Live peer review, leadership roles, and handling hard better

Last week, I had a post about the nuts and bolts (and emotions!) of responding to reviewers. In it, I talk about how my initial reaction to constructive criticism of my manuscripts is for my brain to fall out, leaving me unable to process anything for a while. I still think of myself as someone who is not very resistant to criticism, but who is resilient – I often feel pretty flattened by negative feedback, but bounce back fairly quickly. My approach is to give myself some time, then use a variety of strategies (post it notes, responding to X number of comments before taking a break, lots of chocolate, etc.) to revise the manuscript in response to the reviewer feedback. And, as I hope I made clear in that earlier post, it always ends up better as a result. The process is totally worth it in the end, but it’s definitely a process. 

What I want to cover in this post is something that I’ve been trying to figure out now that I have an administrative role: when getting feedback on something (e.g., a revised policy related to teaching), it feels to me like a live version of peer review. I’m realizing that many of the strategies I have used successfully to deal with the emotional parts of responding to peer reviews of manuscripts don’t work as well in the live setting, so I’ve been trying to develop some additional approaches. This is definitely still a work in progress for me, and I’d love to hear how others deal with this! 

Around the same time that I was thinking about this, I stumbled across the Handle Hard Better impromptu speech given by Kara Lawson, the coach of the Duke women’s basketball team. It’s less than 3 minutes, so it won’t take long to watch it. This is the key part (to me, at least):

Make yourself a person that handles hard well, not someone that’s waiting for the easy. Because if you have a meaningful pursuit in life, it will never be easy.

I had a whole variety of reactions when I first watched this – some of them complicated – but my overall takeaway is that this idea of trying to figure out how to handle hard better is a really helpful framing. The key then is figuring out how to actually do that! I’m still figuring it out, but right now one thing that is helping me is thinking about potatoes.

The nuts and bolts (and emotions!) of responding to reviewers

Almost 10 years ago, I wrote a post about writing a response to reviewer comments. It focused on the overall structure of a response to reviewers, with suggestions on what to include and how to address things like if reviewers disagree. That post – which I think is still relevant – focused on the response itself. In this post, I want to focus more on my process for actually writing the response to reviewers and making the revisions. As I said in the earlier post, I’ve generally had the good fortune of responding to reviews that are thoughtful and constructive. Even with that, it can be…. an emotional journey. So much so that, when I saw this cartoon by Liz Fosslein* it immediately made me think of responding to reviewers:

Elevator (and Boat Launch!) Pitches Revisited

One of the things we’re planning on doing with Dynamic Ecology 2.0 is revisiting some old posts that are still relevant, but possibly with some updating. This is one of those posts! The original post was a guest post by Catherine Searle, who at the time was just finishing up a postdoc and moving to a faculty position at Purdue. She’s now an Associate Professor! Being able to give a short, concise overview of your research is super useful and a skill that pretty much all of us could use some more practice with. Cat’s old post is still very relevant, so I encourage you to click through to read her original post, which you can find here.

Once you’ve done that, come back here to read some more ideas about specific exercises to help you hone your elevator pitch (a great lab meeting activity!) A PhD student in my lab, Teresa Sauer, led a lab meeting on this theme this past fall. While ‘elevator pitch’ is a common term for this, that particular setting – a 30 second ride in an elevator with someone to whom you are introducing yourself – is, well, unlikely. Teresa came up with some excellent ideas of more realistic scenarios where you’d want to give a quick introduction of what you work on to a range of people, including a visiting seminar speaker, a thirteen year old at a pop up outreach event, and two men at the boat launch who are about to go fishing (perhaps the most common informal outreach for people in my lab!)

Spread Sunshine

In a recent Friday linkfest, I shared a NY Times interview with Tara VanDerveer. There were a lot of things I loved about it, one of which came at the end:

We draw inspiration from those who play (and work) for us. Tell us about some players who inspired you.

Angela Taylor was on the national title-winning team with two all-American guards so she almost never got to play. I asked her about her role. She said, “to spread sunshine.”

This didn’t only stand out to me – a colleague with whom I shared the article also loved that part, which led me to suggest that maybe we should add a section to our Annual Faculty Reports (‘tis the season) that asks about how much sunshine we’ve spread.

I think this is not that hard to do, perhaps especially for those of us who are no longer early career. And I think a lot of people would enjoy doing this – it’s fun to receive the positive feedback, sure, but it’s also fun to share it. I think some of why it doesn’t happen more is people just don’t think to do it, hence this post. If you think of something positive you can share and you’re in a position to do so, consider spreading a little sunshine. 

Convey the key message of your figure in the first sentence of the legend (Updated!)

During DE 1.0, I had a series of posts that related to conveying the key message of a study. I’m going to briefly revisit a few of those here, plus add one specific suggestion: whenever possible, convey the key message of a figure in the first sentence of the legend. 

But, before you read any of those, if you haven’t already read Brian’s post on the 5 pivotal paragraphs in a paper (or haven’t recently), go read it. It’s so incredibly useful. I share it with others frequently and reread it myself regularly.

Now on to thinking about figures and how to share key results:

Non-definitive guides on developing a reading habit & generating project ideas

Note from Meghan: This is a guest post by my colleague Gina Baucom on a topic that’s sure to be of interest to lots of readers!

***

I lead a graduate-level professional development seminar* where we read about and discuss academia-related topics like mentoring, improving communication (Crucial Conversations ftw!), how to write grants and papers, social and emotional aspects of graduate school, and how we frame our relationships with work. I had to cancel a recent class because of an early-morning snow storm that made getting into campus at 9 am nearly impossible and pretty dangerous. (It took getting stuck behind three wrecks for me to finally decide to cancel). I felt pretty bad about canceling class from the road**, rather than earlier in the morning, and was also bummed that the students would miss out on that day’s planned discussion, which was on reading the literature and developing project ideas – arguably two pretty important topics for beginning graduate students! So, I wrote up a quick guide on both for the students, and then thought it might also be useful as a blogpost. The Dynamic Ecology bloggers (Hi! OMG you’re back!!) agreed, and the end result is below. These quick thoughts on literature reading and project formation are non-definitive; there are a number of ways one could go about either. I hope this guide is helpful nonetheless. 

Quitting as a virtue

I recently started reading the book Quit by Annie Duke after it was recommended by a friend. My friend’s general summary was that the book covers how we tend not to quit things until well past the point where quitting would have made sense, and that it helps to establish criteria well ahead of time for what would be signs that one should quit. I can see how this could be useful in a variety of areas, including narrower topics such as when I should quit trying to get a languishing manuscript out the door, and also bigger topics such as how long to keep a long term project going that I plan on exploring more in future posts.

One of the key points that Duke makes early on in her book is that, yes, grit is a virtue but its opposite, quit, is a virtue, too. Sometimes quitting is a virtue in a literally life-or-death way – she begins the book by talking about climbers on Everest who survived a disastrous day on the mountain because they decided to turn back rather than pushing for the summit. But quitting is also a virtue in a more mundane way because it lets you explore more things, ultimately finding the right things to stick with, or allowing you to take a new and exciting opportunity. 

Friday links: the art of the controlled meltdown, remembering Paul Keddy, and more

Also this week: why is it so hard to know if you’re helping, death by numbers, in defense of dabbling, and more.

Why do we number dissertation chapters the way we do?

This is such a minor topic that I abandoned the post multiple times, then was inspired by Jeremy’s return to very old school blogging (writing a very short post) and went for it. You can file this under: things that don’t really matter but that I nonetheless wish were different. My wish: that US dissertations had the introductory chapter as chapter 0, not chapter 1.

As far as I’m aware, in the US, the norm for PhD dissertations in ecology is to have a series of studies that are written up as individual publications (ideally with some already published or submitted to a journal by the time of the dissertation defense). In addition, as a sort of wrapper around that, there’s an introductory chapter and a conclusions* chapter. But those come at the end as kind of an afterthought in most cases, which means that students spend all of their time in grad school thinking of their main dissertation chapters (that is, the individual studies that they will publish independently) as chapter 1, chapter 2, etc. Then, at the last minute, those all get 1 added to the chapter number, since the Introduction becomes chapter 1. What this means is that, at the dissertation defense, no one really knows what ‘chapter 2’ means anymore. The solution seems simple: make the introduction chapter 0. Is this a big issue that will make a substantial difference in anyone’s lives? No. But it also seems like something we should be able to do (albeit unlikely to happen, in my estimation).

As far as I can tell, the University of Michigan dissertation formatting guidelines don’t explicitly forbid this, but they do require an introduction and the template they provide starts with Chapter 1. This is generally how it’s been at the universities in the US where I’ve seen dissertations (including for my own dissertation). But when I quickly scanned dissertations I’ve read from outside North America, they avoided this in a variety of ways, including by having the introduction not having a number, or by having a broader numbering system with the publishable units then labeled as “Paper 1”, “Paper 2”, etc. Those approaches make a lot more sense to me!

Does this bother other folks? (Again, I don’t think this is at the top of anyone’s list of annoying things.) Is this a North American (maybe just US?) issue but not an issue in other places? What creative solutions have people found?

* I really resisted the idea of having to write the intro & conclusions chapters because they felt pointless — who would read them? After complaining about this, I was told that one reason to really think about the intro was that it would help with the introduction for my dissertation seminar and a job talk down the road. That helped, and I still think that’s the biggest reason why those chapters are useful.

Generative AI & graduate training in ecology

I’m guessing most folks reading this have already read about generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and large language models such as ChatGPT. To say this is a hot topic would be an understatement, but there’s one specific topic that I haven’t seen as much discussion about and that I’ve been trying to think through: how ChatGPT and related tools influence (or should influence) graduate training, particularly in ecology.