An important read about quitting vs staying in STEM

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Choosing to end any phase of your life is never easy. As a woman, choosing to leave science is harder still. Although there are support groups and professional associations for women in science, there is little day-to-day support for staying. There is even less support for leaving.

This article by Frances Hocutt spoke to me. I know many people (especially women) who have stood at that same threshold and thought "Do I dare quit?" I'm glad she had the courage to choose self-respect.

When a pipeline leaks, we don't blame the water.

Go read it.

via @shanley

Fluorescent fish

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Fluorescent fish

A paper out in PLoS ONE last month announces the discovery that a lot more fish fluoresce than we thought. 180 species of fish biofluoresce, with emission colors ranging from greens to reds: eels and rays are in the greens while scorpionfish and gobys are fairly red and others are in between.

The authors consider several evolutionary advantages that biofluorescence might bestow on these species. Some fish may use it to blend in with fluorescent corals, others may use it to communicate. Certain deep sea fishes are thought to use fluorescence to lure prey.

What really gets me excited about this paper isn't the fish, though. It's the fluorophores.

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About that STEM shortage

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About that STEM shortage

A week or so ago, somebody on Twitter shared this post at the US Census Bureau blog on employment in STEM fields. It includes a chart showing the trends in the fields as a fraction of total STEM employment. It doesn't tell you about would-be STEM workers who are unemployed, nor does it tell you about unfilled positions in these areas. Still, I think you can get a rough idea of the relative demand for workers in each field. If there are many people currently employed in a field, it implies a large demand for that field. Said another way, if there weren't demand for that work, why would those people still have jobs?

I was not surprised to see that T and E are bigger slices of the STEM pie. What did surprise me was how much bigger they are. So here, for your viewing pleasure, is a little graphic. The colored bars are proportional to each field's contribution to total STEM employment in 2011.

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Happy New Year

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2013 ended on a high note for me: great visits with family, laughs shared with my husband, good news on the writing front, and fun plans with friends.

Looking ahead, 2014 is a little daunting. I don't know where we'll be living come September, nor do I know who we'll be working for, or what we'll be doing. But I know we have excellent friends and welcoming family, and that the unknown can be as exciting as it is scary. We don't have to have the answers at the outset; there's plenty to discover as we go.

So here's to a year of discovery. Best wishes for 2014.

Don't blame the children

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The main explanation I've heard from readers for why women had higher rates of job seeking than men is that those women are mothers. I'm not really convinced. "Parenting" isn't a choice in the postgraduation status question, so I suspect it would be lumped into "Other." But let's assume for a moment that motherhood is the major factor in the higher frequency of job-seeking among women vs. men in fields like Chemistry. Why might that be? I can think of two possibilities.

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On Editor's Block

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It's amazing to me how I can – sometimes – make more progress in 3 hours than in 3 days. I've spent a large part of this week slogging through some revisions. I had lot of trouble staying motivated and focused, but I kept pushing at it day after day because I wanted it to be done. Today I whizzed through the rest of the task and was done with it just after 2 pm.

And man, does that feel good.

MATLAB Tip of the Day: Better Histograms

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My undergrad has a lot of histograms to compare, and the MATLAB defaults can get in the way. You can set the number of bins, but if your data sets span slightly different ranges, you'll quickly find that your bins have different widths or different maxima and minima. They're okay defaults for making a single histogram, but if you want to compare multiple figures, as we do, it gets frustrating fast.

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Trailing Spouses

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I wrote this almost three years ago, but it's back in my mind as I start looking for post-grad school jobs.

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I emailed my committee this afternoon to invite them to a talk I will soon give. One of the professors said he'd be glad to attend, and he will happen to be in the country on that day because one of his students is defending. I say “happen to be” because he is currently on sabbatical.

His email got me thinking: not about his reply, but about sabbaticals. With years still left before my own defense, sabbaticals are still a distant future to me, but all the same, they're on my mind. In particular, I wonder what the spouse is supposed to do.

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Graduation Ahead

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Today I had (most of) my pre-defense data meeting.1 My committee has declared me ready to write my thesis, and on track for graduation by or before August of next year. I'd like to be done by May, but that means t's crossed, i's dotted and revisions revised by April, and I still have another project to complete by then. Summer will get here soon enough.

I am glad to have an end in sight. I don't want to be a grad student forever, and some days it feels like it's already been forever since I started.

1: One committee member had to reschedule, so I get to give the same talk all over again tomorrow. I don't mind it a bit, though, because I always enjoy our meetings; I learn something new from him every time.

November Recap

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Looking back at my November writing experiment, I'd call it generally a success. I didn't make it all the way through the month; Thanksgiving visits with family disrupted my schedule. I missed about a week of writing total. But I wrote nearly every day before Thanksgiving, and I am still writing more frequently than before, so I am satisfied.

My plan for now is to do at least one post per week, hopefully with a bit more polish. Not too much polish, since that sends me down Perfectionist Lane sometimes, but more than I've been able to manage for the near-daily writing this last month.

You are an environment

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We tend to think of ourselves as individual organisms. Even though we're made up of thousands upon thousands of cells working together to send and interpret sensations, break down and rearrange nutrients, transport wastes, provide structure and mobility, and keep our selves humming along in homeostasis, we think of ourselves as single creatures.

We are not actually alone. Our bodies are home to many other organisms. Other living things go through entire life cycles on and inside us all the time. It's kind of incredible, when you stop to think about it.

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GoldiBlox and the Trouble with Pink

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GoldiBlox are filling up my Facebook feed and my Twitter stream this week, despite the fact that I don't know any girls (or parents of girls) in the right age range for the toy. My thoughts on GoldiBlox haven't changed much since the Kickstarter campaign. The short version is this: an engineering toy marketed to girls is a great idea, but why must it be pink? 

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Matlab Tip of the Day: Changing line properties programmatically

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I have an undergraduate working with me on some simulations, and I've been teaching him Matlab for the last year. This week I showed him a useful trick for changing the look of some line plots. He has a whole bunch of these to do, and instead of replotting the data or using the Plot Tools GUI to edit each figure, I taught him how you can get at the various properties of the plot. Once he figured out which properties he wanted to change, and which way, he could save the commands as a script, and run it on any open image to get a consistent look.

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