Today Professor Shahir Rizk and Ph.D. Candidate Maggie Fink join us to discuss their thoughts on effectively communicating science.  Our conversation is wide-ranging, and goes through fostering fascination, treating people with dignity, listening (instead of trying to change minds), telling stories, and deciding what you want people to leave the room with. 

Shahir and Maggie developed and host a science communication workshop and they are also hard at work on an upcoming popular science book on proteins that they are signed to publish with Harvard press. Their website is foldingmoonlight.com.

You know that thing you want to do, that doesn't quite seem doable? Maybe it’s outside your expertise, or is a departure from what people expect from you. Maybe you’re not sure you can even do it. I bet you can.

Claire recently was co-chief scientist of a two-week research cruise off the coasts of Oregon and California. In this episode, Ruth asks Claire about her experience. Pre-cruise, Claire was really nervous and had many fears of failure, but once there, she really enjoyed the leadership role and being fully immersed in the collaborative research project. She also found, to her surprise, that being a leader on a ship was very similar to leading a class: lo and behold, teaching and research are intertwined.

An empowering lesson from the cruise: with time to focus on them, things that seem impossibly hard are often completely doable.

Are you doing a big project? What tips do you have? Share your thoughts with us at contactprofessorpodcast@gmail.com. 

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You know what it is - that type of studying that you wish all your students would do more. How can we put that into our assignments?

Claire is excited about her homework philosophy that 1) has very clear goals laid out for students, and 2) provides explicit scaffolding for how to get there, with 3) loads of practice problems. However, there are aspects of her assignment that don’t encourage the students to make full use of the scaffolding and knowledge of the goal. Here she and Ruth brainstorm solutions to that.

It’s really important to Ruth for the students to practice laying out the problem and have a system for approaching new problems. So she has a smaller number of problems assigned, she grades for methodology, and she supplements that with suggesting other problems from the book for even more practice. However, this isn’t scalable to large classes, so she and Claire brainstorm solutions to that. 

They refer to Specifications Grading, which they discuss in detail in Episode 124.

What do you like in homework assignments? Share your thoughts with us at contactprofessorpodcast@gmail.com. 

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Claire is familiar with participating in research cruises, but this time she is co-chief scientist and is working to make the cruise as a whole successful, and not just her own piece. Ruth is familiar with helping to organize events, but now is in charge of organizing a large event and juggling all the pieces. 

Share your thoughts with us at contactprofessorpodcast@gmail.com. 

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“Is this going to be on the test?”

Some classes or programs end with a standardized test. Is teaching to the test good or bad? 

Claire reflects on her high school and college classes and thinks that teaching to the test is okay as long as it’s clear upfront. Ruth wonders about designing better assessments so that there’s no downside to “teaching to the test.” 

Share your thoughts with us at contactprofessorpodcast@gmail.com. 

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What makes us feel comfortable offering and accepting input in communication? This episode, Ruth and Claire talk about inviting contributions: what helps people contribute to the best of their abilities and feel empowered to contribute?

Claire is reflecting on positive interactions with an especially calm and non-judgemental colleague.  Ruth finds when questions come from genuine curiosity she feels safer to contribute. 

Share your thoughts with us at contactprofessorpodcast@gmail.com. 

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Adjunct, Assistant, Associate: what’s the difference?

Today Claire and Ruth revisit the topic of job applications and discuss the different professor roles. They discuss the difference between tenure line professor positions (assistant, associate, full) and non-tenure line positions (adjunct, visiting), focusing on US definitions. They also discuss different types of institutions and how the role of the tenure line professor - and thus what makes a strong tenure line application package - varies between them.

Also, a special invitation - if you are in the hunt for a tenure line position and would like another set of eyes on your application materials, we would be glad to give our two cents!

We also refer to our previous episode on Getting a Job: Episode 14, available here: https://professorpodcast.simplecast.com/episodes/14-getting-a-job

Does your institution have any differences from what we covered? Is there anything we missed?

Share your thoughts with us at contactprofessorpodcast@gmail.com. 

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“The secret to success by achieving more with less.” 

The 80/20 principle is that a relatively small amount of your effort (~20% of it) leads to the vast majority of your results (~80% of them). This major imbalance is the case whether we’re talking about effort on writing a paper, embracing happiness, doing labwork, teaching a class, or virtually anything else. 

Given that 20% of effort or time is leading to most of the output, we can multiply our progress with significantly less effort or time by identifying and expanding that highly effective 20% iteratively.

A key detail: the 80/20 principle does *not* mean you should stop when you reach 80% of your results. (Unless you want to!) It’s not even saying that the first 80% of a task is easy and the last 20% is hard. Rather, it’s saying that out of all the things that you do toward a particular goal/project/activity, 20% of them are much more effective. By concentrating on those really effective things, we can unlock huge potential to do more with less.

Ruth and Claire discuss their experience with the 80/20 principle. Ruth is getting more comfortable with identifying times when ‘good enough is good enough’ but is wondering how to know when the extra push is worth it. Claire identifies a few aspects of her job that she really values and a few that she spends a lot of time on but doesn’t value as much. She considers how to shift her effort around accordingly. 

This episode is based on The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Success by Achieving More with Less, by Richard Koch.

What are your thoughts on effective effort? Share your thoughts with us at contactprofessorpodcast@gmail.com. 

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