Exam anxiety

Earlier this week I read about a University of Manitoba case in which a PhD candidate in an unnamed program was reinstated after twice failing their comprehensive examination because the student suffers from "extreme" exam anxiety.  A senior administrator indicated that the student's PhD will be determined solely on the basis of the thesis.  I bet there are many chemists out there who wish they could have availed themselves of this option when they were in graduate school.

According to the article, the Anxiety Disorders Association of Canada claims that 7% of college students report symptoms of anxiety disorder.  Hell, in my organic class only 7% don't have test anxiety and those people are generally the ones who should have test anxiety.

I am not without sympathy, but I also am a lift yourself by your bootstraps guy too.  Will a student who has been accommodated throughout college get the same type of treatment in a career?  Are we awarding a degree which they will not be able to use?  Are we really helping the student by not asking them to address their disability and find the personal or community resources needed to overcome their disability?

Perhaps we should make accommodation for disability to the extent that students are making an effort to deal with their disability.  Have test anxiety?  We will accommodate you during exams so long as you attend weekly counseling to deal with your anxiety.

I have seen many students over the years who got extra time on exams due to disability and had very high grades.  Yet on quizzes, where they got the same amount of time as everyone else, had no apparent problem.  For some of my students the disability designation is a crutch.  I can't help but wonder if we should be tougher and help our students stand on their own to the limits of their ability.

T.S. Hall

Testing to the Teach

Today I spent a half-hour completing the on-line survey for the Association of American Medical Colleges, which is being conducted as part of the fifth comprehensive review of the MCAT exam.  The stated purpose of the survey is to assess the "science content that the future MCAT exam should test."

Here I thought that the MCAT tested students on what skills and knowledge are necessary to succeed in medical school, not on what we teach.  I clearly remember people discussing how changes in the MCAT dictate changes in organic textbooks and teaching.  How did I get this backwards?

A fairly common topic of discussion around here is what we should be teaching in the organic class and lab.  Often these discussions come around to ensuring that the student is prepared for their future endeavors, be they biochemistry classes, work, or graduate or professional schools.  The MCAT carries a lot of weight in those discussions.  The idea that the test is on what we teach rather than on what medical schools students need changes the game a bit.

For one thing, it changes the answer when students ask if a topic will be important on the MCAT.  My physics friends suggested that they will be putting more emphasis on the physics of transporting your professor from place to place in a sedan chair.  I bet there is a lot of good organic chemistry associated with washing and waxing my car.

T.S. Hall

Seminars Part III: Hosting

For the last part of this series on developing a seminar program I have reserved the most commonly overlooked part of the program; hosting seminar speakers.  While often overlooked it may be the most important if you want your program to thrive.

If your program is going to succeed you must have something to offer to the speakers.  If the experience is excruciating for the speaker the word will get around to the detriment of your department's reputation and your seminar program.  You want them to find your faculty and students engaged and excited about the field.  If they are not, the speaker will be wondering why you invited them in the first place.

A successful seminar program requires buy-in from your faculty and your students.  Student buy-in could be provided by requiring attendance, but keep in mind that just as you can tell when you have lost your students interest in class, a speaker can tell when the audience comes in disinterested.  If your students are going to impress potential graduate programs and employers they should be available to have lunch with the speaker and should ask a question or two at the seminar.  They should be able to talk about their research and see the interaction with the speakers as something that will be of value to them in their careers.  Make sure every student thinking about graduate school at least looks at the campuses who have visited you.  This positive attitude in students must be developed by the faculty in talking up the speakers, the program and the value to students.  Ask some questions of the speaker during or after the talk.  If you can connect to work being done on your campus the students will see what shared ideas can produce.

If the faculty are engaged in expanding their perspectives on chemistry and biochemistry a seminar program will not work.  A sure sign of a weak PUI/MCU department and a weak seminar program is when only the faculty within the sub-discipline of the talk speak to the guest or come to the talk.  This also sends a message to students that they can narrow their focus to the point of ignoring any chemistry but that of the lab they are working in.  Putting such blinders on early in a career limits the intellectual flexibility of the student, and their career prospects.

Face time with speakers should be about a half to three-quarters of an hour.  The faculty should have something other than the weather to talk to the speaker about.  Research active faculty don't generally want to talk about the merits of intro-organic books in the half hour they might have with you.  Talk about students and courses can be reserved for casual conversation over dinner.  Talk about your scholarship.  Talk about the successes and the places where there might be overlap with the speakers work or facilities.  You don't have to be publishing in Science, you need to be trying to move science forward with a clear plan to answer a question.  Opportunities to collaborate will enhance the guests funding potential and will give you the chance to get access to facilities you lack.

When I speak at another institution I want to hear about what they are doing and how it might relate to what I do, or what my colleagues do.  I want to see my hosts as scientists engaged in a thoughtful exploration of their field.  It may not be exactly my field and but if the question and research plan seem to have been thought out, and show signs of some progress I am happy.   I also want them to bounce their ideas off me and I want to bounce ideas off them.  If there is potential for collaboration I want to know I can contact them for collaboration opportunities in the future.

Lastly, after the formality of the day is over, schedule some time to relax and have a friendly conversation over a drink and/or dinner.  Make sure a couple of faculty attend and participate in the conversation.  If the seminar was the last thing on the days events bring up those collaboration ideas then.

Hosting faculty should want the speakers to walk away thinking about the potential of the students and faculty at your institution and do everything they can to make it happen.

T.S. Hall

Seminars Part II: Bring them in

I once taught at a PUI where the meager library resources and virtually nonexistent seminar program made me feel that I had lost contact with the current state of the chemical sciences.  This feeling influenced my choices on where to apply and what offer to take when I chose to leave.  Off the beaten tract locations or urban locations where there is little regional chemistry or biochemistry going on can really hamper a career.  The inability to get people to go a day or two out the way to come in for a visit makes developing a seminar program difficult.  In continuing the train of thought on seminars, let's consider what can be done to bring in speakers.

On the RO1 campus putting together a seminar series somewhat takes care of itself.  Many of the faulty at research universities know and work with other research university faculty in grant review panels, etc. and the seminar programs allow for many interactions and sharing of seminar invites.  The rates of research productivity are generally higher, allowing for frequent return visits and more importantly useful discussions on issues of research.

On the PUI/MCU campus, you have to make it worth while to come in to visit and give a seminar.  In making seminar offers, remember, your most valuable commodity is your students.  Many universities have graduate recruiting budgets to send faculty out to bring back the cream of the regions campuses.  If you don't get mail form these campuses, reach out.  Start with the campuses that your graduates have attended.  If there are other PUI/MCU campuses on our area, work with them to set up a circuit that visiting faculty can come through to hit several campuses over a few days.  These types of visit are usually in the Fall, so make your requests in July or August.

While you are working with regional campuses, how about setting up a seminar exchange.  Make a list of seminar speakers and titles or topics available from your campus and share it with the other regional campuses.  If your productivity rate is low you might not want to revisit a campus more often that five years.

In the Spring reach out to your past graduates who have gone on to graduate school, and who may be finishing up.  If schedules allow, and they are from the local region and can work in a visit when they are visiting family, they generally are happy to come back and show how far they have come.  They also become role models for your current students.

Anytime of year, find those regional PUI/MCU faculty who are nearing tenure or promotion.  The visit will become part of their service portfolio.  Don't forget to send a note on letterhead commenting on the specific types of insights they brought to the faculty in students through their seminar or conversations after the visit.  In a large department there may be member of the RTP committee who don't know exactly what a junior faculty does in their research.  I invite my own campuses faculty who are coming up for tenure or promotion to give a seminar so they can show what they are doing in their labs.

Look for regional industry or government people working in the field to a closely related field.  You will want to work with them to make sure the talk is of value to your students and faculty.  What do they get out of it?  They are helping train the next generation and they get to connect to the community.  Folks how are involved in the local ACS section are good candidates for this.

There may be other ideas out there, but these will help get a program started.  In the last part of this series I will share my thoughts on hosting seminars and how to keep the program going by not chasing away speakers.

T.S. Hall

Seminars Part I: Why

I am a big fan of seminar series at PUI and MCU institutions.  I am not talking about the internal seminar were the students talk about chemistry or biochemistry in some capstone discipline specific communication course, which has its own value.  I am talking about the seminar series where outsiders come to campus visit with the faculty and students and give a professional presentation.

To the students who get to see other ideas and chemistries played out in the presentations and to potentially interact with faculty members from PhD institutions and regional employers there is great value in a seminar from outside.  There is also great value in their seeing professionally presented presentations so that they can see the good and bad of that art.

In their ideal form the seminar series also gives the hosting faculty an opportunity to interact with outsiders.  Faculty hiring priorities at PUI and MCU campuses sometimes place emphasis on making sure that the panoply of chemistry is covered by a faculty resulting in only a modicum of overlap in their scholarship.  Many PUI faculties are small, but even with a fairly large faculty the diversity of scholarship can make you isolated.  For example: if you have four organic faculty and one is a polymer type, one is bioorganic, the third is a physical organic mechanism inspector, and the last is a methods development/synthetic type, they can talk about organic chemistry, but their diversity means that they generally don't challenge tho other's "expertise" in their research conclusions.  Well chosen outside speakers can provide valuable opportunities to bounce ideas off someone who is in a position to challenge our assumptions and conclusions.  The seminar series can help fight the isolation that sometimes can occur at the PUI/MCU institutions.

Research universities seem to be more focused in their hiring.  They often develop areas of expertise within a department or college to help attract funding resources under shared instrument programs, etc.

The difference between the PUI/MCU and the RO1 may reflect the difference in the focus of the institutions, where the hiring emphasis at teaching focused institutions is on being able to provide expertise across the field in the lecture halls.  This ensures that students are in a position to select an area of focus and appropriate graduate program or career upon graduation.

If the outside seminar series has value this still leaves the question of how to implement a program, which will be the subject of a future post.

T.S. Hall

Beware of Rationalization

It has been almost a year since the start of this blog.  In this, the one hundredth, post I want to draw attention to one of the things I encountered during my sabbatical and its bigger picture lessons which don't fit neatly into the paper I am working on.  I won’t go into the specifics as I am working on the paper and my point here is bigger picture than this specific case, however illustrative.

The research I have engaged in involves a stereoselective condensation reaction to form a heterocycle.  A number of years ago the major player in the field proposed a mechanism for the condensation as a rationalization of the observed stereochemistry in one of their papers.  That mechanism has since been used, or more commonly the proposed stereo-setting transition state geometry has used, by many others to rationalize observed stereochemistry in this type of heterocycle formation.   The systems to which the mechanism has been applied have become increasingly complex and people have generally added groups onto the original transition state structure without revisiting the mechanism itself.  

In our study we found that the proposed transition state geometry not only fails to predict the major isomers observed but also predicts that our major product isomer can not be formed.  This made me reconsider a number of the prior studies.  It appears that the transition state of the rationalized mechanism was applied by many without considering other transition states in that original mechanism, or other mechanisms.  When I looked at the other transitions states available in the original mechanism in the more complex systems it was clear that the energy differences of the various transitions states don't justify the observed stereoselectivity.  Over the last two decades authors appear to have never gone back to the point of considering all the possible transition states, or to reconsidering the mechanism in the face of additional data and systems.  For my part I am proposing a different mechanism for the reaction.  Of course this is the nature of the scientific method in practice.  

The author of the original mechanism did not suggest that the mechanism was more than a rationalization to explain the observed stereochemisty.  The point of this story in the context of today's blog is that while the original rationalization was reasonable in the context of the original work, the practice of assuming that it was correct as the system became more complex passed muster with authors and reviewers over the past twenty odd years.  People have made their names on this work and earned major awards.  No-one appears to ever have asked if the original rationalized mechanism still held in the face of additional data.  The rationalization became dogma for reasons that may have more to do with lethargy and bowing to authority (the name of the author of the original mechanism) than because the scientific method was applied.  The original author did no in depth study to support the proposal.  It was only a rationalization, yet over the last couple of decades it has become so much more.  As research scientist and educators we must question what we believe and ask ourselves if we believe because it is dogma and to do otherwise is to blaspheme, or if on reconsideration in light of all currently available data we should revise some of the base assumptions of our field.

T.S. Hall

Being a Responsible Educator

When part of your life's work is to educate it is some times hard to not correct people when they are mistaken.  It is especially hard when almost everyone is mistaken and some simple thinking would correct the problem.  Normally this is just a problem at family reunions/holiday events and in the classroom.  Sometimes it goes global and you must weigh the value of trying to correct the mistake verses grinding your teeth.

Today's case on point is the temporal confusion about the decade.  Everywhere you are hearing wrap ups of the decade and projections for the next decade.  Too bad the decade does not end for another year.

There was no year zero!  This means that the first decade was from the start of year 1 through the end of year 10.  The first millennium was from 1 Jan year 1 to 30 Dec 1000.  The second millennium did not end until 30 Dec 2000, not 1999 as most people incorrectly think.  Likewise, the first decade of the millennium does not end until the end of the day 30 Dec. 2010.

Happy End of Decade Year,

T.S. Hall