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Covid 19 Ruck Luck - With Lana Ruck - Ep 81
341 Plays4 years ago
In this episode, we are joined again by Duel Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology and Cognitive Science, Lana Ruck. Lana first appeared on Episode 16, then Episode 41, and recently appeared on Episode 79. But on this episode, rather than talk about pseudoscientists or nerd out over paleo-anth with Ella, we’re going to catch up with Lana about her dissertation and the academic job market and why each pot and pan needs its own shelf in the kitchen. We recap her dissertation topic and talk about the effect the pandemic had on her data collection. Lana then talks about having to return money from the NSF and we finish out by talking about the academic job market and Lana's future trajectory.
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Introduction to Episode 81
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Welcome to episode 81 of A Life and Ruins podcast, where we investigate the careers of those living life in ruins. I'm your host Carlton Gover, and I am joined by my co-host, Connor Chonnen.
Guest Introduction: Lana Rock
00:00:24
Speaker
Today, we are joined by
00:00:28
Speaker
dual PhD candidate in anthropology and cognitive science, Lana Rock. Lana first appeared on episode 16, then episode 41, and recently appeared in episode 79.
Lana's Academic Journey and Research Focus
00:00:39
Speaker
But today, rather than talk about pseudoscientists or nerd out over paleoanthropology with Ella, we're going to catch up with Lana about her dissertation and the academic job market and why each pot and pan needs to have its own shelf in the kitchen. Lana, thank you so much for joining us back on the show today. How are you doing this evening?
00:00:55
Speaker
I am good. I'm coming at you live from El Paso, Texas. So I'm warm and toasty and getting blown around by some wind, but otherwise pretty good. Thanks for having me back. Excellent. Yeah. We're very excited to have you on again. So real quick, Lana, just to recap for our audience, if they haven't heard you before, can you briefly introduce yourself and what it is you do?
00:01:20
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm Lana Ruck. I'm a PhD candidate in the Cognitive Science Program in Department of Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. I am trained as a paleolithic archaeologist and I specialize in stone tools, but my research is about the evolution of handedness and what that might be able to tell us about the evolution of stone tools and also the evolution of the brain, possibly the evolution of human language.
00:01:50
Speaker
What else about me? I am originally from Texas. I've done fieldwork in a few places in Ecuador, where I did my field school, Nicaragua, one week in Wyoming, and also at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. So, yep.
00:02:11
Speaker
Excellent.
Dissertation Overview: Stone Tools and Cognition
00:02:12
Speaker
Thank you for the recap. So last time, well, not last time, back in episode 16, which was dedicated to learning more about your research. Look what your data collection for your dissertation. Can you give us a brief, a little bit more than a brief recap on what your dissertation is on?
00:02:28
Speaker
Yeah. So my dissertation is the first study to try and study stone tool making language, visuospatial attention and handedness all together in like this delicious little soup. So I have left handers and right handers in my dissertation and it's a multi-day study. They would come back three separate times.
00:02:51
Speaker
And so the first part of my study is about assessing handedness and the many different ways in which we researchers do that. And so people come into the lab and they build puzzles and play with some Legos and do some different tasks with their left and right hands. And I compare the behavior of their hands. Then the second day they came into the lab and watched a short nonverbal video, a first person perspective matching their handedness.
00:03:21
Speaker
of how to make expedient Oldowan tools.
Data Collection and MRI Process
00:03:24
Speaker
So it's just cord reduction, hard hammerstone, nothing fancy. And then they with two or three cores got to attempt to do it themselves. And I would say about 70 to 80% of people were able to take flakes off. Some people were not successful. And then the next day they came back for a two hour MRI brain scan at the MRI facility there at Indiana University.
00:03:48
Speaker
And that was the most expensive part of the project. It was $500 an hour plus paying the participants $100 each. And in the scanner, they did some stone tool making tasks, some anatomical scans, a language task where they had to see some words out loud, and a visual spatial task where they had to look at some lines.
00:04:11
Speaker
And I'm kind of seeing which hemispheres of the brain each participant is using for these tasks and how it relates or does not relate to their handedness. So yeah.
00:04:22
Speaker
You know, speaking of costs, could you recount the story of how a certain subject might have interfered with what you're trying to do? And I think his name starts with C and ends with Carlton. Yeah, yeah. So, and I, you know, he's not the only one who's done it, but he's one of very few.
00:04:48
Speaker
Carlton was one of my participants. Is it, do I have your consent to give your participant number so they know which one you are? Yeah, go for it. So he's participant 18. Oh, one eight. And you know, the brain scan is two hours long, but it's very loud in the scanner. It's this giant magnet. So it's going like, the whole time. And he's watching videos of rocks being broken. So it's a really loud task.
00:05:16
Speaker
And he fell asleep during one of my scans. And so one of the scans, I didn't even run on him. It was a three-part video and we didn't even watch part three. I had two other participants do that. So now I have to throw out that entire video for everybody. It's a little bit of a pain.
00:05:34
Speaker
And that's one of the things with MRI research is that you have to average across participants. So if any of your scans go wrong or someone moves their head too much and by too much, I mean more than like three millimeters, you know, you have to throw them out of the data and your sample size, just you just watch it become smaller and smaller and smaller and you get so sad.
Impact of COVID-19 on Research
00:05:55
Speaker
But yeah, one of our scans got interrupted by a fire alarm that was dramatic.
00:06:02
Speaker
So yeah, yeah, Carlton wasn't the best participant. And when he was building the puzzle, he became self aware that he hadn't used his left hand a single time. And I'm just kind of in the background thinking like, yep, you're really you're being a perfect right hander. You're totally on brand. Don't think about it. It's okay.
00:06:24
Speaker
So yeah, I do miss data collection. It was really fun. My calendar was always booked. I was always running across campus from one lab space to the other. It was really fun. Excellent. Yeah, it was a fun time. When we did have you on, it was kind of in the beginning of COVID. I mean, I don't think we expected COVID as a society to last as long as it did. How did COVID-19 affect your data collection?
00:06:53
Speaker
Well, when we recorded me, I don't even think COVID had happened yet. I think it was still the fall. But so for me, my data collection was impacted really heavily by two things. And one of them was the COVID-19 pandemic.
00:07:10
Speaker
But the first is so Indiana University made it so that you could scan for free. You just didn't have priority access. So you had to book your scans like 24 hours before. And for someone like me who had other time constraints for my study, like there had to be as close to 24 hours as possible between the Flint napping session and the MRI for memory consolidation purposes.
00:07:36
Speaker
Assuming every participant slept in the 24 hours in between the two days. And so booking scans was a little hard, but they made a system so that if you had grant money and you paid it into the running of the scanner and the wages for the MRI technician and the physicist who helps you build your scans, then you have priority access and you use the scanner as a normal person.
00:07:59
Speaker
And so I got an NSF grant two weeks before IU shut down all human subjects research. And I was in the middle of collecting data and I had collected almost as much by the time I got the grant because grants are so slow. I had collected almost as much as I had told them I was going to and then everything shut down.
00:08:24
Speaker
And then nothing was happening for a couple months and they reopened Human Subjects Research towards the end of summer. And by that time, what had happened is half of the scanner had been paid for by the athletics department.
00:08:42
Speaker
who instead of running experimental brain skins and doing psychological research, they were running COVID research. They were taking athletes who had gotten COVID and were COVID positive, and they were putting them in the scanner and scanning their heart and lungs. And I'm not saying this on important research, it's really important to do, but
00:09:04
Speaker
I wasn't really comfortable going in there unvaccinated when I knew right before me and right after me someone with COVID was in there. I was one of those very paranoid people. And so I waited a whole year to try and spend that grant. And by the time it came to it, I just, I didn't have the time because they were still a full year later, still scanning athletes. And there was no time in the scanner to run my study
00:09:32
Speaker
They had two years of backlog by that point. So many people use that facility. I had to give the NSF grant back, which was a really dramatic story. I think I might be one of the only people that's ever had to do that.
00:09:51
Speaker
So the athletics department hijacked, maybe not hijacked is the right word, but begun to use the scanner. How many subjects were you shooting for and how many did you end up getting? So I was aiming for 50, 25 lefties and 25 righties. And what I ended up with was 19 lefties and 23 righties. So I'm only too short on that one.
00:10:19
Speaker
But then I've had to throw three or four people out for excessive head movement or stuff like that. So you're kind of chipping away at your sample. Those weeks in March of 2020, I was running four lefties. I had four lefties on the books. At that point in time, I was the one who was probably using the scanner the most frequently.
00:10:45
Speaker
You know, there were so many other things going on. I was supposed to move away for a teaching fellowship and that never happened. And I probably would have been done collecting my data by April of 2020. I was so close, you know. And if I had gotten that grant, I would have just been able to run so many people and get a huge sample. And then the study, I think really would have, it would have been really worth it.
00:11:09
Speaker
But there have been some people, especially international researchers, who just everything
Funding Challenges and Grant Management
00:11:16
Speaker
was put on hold. People who hadn't gotten funding yet and didn't have these kind of equity measures going on in the background that allowed them to collect data. I am still really thankful that they changed the system and allowed a lot of free scanning to happen. But yeah, it was pretty unfortunate.
00:11:37
Speaker
Yeah, we're super sorry to hear that. I'm sorry for anyone whose research is affected by COVID-19. You had mentioned that your study, or you had said that your study might have a greater impact. So do you still think your research and your dissertation is going to be impactful, but
00:11:58
Speaker
maybe there's always going to be a question about sample size? Is that what you kind of meant? Well, fortunately, and so I haven't analyzed the stone tool brain data yet. And that's, you know, like the wild west of my data, it's the most exploratory, the stuff that going into the study, we really have the least expectations coming out of it. But I haven't been able to replicate a language and visual spatial attention study that I was trying to
00:12:27
Speaker
because I haven't found differences in brain organization between my left handers and my right handers.
00:12:33
Speaker
And it's because I don't have enough weird lefties in my sample. All of my left-handers look like they have very right-hand organized brains. And you know, handedness studies and brain imaging studies now, their sample sizes are, you know, between 350 only left-handers and 150,000.
00:12:58
Speaker
So, you know, very insane that I get over here. I'm like 19. I tried so hard guys. You have no idea. You know, it's, it's a little unfortunate, but we're trying to spin it in a positive light and I can put this as pilot data into a grant proposal for a bigger study.
00:13:17
Speaker
There are some things about my methods that were different than theirs. It's image analysis, MRI analysis, and you do a lot of spatial smoothing and processing of the data.
00:13:29
Speaker
And so I might try smoothing at a lower resolution and doing a lot more averaging to see if I might come up with some different results. But that's going to have to be after my dissertation. This is the thing to the wait and see and sit and hope and all of that.
00:13:47
Speaker
Yeah, I'm on a timeline. Every year that I don't graduate, I'm losing wages by not getting on the real job market. I'm sitting on my ass doing nothing except having panic attacks maybe, I don't know. So I had to call it a day and get working on the data that I did have. Neuroimaging, pre-processing, if you do it correctly is very time consuming.
00:14:13
Speaker
because you want to manually check for participants if it's working properly. So yeah, it's been a rigmarole. I don't know what my other results will be, my stone tool stuff. I'm still excited to get into that data. And there's so much data for that project that I'm not even touching. I'm really not even touching the lithic materials yet. So I don't know, a couple more months and I'll have my full results and know how screwed I am truly.
00:14:43
Speaker
Well, it sounds like there's a lot of potential, and we're thinking good things, and I've heard that the only good dissertation is a done.
00:14:54
Speaker
or a finished dissertation.
Navigating the Academic Job Market
00:14:56
Speaker
That's 100% correct. My committee calls it a credentialing exercise. You want to make sure that you can run a study. And I definitely did that. So I'm ready for my degrees. Just a couple of chapters away. Excellent. And with that, we'll be right back with segment two of episode 81 with Lana Ruck.
00:15:16
Speaker
And welcome back to episode 81 of life from its podcast or appear again with Lana rock fourth time I'm pretty sure this makes her the most hat on guest I think that's me actually
00:15:33
Speaker
I'm not actually a host. I think I realized out of the hosting pedigree, Connor, you've been on every single episode, pretty much. Me and Connor have it, or me and David have missed some, but you've been... I missed one. I missed one with hip hop science guy. Oh, that's right. Okay, so we're all about even.
00:15:52
Speaker
Yeah, but we do have Lana Rugg here and we are not talking about us right now. We are talking with her and we wanted to start this second segment talking about maybe some of the things that were happening with you with your NSF grant, if you don't mind talking about that. Space music comes with the NSF grant.
00:16:17
Speaker
That's what they give you when you get it. Yeah, so I got a dissertation research improvement grant from the archaeology sub directive of the National Science Foundation in March of 2020, two weeks before IU shut down all human subjects research. And a full year later, I had to give the NSF back because I couldn't spend it.
00:16:45
Speaker
And so the first problem with the grant was that I got it like six months too late and I had already been really in the swing of collecting my data. And so the grant reviewing process can take a really long time, especially if your reviewers are very slow, you can take up to six months to get feedback.
00:17:06
Speaker
and also you can't apply for these federal grants unless you're a phd candidate for me involved i can't remember if we talked about in the first segment or not to qualifying exams and so and and it involves a lot of paperwork and so i submitted the grant like i
00:17:25
Speaker
almost a full year of doing no research, no nothing, waiting for money so that I could collect data because MRIs are $500 an hour and then I pay each of my participants $100. So it was an expensive project. And so what had happened was they shut down research and by the time they opened research back up,
00:17:46
Speaker
Half of the scans that were happening at the MRI facility were being paid for by the athletics department, and they were scanning athletes that had COVID. And they were doing like, instead of psychological research and brain scans, they were scanning people who had heart and lung damage from COVID. And so I didn't want to be scanning people while they were literally COVID positive.
00:18:13
Speaker
patients in and out of the scanner room because it's a room that's smaller than an office. It's a really small room. I refused to run participants while they were scanning athletes. By the time I was vaccinated and I felt safe scanning, so many people wanted to use the scanner that they basically told me it was impossible to use it in my time frame. I have a smaller sample size than what I intended and I decided to return the money.
00:18:43
Speaker
Now there's another part to that where you still had money left and the scanner just wanted to take your grant money and fit you in, quote unquote, when they could. Yeah. Yeah. And so this was the whole thing when I negotiated the grant, you know, it was a percentage of salary for, for the, the MRI technician and the physicist. And it was a percentage of their salary based on how many hours I was going to scan.
00:19:10
Speaker
And so I was kind of expecting this kind of pay as I go kind of thing which is how the system used to work before they made this kind of other way of doing things where I would be like alright I'm gonna run you know five participants that's.
00:19:26
Speaker
you know, what is that? That's like $3,000 or $5,000 or something. Yeah, it's $5,000. And they wanted to take all the money without guaranteeing that I was going to get any scan time. And I didn't want to do that. And they were like, I had given them the account number because I was like, oh, which number is the right one to give you? Is it this one or this one? And it was like, oh,
00:19:50
Speaker
Thanks, and they're like, okay, we're going to run it. We're going to take your money and like, no, please don't, um, don't run that, that email. Like, don't tell that financial person to do that. Cause I don't want you to take all my money and then me not be able to scan. And, and everybody on my committee and elsewhere was trying to do everything possible to avoid me returning this grant.
00:20:15
Speaker
Because overhead, when you get a grant, your institution takes a portion of that money to pay for, in their view, facilities and infrastructure that you use as a grant or as a faculty of that institution.
Research Impact and Future Opportunities
00:20:31
Speaker
And so for IU, that percentage overhead is 58.5%.
00:20:37
Speaker
So let's say you pull in, like my grant was actually, it was quite small. It was a $7,000 grant. It was really tiny. And IU pulled in, I actually had to ask for something like 12,000 because IU pulled in five of its own. And so when you get a grant, they really don't want you to give it back because they want that overhead. They've already kind of factored it into there. And they had been sitting on this money for a year. So it was in their fiscal budget, you know, not that $7,000 or $4,000 is a big deal.
00:21:04
Speaker
in the grant scheme of things. But my committee was trying to get me to use it for other projects that were not my own. And it's like, I'm not going to spend my grant money on your projects, trying to see if I could use it for publishing fees, which is not what that grant is for. And I just got a lot of really, really, really, really bad advice in that whole process. The whole application process, I would say, was a nightmare.
00:21:30
Speaker
So, I think I had mentioned this before. I think there should have been a fast pass that you should have been able to give money for, and then you skip the lines like they do in Disneyland. I think that should have been a thing, especially if you have the money and you're right there for it. But also, I think it's crazy that 58% of the money you're applying for is gone almost immediately.
00:21:55
Speaker
Yeah. It's staggering. Well, and so I'm part of a team that has actually started their own independent of the University Research Institute and they run their grants through their own institute so that they don't have to give.
00:22:11
Speaker
overhead to the institution. You can't do this, for instance, for federally regulated funders like NSF, NIH, NEH, anything like that, but for private foundations who will just give money to whoever, you find a lot of these research institutes because they're trying to avoid that overhead. The first time I asked for the NSF when scanning was twice as expensive,
00:22:38
Speaker
Because they also changed the budget, you know, arbitrarily that way while I was a student there. The max you can ask for is $20,000. And I asked for $30,004 because the overhead that year was like 54%. And all these agencies, they just build it into their funding model. They just build it in.
00:23:00
Speaker
Yeah. It makes me think of the paleo-indian research lab in the Fresno Institute at UW. The Anthro department has two research institutions and it makes me think, I wonder why these things got started. I guarantee you it's something like that. I guarantee you it is.
00:23:16
Speaker
Well, it's just crazy to me because the amount of money that students pay in fees, tuition, all that stuff, in theory, should cover everything, right? You shouldn't. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, it's literally called facilities and equipment. And it's like the facilities and equipment are what I pay for.
00:23:39
Speaker
in my fees like just the infrastructure is not special to the grant if you have like special freezers and things like that but that's usually built into the cost of the lab and it's just it's like doubling down on these built-in costs for the university for sure.
00:23:56
Speaker
That makes me think, even though University of Colorado Boulder is a quote unquote public school, I think it's like less than 3% of our total funding for the university actually comes from tax dollars.
University Funding and Research Implications
00:24:07
Speaker
We're really not a public enterprise. Especially because states have been cutting budgets for public post-secondary education, higher education college.
00:24:18
Speaker
I mean since the Reagan years so state appropriated budgets are tiny and so they charge wild amounts of tuition and room and board and food and you know this year IU in the post pandemic whatever they're in liminal space they contracted out all of their food delivery services for all students living on campus to grubhub and students were waiting like six hours for a meal.
00:24:47
Speaker
And it's like, I paid three thousand, like, this is my only way to get food because you've taken all of my money. Please feed my children or please feed me if you're the student yourself. And it's.
00:24:58
Speaker
I don't know. It's kind of crazy. That was a tangent. Where are the feeds going? I want to know. Also, the university is supposed to afford mascot shaped pools. I mean, I can't imagine a... I need a lazy river, God damn it. I can't imagine CU Boulder without our bison shaped pool, which I'm not allowed to use because I'm not an undergraduate.
00:25:19
Speaker
or the extra stand they just added in whatever for the executives or whatever. Didn't they just add an upper level portion to Folsom Field or something like that? Yes, they did. They did. The president gave himself a raise and now he's on his way out.
00:25:37
Speaker
Well, at my institution, these former employees of this thing, well, part of the financial branch of the institution, they wrote like a, I described it as a hit piece on how the finances of the university were being used to fund exec salaries, parties for executives, like international trips for them. And that article was up for two days before the newspaper took it down.
00:26:05
Speaker
You know, nobody really teaches you finance management or grant management as part of undergraduate or graduate training unless you happen to be in a lab that gets a lot of extramural funding or we're trained to do grant proposals, but we're not really trained to manage the money and work with the granting office. It took my granting office two months to approve my proposal. And like, for instance, nobody had told me to factor in that time.
00:26:31
Speaker
And the NSF archaeology program has a ruling deadline, so it wasn't a problem for me, but I could have missed a deadline. And that's another thing, too, is that granting cycles are so slow. And I'm hoping it was in this segment that we mentioned winter grand. Like, if you're applying for a winter grand doctoral grant, you get your feedback from your first round of applying like three weeks before the next round is due.
00:26:57
Speaker
And for some people, that's not enough time at all to get meaningful edits done, especially if they're teaching and doing other research. And it's crazy. It's really difficult to fund your own research at the doctoral level for sure.
00:27:12
Speaker
Well, it seems like it's easier if you were already a professor and you have all this stuff built in. It seems like those things are favored. Yeah. And unfortunately, in our system, money begets money. So for me, I still have it on my CV that I was awarded this NSF grant, even though I had to return it, because I want people to know that I stood on my own merits and was able to get it. And it makes me more likely to get funding in the future.
00:27:42
Speaker
So it's, I mean, it's like, you're like a little domino and you're waiting for the right breeze to be over.
Balancing Academic Expectations and Real-World Challenges
00:27:50
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I know my advisor does not write big grants and is not really used to granting cycles. He just kind of does Doug van for things, which is not writing big grants like other professors of mine do. So he's not aware of those granting cycles. And I remember I missed applying for the NSF.
00:28:12
Speaker
You forgot that I came in with the masters. You're only eligible. Yeah. I didn't even know about the GFP until after I was eligible. So completely forgot about that.
00:28:25
Speaker
They've changed that one, so you can only apply once now. You can apply twice if you apply as a senior undergraduate. And it's like, what senior undergraduate students, like I know some stellar students that have great ideas for a project, but I don't know that we should be expecting that much of them at that point. What does the GRFP stand for? Graduate Research Professionalization Fellowship? FP is like fellowship.
00:28:54
Speaker
It basically funds you for three years? Yeah, I think it funds you. Yeah, it funds you and it's not for research. It's like to pay your stipend for any graduate program. You can go anywhere you want for three years. Yeah. It's a really fantastic grant. I know a couple of grantees.
00:29:17
Speaker
Boulder is a big one. There's only like a couple big schools that get it and Boulder is one of them. So it seems to be an institutional type thing. So like, well, and there are definitely some areas of research that are more well-funded than others within anthropology. You know, who's running which society and kind of where money goes is something that you pick up along the way, which is not, I mean, getting back to science is done by people.
00:29:47
Speaker
And these agencies are run by people, and your peer reviewers are people. If you're here at Colorado Boulder, we know what John Yellen likes, and we know how to write to him.
00:29:58
Speaker
That's all that matters. That's all that matters. Yeah. If you're going to put, if you really want to get anything, you say Clovis pre Clovis and then any sort of scientific, you know, fancy big complexity or climate change is a big one now. Not that it shouldn't be. I think everything should be climate change research. But there's, there's doctoring. I mean, there's a little bit of. Oh yeah. You've got a point.
00:30:28
Speaker
You know, as Doug always told me, what you write is one thing. What you actually do with it is another. It just can't be that different.
00:30:37
Speaker
I will take that into my dissertation. Thank you. All right. Well, we'll go ahead and wrap up this segment. We'll be right back with episode 81 with Lana Ruck here in a second. Welcome back to a life in ruins podcast. We, this is episode 81. We are talking with Lana Ruck, our, uh, I don't want to say favorite guests, but our, probably our favorite guests. I'd say she's our favorite guests. When we need, when we need a guest in a pinch, all I have to do is just yell in the bedroom.
00:31:07
Speaker
That does help. And I'm really available now that I'm on writing fellowship.
Networking and Collaboration in Academia
00:31:13
Speaker
I'm always free. Speaking of that, an important thing that you're probably dealing with now is looking into the job market. Can you talk to our listeners how that's going and kind of the process that you're going through at this moment?
00:31:29
Speaker
Yeah. So right now I'm looking solely at the academic job market. I'm giving myself a solid six months of just that, giving that just a chance. And since I'm a dual degree in cognitive science and anthropology, and I study language and stuff like that and brain things, I would say about 60% of the jobs I'm applying to are tenure track jobs in psychology departments.
00:31:58
Speaker
And then about 40% are in Anthro. And my list is like 25 jobs long so far, which is a lot.
00:32:11
Speaker
I'm finding them on job wikis and in my email inbox. If I see stuff, I send it to people and they send it to me. You become part of a network of who's on the market. It's stressful. I've applied to 11 places so far and I haven't heard back from a single one.
00:32:31
Speaker
So it's rough out there and I have a really good CV. I don't know. I'm trying as hard as I can. I had a really disheartening meeting with, I think he was well-meaning, but one of my graduate advisors in
Career Paths Beyond Academia
00:32:46
Speaker
my cognitive science program was asking me about how the job search was going and they know I've had job anxiety.
00:32:52
Speaker
probably my whole life. So everybody's really, you know, trying to root for me. But he was asking me how many people had read my statements because my job apps, sometimes they're five pages long and sometimes they're 90.
00:33:06
Speaker
It just depends what the school is asking for. Some people only want a two-page cover letter and a CV to start with, which is great. And some people want a cover letter, a CV, a research statement, a teaching statement, a diversity statement, a teaching portfolio, or some evidence of teaching evaluations or syllabi, and three letters of recommendation up front. Oh, and preprints or writing samples.
00:33:33
Speaker
So you put all that together and that's 90 pages for me. And so there's a wild range of what these people want and what they're looking for. So he was asking me, he was like, well, how many people have looked at your statements, the documents you're sending for these job apps? And I'm like,
00:33:50
Speaker
Well, my whole committee, my letter writers, the teaching and learning writing center, all of my peers, like eight or nine of them, my family. So it's like my list is like 20 people long at this point. And he's like, oh, I think we should think of more people for you to show these documents to.
00:34:10
Speaker
And it's like I can't, I personally cannot spend mental energy and time rewriting and rewriting the same, you know, it's two pages about me, it's as good as it's gonna get and I gotta send it.
00:34:22
Speaker
And I just don't think, I think they don't realize how much of it is sheer luck and timing and the better you can make these documents. Like my whole seven years in the program has been me making my documents as good as they can get. Like I can't change any more of that now. And then if I, if I don't hear back from any of the psych or anthro programs, I'm applying to a couple postdocs. I really don't want to postdoc because I've already published enough that I don't need time just for that. And then I'm over the precarity kind of.
00:34:52
Speaker
But if I don't hear back, I'm going to start looking for non-academic jobs, probably an industry, doing UX research or whatever anthropologists do these days. I have a fair amount of coding experience and I'm really organized and detail oriented, so I'll find a job somewhere. We'll just have to see. That was an excellent job, bitch, by the way. Yeah, thanks. Come hire me.
00:35:20
Speaker
I care about the world's problems and I want to solve them. Yeah, I might look into work in policy. I might do something, you know, kind of not challenging or demanding for a while. I just, you know, be an academic advisor and help people register for classes. Click some button. Yeah, we'll see. Yeah. But hopefully I hear back from any programs.
Strategies for Academic Job Applications
00:35:41
Speaker
I applied to one program last year and I got interviewed, but I was a really good fit. And I haven't really seen like, there's nothing this year that's perfect for me.
00:35:50
Speaker
If there are people like, you know, the market goes the way it goes and three or four years ago, everybody was looking for, you know, like digital archaeology, 3D scanning lidar. And then everybody was looking for like sustainability and climate change people. And now everybody's looking for race scholars and diversity and equity people.
00:36:13
Speaker
who knows what the next thing is going to be. But if you don't fit in those things, and I'm incredibly niche in my discipline, it can be hard to kind of pitch yourself to a program and not know where it's going to land because they just don't contact you back. It's not like they say anything, they just ghost you. So you just kind of off into the ether.
00:36:34
Speaker
I was going to ask, because I've heard this spoken from many people who are applying for these jobs, it's like there's like a batting average. So it's like you're going to put out, say if you do 10 applications, you'll maybe hear back from two or three, maybe five at most
00:36:52
Speaker
And from those, one or two, you get an interview. So I just wanted to put those numbers out in the world to say that as an academic, this is what you're looking at, is that you're looking at disappointment, large numbers. And it's like, I would easily, I would spend more time finding and replacing university names in my same 90 pages that I put together. I would do that for 100 schools if 100 were hiring.
00:37:18
Speaker
But 25 is it. That's the list, you know, and what is 10, 11 of a marine throw for how many people are on the market? 300, 400. If you include, you know, non-recent grads, 600 or more.
00:37:36
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I just want to talk about those numbers because it's also a staggering number to me is that you do all this work, you put in all this time, and it's like baseball numbers. You might get a hit one every 10 times.
00:37:55
Speaker
Yeah, I think getting a tenure track faculty position at this point is like becoming a pro athlete without the wages or the contract. I guess you get the contract if you get tenure, you don't get the wages.
00:38:13
Speaker
And this is the thing too, in this meeting with the director of graduate studies where he was grilling me about my statements, he was also like, we really want you to get an academic job. We don't want you to fail. And I just heard that word and I'm like, that's not a failure. You can't say that to people who, what if you go into your program wanting to go into industry or public policy or
Alternative Careers and Skills Transfer
00:38:42
Speaker
something?
00:38:42
Speaker
You know, because we're getting a lot more students who want to do that and they just have no idea. And I'm also sitting there thinking, like, if you call everyone who leaves academia failure, you know, 10 years down the line, you don't have alumni connections to hire your students. It's a long term problem to think of it as, you know, us and them and, you know, fail and not and.
00:39:04
Speaker
It's not even acknowledging that you spent time and you got a dissertation. That's an achievement in and of itself. I don't think anything past that.
00:39:13
Speaker
Yeah. It shouldn't be called a failure or anything like that because you have this great achievement that you already went through. That's hard for me to hear that if you don't get an academic job, you're a failure. Yeah. Well, and you won't hear like that what you just said. I haven't heard anybody say that to me because we're all steeped in this idea of going on this one track towards the same thing. And so we're all in the failure together in a sense.
00:39:42
Speaker
And nobody's there to tell us. There are loud voices now in alt-act jobs that are like, hell yeah, get out. It's way better. And there are those that are just the same old capitalist hellscape out here. So it really depends. As someone who's in that targeted demographic at the moment, it's definitely because
00:40:05
Speaker
It's very different vibes between two different corners of this office. You have Lana over there plugging away all the time, working on job apps. I'm over here forgetting that I'm a co-author on publications, which drove her up the wall.
00:40:19
Speaker
And then I'm getting phone calls and emails about people wanting me to apply to jobs in museums and stuff. And so if we're going with this baseball thing, I'm just a guy holding one hand's full of nachos, the other's with beer, and I'm getting hit with foul balls trying to get back to my seat. They're coming to me. And I'm not at a position yet where I'm necessarily ready to be on the job market. I can be if something was like, this is your deadline. I do better with deadlines.
00:40:48
Speaker
But I don't know, you know, how much longer is the whole we need to hire Indigenous folks phase going to last until there's, you know, quote unquote, enough. Yeah, it's it's scary to think about it that way. And especially, you know, not knowing what the next thing is going to be, but
Dynamics of Academic Partnerships
00:41:10
Speaker
You know, something that we're both really not, we haven't really engaged with it yet is that we're going to have the two body problem where we both want to be academics and we have to find a place where either both of us can get a job or nearby.
00:41:27
Speaker
And that's becoming even more rare. And, you know, luckily we're both very competitive academics that helps, but it, you know, it might not help enough with budget cuts and COVID and everything going on, you know, shrinking faculty lines in the first place.
00:41:45
Speaker
the people that I know that have spousal hires that happened in the last 10 or 15 years, the spouse isn't tenured. It's one of them is tenured and one of them is a lecturer, and that's the best you can get, or one of them works for the museum or something like that. There's that as well. But I do a lot of reading from
00:42:08
Speaker
people who've left academia and advice for that. And it's like we have so many transferable skills that if I don't hit on the academic job market after a year of trying and after all the years of training that I've done and knowing what the statistics are, I'm totally going to be fine being like, yep, I gave it a shot, y'all. I'm going to be so much happier and probably more compensated somewhere else.
00:42:36
Speaker
Give it the college try. Also, I volunteer to be your couples counseling if you need to talk about potential issues with hiring and stuff like that. You got it. All right.
International Academic Opportunities
00:42:48
Speaker
Well, we'll do recorded sessions. We'll do, we'll release them.
00:42:51
Speaker
And I know I can't go too much into this because for one of those conversations I had where they asked me to apply, they listened to the podcast, which was a terrifying way to start off that. It's like, Hey, I really like your show. And it's like, Oh God. And then when we talk about like, we're getting into a question now of different countries hiring practices and then
00:43:14
Speaker
Well, in visas, and I mean, especially every conference that well, most of the conferences I've been going to for the last couple of years are based in Europe. And so I'm in a European academic circuit kind of over there. And
00:43:32
Speaker
I mean a lot of them are just like i would never consider working in the united states because we don't have good health insurance and we don't have family leave and like so for us academics especially right now where it literally education is under attack.
00:43:47
Speaker
And we want an ignorant populace, you know, idiocracy or whatever. It's very difficult to want to envision a future just here versus broadening your horizons and looking elsewhere. But then you do have to with the two body problem, like if the other person doesn't get hired there, it's very difficult to prove that they deserve a working visa in some of these countries.
00:44:13
Speaker
Yeah. And then, again, people observe different countries, academics differently. So dissertation, having a PhD means different things if you're from Europe or if you're from the US. Yeah. The training is totally different. The funding models are totally different.
Preparing for Career Transitions
00:44:31
Speaker
The teaching expectations. And even within the different disciplines in the United States, for instance, you can
00:44:41
Speaker
You can graduate from a psychology PhD program having never taught in your life and you'll become a faculty member and you will become a teacher, but you didn't have that experience. Like maybe you graded for one course and it's, that's so different than in anthropology where most of your funding is based on teaching. And then a lot of the jobs don't end up being teaching base. There's something else.
00:45:07
Speaker
Yeah, definitely troubling times in the market. I know we'll talk more about- I'm trying to stay positive. If nobody contacts me back, at the end of the day, I've gotten two PhDs. I'm a very qualified person. Somebody will be lucky to have me as an employee.
00:45:26
Speaker
Yeah, great. I know next episode we have Alex Garcia Putnam, important to include Putnam as we'll get on to next episode. He just graduated from UW with his PhD and he's now, I mean, I guess kind of spoiler alert, he's like the forensic anthropologist in Oregon or Washington.
00:45:42
Speaker
Yeah, he's the assistant. Yeah. So we'll talk more about how that job market went, how he went, because I know I'm pretty sure Alex wanted to be a professor. So I'm curious for next episode, which we actually record tomorrow. You saw him today. How is he doing, Connor? He's doing good. He's doing good. He likes it out here so far. Yeah, we'll talk with him soon. But I will say in my limited observations of folks who are
00:46:08
Speaker
committed to the academic lifestyle and looking for it is that persistence will pay off, I think,
Future Strategies and Persistence
00:46:15
Speaker
through time. I think that's something that we've shown, even though you might not be a professor immediately and you might eventually get into that position. But I think if you want to do it and it's something you really want to do, it pays to be persistent. Absolutely.
00:46:31
Speaker
Yeah, I think we'll see. If I don't hit on the market, I've been saying all year, I'm going to give myself this year and then I'm done. I don't want to engage with it anymore. We'll see. But it's like the waiting game
00:46:50
Speaker
ignores material pragmatics of our lives where it's like I have loan payments that are going to kick in. I've made $25,000 or less for the last eight years of my life and I'm up to my eyeballs in debt. I have to find something. If PhD programs are going to graduate students that can expect to be on the market for several years,
00:47:17
Speaker
then they need to put resources into training us to find jobs while we're on the market. And that is like, I mean, even saying that sentence out loud, it's like, can you imagine 10 years from now where we have like the center for innovative, you know, job market limbo, where they show you how to, you know, tweak your CV for seven years while you
00:47:44
Speaker
you know, work three jobs. Like I don't want that. I don't want a reality where we have to expect to be on the market for years. Cause we got, we got to get paid. Yeah, absolutely. And that's, that's a great point, Lana. Thank you for, thank you for bringing that up.
Importance of Networking and Support Systems
00:48:00
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, before we end the show, Lana, what are a couple sources, you know, these could be books, articles, videos that you recommend for anyone interested either in your research, working on handedness or, um, surviving the job market.
00:48:14
Speaker
friends and family. I don't know. I'm at a point where I'm very disengaged with, I mean, I can tell you the brain imaging papers I've been reading, but nobody wants to hear those. They've been very helpful to me. Yeah, I don't know. I think staying connected in the application process and bitching with others who are in it, sharing your documents with people.
00:48:38
Speaker
Yeah, I'm in a dissertation writing group with people all across the university and all these different departments. And that's been really helpful because we all just, you know, come from our different unique spaces and we all have the same grapes. And so I would recommend writing groups and stuff. What about the professor is in? Would you recommend that book? Uh, mixed reviews on that, I would say. I would say it's a good place to, you know, she, okay, she has a lot of free material.
00:49:06
Speaker
go ham with that. I will say a lot of her free material is getting to be dated now. It's like 2008, 2010. Twitter has fantastic academic spaces and could go crazy on those. Academic Twitter, okay. Yeah. Sounds good. Awesome. Where can our listeners find you on social media?
00:49:33
Speaker
You can find me on Twitter, retweeting academic things at Lana Ruck and on Instagram at Lana Lately. I'm not super active on it. And that's about it. Yeah. Well, you're on it. You just don't post much.
00:49:49
Speaker
Yeah, I'm a lurker.
Closing Remarks and Credits
00:49:51
Speaker
Yeah, I mostly get cat memes. All right. Well, everyone, we just interviewed PhD candidate Lana Ruck. You can find her on Twitter at Lana Ruck and Instagram at Lana Lately. Those handles are down below in your episode description. And please be sure to rate the podcast and provide us with feedback on whatever platform
00:50:10
Speaker
you are using to listen to our show. Let us know how we are doing. If you hate it, if you love it, if you don't want to hear David's face ever again, if you don't want to hear my face ever again, you know, let us know. We'd love to hear from you. We might not listen to you, but we'd love to hear from you. And if you're saying 75,000 year old temples and mountains somewhere, please give Carlton an email because apparently that's what he's dedicating a lot of his time to. And with that, we are out.
00:50:45
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archaeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. So what's the human psychology behind all this toilet paper hoarding? Oh, tell me. That's just how we roll. Oh, I liked it. I liked it. Great.
00:51:14
Speaker
Alright everyone, we are out!
00:51:25
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.