Grad Student Experiences in Leadership

Posted on April 15, 2013 by

scrollThis will be a different type of blog post. This is actually a blog post from 14 graduate students who are about to graduate (or graduated) from the Rutgers Pre-Doctoral Leadership Development Institute (PLDI). This post is composed of short notes about their experiences and serves to thank the Faculty and Staff involved in PLDI.

What is PLDI?

Rutgers’ Pre-Doctoral Leadership Development Institute program (PLDI)  is designed to teach doctoral students aspiring to careers in academia how to navigate the challenges of academic leadership and thrive in the university environment. In this two-year certificate program, our professors shared a very precious gift with us – their experience. We created this blog in order to share our experience with them, with respect and appreciation for the gift they have so graciously given us. We hope that this will continue to serve as a reflective space for affiliates and future cohorts to share their perspectives.

-The PLDI Class of 2013

Tara Coleman: Program in Comparative Literature

When I first started the PLDI program and told my Dad about it, he looked at me strangely and asked why I needed leadership training if I was going to be a professor. He doesn’t know it, but I have already benefitted from my training a great deal, in ways as simple as being able to participate meaningfully in debates among my family and friends about Rutgers, the challenges facing higher education, and how I see my future in this field.

Continue reading →

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Be yourself and don’t take things too seriously

Posted on April 9, 2013 by

It’s almost a year since I came Rutgers as a graduate student, and I have to say: “Oh, I love it here!” To new graduate students, I’d like to share my experience here with you: don’t take things too seriously, and I bet you’ll love Rutgers too!

Enjoy your time at Rutgers!

There are smiles and tears in this first year.  I enjoy the knowledge I get from my courses – I want to learn. I’m happy to be a good TA, and I make the effort to improve each recitation I give. It’s always great to meet cute and kind people, and at Rutgers you’ll meet many.

Sometimes I distance myself from the crowd, not because I am too shy to show my friendship, on the contrary, it’s exactly because I want to develop friendships. It’s important to maintain friendship with people in your work circle, which is a key element in guaranteeing efficiency and cooperation in a research project, and a happy environment for study and working. Always keep in mind that studying and doing research is why you have come to Rutgers.

Be yourself and don’t take things too seriously.

Maybe you have a general goal for yourself when entering graduate school — you know what you are interested in and ready to dedicate yourself to research in your area of interest, however, life is not always as you expect it to be. It’s not always how hard you’re willing to work — there are many things that you cannot control — but what you can do is to find a balance between your goals and the environment you are in.

Maybe you like a research group very much but decide that it would not further your research goals; maybe you have found a suitable group but realize that you have not sufficient passion for the particular project and need to dig out a topic that you like.  Be yourself, and don’t hesitate discussing the project with your professor, letting him/her know what you want to do and getting suggestions. Everything is changing very fast — just remember to keep your goal in mind and be ready to adjust it as necessary to stay in balance with your environment.

Think a second time before making decisions, try your best to accomplish everything you decide to do, keep in mind your life goals, and find balance with the changing world — that’s it —  nothing to regret, and enjoy every day. Like an old song said “whatever will be, will be”.

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What are community land trusts, anyway?

Posted on March 20, 2013 by

For the last five years, I’ve been reading, studying, and working with a form of tenureship called the community land trust (CLT).  I’ve become very personally involved, serving both on the research and policy development committee for the National Community Land Trust Network and as a board member for the Essex Community Land Trust in Essex County. But what are they, you might ask?

A CLT is a participatory, community-based nonprofit organization that owns and holds land in trust for the common good. It leases that land to households that purchase the improvements (houses and whatnot) located on the trust’s land. When these households sign the ground lease, they are granted all the rights of more traditional homeownership. The main limitation in the lease comes with the resale of the home. They can only realize a certain percentage of any increase in the home’s value (usually between 10-15%), and can only sell the home to a household that falls within a certain income range. This allows them to realize a certain amount of equity while keeping the home affordable for the next low- to moderate-income household.

It was originally created in the late 1960s as a means for black farmers in rural Georgia to gain and control land. While it remained on the fringe of the affordable housing scene for a few decades after that, its star has been on the rise for the last ten years or so. It has attracted the attention of HUD, the Ford Foundation, and a few other major players on the community development scene. Why did I get interested in it? After spending time walking through neighborhoods in Essex County that had been hit hard by the housing/foreclosure/credit crisis, I became interested in forms of tenureship that would prevent housing from being entwined in the volatility of finance markets and speculative ownership. CLTs and another form of tenureship called limited equity cooperatives caught my eye, and the rest is history. My research is currently focusing on how CLTs are handling their emerging popularity and whether or not their radical ideological heritage as the means to fundamentally altering property relationships will survive the attempt at making them a viable alternative to traditional homeownership.

Any questions? Feel free to leave a comment! I love talking about this stuff.

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Towards Clarity

Posted on March 12, 2013 by

I recently presented a paper at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Southeast Colloquium held at the University of South Florida, Tampa.  It is fairly typical within my discipline of media studies to project slides to illustrate various points of your paper rather than reading directly from the paper itself.  I find this method much more engaging as a presenter and as an audience member, but after this conference I realized this kind of presentation forces something else in my work, namely better organization.  I now know how to improve the structure of my paper after doing the work of deciding how and what to present.  Some aspects must be cut for time.  I will leave these nuggets in the paper itself, but the process of presentation hones my approach resulting in (fingers crossed) more clarity and perhaps publication.  I tell myself that I have 20 minutes or less to tell a story.  I guess I work much better under pressure.  I have decided that come the first or second draft of any given paper, I am going to go through the process of presentation even if I am not presenting it to an audience–right down to making the slides.

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Here I am presenting my work in the standard hotel ballroom. My kingdom for better lighting. The carpet is a lost cause.

The conference also reminded me of the value of feedback for the paper itself.  A questioner from the audience asked me how I defined diversity.  I confidently gave a two-pronged answer.  No problem!  Hit me with more!  But of course, the problem was that the question should have been unnecessary.  I am grateful for the question because I realized an opportunity or perhaps a demand to be explicit about a key term in my presentation, but most important in my paper.  Defining terms is one of those obvious academic priorities that countless professors rant about, right up there with “read the <expletive> syllabus,” but when we get too close to our work slippage occurs; the obvious becomes obscured.  Academic conferences, at their best, offer paths to clarity.  The Florida weather in February did not hurt either.

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Research: Estrogens and the body

Posted on March 12, 2013 by

Let’s first start off by stating that I am a student in the Endocrinology and Animal Biosciences Program at Rutgers. The program I am in is very diverse and we study multiple aspects of endocrinology–or the study of hormones. There are professors here that study anything from cancer biology to the reproductive system to obesity. The lab that I am in focuses on estrogens. Specifically, I am interested in how estrogens control the body–what changes it can make to energy balance (consuming more or less than our body uses), thermoregulation (temperature control), and reproduction.

In addition, our lab is interested in how estrogen acts. Estrogen is considered to be a steroid hormone, which means that it is able to go into cells and bind to a receptor to become activated. However, there is now a new way that it can function–it does not have to go into the cell, but responds to receptors on the outside cell membrane. Furthermore, I am interested in something called KNDy neurons, which are neurons that produce three different genes: Kisspeptin, Neurokinin B, and Dynorphin. These neurons are located in the brain and are important for many body functions including those that respond to estrogen.

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Organizing Events and Programs

Posted on February 27, 2013 by

Organizing an event can be incredibly taxing and difficult, especially for a graduate student. However, grad students are often brought into projects of this sort. It provides an event or program with capable staff or assistants of whatever sort, and also provides the student with an important type of experience. The managerial and administrative skills grad students can learn and refine from these experiences is important and useful. If anything can teach time-management, putting together a conference or workshop certainly can.

The type of work undertaken can be varied, as can be the time-commitment and intensity of work. Some students may help with the logistics of a conference and wind up incredibly busy for a 3-day period, while others may be junior members of the organizing committee and wind up working a moderate amount* over a longer period of time.

*And keep in mind, such duties and such work are undertaken in addition to existing obligations towards research, teaching, or coursework. So “moderate” is more than it sounds, perhaps.

From my perspective, these skills are sometimes hard to describe or quantify. Some of the skills may be specific to the type of event being organized, while others may be widely applicable. Having been graduate coordinator for the DIMACS REU for several years, I believe some of the experience may only be applicable in scenarios with undergraduate research. Other skills, however, may transfer to scenarios like organizing a conference or working within a department or university bureaucracy. In some sense, one learns how to do things, how to get things done, whether that means learning to adapt to certain scenarios, understanding how to navigate certain structures, or simply having the experience of making something happen. In the future, stepping up to the figurative plate will be easier and more natural.

One important virtue in organizing events and programs that I have come to value as almost universally applicable and of great importance is this: Set yourself up to succeed. Front-load the work, make sure it is done right, have a plan, and always be as prepared as possible.  Don’t forget to follow up on important emails. Make sure that contingencies have been covered. Accidents will happen, disasters will occur, and you will make mistakes. Have a timetable, have back-up plans, and so on.

That sounds like many principles, but to me it really is one coherent guiding idea. Success in organizational and administrative tasks can be decided, or at least heavily weighted, by the organizational and managerial efforts invested, especially those invested early. That lesson, and a little experience, can help a capable grad student or young faculty member successfully bring together virtually any meeting, conference, project, or program.

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The Nurturing Paradigm of Scientific Training

Posted on February 26, 2013 by

Uri Alon, a biophysicist at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, likes to tell a story about when he first became a faculty member.  Already an accomplished researcher, he stepped into his empty new lab and immediately felt overwhelmed.  Despite all the training he’d received about how to do science, there was so much more to being a scientist that he was completely unprepared for: setting up a laboratory, recruiting students and postdocs, developing good projects for students and postdocs, managing a large team, mentoring young people for the next stages of their careers, and so on.  As critical as these skills are to being successful, there is very little emphasis on developing these skills early in one’s career.

Indeed, there seems to be little respect in the scientific community for the importance of these “soft skills,” at least in comparison to the technical skills required to do the research itself.  As a result of his personal experiences, Uri Alon has led a small crusade toward greater emphasis of the human aspect of doing science.  On his website he’s compiled a growing set of resources called “Materials for Nurturing Scientists,” including articles, videos, and songs, authored by both himself and others.  Topics include how to choose a scientific problem, how to give a good talk, how to build a motivated research group, how to achieve work-life balance, and more.  He also has developed support groups for young scientists at his institution and has advised other institutions how to do the same.  His title evokes a compelling vision: one in which one’s goal as an advisor to students and postdocs goes far beyond merely supervising their research.  The “nurturing paradigm” entails holistically developing young people in every aspect of becoming a professional scientist.  Having heard Uri Alon speak (and sing songs) about these issues multiple times in person, his vision is certainly an inspiration to me.

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