My supervisor

I ran into my supervisor today. As he was entering the University Library and I was leaving it, he stopped and teased me - "I didn't know sociologists went to the library!" (As a book historian and the lead editor of Darwin's letters, he spends a lot of time in the library, and - it's true - way more than I do!)
I suddenly felt very grateful for being his student. I have often felt that way - almost every time we have a meeting, really - but lately a lot of my friends have been complaining about their supervisors, for being distant, harsh, not "getting" the student's ideas, etc. How did I get so lucky? Let me count the ways that my supervisor could be terrible but is instead, somehow, amazing...

1.  My supervisor is not in my field. He told me with a smile after my first six months as a PhD student that I now knew more about sociology of science than he did. Usually that's a crash course for disaster, but for us it worked, in part because it meant he had to listen. He usually couldn't suggest readings for me, but he could ask intelligent questions about my ideas and be a fabulous editor of my writing.

2.  My supervisor doesn't answer email. Ever. He is a professor and runs the Darwin Correspondence Project - two full-time jobs, really - and he was also Head of Department for 2010-2011. That means he is impossible to track down, electronically or otherwise. He actually has a reputation in the department for "feigning incompetence", as our all-powerful administrator put it, with regards to email and other technologies, so that he is never assigned to do administrative work. Brilliant move by him, but how is all this not a train wreck of a supervisory situation for me?
Because when you do manage to arrange a meeting with him, you have his 100% full-on attention. He sometimes hasn't read the stuff you emailed him to read and so he'll send you away for a few minutes while he reads it (in about a page per second, it seems), and when you come back to his office he is guaranteed to be full of insightful comments. Magic. Also, another benefit of having an e-distant supervisor is that we are not friends. We don't share info about our personal lives. I don't send him the upset and ranting emails that some PhD students send their supervisors, because I know he won't respond and he most likely won't read them anyway. He doesn't have time to chat. And honestly, I think it's better emotionally and professionally for me (and maybe all of us) to NOT voice my occasional rants to my supervisor...

3. My supervisor is super famous and successful and goes on TV fairly often to talk about his work. (Which maybe explains #2... too much fan mail!) Isn't he therefore a jerk?
Absolutely not. Never. He is the nicest person you can imagine - full of the homegrown friendliness of his Wisconsin roots. He smiles all the time, which should be off-putting but he makes it charming (perhaps so that you'll forget that he's ignored all your desperate emails?). As I said, he gives you all his attention during meetings. No chat, but also no complaining (or maybe minimal complaining) about his own workload, which happens often to other students I know. He cracks jokes and uses outrageous metaphors while verbally ripping apart your crappy chapter, to keep you smiling and in a favorable mood despite the (almost always well-deserved) criticism.

So how did I get so lucky? And it's not just me, of course. He has shared his wisdom through kind teaching with countless PhD students, though his style seems to work best with those who are self-motivated, don't rely on him to listen to their rants or reply to emails, and have a sense of humor.

Other crucial reasons that my supervisor is awesome? He is cross-eyed, sleeps during seminars, and picks his fingernails til they're bloody - JUST LIKE ME.

With a little help from my friends...

(Sorry for all the song titles lately, but they're all just so RELEVANT!)

Yesterday I submitted my fourth postdoc application, and it was the hardest of them all. Why?! Shouldn't this get EASIER (and hopefully better) with practice? Writing that research proposal - to compare fossil preparators and their work practices in Germany with the ones I studied in the US and UK, because Germans have official training programs and Americans and Brits don't - was brutal. First I got conflicting feedback from my supervisor and advisor, so I wrote a compromise proposal, which won the disapproval of my most reliable and most attentive source of job advice (my mom). Then I changed lots more things and totally lost my ability to read this proposal because I'd been reading it in different forms for like a month.

So I sent it to my friends. Those wonderful sources of support and encouragement, my fellow PhD students, who are just as clueless about job applications as I am but are good at grammar, came through for me in the last 12 hours before this application was due.

I didn't need - couldn't take - any more advice, I just needed some confidence that my proposal made sense and had correct verb tenses and punctuation. My first reader-friend, bless her, was smart enough to ignore my pleas for only grammar-checking and sent back my page-long proposal absolutely covered in Tracked Changes. Turns out she was a former editor at Nature (as in, the top academic science journal! Wow!). But she was worried about hurting my feelings, so she called me first to discuss her suggestions and denounce Track Changes for seeming too final when actually her changes were just ideas... and of course her changes were right-on and insightful and good. So I changed things AGAIN. And again couldn't read the final product effectively, and had to call on the kindness of yet another PhD pal. This time my email was more clearly worded about I CAN'T CHANGE ANYTHING MAJOR and she must have sensed my rising panic about the deadline, so she pointed out some actual mistakes (and added in some Britishisms, e.g., "program" -> "programme", which was funny and which I did not include...) and inadvertently gave me permission to send it. Finally.

Who knows if that proposal is actually any good, but the process of writing it cemented my belief that knowledge is social and that doing things in groups is VERY DIFFICULT and extremely worthwhile. My proposal is SO MUCH BETTER after all these revisions, at least according to me. And honestly, that confidence is all that matters when you're submitting an application that has a lottery ticket's chances of even being carefully read, let alone earning an interview...

"It's always better when we're together..."

Jack Johnson's song "It's always better when we're together" was playing in the hipster cafe near Sloane Square in London, where I met my friend Becky to study today. I love that song, and it was the wedding theme song for my friends Zarah and Robert. It also became the theme of today...

I'm cat- and flat-sitting in my friend's posh flat near Greenwich this week, to prevent the cat being lonely. But that means that yours truly is at risk of being lonely... I have like three friends in London (and one is obviously away since I'm staying in her flat). So I've been hanging out with Becky in her fav study spaces around London. Great fun!

But Becky was busy every evening, and after one night of watching BBC TV and one night of skyping and working, I had run out of evening entertainment. So I went to the movies - by myself, to see a silly and not-cultural movie. I was pretty embarrassed about the whole thing, and all the more so when the theme of the movie turned out to be how important it is to do things TOGETHER, with other people:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZBe7_lE9lE

Yikes. After the movie (which I really enjoyed, despite its badly-timed moral!), I trekked across Greenwich's labyrinth of 18th-century, badly lit streets and then across Blackheath, a giant open field of scariness, to the flat, clutching my "London A to Z" map. It was dark and lonely, and I was hungry and tired. So obviously my mind wandered to muggers and rapists and - worse - the legendary ghost of a horseman who roams Blackheath at night. So it seemed only to be expected when the hedge next to me started to rustle. I ignored the crashing for a bit and then tried to nonchalantly run across the street to avoid the mugger/rapist/ghost in the hedge, but a BEAUTIFUL BUSHY-TAILED LONG-NOSED FOX beat me to it. Ahh! Awesome!! The most English of all possible nighttime wanderers, besides maybe a hedgehog...

I would have liked a companion tonight, if only to witness the gorgeous fox as well as make the walk less scary, and, although I complain about sharing a house with three other people (who are all very nice), I would like another human in this flat (although the cat is very friendly). It's great to have the quiet and to find things in the same places you put them and to have only your dishes piled in the sink... but it's just not very fun. Maybe my days of student house-sharing are not as numbered as I thought... and maybe I'll be a little more appreciative of my housemates.