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nd interpretation of data at first when people came to me with data sets and a somewhat cloudy focus on what they hoped to get out of the analysis i felt trapped stuck analyzing something for someone else and taking away from my own work i quickly realized that too was a product of trying to manage too many research students at one time i have truly come to embrace how much i can learn about other systems and other questions and advanced scientific inquiry in general by collaborating with so many people on the analytical components of their work further neither the broader scientific community nor my peers and administrators on campus see this type of contribution to research as a negative thing it is often complex and important enough to warrant co authorship on papers which are more likely to be published with appropriate and rigorous statistical analyses in addition word gets around quickly that i can be a good team player most of the time finally the third important thing i ve learned in five years here is to be visible i am sure to show the campus community and administrators in particular exactly how productive we can be with even moderate amounts of support that support needs to come in the form of time to complete research activities as well as financial support for those activities i have taken every opportunity to not only showcase my students work through campus and local media outlets but also to provide colleagues and administrators with quick summaries of how much was accomplished with relatively little financial investment i have no doubt that teaching one or fewer courses per year and operating a lab with a multi million dollar nsf grant as a backbone makes for more convenient research but that is far from being the only route to good impactful research my students and i have strung together a number of small grants and have reached a level of productivity that i could have only hoped for when i started here and honestly i know a big part of that is being able to communicate what we do how well we do it and most importantly why anybody should care summary my tenure portfolio is due 3 months from friday and i think i feel about as good as anyone could about putting everything on the line in front of my peers in the tenure review process i have learned so much from my experiences here and i have learned so much from my colleagues i have probably learned the most from my students i hope that many of them have learned from me and benefitted from my presence on this faculty as well tw comments leave a comment categories uncategorized author travis wilcoxen how do you recruit new students into your lab 25 feb one of the challenges that pis of research labs at liberal arts colleges face is the revolving door problem students graduate and their vacancies need to be filled with new students in principle this isn t much different than when pis at research universities graduate their ms and phd students however we face at least 3 unique circumstances in the liberal arts setting first our new students often lack the basic research skills that many incoming graduate students have you mean i was supposed to write that down randomize what second in liberal arts research labs pis frequently do the majority of the scientific training of incoming students whereas it is common for undergraduates to work primarily with senior level graduate students when receiving their training or in some cases take part of in multilevel training lastly undergraduate students sometimes want to do research with multiple faculty members while completing their degree and thus it is fairly common to train a student for a semester and lose her him from your research group because of this we can have less overlap between our senior level and incoming research students i m not blindsided by these challenges and this post shouldn t be taken as my hidden wish that i was conducting research in a different setting however as i finish up my 2nd year as a pi i m now starting to cycle through students and i m trying to think through the logistics of how i can have some institutional lab knowledge passed from cohort to cohort so that students have the opportunity to train their peers and so that i can maintain my sanity one approach that i ve found particularly effective is to embrace teaching in the introductory sequence in your department program at allegheny we have 3 courses in our intro sequence i ve taught our 2nd intro course the first 3 of my 4 semesters at allegheny and i also taught our 3rd course all but my 1st semester i ve previously blogged about our 3rd course fsbio 201 and if you have a course like this at your institution this is an easy way to recruit students interested in your research however our 2nd course bio 221 genetics development and evolution is a traditional lecture course and faculty generally view teaching these courses more departmental service than anything else however i ve built amphibian chytrid case studies into this course in a number of different areas which has made the material more exciting to me and also to the students i ve also recruited 3 of my current and 1 of my incoming students from this course recruiting sophomores into your research lab has the potential for tremendous payoffs in terms of research productivity in my case this core group of 3 students should each graduate from allegheny with 3 4 publications each including a 1st authored publication for each of them i also advertise and accept independent research students into my lab every semester during my first 2 years at allegheny i ve averaged 4 students each semester these students are frequently sophomores with high energy and eager to ask questions but lack general research skills and a knowledge of the literature when taking students i expect them to start and finish a research project and thus i fully commit to this process myself the idea is that through time my involvement in the training will be less and less of a time commitment because these independent research students contain a mix of prospective incoming and senior level students on the same project i ve been lucky to retain many of the students that have worked with me and i think that my approach of continually taking on new research students will pay dividends down the road as i m able to let students train each other more frequently lastly because i work with charismatic critters i have an opportunity to get students interested in research simply because amphibians are pretty awesome i frequently ask my research students to invite some of their friends who are interested in research out with us on collecting trips evening salamander migrations or amphibian call surveys this is my hook for students that might not know the benefits of getting involved in faculty research this is the fun and glamorous part of the research little work and seeing amphibians in the field sometimes for the 1st time for students mdv comments 1 comment categories allegheny college author matthew venesky why you need to re submit your nsf pre proposal 16 jan last year travis wilcoxen and i submitted what was at the time my first nsf pre proposal for some collaborative work on stress physiology and disease ecology at that time finding the time to complete a grant proposal wasn t too far in left field because i was given some teaching release my 1st semester at allegheny and my only course was actually co taught with another faculty member the reviews came back and they were generally positive 1 excellent 1 very good 1 poor however the proposal wasn t considered for a full proposal i spent most of my summer working with 2 of students one of whom worked on a project whose data was slotted to be used in the re submission the data came out beautiful and did a fantastic job in filling in one of the gaps and critiques of our previous proposal submission about half way through my fall semester i was already exhausted from a challenging and demanding semester among other things i had a normal teaching load at allegheny this is 2 courses and also advising senior comp research students and i was in the midst of putting together my file requesting that my position as a visiting assistant professor vap get converted to a tenure track position at allegheny and also applying for tenure track positions at other institutions as a back up plan at the time my inclination was to put the pre proposal revision on hold either temporarily or permanently the dismal nsf funding rate coupled with the fact that i was at a pui didn t give me any confidence boost that our re submission would fare any better than the original proposal in november i officially heard that my position as a vap at allegheny was converted to a tenure track position which mean that i was also able to re negotiate a start up package that reflected the research expectations for a tenure track faculty member and not a vap given the generous start up i was confident that i could continue the research productivity that would satisfy my own expectations for scholarly activity and also what was expected for faculty at allegheny plus it is not necessary for us to successfully land a large extramural grant to be considered for tenure i had essentially written off every notion of the re submission earlier this week i submitted 2 different nsf pre proposals one of which was the re submission of the proposal on which i am the pi the second was a 1st time submission for a proposal on which i am the co pi what changed certainly not the amount of time in any given day nor my commitment to my family during the break before spring semester the first was the reaffirmation that it would improve my research by simply revising and resubmitting the proposal regardless of whether it was considered for a full proposal or turned down again i don t have the time to read as many papers as i did as a postdoc and although i had a productive 1st year at allegheny i published 2 projects that i started here with 8 different undergraduate students from my 1st year i wasn t writing as much as i hoped yes i really do enjoy writing papers seriously at a minimum revising the proposal would get me past the abstracts of the hand full of pdfs that had been piling up in the need to read folder on my desktop additionally it got me back writing i hadn t written any type of scientific writing for an audience outside of my department the entire semester and that was way too long for me i ve always felt that one of my assets and writing strengths that helped maintain a high publication rate was the fact that i was always writing i never fell out of practice and it was always easy to pick back up fall 2014 i was out of practice and i knew it thus revising this pre proposal would actually help me later to write up the recent projects that my students and i have completed the second was that it would improve my teaching i am offering a new course this semester a junior seminar on disease ecology my course is designed so that students read some of the classic ideas in disease ecology from a text book and supplement those ideas with student lead discussions of case studies in the primary literature i had yet to finish compiling the reading list for this course and i knew that getting back in the literature on stress physiology and disease ecology would also introduce me to some of the newer papers in this field some of which i ultimately selected for my disease ecology course although some of you may not have an opportunity to teach a course similar in style as my junior seminar there are always opportunities to work in new case studies into traditional lecture courses lastly but most importantly i think that my work can be funded by nsf i think that my proposal addresses an important gap in knowledge in disease ecology and i think that the results from the projects that i am proposing to do can transform our understanding of why diseases sometimes cause epidemics and other times do not in the midst of a pretty busy semester i let the reviews get to me and i convinced myself that nsf wasn t interested in funding such a small fish in a big pond but that simply isn t true i took a job at a liberal arts college and subsequently started this blog with two of my friends because i believed that i can do quality research in this setting i stand firm in that belief so with the looming deadline for ios pre proposals later this evening i wish you all good luck as you submit yours mdv comments leave a comment categories uncategorized author matthew venesky sicb time again 18 dec the final two weeks of the semester are busy for everyone with stacks of grading year end meetings and preparation for winter break plans but this year it is even a bit busier for me i am bringing five of my research students to the annual society for integrative and comparative biology meeting january 3 7 2015 i am excited for this conference because my students are presenting on a variety of topics that represent the breadth of my own research program and that of my collaborators here at milllikin university in addition i will be presenting my first talk on raptor ecoimmunology and disease ecology since i started working with birds of prey just last year as i wrap up manuscripts from the 3 year study of supplemental feeding in a community of songbirds that was my first major research project as a faculty member i am pleased to have been able to get a new study to the point of presentation at a national meeting the dynamic of bringing undergraduates to a national meeting is always an interesting one this time made more interesting by the diverse interests and motivation for these students to participate two of them are already entrenched in the path to graduate studies in physiological ecology having already made connections with potential graduate advisors written grant proposals and submitted application materials those two know that this meeting offers a chance to connect with some of those potential advisors in person and get great experience and feedback that will facilitate their transition to graduate school i suspect they will spend much of their time outside of their presentations taking in as many talks and posters related to their field of interest as possible the other three are pursuing professional programs veterinary physical therapy etc and for them i am sure they will approach this meeting much differently give their presentations and go explore west palm beach if they are like my last pre professional students i brought to a national meeting however they will likely find themselves drawn to a few presentations here and there because they wouldn t have made the commitment to this meeting if at some level they didn t love biology what i always look forward to is the conversations we have about what they learned during the day either from their own presentations or from listening to others and that i never have to look at...