Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

The Academy, LOL Cat Style

It's been a while since my last (and first) "laugh out loud cat" post. But today I needed a laugh so I though it was time for another LOL Wednesday. These, I did not make myself. But I thought each of them fit nicely with a higher education theme by illustrating some of the disciplines you might find at your local U. (Also, see this post for more cat-college comparisons.

Enjoy!

Criminology Departmentlolcat

more cat pictures

Theoretical Physics Departmentlolcat

more cat pictures

Political Science Departmentlolbird

more cat pictures

Fine Arts Departmentlolcat

more cat pictures

Psychology Departmentlolcat

more cat pictures

Modern Languages Departmentlolcat

more cat pictures

Genetics Departmentlolmouse

more cat pictures

Computer Science Departmentlolcat

more cat pictures

Theology Departmentlolcat

more cat pictures

Greatest Academic April 1st Joke Ever!

Or at least in the top 10.

Some Brown University mathematics professors were confused and dismayed this month to learn that the university planned to admit 20 percent of its next freshman class completely at random — by putting names in a hat and drawing them out.

The Brown professors were reacting to an e-mail message they received from a colleague reporting on his work on the university’s Admissions Advisory Committee. Complete with the sort of verbiage and citations one might expect in a report from an august institutional panel, the memo outlined the reasons Brown was going to “merit-blind admissions” and the comparable actions of peer institutions. Naturally, professors reacted to this memo, with some expressing concern about random admissions. Had they followed a link provided in the memo, they would have realized that there was no cause for concern. However irrational many people find elite private college admissions, it isn’t in fact being replaced with drawing names out of a hat...

(IHE full article here)

Happy Pi Day!

3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 421170679 8214808651 3282306647 0938446095 5058223172 5359408128 4811174502 8410270193 8521105559 6446229489 5493038196 4428810975 659334461 2847564823 3786783165 2712019091 4564856692 3460348610 4543266482 1339360726 0249141273 7245870066 0631558817 4881520920 628292540 9171536436 7892590360 0113305305 4882046652 1384146951 9415116094 3305727036 5759591953 0921861173 8193261179 3105118548 744623799 6274956735 1885752724 8912279381 8301194912 9833673362 4406566430 8602139494 6395224737 1907021798 6094370277 0539217176 931767523 8467481846 7669405132 0005681271 4526356082 7785771342 7577896091 7363717872 1468440901 2249534301 4654958537 1050792279 892589235 4201995611 2129021960 8640344181 5981362977 4771309960 5187072113 4999999837 2978049951 0597317328 1609631859 5024459455 469083026 4252230825 3344685035 2619311881 7101000313 7838752886 5875332083 8142061717 7669147303 5982534904 2875546873 1159562863 23537875 9375195778 1857780532 712268066 1300192787 6611195909 164201989. . .

P.S. And Happy Birthday to AE!

Science Friday link

Maybe there is hope for me...

...if I really, really get going...

Newly Tenured — at Age 68

...“If someone had told me that I was going to start on a tenure track when I was 62, I would have laughed,” [Victoria Lichterman] says.

“But now I’m 68 and indeed, it’s been there, done that.”

Lichterman, an assistant professor of humanities, received tenure at New York City College of Technology this year, having signed on as a full-time junior faculty member six years ago at age 62 after a couple years as a part timer. “She’s just one of us, who came to tenure late in life,” says Cathy Santore, chair of the humanities department at City Tech, which is part of the City University of New York. “She’s worked extremely hard and with so much energy, I worried about her because I thought she’s just knocking herself out. She wants to keep up with the younger faculty but she went beyond what some of them are doing.”

“Actually,” Santore says, “she’s teaching me about age. When I said to her, ‘Victoria, you don’t have to work so hard,’ she said, ‘Oh, when you get to my age, you’ll see….You’ll just be so delighted that you can still do it that you’d like to do it"...

Well done! BTW, one of her research topics sounds fascinating: "the history of white writers speaking through black characters."

The Academy According to Kitty and Biggie...

I was at home packing up some of my books when I came across several academic survival guides. (I discuss a few of these books here and here.) Prior to graduate school and throughout both my masters and PhD programs I consumed these books like food. Survival guide to graduate school for women students, and how to write your dissertation, and getting the most out of graduate school were just a few of the themes in these publications. I guess reading them did me some good--This is assuming that having been granted your PhD and living to tell the tale qualifies you as having survived.

But there is always another level of "survival" in the higher ed game. Having survived graduate school, how can one survive a post-doctoral experience? If you survive that, what about the tenure track job search process? Assuming you make it through that hoop, what about surviving the promotion and tenure process? If you decide (or are forced) to go the non-academic route, how are the survival rules different there?

Well, I have few answers to these questions (though I do have several books covering those topics). What I have found helpful, though, are a couple of recent Inside Higher Education articles that have effectively used non-scholarly metaphors to give helpful advice for getting on and getting along in the academy.

In this piece posted just today Rob Weir calls on academic types to learn from cats:

Academic squabbles are often compared to cat fights, but as one who has owned cats for several decades, I’ve come to believe that such analogies are unfair to felines. Cats, for instance, instinctively know to terminate a chase when they would consume more calories than their prey would provide. And even the pugilist tabbies I’ve owned eventually learned to give wide berth to rivals who consistently bloodied them. All of this suggests that cats may be more evolutionarily advanced than a lot of academics.

Weir then goes on to discuss several academic debates from 2007 that he believes "aren’t worth the calories, let along the anguish" and thus should be terminated, cat-like, by folks in higher education. In light of my interest in the transformation of higher education into a more market-based delivery model I was particularly interested in his third example of a battle that needs to be walked away from:

Should the Academy Operate According to a Consumer Model? If you answered “no,” prepare to be boarded; your ship has been vanquished. The high price tag of higher ed makes it a market-place commodity and it’s as naïve to assert that a college education is its own reward as to believe that the Olympics are a still bastion of amateurism. Whether we like it or not, kids shop for courses just like they hit the mall. Profs and departments can assume the crusty purist’s demeanor, or they can start making course offerings jazzier and sexier. The latter path leads to the vitality, the first to extinction.

Among other issues, he also gives feline-inspired responses to the questions What Do We Do About Poorly Prepared Incoming Students? ("How about teach them..."), Why Should Faculty Be Forced to Be Tech-Savvy? ("Because it’s the 21st century..."), and Should Colleges Be Required to Dip Deeper into Endowment Funds? ("Yes...").

Some very relevant thoughts. Though I do not agree with all of the specific points, I do agree with the overall premise of the advice. Not to say that there are not some battles that are worth fighting. But I agree we can learn a lot from our fine feline friends by developing the ability to know when to slink silently away: our tails down, head up, and paws at the ready--just in case. (By the way, my only quibble with this article is that I wish it had been illustrated with some lolcats!)

Now, maybe you are not a cat person. In that event, you might be served by the simple observation that "all hustles obey the same logic"--thus the academic hustle can be informed by guidelines of a hustle in a very different sphere. That is the premise of this piece I read in IHE last summer. I did not revisit the comments this time, but did recall that when the piece originally appeared folks either hated it or loved it. At any rate, Phil Ford introduced his advice with the following:

We’re staring down the barrel of another academic year. Time for a refresher course in professional deportment — by which I mean “The Ten Crack Commandments,” by The Notorious B.I.G. All you professors starting out at new institutions (like me) will be getting orientation sessions to show you the academic ropes — procedures on academic misconduct, FERPA guidelines, sexual harassment policies, etc., but you can save some time and just listen to hiphop.

Ford directs the second point particularly to academic bloggers:

Never let ‘em know your next move/Don’t you know bad boys move in silence or violence. Or, as MF Doom says, never let your so-called mans know your plans... Seriously, bloggers, always assume that everyone you know, and everyone you might want to know, will read your blog. It’s easy to get suckered into the illusion that you’re confiding your innermost thoughts with an anonymous Them you’ll never actually meet. Nope, and when you confide stuff about yourself that you wouldn’t announce from the lectern of a plenary session of the American Musicological Society, you could end up like Youngblood Priest from Superfly, who accidentally kills his best friend when he drops the name of his connection in a nightclub.

I do not want to get into the whole "Tribble Controversy" here again, but suffice it to say that this is a good piece of advice. Yes, blog if you want to. But though it may well be good advice to "dance like nobody is watching," the same is not true for blogging. Even, I might add, if you do so (or think you are doing so) anonymously.

I also appreciated the advice about not believing your own BS, or, as Biggie would say "never get(ting) high on your own supply." Ford notes about this point that it may be hard to see its relationship to higher ed types:

But think of it this way: when you are up in front of your students, you are not necessarily “being yourself.” You have a persona, or several personae, that you adopt as a way to frame the meaning of the material you’re teaching, and to impart a sense of your own relationship to that material... Keep clear, if only in your own head, the distinction between who you are for professional purposes and who you are at home.

I think the same thing holds for one's "research personae" and any other Self one displays in an academic setting. Not partaking of your own product is advice easier rapped than followed. We tread a fine line in the higher educational setting that runs right between needing to bolster our confidence--for example, so as to overcome the "imposter syndrome" that many of us suffer from--and needing to maintain a sense of perspective and humbleness. On that note I'll close by offering my own piece of survival advice courtesy of a joke I adapted a while back. It doesn't have a happy ending. But I know you would much rather hear real advice than a bunch of feel good lies, right?

Two NCFR Announcements

My email in-box offered me today two very welcome pieces of news, both about my main disciplinary organization, the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR).

The first announcement concerns the launching of a new NCFR journal, the Journal of Family Theory & Review. This is a huge and--IMO--important development for the organization and discipline. I was present during talks at the Theory Construction and Research Methodology (TCRM) Workshop some years ago when this idea was first proposed. After a few set-backs and revisitations, the idea was finally transformed into reality. From my email:

NCFR announces its forthcoming third scholarly journal; the Journal of Family Theory & Review (JFTR). The inaugural issue is slated for publication in March 2009. JFTR will be peer-reviewed and published quarterly. The journal's editor, Dr. Robert Milardo, Professor of Family Relations at the University of Maine, invites submissions beginning November 1, 2007 on theory and review in any area of family studies. The journal is especially interested in publishing emergent theory or work that reinterprets or integrates existing theory... Coming to Pittsburgh? Dr. Milardo will be available to meet NCFR members at the Business meetings of the Theory Construction and Research Methodology (TCRM) Workshop, the Research and Theory Section as well as the Wiley-Blackwell reception for NCFR Journal Editors.

Given my love of all things theory and my growing interest in methodology, I am greatly looking forward to reading--and hopefully, one day, publishing in--this new journal!

The second announcement is also about something very close to my heart: NCFR now has a blog! Again, from the email:

I have asked staff member, Nancy Gonzalez, to launch NCFR’s first blog, which she has entitled - Nancy’s N = 1 Experiment. Organizational bloggers are an increasingly popular trend in professional associations; social networking and Web 2.0 are here and NCFR is ready. Read Nancy’s news, commentary and thoughts - then post a response.

Well, I am very glad that NCFR is now "ready" for blogging! A few years ago I tried to organize an NCFR conference session on family scholars who blog and sent out a call on the various email lists. The overwhelming response I got back was "What is a 'blog'?" Maybe this year there will be enough bloggers to get together informally at the meeting in Pittsburgh. If you are going to NCFR this year and blog or are interested in blogging, shoot me an email.

On "Diversities," New Philosophy, and Stinky Cheese

I am way behind in clearing out my drafts folder and it looks like I will end up deleting entries about a lot of worthy topics due to their (now) lack of timeliness and/or my lack of time to complete them. But I did not want to miss the opportunity to post about the special Diversity in Academe section of the Chronicle of Higher Education.

This special section has something for everyone. Really. Lest you think "diversity" only means "race," there are articles on diversity of religious beliefs ("Some Evangelicals Find the Campus Climate Chilly — but Is That About Faith, or Politics?"), diversity of sexual orientation ("Gay Professors Face Less Discrimination, but Many Still Fight for Benefits"), diversity of marital status ("Make Room for Singles in Teaching and Research ," and diversity of social class ("Elite Colleges Must Give Low-Income Students the Tools to Succeed")--just to name a few.

Of course, the section also delivers on one of the things that the CoHE does best: documenting nationwide statistics. This article breaks down faculty race/ethnicity figures at 2,700 colleges.

One of my favorite articles in the issue is this one about a small group of African American female philosophers who have found each other and are getting together to meet face to face:

When the nation's black female philosophers meet for the first time next month, the auditorium at Vanderbilt University will have plenty of empty seats. Not because no one is interested in attending, but because fewer than 30 black women are known to hold full-time jobs in the discipline.

The women — plus about a half-dozen black female graduate students — are getting together for the first meeting of the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers. The gathering will be part pep talk, part networking opportunity, and part research seminar.

As part of my graduate minor in bioethics I took courses in the philosophy department. It did not take long for me to notice that I was only one of a handful of Black graduate students. Even though I have grown used to my Only status, it was even more apparent walking those halls. So I will be waiting with interest to see what these women will do with their new-found sense of not being Only.

The special issue is not all "pro-diversity," however. One article aims to explain "Why Diversity for Diversity's Sake Won't Work" while another claims that "True Diversity Doesn't Come From Abroad."

The latter article in particular is one that resonated with me, as it articulated well my increasing sense that "diversity" policies are being used as a bait-and-switch tactic to ignore social justice responsibilities. I wholeheartedly value an increasd emphasis on global understanding and experience--If my experience living in Germany for three years taught me anything it was that too many of us Americans are too ignorant about the rest of the world, and that we are bound to suffer greatly because of it. Yet, efforts at internationalizing our campuses and curricula should not be undertaken at the expense of addressing issues of racial disparities and discrimination within our own borders. From the Chronicle article:

Correcting the underrepresentation of minority groups, then, has little to do with international programs. The presence of foreign scholars — even those who are black, brown, or Spanish-speaking — does little to solve the problem of our universities' lack of success with Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, and black youth from across the United States. Foreigners should not count when we are talking about underrepresentation of American groups.

Diversity initiatives began in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a way to solve broad, deep, race-based problems in American society. But with its shift in meaning, diversity today is a sort of red herring. We can deceive ourselves that we are taking the right steps to increase diversity when in fact we are ignoring what is still one of this country's most troubling issues: educating our minority youth.

I'm not sure about the term "red herring" the author of the above article uses. Dictionary.com offers a second definition of the term as "something intended to divert attention from the real problem or matter at hand." I think that the rhetorical frame of diversity, or diversities, is not so much a focus on "un-real" problems. It is more that talking about multiple differences--indeed, being able to frame virtually everything as a matter of an important diversity--we are able to diffuse attention, spead it out from race to cover other things that in some cases may not be so contentious. (And the greater problem is that we seem to be spreading out the same store of attention, the same time for discussion, the same pot of resources to cover all these new areas instead of investing in more to cover more.) In the process, with each switch of diversity focus we change around who the "oppressed" and "oppressors" are such that no one has to remain the "bad guy" and everyone gets to be the "good guy" at some point.

In this environment of Everything is Diverse talking directly about race can be exhausting and frustrating. As I put things in this previous SITBB post, for example:

...I bet I am not the only person who has had the experience of, as someone on a discussion board so brilliantly put it, bringing up race and feeling as if I had "brought stinky cheese to a potluck lunch." That is, instead of being rebuked, debated, or otherwise engaged in conversation about what I have said, the reaction is a polite--but firm--avoidance. Too well-mannered to chide me for my poor choice of dish, my fellow lunchmates nevertheless steer clear of it.

This makes me think: Has "diversity" failed as a workable strategy in higher education?

In the more than two years since I first posed that question I am no closer to a definitive answer. But I have seen this trend toward multiple diversities continue to grow. I am also not close to deciding if this will end up being a good thing or a bad thing.

In the meanwhile, I am continuing to enjoy the...um, diverse perspectives in this CoHE special section. I also continue to be a fan of another higher education publication, Diverse Issues in Higher Education. This publication used to be known as Black Issues in Higher Education but it, too, was bitten by the diversity bug--Although actually, even when it was named Black Issues it covered issues related to other diverse groups, too... Well, at any rate the current issue of DIHE also is well worth the read.

Life, 2007, Gel Ink on Yellow Squares

SITBB Vault: Falling In Love...Again

When I first started my dissertation research I was deeply, deeply in lust with my research.

This was before I finalized my topic in any formal way (e.g., dissertation proposal written, prospectus meeting with my committee). I was in lust when I had a pretty good idea of what my topic was. I talked about "My Research" constantly and to whoever would listen (or pretend to). Everywhere I turned, Signs were present confirming that My Research was IMPORTANT EXCITING INNOVATIVE BRILLIANT. I sometimes dreamt of My Research and awoke to find myself hugging my laptop-turned-pillow...to rush downstairs at 5 a.m. to conduct another lit search, read another chapter, compose another research-related blog post.

Then at some point my lust for My Research cooled. I had some doubts. I was unsure of Research's feelings for me, and mine for it. My Research seemed neither important nor exciting. It was clearly neither new nor brilliant. But slowly, somehow, eventually our feelings for each other prevailed.

I fell in love with My Research.

Soon afterwards I was ready to declare my love for My Research openly. I outted my love to the whole University community in a dissertation fellowship aaplication, then to my committee members during my proposal meeting. When I left the conference room following that meeting I was sure that everyone was looking, saying "Ahhh, don't they make a cute couple?"

Signatures were signed; official papers were filed. My Research and I were thus wed.

But as luck would have it--and, as is the case with many newlyweds--no sooner had we made this committment than we were thrust again into uncertainty. A relationship with Research takes a huge committment. This I found. A relationship with Research takes work. This, too, I found. Love is not always love-ly.

This I found every time I rolled over and saw my ugly, annoying, needy Research curled up in bed next to me.

Of course, this state of affairs made things ripe for...wandering attention. Ooooo, I would sometimes think, look at that gorgeous research topic. Other times, my imagination would soar with images of What It Would Be Like To Not Be Researching At All. Or worse, when my attention would be firmly directed to My Research, It would instead ignore me, not offering up previously easy insights...not speaking to me when I was trying to engage it in scholarly conversation.

But. I did make a committment--and in front of College and Committee. I tried to remember all the things that drew me to My Research in the first place: all the little insights that could set my mind all a-flutter, all the gestures that seemed to link all the academic paths I had followed. I read and re-read the love letters of our early brainstorming sessions. I reviewed like snapshots all of our dates in cyberspace, in the library stacks, and in piles of transcript pages.

Now I can say with certainty that I am in love with My Research--again. And, as far as I can tell, It is in love once again with me.

What comes next? Well, I think I know now that any Research worth having is Research that is worth working at. And I know that loving My Research is cyclical and will not be constantly sunshine and roses. I am fortunate to have guiding me a mentor who is with his own Research an old, but still very much in love, married couple--one that has produced many, many children and even more grandchildren.

My Research and I are trying for our own first offspring: We have a proposal submitted for a conference presentation! Wish us luck!

In the meantime, I gotta go. I have a date with a tall, dark and incredibly brilliant Lover.

Party Like a Rock Star Postdoc

A helpful hint:

It is probably best--
if you plan to celebrate the completion of a multi-day, multi-step statistical problem (or any other problem that might be relevant to your work)
by jumping up from your desk to do the "Happy Dance"
to the beat of "Stretchin' Out on a Rubber Band"
(or another Bootsy Collins song or whatever it is you like to do the "Happy Dance" to)
blasting from your iPod's earbuds--
to first make certain that the shades to your office window are closed completely,
so as not to startle the maintenance person working on the accessway just on the other side of your windowpane.

You're welcome.

Check Your Underpants

"Check your underpants daily."

That is my newest piece of advice for anyone trying to become/remain productive in graduate school or a postdoctoral position. It will not be quick advice as it will need some amount of explaining.

Which I will do now.

Some of you may have had similar mothers, but when I was a child my mother always stressed to me the importance of leaving the house wearing undergarments that were fresh, clean, and not in a state of disrepair. The fear I was supposed to internalize was that I might get into an accident, and be discovered by others (e.g., ambulance attendants, emergency room physicians, passersby at the accident scene) to be wearing dirty and/or tattered drawers. You must (in case your mother never imparted to you this warning) understand that this was the tragedy--to be revealed to be wearing soiled or inadequate unmentionables: not getting into a bad, possibly fatal accident.

The lesson I extract from this for my newest advice is that sometimes anticipatory shame must serve as a motivation for something one should strive to do anyway. So, I know that I should want to make constant and timely progress towards my various tasks--finishing my dissertation summary for an award application, starting my pilot chapter revision, continuing with my data cleaning and analyses, etc. etc.--solely because I am a serious and conscientious scholar.

But there are days when that is not enough.

And on those days, what gets me and keeps me moving is the idea that on my way home from my office I may get into a terrible accident. At some later date when my distraught spouse, friends, colleagues, and professional mentors try to reconstruct the projects I was working on at the time of my tragedy, I do NOT want them to discover that I hadn't accomplished a dagg-on thing. No, my projects may not be "complete" as most normal folks understand the term. But I will have coherent notes of my thought processes of the projects that were in the earliest stages of development. If I said the day before that I would get to points G, H, I, and K on a certain project, at the time of my accident I will have at least fully achieved H with a clear indication of making a dent in I and K. There will be a computer trail of documents worked and analyses run and relevant searches googled.

My "underpants" will be found to be acceptable.

And my mother will be so proud (if somewhat saddened by my untimely demise...)

What's it all about, Postdoc?

Quite often, folks from my Former Life (=when I was a graduate student) ask me "What is it like to be a post doc?" I never have an adequate response for them, and I am not sure why. Perhaps because I do not feel fully transitioned from grad student status. Perhaps because a postdoc is inherently such a betwix-and-between category in academia. Perhaps because I do not feel I know enough about what postdocs are supposed to be/do in order to accurately compare my current experiences. Whatever the reason, I can only report what it is that I do now without wrapping all this up as some accurate description of "Postdoc-ing."

But others have thought more about this issue and--even better--have blogged about it. So for everyone who has asked me about postdoc life and then walked away thinking I was a complete idiot in my non-response, hop over to the first ever Carnival of Postdocs for enlightenment.

Show Me the Funding!

One thing you may think as you move through your graduate school journey is

"I can't wait until I get a faculty position or post doc! Then all my funding problems will be over!"

Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but if you plan an academic career as a researcher, a large part of your life will forever be spent on issues related to funding: Searching for relevant grants, filling out massive amounts of paperwork, waiting anxiously for word, the agony of rejection--and the ecstasy of funding receipt. Soon followed, of course, by the stress of grant/project management and accounting for their money and your progress. (Or lack thereof.)

So, while you may be able to upgrade your diet from dried noodles in a rectangular plastic package, you will still be spending an inordinate amount of time begging--er, I mean, applying for research funding.

In this context, I believe it is never too early to begin familiarizing yourself with grant opportunities beyond the grad school level. That may seem like an odd bit of advice. Afterall, it is already a full-time job keeping up with deadlines and requirements for graduate student funding. But I think this is a necessary task if you suspect that research will even be a small part of your future career.

A great, great, great place to start is the National Institutes of Health (NIH) "New Investigators Program" web page:

New investigators are the innovators of the future - they bring fresh ideas and technologies to existing biomedical research problems, and they pioneer new areas of investigation. Entry of new investigators into the ranks of independent, NIH-funded researchers is essential to the health of this country's biomedical research enterprise. NIH’s interest in the training and research funding of new investigators is understandably deep and longstanding.

If you, like me, are a researcher in a social/behavioral research discipline, you may be wondering what this all has to do with you. Well, the NIH recognize that knowledge from non-biomed fields is necessary to the mission of improving the nation's health--especially in the areas of translating "basic" science to practice and evaluating effectiveness. There is even an entire office at the NIH concerned with behavioral and social research called, appropriately enough, the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR). The NIH and OBSSR define "behavioral and social science research" as

a large, multifaceted field, encompassing a wide array of disciplines. The field employs a variety of methodological approaches including: surveys and questionnaires, interviews, randomized clinical trials, direct observation, physiological manipulations and recording, descriptive methods, laboratory and field experiments, standardized tests, economic analyses, statistical modeling, ethnography, and evaluation. Yet, behavioral and social sciences research is not restricted to a set of disciplines or methodological approaches. Instead, the field is defined by substantive areas of research that transcend disciplinary and methodological boundaries. In addition, several key cross-cutting themes characterize social and behavioral sciences research. These include: an emphasis on theory-driven research; the search for general principles of behavioral and social functioning; the importance ascribed to a developmental, lifespan perspective; an emphasis on individual variation, and variation across sociodemographic categories such as gender, age, and sociocultural status; and a focus on both the social and biological context of behavior.

The many, many NIH webpages contain a wealth of information to help you begin to see how your work and interests might fit with the NIH mission. There are even webcasts of conferences and seminars highlighting exciting work being conducted by people with degrees like ours. One I have viewed and recommend is the "NIH Roadmap: Interdisciplinary Methodology and Technology Summit" that was held last summer.

I can't guarantee you that allocating a little of your time exploring these opportunities now will result in you getting a post-doc or K-award later. But at the very least it will give you something interesting and informative to do while you're eating your piping hot bowl of noodles.