My (thankfully brief) experience with Cheeky Scientist

I was glad to see the following article published by Science Magazine come across my news feed this week: Criticism builds against Ph.D. careers firm Cheeky Scientist, though I confess it seems far too little too late.

Cheeky Scientist is a company the bills itself as a magic bullet for transitioning Ph.D. graduates into industry jobs. It draws on the charisma of its cult-leader-like CEO Isaiah Hankel, and preys on academics when they are at their weakest. What do I mean by that? Well… in my experience, there are two flavors of academics who leave academia. The ones that plan to, and the ones that are motivated to by coming to the conclusion that their desired career path in academia is unsustainable. I consider myself in the latter camp. I always wanted to pursue an academic career, but I reached a point that it was no longer a viable, sustainable option.

For people in the latter camp, leaving academia is traumatic. If you’ve done a Ph.D., the odds are good that your field is all you’ve ever known. You’re not trained to believe you can do anything else, and you are frequently sold a false sense of security–that you will be able to continue in your field along a career path that is sold as a ladder, though it is in actuality more like a drug cartel: a growing number of low-level early career academics drudging away for an increasingly rare number of promising academic positions.

Imagine, if you will, that mindset. You decide that you need to leave academia, even if you don’t really want to. You have no experience in looking for industry jobs, your heart isn’t in it, and you’re drowning in your own sense of grief and loss, because your field was your identity. You don’t know what to do, what skills you have, or your own worth. And then, like a white knight, Cheeky Scientist swoops in. Promising to get you into a solid industry career in a short period of time, validating your worth. It sounds too good to be true, because it is.

When I chose to leave academia, it was one of the lowest points of my life. I had no idea what I was going to do, how I was going to do it, and I felt like I was betraying my own sense of self. It was in this dark place that I saw the cheery marketing for Cheeky Scientist, and clicked the link to “Schedule a free transition call”. I don’t remember how long it was between clicking and the call, but it couldn’t have been more than a few days.

Thankfully for me, on the day of the call, my partner at the time was in the apartment and I wasn’t using headphones. It started with a higher level recruiter type person listening to my story, what I wanted to accomplish and what my experience was. The man thought I would be a good fit for the Cheeky Scientist program, and kept propping up Isaiah Hankel’s one-on-one mentoring as a gateway to a successful career. Everything was framed as dependent on this one man’s personal network. He introduced the Diamond Program, and refused to tell me how much it cost at first. “How much would you pay to land a $90,000 salary position in 6 months?”. It was about at that point that “Oh, I wasn’t sure if he would be able to join us, but Isaiah can join the call.”

At this point, alarm bells were going off in my head by the dozen. My partner was standing just out of my web-cam’s view, looking absolutely horrified. Hankel again validated my abilities, promised he could get me a job (through his power alone). And they said that it would cost a mere $10,000–but for me, they could discount it to $5,000 if I joined that day. I started to back pedal– that’s a TON of money. “I have to talk to my partner about it” (literally looking for any excuse to back out of the conversation at that point). “Do you always talk to your partner about major expenses?”.

As I recall, it took me about 15 minutes to extricate myself from the call, saying I would think about it. (I would not.) The threat of losing the discount was left hanging. I clearly dodged a major bullet.

I would be lying if I didn’t say the prospect of the program, outside of the cost, wasn’t outright seductive. I felt desperate, I needed help, I didn’t know what to do, and I certainly didn’t think I would land a job– let alone one I would be satisfied with. Cheeky Scientist promised a community I did not have, support I sorely wanted. But in hindsight, there are other ways of getting that support. University careers offices, old-fashioned networking.

Ultimately, and fairly quickly, I did get an “industry” job. I wouldn’t say I am fully satisfied or happy, and I’m still doing a lot of hard work to find my identity outside of science and academia. I honestly don’t know if I ever will, and that is terrifying. My mental health is much better outside of academia though, and I have a lifetime to do that work. I wrote this post because I think what Cheeky Scientist is doing–cheating people who may be feeling sad, lonely, desperate, and hopeless out of a lot of money because they systematically don’t know their own worth–is disgusting. Kudos to Science Magazine for publishing the article, even though Cheeky Scientist has been operating since 2012… hence “too little too late”.

And for the love of all things, if you’re thinking of leaving academia, and you feel any of these difficult emotions, you are not alone. The work is hard, but you certainly don’t need a cult-leader to take away your money to do it.

A brief re-introduction

It’s been a decade since I wrote about science in this blog, and a lot has changed in my life, including my philosophy about how ecomorphological and biomechanical science should be done. I am nothing if not opinionated about what makes good science… and since I’m no longer in academia, I can speak a bit more freely than I may have otherwise. So, for my first post back and as a means of reintroduction, I thought I would revisit a perspective article of my own, written with my colleague Hernán:

Feilich, K.L. and H. López-Fernández. 2019. When does form reflect function? Acknowledging and supporting ecomorphological assumptions. Integrative and Comparative Biology 59: 358-370.

I jokingly refer to this paper as my “rant list-icle”. Born of our reflections on the many pitfalls inherent to a largely correlative science, “When does form reflect function?” outlines 10 assumptions frequently inherent to the study of ecomorphology–some of which are inescapable to anyone doing this kind of work. Before I list the assumptions, I want to say that this article definitely makes me sound like a grumpy curmudgeon. For those of you who know me, that’s largely accurate. BUT my point (and hopefully Hernán’s too, but I dare not speak for him!), wasn’t that we should abandon ecomorphology all together, nor that we should make a habit of poo-pooing other people’s work. Rather, this was a call for honesty, transparency, and humility in science. And it still reflects what I value. If scientists need to make an assumption in the course of research, they need to be completely forthright about it. They can (and should) try to support that assumption to the best of their ability, acknowledge the assumption , and caveat their findings so that they don’t extrapolate beyond the scope of what the data can answer.

With that in mind,

The Assumptions:

1. Morphology is generally adaptive (i.e., “selected for”) in the context of an organism’s ecology.
2. The relationship between morphology and ecology, if it exists, applies at the ecological, evolutionary, or temporal scale of the question being asked.
3. The relationship between morphology and ecology, if it exists, is comparable across the range of the organisms being studied. In other words, the morphology of interest has a single consistent mapping to function across study organisms.
4. Morphology serves as a proxy for function or performance.
5. A statistical relationship between morphological variation and ecological variables is biological meaningful (or, morphological correlations really mean something).
6. If individuals or species are being assigned to categorical “bins” describing some aspect of their ecology, these bins are accurate in their reflection of life history.
7. The species for which we are measuring or modeling function are appropriate models of both the morphology and the function.
8. The metric of performance we choose to measure is biologically relevant.
9. Performance under experimental or modeling conditions reflects performance in field conditions.
10. The features under observation are related to the ecological variable(s) of interest, and not to some other unmeasured confounding variable in the environment.

If you read the article, Hernán and I go into each of these assumptions in detail. I am NOT going to do that here. But for the sake of re-introduction to my writing about biomechanics and ecomorphology, I will point out some common themes and my own (NOT Hernán’s, unless he and I are more similar than I thought) pre-dispositions.

First, in a field of adaptationists who generally believe that traits are “adaptive” (i.e., the result of the process of natural selection, which is one of several evolutionary processes), I am not one. Various evolutionary processes underlie all trait variation, but I am generally adaptation agnostic. My beliefs about trait evolution can be summed up as follows: Organisms are variable. Some organisms live and reproduce, and others don’t. If a trait helps an organism reproduce more somehow, great, it’s adaptive. But some traits just don’t kill you. Those traits may persist and vary, but they’re not adaptive. They just are. Adaptation happens, stochastic variation happens, bottlenecks happen. Lots of evolution happens, not all of it is adaptive–and I have NO IDEA a priori about how much evolution is by natural selection, so I refrain from assuming everything is adaptive. (The majority of trait variation may be adaptive, it may not be. I’m just saying I have no clue.) This informed my stance on assumptions 1, 4, 5, and 8 in the paper.

Second, I believe that some questions in evolutionary biology are answerable, and others aren’t. At least, not until we have functional time machines, or perfect ecological datasets capturing every possible source of variation. I, personally, prefer the answerable questions. (I would have called myself an experimentalist–I prefer direct manipulations.) And while I find the unanswerable questions absolutely fascinating, I find the research around them to be more credible and persuasive if the authors acknowledge the limitations of their methods. This informed my thoughts on assumptions 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.

All of this is to say, my philosophy of science is that our knowledge of the world is necessarily imperfect–and as scientists, we have an obligation to be humble in the face of an infinitely nuanced world. We should be honest about what we can learn from our data, hopeful about what future advances will bring, and always curious about what we might be missing.

Kara’s Tips for Conference Success!

Hi all! I haven’t written in some time, but a topic just came up on twitter that I really want to write about:

#SICB2017 attendees! What did you wish someone had told you about your #FirstConference?

— SICB Student-Postdoc (@SICB_SPDAC) October 17, 2016

As a member of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology I have so many thoughts on this, so I’m going to put them all here for easy reference. Most are relevant to other conferences too!

• Conferences, especially SICB, are endurance trials, not sprints. You learn a lot of new information, meet a lot of people, and generally are busy every waking hour (and sometimes later) for five days straight. Don’t be afraid to take a break if you need one. You don’t have to go to every session, and you may even process all of the new stimuli better if you take some time to decompress and organize your thoughts.
  • NB: Your advisor may want you to go to some specific things… you should probably do that.

• Go to talks outside of your area of expertise. You may not understand everything, but you will inevitably be exposed to new ideas and ways of thinking about familiar concepts. Some of my best “big picture” ideas are the result of exposing myself to lots of diverse topics. Are you a swimming biomechanist like me? Maybe check out a bee talk. Really interested in cnidarian phylogenies? Maybe try something on community ecology. You never know. Go to whatever looks interesting.

• Bring a note-taking device and a note holding receptacle. I know some people swear by digital devices–tablets and laptops. I prefer a paper notebook and pen: I find the lack of internet lets me focus on the talks, and I never need an outlet. I write notes on interesting findings and methods, and write down names and contact information of people I meet or want to meet. (Pro-tip: This makes it easier to follow up with people after–see below.)

• Meet new people outside of your lab group/ institution. Do it. This may be the single most important thing you can do at a conference. If you’re shy like me, this may be challenging, but you can always ask for an introduction from someone you trust. As long as you’re polite, you probably won’t run into trouble.

• DO NOT EAT ALONE. This is the single thing that makes me most sad and upset at conferences. Seeing a group of friends going off to eat, and then having to sit by myself with whatever terrible food I find is no fun. Invite yourself along with others if you have to. I volunteer to eat with you if you are going to be alone. You can always leave early if you want alone time later…

• Follow up with people about a week after the conference. If someone introduces you to someone else, say thank you. If you get introduced to someone, follow up with them. If someone’s research was really interesting, and you want to know more–or just want to let them know it was awesome–FOLLOW UP. It’ll help people remember who you are, and being courteous and appreciative is a good thing.

• Bring extra back ups of your talk/poster. Just do it. A USB takes up no space, and you’ll be glad you did in case of emergency.

That’s off the top of my head for now… What are your tips for new conference goers? Did I miss anything?

About the Header: The Zoology of Captain Beechey’s Voyage

I’ve just switched the header image again, this time, to a plate from the expedition notes of Captain Frederick William Beechey. Captain Beechey, later Rear Admiral Beechey, of the British Navy was an Arctic explorer in the first half of the 19th century. As captain of the Blossom in 1825, he sailed from England westward, around Cape Horn (the southern tip of South America), and north from there to the Bering Strait. He returned from his arctic voyage in 1828. For the rest of his life, he continued surveying coastlines for the British navy, until finally being elected president of the Royal Geographical Society in 1855, a year before his death.

Natural history collecting was routine for such naval expeditions, and the Blossom brought back many botanical and zoological specimens. The conchology, (=the scientific study and collection of mollusk shells) of Beechey’s voyage, from which the header image was taken, seemed to be more than a little problematic for Beechey and his colleagues. He writes:

I wish I could with sincerity have included with the above-mentioned names that of Mr. J. E. Gray, who undertook to describe the shells, but the publication has suffered so much by delay in consequence of his having been connected with it, that it is a matter of the greatest regret to me that I ever acceded to his offer to engage in it. This delay has from various causes been extended over a period of eight years, and I cannot with justice or propriety conceal from the government, the collectors, and especially from the contributors to the work, whose MSS. have been so long printed, that it has been occasionally by Mr. Gray’s failing to furnish his part in spite of every intercession from myself and others: promising his MS, from time to time, and thereby keeping the department in his own hands, yet always disappointing the printer, until at length, from other causes, the publisher fell into difficulties, and all the plates and letterpress  were sold by the assignees and lost to the government. ….

At length, Mr. G. B. Sowerby was engaged to complete the Conchology, and to revise the unprinted portion of Mr. Gray’s MS….

So remember next time you miss a deadline–someone may hear about it 200 years later…

Header Image: Plate 38 from “Molluscous animals and their shells” by John E. Gray (sort of)  in Beechey, F. W., et al. 1839. The Zoology of Captain Beechey’s Voyage. Howlett and Son: London.

SICB 2013, Day 2: So many fishes.

It’s the first full day of SICB, and filled with all of the things that make big conferences fun. There were an absurd number of talks (13 concurrent sessions in the morning!), an absurd number of biologists, and an absurd, yet necessary amount of coffee. You may not know this, but biologists run on coffee.

As I mentioned, I spent this morning in two sessions on fish swimming biomechanics. Despite the narrow focus, the talks had very different themes.  For instance, did you know that stingray fin skeletons seem adapted for their particular mode of locomotion? Erin Blevins of Harvard University does. Their fin bones are so complex that they seem more reminiscent of a ray-finned fish’s than they do a sharks. This is even stranger given that rays are much more closely related to sharks.

A few talks tried to simplify the vast array of undulatory swimming kinematics down to just a few variables using sophisticated mathematical and computational models. What does that mean? Suppose you have an eel swimming, a tuna swimming, and a sperm swimming. Their patterns of movement, (“kinematics”), are quite different. But if you approximate the kinematics using equations (often combinations of sine and cosine waves know as Fourier series), you can boil the movements down to, perhaps, two angles and a speed. Some simulations can predict optimal swimming movements. Others demonstrate the incredible physical challenges of swimming at small sizes, like how larval fish may experience day-to-day accelerations of over 40 times Earth’s gravity!

My talk went a little overtime, but I think it was well received. I’ll take it.

After the morning sessions, and paying slightly too much for Indian food across the street, I took a nap to recover from my morning…(Talks are exhausting!), so I don’t have too much to report from the afternoon. I sat in on a talk about water snake tongue flicking, proving that even the most arcane science can be fun. I even learned about the association of an arboreal habit, and grasping behavior in mammals. If you live in the trees, you’ll often have forelimbs that are particularly well suited for grasping and fine manipulation.

The afternoon poster session was a fun time too. The science was great, but poster sessions are often my favorite parts of meetings for a completely different (and perhaps less valorous?) reason: socializing. Biologists from all over the world coming together for a few days—these people are friends as well as colleagues, and I don’t often get to see them. They are tremendous influences, and some of the best motivators for my continued research.

Tonight, I’ll go to a lecture on invertebrate vision before hopefully going out into the town. (Much more likely I’ll hang out for a social though…)

 

EDIT: I’m posting this a day later. The invertebrate vision lecture was amazing. More later!

SICB 2013: Biology in the Bay Area

Hi everyone!

Once again I’m going to be keeping you posted about all things wonderful at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology’s annual meeting. This year we’re in sunny and favorably temperature-d San Francisco, and the meeting promises to be the largest yet. There are over 600 scheduled talks, and more than 1600 posters (if my eyes don’t deceive me.)

As usual, the chief problem seems to be choosing talks to see given the myriad overlapping and related sessions. Tomorrow seems to be the most biomechanics heavy day, with sessions on fish swimming, running, jumping, and all kinds of morphological and physiological evolution. While I’ll be buried for most of the morning in the fish swimming sessions, (and giving my own talk) I’ll do my best to write about a whole diversity of things.

Sadly I’m going to miss Robert Satterlie’s opening plenary lecture… Flights are exhausting, and only made more so by idiotic bicycle falls a day prior. If there’s anything fascinating at the welcome reception, of course, you’ll hear about it. 

Cheers!
K

School’s Out For Summer…at least, classes are

With final papers submitted and exams finished, life gets so much sweeter. I can go back to enjoying the spring weather, going to friends’ cookouts, and actually working on my research. It’s actually a relief to have enough time to read papers, analyze data–and keep up a blog, perhaps.

In honor of my new-found free time, (and in memory of the many hours spent last week on flight biomechanics) I offer you:

The Leading Edge Vortex Sonnet

Though once they said that bees could never fly
When limited by quasi-steady flow,
The underlying theory was a lie.
Non-steady conditions cause lift to grow.

As vortex sheets roll up above the wing,
Creating a negative pressure core,
Higher lift coefficients they do bring
So that even a bumblebee can soar

And just thirty years later we have found,
Among the flying animals and plants,
Leading-edge vortices on wings abound,
And through the fluids organisms dance.

So when they say you can’t make enough lift
An attached LEV may help you drift.

A leading edge vortex on a moth’s wings. (Picture from Charlie Ellington’s animal flight group at the University of Cambridge.)

** Don’t worry, I’m keeping my day job. 

Most charismatic arthropod?

Arthropoda may not be the most endearing phylum. It’s filled with critters  that make people squirm: mosquitoes, centipedes, spiders, scorpions, barnacles… If I had to guess, I would say most people’s least-favorite animal is an arthropod.

This thought led to a discussion I had yesterday: Is there a charismatic arthropod? Every phyla must have some exemplar of charm, right? So I’m asking you, dear readers, to nominate your pick for “Most Charismatic Arthropod”. I’ll feature the winner in an upcoming post. (Besides, it must be easier than coming up with the most charismatic onychophoran….)

To start you off, I nominate the peacock mantis shrimp, Odontodactylus scyllarus.

Snake Eels!

Hello everyone!

Just wanted to share a video that’s been making its way around my lab. Long story short: Snake Eels (Anguilliformes: Ophichthidae) are amazing.

It starts slow, the fun begins about half-way through. Definitely worth watching.
“Snake Eel Spinning” by Matthew Berry

Cheers,
K

Armor or Anchor? Throwback to the Middle Ages

Biomechanists have their fair share of whimsy. Every once in a while, I come across a study and think, “Why didn’t I do that? It would have been AWESOME!” Recently, Proceedings of the Royal Society B published a study called “Limitations imposed by wearing armour on Medieval soldiers’ locomotor performance”. WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THAT? IT WOULD HAVE BEEN AWESOME! Well done Graham Askew and colleagues! I aspire to do biomechanics research as amusing as yours.