Paper!

I forgot to mention that I just had a paper appear online. You can get it from JLD - it's the paper I wrote about a while ago in this blog I think, that kept getting rejected...well, finally I found a home for it. I got some great help to from the journal editor, so that's great. It's about how non English speaking background students can be better catered for in our English speaking classrooms and similar such discussions. I wrote this in about 3 days while Graeme Pettet and I were Bogota, Columbia in 2009 (see the photo...great place).

Good news, bad news

So....that Australian Learning and Teaching Council Grant I applied for (with a bunch of other people)...turns out, we got it! Yay...so (unofficially at this stage as the press release is yet to be made) I'm leading the Australian Mathematical Sciences Learning and Teaching Network. Sweet. Once the news is out, I'll probably post more about it up here and maybe even the application itself.

On the other hand, I applied for a job and didn't get it... bummer.

I'm back!

Post application submission beverage and sustenance.

Sooo...after last minute loss of support from my two most important backers for my Australian Learning and Teaching Council grant application, I managed to claw one back (arguably the most important) at the last second - ie about 12noon today...5 hours prior to submission deadline!

Nice - so if we are super lucky, in a couple of months there will be a Commonwealth funded Australian Mathematical Sciences Learning and Teaching Network! But don't anyone hold your breath...there's not much cash and I know of 4 other applications from QUT's Faculty of Science and Technology alone (not maths...other things...although one of them is Statistics education as I found out indirectly).

Much thanks to my team members: Shaun Belward (JCU), Mark Nelson (Wollongong), Carmel Coady (UWS), Maureen Townley-Jones (Newcastle), Anne Porter (Wollongong), Irene Hudson (Newcastle) and Antony Dekkers (CQUniversity) and also to those who provided assistance including Australian Mathematical Society via Peter Taylor, Steph Beames and BUNSE, Kelly Matthews from the Quantitative Skills Network, some folks at QUT and of course my wife who dealt with my hissy fits and excessive swearing both at certain people and at Microsoft word. :P

stats

I watch my stats for this blog - they interest me greatly... I'm very interested to see who are the people reading this from various places. I know Norway, the UK, Switzerland and the US, but I've really got no idea who is in the rest of these places. See the following table for example, for this month's readers. Let me know who you are people!

Australia 208 United States 22 Norway 17 United Kingdom 10 France 5 Germany 4 Malaysia 4 Netherlands 3 Switzerland 2 Japan 2

setback

So my Australian Learning and Teaching Council application is about as shot as that Council itself (it was discontinued by the feds to save -$8 million in the recent budget...yes, that's a minus there). The Aust Math Society and the Aust Math Sciences Institute basically pulled support today and yesterday...oh well. There was a waste of a week.

On supervisors of research students

I've been thinking about supervision of research students a fair bit lately. I've obviously only been doing this for a few years now (got my first principal supervision roughly 2 years ago and had associate supervision for about 5 years now I think), but already I've changed the way I approach it quite a bit. Probably as a result of my own maturing as a researcher a fair bit. This little story will be a bit about that change. It's also about how people match with supervisors...or not.

I think that I'm a fairly laid back person most of the time and about most things (not everything: ask the scum who used to live in the apartments above and below me when we had an apartment in Brisbane City). That was how I originally took to supervision. Really laid back. Possibly because of my own nature, but also because I don't think I had any idea what I was doing, so I didn't really push any particular method or style very hard. I didn't have one to push!

Over the last couple of years, my style has become such that my expectations are a lot more focussed. I'm not so into just "rolling with the flow". This has reached such a point that a few weeks ago when a student wrote to me asking to do a coursework masters project with me (a small project really, 24cp over one semester) I responded with an email that was about 2.5 pages long explicitly outlining not only the project, but my expectations down to the level of when and where we would meet, what we would meet about and at what point of the semester, what I expected in terms of written work submitted, when it should be provided, what I would give back, oral presentation of research at regular intervals, and all of this culminating in submission of a draft of a research paper to submit to a journal following assessment etc.

Needless to say, I'm pretty sure I scared the shit out of this student and they haven't written back since. Not to worry! Obviously this student wasn't really keen on that sort of situation. It's a shame because I guarantee you that this would have given this student a research paper published in a peer reviewed journal - which they probably won't get now as part of this project unit. But that's ok.

Not that I have any reason to believe that this was the case in the above case in particular, but it's probably relevant to say now that sometimes, a student in that situation cares more about a high grade in the unit than something which is probably more useful in the long run. Not just the paper, but the actual research experience, rather than some artificial course pretending to be research.

Anyway, that's bring me to the topic of the interaction between a supervisor and a student. There is so much to this, that I had never really thought of until reasonably recently. I guess I'm a bit naive and a bit optimistic sometimes, but I kind of thought of it in the sense that there's a job to do (the PhD) and it just needs to get done by the relevant people (the student and the supervisor(s)). But it isn't really that simple. There are so many factors at play. 

Sometimes, it is that simple. Even though there might be differences in style between the involved parties, sometimes they just work around each other and the job gets done. I think that this was my own experience. Graeme (my PhD supervisor) seems to be much more of a perfectionist than me and he likes to think around problems more than I do. I like to come up with an approach, use it, report on it and move on (provided it works of course). It doesn't have to be the perfect approach in my opinion...that is just scope for future work in my way of doing things. I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with either way, but they are certainly different and for the first part of my PhD it caused me problems because I couldn't reconcile the two approaches - I was always trying to satisfy both of us. Eventually, I just satisfied me and wrote a thesis. It wasn't great (in my self-deprecating opinion, it was probably only barely good enough), but it was obviously enough...and that was what I wanted - enough to get me over the line.

Other times, the factors at play can be big problems. One of the things I remember from student days is not really knowing anything about academia. I try to keep that in mind now - I realise that my students don't necessarily know about postdoctoral life, about grants, about jobs, about research projects, about life as an academic. Sometimes they don't know about the drivers that their supervisor has - I think it's important to let students know where they fit into your life plan. The more you communicate the better. I know some people don't think of it that way and think that you should either just know or just find out yourself, but personally I think that's like having a partner and expecting them to know your feelings etc in your relationship...it just doesn't work - you have to talk or communicate in some way, or disaster ensues.

Sometimes disaster still ensues unfortunately....but I guess if it does, at least I'll realise that I wasn't being an ass and I was always trying to make it work out.

long time, no blog...again

Ok first things first, link to the promised paper preprint...feel free to check it out. I submitted it to the Journal of Theoretical Biology about a week after the previous post. It's currently under review.

Now, I've been away from the blog for a while but for good reason. I have been working my arse off on some grant applications. This is my first time doing this in any serious way. I've been third CI on an ARC discovery application a couple of years back, but didn't really contribute anything and we didn't get the grant anyway. Years back I applied for an Australian Learning and Teaching Council grant and didn't get that either...so I'm counting these last couple of weeks as my first real serious effort at getting funded. That said, I completely expect that neither of them will be funded!

ALTC - Discipline Network

The first one is an application for a national learning and teaching network for the mathematical sciences. The Australian Learning and Teaching Council has been shut down by the Commonwealth Government, but before they close completely they are splashing all these grants around in the hope that the work they've done already will continue. One scheme is to set up national, discipline based L&T networks. I'm leading an application with some folk from JCU, Newcastle, UTS, Wollongong, UWS and with support from the Australian Maths Society and Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute to set up a network for mathematics. It's only for $100,000 over 2 years, but it could see some nice initiatives for recognition and sharing of excellent teaching practice get off the ground. It's due Tuesday...almost there.

Learning experience: I'm not really one to work with other people. I hate it actually. But I went extra hard at it for this application. I essentially cold called about 30 people including the president of AustMS and Director of AMSI as well as various academics who have never heard of me. It was awkward, but worked out well in the end. Lots of support for the idea and now I have a fairly large team of interested people coming along on the journey in the hopes of getting the $$$.

US Dept of Defence - Prostate Cancer


So it turns out the the US Army funds medical research! Most of it is for clinical, experimental type stuff, but they had this one opportunity listed for "innovative" projects that "explore hypotheses". They DISCOURAGED data and/or experiments. So I put together an application based around the concept of in silico (computational/mathematical) modelling and experimentation to inform laboratory experiments prior to actually running them, or to improve them when they are already completed. I did the awkward "approach people to be involved" thing again, and it worked out pretty well again! Yay for self-improvement.

This would be for $70,000US for a one year project...basically it would hire a postdoc researcher for a little while to get some work done. Hopefully with a view to building up a more serious project that could get more, longer funding.

The learning experience here was the pain of the admin side of the application. I ended up having to make 16 separate pdf files for parts of the application as well as a fill it in as you go pdf form from the US gov't grants system which was an absolute pain in the ass.

Research postgraduate students seminar day


Yesterday we had our annual research students seminar day. From memory, way back, this used to be a day when ALL of our research students gave talks. But these days we have about twice as many students, so only a few actually get/have to speak.

I know that most of the people who read this are research students or were once, so I'll say a couple of things more about this. First I used to find it boring as hell. Now, not so much. I'm even interested in the talks from students who I can't understand the work of. Next, I know some of you worry about giving talks - don't - seriously...look around - some people give absolutely shit talks, but it doesn't matter.  Chances are you are doing good work. Don't get so concerned about looking good, or people thinking you are doing something hard or easy or whatever. KNOW that you are doing something good! Then just tell everyone about it. I think some of you do this and it really shows in how relaxed you are and how the point gets across so much easier. Just talk to everyone like you are telling them your story!

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Well, less than two months to go. I need to get more papers finished.... I need to get working on a book.... and I need to help my research students more...! That's all for now.