Alyssa's blog

Alyssa is a doctoral student in neuroscience at the University of Rhode Island. Follow them @yes_thattoo or check out their personal blog.

I admit it: for my first conference presentation, I did a lot "wrong." I was a junior submitting an abstract for work I hadn't actually done yet to a conference in a field I wasn't officially studying. I had an undergraduate advisor in engineering who didn't even know I was submitting to this conference. And I didn't know who my advisors were for mathematics or Chinese - needless to say, they didn't know I was submitting anything. Until the night I sent my abstract in, I didn't know I was submitting anything! This sounds like a recipe for disaster, right? Or at least a rejection?

Imagine, for a moment, my surprise when they told me they liked my abstract. Then consider my panic at the realization that I actually had to be ready to present. I was a junior in engineering, with two other majors. I was taking more credits than was strictly allowed, and now I was preparing to give a talk about the erasure of queer autistic people at a Queer Studies symposium. There's plenty of good advice about presenting at conferences. I took none of it. Instead, I
 

• Wrote (half of) my paper on the train to Washington, DC the night before.
  • Wrote a little bit more of the paper in my friends’ dorm room, where they were doing the same with their paper instead of sleeping.
• Did not practice my presentation once.
• Made no visual aids.
• Gave no thought to what questions I might be asked.
   

These aren’t the best of ideas. I learned from experience, both at that conference and at future conferences. Now I know which of these "mistakes" aren’t even really mistakes, which ones I can get away with if I'm pressed for time, and which ones I need to prioritize avoiding. Not all “mistakes” are created equal, and there are some shortcuts you can take if you’re pressed for time.

So:

If you know your topic well enough that actually writing the paper down is all that's left, and you're in a field where a standard conference presentation is anything other than "read the paper out loud," you can get away with leaving the writing incomplete. You'll (hopefully) get questions and feedback at the conference, which may make it into your final paper. Said feedback may even be more likely to get into the final product if it wasn't "final" yet at the conference. If you're going to leave the writing incomplete, however, do it knowingly, and don't try to rush through your paper the night before the conference instead of sleeping.

You may similarly be able to get away with minimal practice, if you know your topic and are a comfortable public speaker. Know yourself before trying this. If you get nervous during your talks, practice. If you forget where you're going during your talks, practice. If you need to say the same thing n+1 times in order to remember it, practice. If you know your topic well enough to talk about it with minimal repetition for longer than you're scheduled to talk and you're not sure what to cut, make an outline... but if you have a sense of how long it takes you to get through each bullet point, you may not need to practice it out loud! Given my particular issues with speech, it's not actually possible for me to "practice" giving my presentation to an audience in the absence of said audience. I just accept the reality that I have an outline and that there will only be one spoken version of my presentation - the one I give at the conference.

Skipping the visual aids is generally a bad idea. It may be better than making visuals that have nothing to do with your topic, or which serve to distract your audience, but I really do suggest taking the time to make good visuals. I've made slides for all my presentations... except that first one. Sometimes they were made the night before the conference. That's more common than I think most academics would admit. As long as the visuals are relevant and support your talk rather than distracting from it, who cares when you make them?

Failing to consider possible questions is a "mistake" I continue to make, even though it led to an awkward situation at that first conference. One pattern in disability spaces is the use of physical disability specific terms as umbrella terms. The use of able-bodied as the supposed opposite of disabled is one example. Since I was talking about issues related to queer, disabled people who aren't primarily physically disabled, this was relevant. I pointed out another example from one of the "big" authors in the intersection of disability and queerness. He was in the audience (and moderating the plenary session). My friend asked about it during the Q&A, and the big name actually got in on the answer. Just to be clear, that was and remains the only time I have been scared while standing and presenting in front of an audience. The moral of that story: have some idea about the politics of your field.

Advice is never one size fits all. What conference advice have you found doesn't always apply?

[Image provided by Kate Ter Haar and used under a Creative Commons license.]

Alyssa is a doctoral student in neuroscience at the University of Rhode Island. Follow them @yes_thattoo or check out their personal blog.

Just like most of us aren't going to be tenured professors when we get out of grad school (so we should think about what else we want to do), most of us won't be doing the same work we do now after graduation. Being a teaching assistant doesn't always mean teaching our own classes - so we might not have that experience until we’re somewhat locked into a teaching career. It would be nice to figure out if we even like teaching sooner rather than later! Writing a journal article or a dissertation differs from writing for the general public.

At the same time, graduate students tend not to make that much. Budget advice for graduate students is everywhere. That’s not as an endorsement of "better budgeting" to solve problems of low income. We're not going to buy a house by skipping the avocado toast. We are, however, fairly likely to work multiple jobs: 44% of 25-34 year old workers have a second job. Grad Student Finances has a series about the additional jobs of graduate students.

To be fair, working a second (or third) job in graduate school is not always practical, nor is it always permitted. Sometimes graduate assistant contracts ban side work, and sometimes departments frown on it. And really, any one job should pay a living wage. Still, many of us will work additional jobs in graduate school. We're also likely to want professional development opportunities beyond those our programs offer, especially if we're looking at career paths other than research and possibly teaching.

So let's kill two birds with one stone: we need money, and we need work that relates to what we're going to do after graduate school. If I'm not going to become a professor, my preferred career options are teaching and writing. My professional development needs are therefore fairly similar to those of the folks who will be professors, honestly. I need to teach, and I need to write.

When I was in the math department, being a teaching assistant meant teaching a class. As a neuroscience student with an assistantship in electrical engineering, it did not mean teaching a class anymore. I'm still teaching math, though - just online, and to a younger audience. If you're interested in teaching, you can consider writing centers, and private tutoring as job options as well. Even if you can't always get a whole class, there are quite a few ways to work in education.

Maybe you want to be a writer. A thesis or dissertation is, after all, a huge writing project. Somewhere along the way, you could discover that writing about your topic is the thing you love, and want to make a career in communicating your field to the public. At that point, it may be worthwhile to look into publishing opportunities that pay. Academic publishing may not pay, but writing is a career for some people and other paid outlets do exist. Get out of the ivory tower with your writing and maybe even get paid.

Perhaps you're interested in working for a non-profit. There are commonalities in grant-writing, no matter who the grant is meant for. That gives graduate students in grant-heavy fields a bit of an in. Non-profit organizations may also run community events, which would make event planning a relevant side gig during graduate school.

Whatever it is you want to do after graduate school, there are probably some aspects of it that aren’t part of your graduate education. Unless you get some outside experience with those aspects, you're not going to be much better with those tasks after graduation than you are now. If you need outside employment, getting a job which incorporates some of those skills can kill two birds with one stone. Considering how pressed for time graduate students tend to be, that’s handy!

Have you worked outside your department in graduate school? Was that work connected to what you’d like to do after you graduate?

[Image provided by Flickr user Ken Whytock and used under and used under a Creative Commons license.]

Alyssa is a doctoral student in neuroscience at the University of Rhode Island. Follow them @yes_thattoo or check out their personal blog.

As a teaching assistant in the math department, my home before I joined the neuroscience program, I taught classes. All the teaching assistants did, and when students registered for classes, our names showed up in the registration system. The department tried to put first-time TAs on coordinated classes, which meant we didn't have to do much in terms of curriculum development. We were given a syllabus that was common to all sections of the course, and we didn't have to write our own exams, either - those were common across all sections, too. So, what did I still need to do?

• Prepare notes for myself before teaching. Do I want to use slides to save the students from my poor handwriting? I tried that, the first day of my first class. I got to the classroom 10 minutes early, as the class before me was filing out, and discovered that I couldn't get my laptop connected to the media system. So, as much as I might have liked slides, the answer became no. What problems do I want to cover? I'm teaching math, and we learn math by doing it. Which subset of the possible examples (mostly even problems from the textbook that weren't assigned as homework) will make sure the students have at least seen every trick they might need on the homework and the exam? I need to find a combination that covers everything and that I actually have time to get through.
• Create classwork. A lot of this class was standardized across sections. Exams? Standardized. Pre-tests? Standardized. Online homework? Standardized. Schedule? Standardized by necessity - everyone's taking the same test at the same time, so they better have covered the same topics by then! Distribution of points? Mostly standardized, but I had about 10% for whatever classwork I might want to assign. Did I want to give a project? Quizzes? A problem of the day? My first time teaching, I tried a weekly quiz, at the end of class on Friday. People came to class... on Friday. The disadvantage of teaching an introductory class that no one really wants to be in is that no one really wants to be there, and they often aren't there. Switching to a daily classwork/problem of the day type model in later semesters helped a bit.
• Hold office hours. Sometimes students had questions they didn’t want to ask in front of the whole class, or more questions than there was time to answer fully in class. They could ask in office hours. Sometimes they needed to make up a quiz. I kept an eye on them while they made it up in office hours. Sometimes they got extra time and a private room on tests. I couldn't count on them being alone if I sent them to department proctoring, so I'd keep an eye on them in office hours. Sometimes people wanted an emergency review before an exam. I held a few of those in office hours. Or sometimes no one would show up and I'd get caught up on my grading. It varied.
• Grade papers. Students did math. I checked if they did the math correctly and pointed out where they went wrong so they hopefully didn’t repeat the error. I made note of errors that many students made, then added examples relevant to that mistake to a future lesson plan.
• Get up in front of the class and teach. This is the part that everyone got to see. I had to keep my eyes on the clock (start and end on time!), my notes (what was I planning to do again?), and my students (were they following me, or totally lost?).
• Remember what my abilities are... and aren't. I'm Autistic, and sometimes I can't speak. As such, I needed to be prepared to teach even if speech wasn’t working. I made plans ahead of time, for if I lost the ability to speak while teaching. I kept a speech-generating device (usually my laptop with eSpeak installed) with me, but the main plan was to keep writing on the whiteboard and just write everything. If I had a problem, I was supposed to text our department admin. The original suggestion was that I call her on the department line, but if I can't talk, then I can't talk on the phone. As it happened, I didn't lose speech as a teacher during my time in the math department, but it was better to be prepared than not.

Teaching classes gave me a much better appreciation of everything that's involved in, well, teaching classes. Even with the curriculum chosen and the syllabus (and exams!) written for me, there was a lot of behind-the-scenes work involved.

[Image from Flickr user Marco used under a Creative Commons License]

Alyssa is a doctoral student in neuroscience at the University of Rhode Island. Follow them @yes_thattoo or check out their personal blog.

"Piled Higher and Deeper" by Jorge Cham

www.phdcomics.com  

Most of us aren't going to be full-time, tenured university professors. We just aren't. I think there have been enough articles explaining that fact (and sometimes calling it a crisis in academia that more people are getting PhDs than could possibly become professors.) And sure, some of us probably go into grad school thinking we're going to be the one who beats the odds, whatever the odds may be in our particular field. Maybe we had no idea what we wanted to do with our degrees. I wasn’t certain-- I knew a few things I liked to do, and that was about it. Regardless, I don't want to count on getting a job I'm unlikely to get. You probably shouldn't count on it either.

The question becomes: what do you want to do after grad school (besides become a university professor)? How do you decide?

One resource my program suggested is the Science Careers myIDP site. This particular site is meant for scientists, as the name suggests, but the idea is a bit broader. There are assessments meant to help us figure out career "fit" all over the place, along with assessments that can help you discern the skills that will best transfer to careers outside the ivory tower. Are you good at writing? Do you like to write? How about teaching? Grant writing? Talking about policy? To be fair, it can be hard to assess our own skills because we're often our harshest critics. It can also prove tricky to rate on a scale of 1-5 how much we enjoy something if we only like it under certain circumstances. For example, one question asks how often do I want to teach in a classroom setting, where 1 is never and 5 is often. That depends on several factors. What's the classroom like? I’m not always capable of speech, related to being Autistic, and I need to be prepared for speech giving out on me. Is the classroom set up so that at least one of my alternative communication methods will work? What (almost certainly incorrect) assumptions are my colleagues (and my students) going to make when they first see me need to type or write instead of speak? Do the students actually want to be in the class? All those things are relevant to how much classroom teaching I want to do, and none of them are reflected by a 1-5 rating.

Therefore, your mileage on this type of questionnaire may vary. In order to apply to a wide range of people (science is pretty broad!), a lot of the skill and interest questions must be vague. If you can manage to give useful answers to them anyways, myIDP will match career paths with your stated skills and interests, ranking them approximately by overall fit. Interests matches and skills matches are shown separately, and the ranking seems to be by the sum of the two categories - tie goes to interests, since you can learn new skills. That’s part of what graduate school is about!

If those surveys aren't for you, think about why they aren't for you. Sometimes the problem will open up a different way for you to think about career options. From the results of my getting stuck, I could figure out that I like to write and teach, and that workplace culture is going to be super important to me even though I generally prefer to work alone. How people react when they find out I can't always speak (and will absolutely still give my scheduled presentation or teach class while speech isn't working) varies, and it's going to matter just as much as anything else about the job.

Long story short: take a look at the career paths that are out there. The Society for Neuroscience lists over a dozen types of career path outside academia. A professional organization for your field will probably have a list too. Think about what you enjoy doing. Think about what you hate doing. Think about what jobs have more of the first and less of the second. What do you want to do after graduate school? What are your options?

[Comic by Jorge Cham used in accordance with permissions found in the comic’s about page]

Alyssa is a doctoral student in neuroscience at the University of Rhode Island. Follow them @yes_thattoo or check out their personal blog.

Many graduate students have assistantships of some sort. We have a contracts, either annually or by semester, detailing our titles, what responsibilities are, and what our compensation will be. I was a math department teaching assistant for two years during my masters, I am a teaching assistant in electrical, computer, and biomedical engineering now, and I'm told I'll be a research assistant for academic year 2017-8. The letters I’ve signed, though, are not the entirety of the story. There's also the collective bargaining agreement through my union. Your relevant documentation may well include more than just the piece of paper you sign, too. Read all of it. In its entirety. I mean it.

Yes, I know: it's legal language. I hate reading legal language as much as I think most non-lawyers do. However, this is important. There's important information in each. The letter tells me:
 

• My stipend rate: How much am I getting paid? I actually caught an error in this area once: any student who has passed masters qualifying exams gets bumped up from level I to level II, which means a pay increase. Because my masters is from the math department, and I currently work in electrical, computer, and biomedical engineering, someone didn't know that I qualified for level II. Over the course of the 2016-7 academic year, that mistake would have cost me $356. I'm a graduate student. I want my $356. I bet you want all the money you should get too.
• Work time: How is the academic year defined? How long is it? How many of those weeks am I expected to be working? What are the rules about which of those weeks I'm working? Could I, as a TA in the math department, get the week of spring break off so I could go on the spring break trip with my ultimate (Frisbee) team? (I could and I did.)
• My duties: The form letter says that we could be expected to prepare or teach labs or courses, proctor exams, grade homework submissions or exams, or hold office hours. The third page, labeled "duties and responsibilities addendum," has the specifics, which vary between departments and assistants. My duties have, at various times, been: teach a class and grade another, teach a class and proctor, teach two lab sections and grade most of the associated homework submissions, and grade for four classes.
• Other sources of important information: I need to follow the rules in the University Manual (and so do the people I work for!) It's been a while since I read that in full, but I have done it. There are additional provisions in the Collective Bargaining Agreement, which is the contract my union signs with the Rhode Island Council for Postsecondary Education.

When I first became a teaching assistant in the 2014-15 academic year, the new governing collective bargaining agreement wasn't signed yet, and we were still working under the 2011-2014 contract. That's the one I read first. Here's what I learned from it:
 

• Dues: I'm going to be paying the union the same amount whether or not I officially join, whatever I may think. I may as well join, talk to them, and try to get my views represented.
• Grievances: If I think my contract is being violated, I go to my immediate supervisor first. Then I would go to the University President (or his designee), then the commissioner, and then arbitration. I really don't want to need to do that, but it's good to know the procedure.
• Outside writing: I blog, and not just here. I'm in a few anthologies that aren't related to my official field of study, too. It's important to me to know, then, that my ability to do so is protected. From the academic freedom clause: "When they write or speak as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline." That sounds like protection.
• Disability: The university isn’t allowed to discriminate against me for being disabled. That's good to know. It's also federal law. Yes, I have read a good chunk of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Where do I go for accommodations? I have no idea. Students go to Disability Services for Students (DSS). Faculty and staff go to Human Resources (which then talks to DSS.) I'm a student and I'm staff. What do I do? No one knew.

Because I read my contract and asked around, I knew that no one had the answer regarding my accommodations. If I hadn't known that this was undetermined, I wouldn't have known to bring it up when I talked to my union. They wouldn't have known to bug the administration about it. Guess what? It's specified in the 2014-2018 contract! I go to DSS. I can also handle problems with accommodations that DSS can’t help me resolve  through the grievance system instead of filing an ADA lawsuit, because following relevant federal law on disability is now part of my contract. Again, I really don't want to need to do that, but having one more option is nice, and knowing what all my options are is important in case something goes very wrong.

The moral of this story is, read your contract.

What did you learn from it? What isn't clear?

[Image by Informed Mag and used under a Creative Commons license.]

Alyssa is a doctoral student in neuroscience and union member at the University of Rhode Island. Follow them @yes_thattoo or check out their personal blog.

As graduate students, we tend to have “jobs” beyond our coursework. Maybe we teach. Maybe we work outside the university. Perhaps our research is considered paid work. For a lot of us, this takes the form of a graduate assistantship: we have teaching assistants, research assistants, and assistants whose responsibilities are mixed or primarily administrative. There might be a union, and it's getting more common to have one: graduate assistants at Yale, Loyola Chicago, and Columbia have all voted recently to unionize. As a student at the University of Rhode Island (URI), my union is URI Graduate Assistants United (URI GAU). Regardless of what any graduate assistant thinks of unionization, it's still there. The union already exists here. The question is, what you do once you're at a university that has one? I say, communicate.

Why?

First off, unions have information. Because the union is composed of other graduate students (and maybe an outside employee--our one employee was a former union member), they have other important graduate student knowledge. They're likely to be in the loop about university events, including those with free food. They might know about conferences that your department hasn't heard about, because there are graduate students from all departments in the union. If your work is interdisciplinary, an extra ear to the ground about conferences and seminars outside your department is super useful. They might know about sources of funding that can support you getting to these conferences, too. Mine is even a funding source! This information is outside the official job of the union – but they have it, and you may as well take advantage of their knowledge. You can also add to it, using your knowledge of what's going on in your own department.

Then there's the information that is directly about the purpose of a union. That is, information about labor rights. Let's say you have a conflict in your department. The union should know any relevant procedures for handling this! Or suppose there's something in your contract that isn't clear … but it's important to you. This happened to me, as a disabled teaching assistant. As a student, I get accommodations through disability services. But as an assistant, do I go to disability services or to human resources? It wasn't specified. My department thought I went to disability services. Disability services thought I went to human resources. The union said the other people they knew about had gone to disability services. Disability services took care of my accommodations.

There's also collective bargaining. Regardless of whether your issues are the ones your union is making noise about, it's a good idea to know what they're pushing for! As you might expect, a pay raise is usually on the list. If the current health benefits are nonexistent or insufficient, those might be on the list too. Some unions provide updates on the bargaining process -- I know the URI GAU does. And if there is an issue you care about that your union isn't making noise about? They won't start if you don't tell them. If you do tell them, they might. When I started as a teaching assistant, I wasn't clear about where I went for accommodations because it wasn't specified. The bargaining team requested clarification, and they got it. There is a line in my contract that's there because I pointed out my issue, and my union made it their issue:

4.5 Disability Accommodations. The Administration and GAU shall adhere to Federal and State laws and regulations as they apply to treatment and accommodation of persons with disabilities. Requests for accommodations shall be submitted to the Office of Disabilities for Students.

That would not have happened had I assumed that since they weren't yet working on my issue, that meant they weren't willing to work on my issue. Instead, I talked to my union. Good things happened. What have you gotten from talking to your union?

[Image by Flickr user The U.S National Archives and used under Creative Commons license]

Alyssa is a doctoral student in neuroscience at the University of Rhode Island. Follow them @yes_thattoo or check out their personal blog.

As a new student in neuroscience I've been learning about how the nervous system works, including, of course, the brain. Often, neuroscientists learn about how things usually work by looking at people or animals that don't work that way. Differences are usually studied either in terms of what they teach us about the norm, or in terms of what’s impaired, absent, or just generally wrong. This gets uncomfortable when I have the difference being studied, and it’s not a feeling I want to induce in anyone else. I’m Autistic, for one thing. Aphantasiac, for another. That’s a recently named variation: it's the inability to form voluntary mental imagery. Essentially, having aphantasia means not having a mind's eye (so no, I don’t think in pictures like Temple Grandin). Aphantasia was named in 2015, after British researchers published a 2010 case study of a retired architect, MX, who suddenly lost his ability to make mental images and people who never been able to visualize started contacting the authors. We get to see the history of neuroscience in the making here, including the evolution of how we write about a recently named divergence.

I also have experience as a disability studies scholar with a focus on neurodiversity. The neurodiversity paradigm is a way of looking at neurological variations and cognitive styles that does not label any of the variations inherently wrong. Instead, diversity is valued and social factors are recognized in how “normal” functioning gets defined. Space is left for a person to desire to change (or succeed at changing) their own neurology or cognition, and to understand that people with certain variations tend to want those variations. Epilepsy is one most people would rather not have. Personal preferences are mixed about aphantasia. Autistic pride is more common than many might think. Most synesthetes seem to find their mixed senses cool.

Over in the land of neuroscience, studies are full of “impairment” talk and comparisons to “healthy” controls. In the land of disability studies and neurodiversity work, we consider the problems inherent in defining people by what they aren't, or by what they can't do. When we only consider what a person can't do, we tend to think of them as lesser. It's an issue in special education, where IEPs focus on inability and remediation. It's an issue in fiction, where disabled characters are often written more like walking or rolling inability, sans personality or motivation. Analyzing representation, especially in young adult speculative fiction, is part of what I do as a disability studies scholar.

Having learned to read depictions of disability and difference critically, I don't stop doing so just because the material of the day is a study in neuroscience. That's where things can get tricky. When I read the case study about MX, I still had to notice the way they wrote about his mental functioning. Zeman et. al. definitely talk about abnormal patterns of brain activation and healthy controls, which implies a normal brain that MX is deviating from. At the same time, they focus on how MX does perform tasks we typically associate with mental imagery, rather than on what he doesn't do. They also describe the ability to create mental images as something most people have, rather than something all people have, avoiding the pitfall of (accidentally) excluding the object of their study from humanity.

I also find myself considering these issues as I write. Do I copy the language of impairment used in the original study as I write up the parts of the research I consider important? Do I talk about cognitive differences instead? Do I stick to saying that a given trait is increased or reduced (compared to what, exactly?) rather than calling this increase or reduction an impairment? Is the question this study addressed even intelligible if I'm thinking through the neurodiversity paradigm?

I don’t know the answers yet. I know it’s exhausting to read through research that says I’m not properly human because of some supposedly fundamental or universal human trait I don’t share. Since I’m Autistic and aphantasiac, I’ve dealt with this. I know it’s similarly frustrating to wade through research meant to help people like myself that focuses on burdens and impairments, then discusses indistinguishability from my peers or loss of diagnosis as the optimal outcome. In fact, I had to drop a research project because of these issues: I care about assistive technology for autistic people, but I can’t read that many typical autism essays and I won’t write any. I tried to find a path through the issues of what I can cope with reading, what I can ethically accept in my writing, and the (non-autistic professional) desire the project was meant to address. I failed, to the tune of daily panic attacks until I bailed on the project.

[Image provided by Wikipedia user Muffinator and used under and used under a Creative Commons license.]