papers you need to get tenure, but you need peripheral mining or your need to open new mines to have a viable and fundable research program.  Challenging?  Sure, but if you don't like challenge research is not for you. 

TS Hall

Science Middle-Skill Workers

Back in the days of yore when I was a apprentice alchemist my fellow students knew that if all else failed we could graduate with our BS in chemistry or biochemistry and get a job doing QA/QC or some other lab job.  We could make a decent living measuring sulfur forms in coal or fecal coliform in well water and as middle skill workers be happy.  About the time I graduated I went to the Pittsburgh Conference in Cleveland (It was the days of yore) and saw benchtop GCMS and learned about computer databases that could identify components from their MS.  When I got my first job I convinced my boss to invest in one of Fisher Scientific's early automated titrators.  When the automated titrator allowed us to let go the lab tech who spent her days doing pH titrations I knew the days of the middle skill BS chemist were numbered.

The ACS has a technicians division now, and I wonder as computer and robots take over the lab what the role of the BS chemist is today and if we need to rethink the training of BS degree chemists and biochemists.  Sure we do a decent job preparing the graduate school bound student, but what of the others?  They represent a sizable chunk of the graduates. 

When we consider the low levels of interest in the sciences today, perhaps some of it is because for the non-graduate school bound student there a few options to enter the middle class with a BS degree.  You can teach in a high school and there are still QA/QC and analytical chem type jobs, but not much else for the BS degree holder. 

I would like to see us pay heed to the allied areas where a chemistry or biochemistry degree would have some value.  Too few campuses have chemistry-business plans or chemistry-pre-law options.  These programs could make the degree more relevant to today's student and serve an unmet need on the marketplace.

Strained Analogies

My research students back home have stopped sending reports about their progress.  While I appreciate that the cat is away if the mice are having a party and I find beer cans in the shrubs and panties behind the rotovap when I get home their hangovers will be the least of their problems.

I suspect that the problem is one of time budgeting.  Both faculty and students fall into the trap.  You don't have a do or die deadline so other things take priority.  So, I admonish my students to think of their relationship to their research the way they think of their relationship to a significant other.  If you ignore your significant other for days on end, providing only an occasional "how you doing", you will ultimately find yourself alone.  Putting the quality time into your relationship reaps great rewards on a daily basis.  Doing otherwise, you might one day find yourself alone in a intellectual house full of Schrodinger's cats.

Your research mentor is your relationship therapist.  Worldly wise, they will help you  develop the endless love your are seeking.  Of course some students were just looking for a one night stand. 

Mia Dopa

As part of our recent site visit we brought back some of our graduates to impress the site visit team.  A few faculty, myself included, took our alumni to lunch.  As we were walking with the group of former students one of them pulled me aside to express his thanks for the quality of the education he had received in one of the advanced lab classes he took from me.  He indicated that he had come to realize that he was better prepared for his graduate studies than many of his current colleagues.  He also complemented one of my colleagues for the quality of their teaching.

The reason this conversation stood out was that this student had nothing good to say about either my colleague or myself when he was a student in our program.  He actively and successfully campaigned in favor of low student evaluation scores to be given to both of us.  

So, now out of some sense of shame he was going out of his way to acknowledge the quality of our work.  Perhaps my supply of the milk of human kindness was running low.  I suggested to the student that while I appreciated his comments, they would have more impact as a note to the department chairperson indicating that as hindsight is 20/20 he wished to amend his youthful (two years ago) evaluation of the teaching of some of the faculty.

As I have noted before, asking a student to evaluate a course or instructor near the end of the semester is like asking a pregnant woman her opinion of the childbirth and of her husband during labor.  Unfortunately in the case of course evaluations we make employment decisions based on then "in labor" answer and don't ask again at the time of the second birthday party.

T.S. Hall

Open Question

It's spring.  How can I tell? Because once again the airwaves are full of stories about the evil universities and their high tuitions.  I even heard a high school senior complaining about the high tuition at a school that I know cost less than $6000 per year in tuition.

Here is my open question to the populace: 

What makes a college education on value?  Be specific!  Answers like, it will get you a better job are non-answers unless you can explain why.  I want cause and effect stuff here, not artificial value stuff that basically says that since everyone else believes that it's true it must be.  Save that argument for your next Flat Earth Society meeting.

And, yes, I have my own answer, but I want yours first.