Grad school and mental health

There is news going around that an ASU grad student shot himself in a professor’s office, and the campus was on lockdown in response. We don’t know any details of the story. It’s likely that there was something other than the standard stresses of grad school in play here. But I’m reminded of the studies [...]

Internet burn-out

Okay, you guys, who knows what is going to happen with this blog in the long run, but in the short run I have total internet burn-out. I’m barely even reading my feed, and never clicking through to read complete posts on even my favorite blogs. It’s been a solid month of this now with [...]

Grad school and abortion

There have been a couple posts and comment discussions over at Dr. Isis’s place about a question that was posed to her:
I found out I am pregnant, we want a child but I just accepted a PhD position. Should I have an abortion?
Isis does not want to get into the ethics of the question, but [...]

New Accretionary Wedge: Inspiration

I will be hosting the next Accretionary Wedge carnival right here at the Magmalicious Blog! I’m very excited.
I once had a conversation with our provost about how almost no one goes to college planning to study geology. (The exceptions always seem to be children or other close relations of geoscientists.) For the rest of us, [...]

The sexism of not being able to fake it

Today I’ve been noticing that there are faculty members, in all departments, who drop the ball a lot by letting things slide, and there are other faculty who pick up the slack and keep those balls in the air. I don’t think anyone’s going to argue that that’s unfair. There’s no good excuse for it: [...]

Fitness requirements

Geoscience is a field that has implied fitness expectations. This is easy to handle if you are able-bodied and already love exercising. But it at times feels really pressuring if, like me, you like the outdoors and like moving your body but are not terribly fond of fitness routines and regimens. I don’t get much [...]

Moving

This month’s Scientiae topic is “moving forward”: how our lives, work, and science are moving forward.
In my case, this topic is most easily addressed in list form:

Designing some new classes and new lessons for old classes for next year
Writing a grant proposal to fund a brand new project
Working with a new student
Trying out new activities [...]

Safety

Beryl Lieff Benderly has an editorial in Slate today about problems in academic lab safety. I have mixed feelings, particularly about this:
If Sheri Sangji’s death is to mean anything, it must be that no lab chief—and certainly no federal agency—claiming to further human welfare ever again tolerates the risk of harm to lab workers. That [...]

Experts vs. the media

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about “experts,” i.e. who we consider credible and who we don’t on any given subject,* and on the roles and responsibilities of those who are widely considered to be experts. When we as scientists conduct studies and publish the results, in general those results and our interpretations of them [...]

Taking care of carnivals

I sure did push things to the deadline this month. It’s because I am overcoming challenges, every day! And that’s the topic of this month’s Scientiae: overcoming challenges, and the most firey fire of my academic career.
It’s a hard question to answer because there have been so MANY challenges.  What about deciding halfway through my [...]