Update from the field

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We drove a long 9 hour drive on Wednesday, through the LA basin, then east to the Inland Empire– the Southern California Deserts. As I mentioned in the last post, I am really excited for this trip, as I am collecting a bunch of interesting and important data.

I have been watching the weather, and it has been cold and dry, exceptionally so on both accounts. Neither of these factors bode well, nor does the fact that is it a moonless night. Because we ended up arriving somewhat later than expected, I set traps in the dark, using my headlamp.. this makes is difficult to optimize trap placement..

This morning, nothing… no mice, completely empty.. This is the 1st time this has happened in an extremely long time. Bummer! I decided to try my luck elsewhere, and move my traps to a new area. Thankfully, I work in a canyon where good rodent habitat is nearly contiguous. I moved over an arroyo, to a rock face that had plenty of fresh looking rodent signs.. We’ll see what heppens tomorrow.

In the absence of mice, I decided to take the family on a long walk back into the canyon. This was great, and exhausting. Several close calls with the cholla cactus, and one more serious ‘interaction’ that required I use the needle-nose pliers to remove cactus spines.  All this with 3 year old on my shoulders for much of the walk back home..

bug  In ending, we saw a cool bug. Anyone know what it is (I don’t)?

Heading to the field!

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I’m heading to the field in a couple of days– super excited! Busy today trying to wrap up a few things on campus, and pack up supplies. This should be a great trip, and I have plans to collect some really interesting stuff.. In particular, I’m really excited about trying out the hand-held refractometer that ATAGO gave me to demo– extracting a bit of urine directly from the bladder of animals may be challenging, but this type of info on the physiologic status of individuals is exactly what I really need.

In addition to urine, I’m collecting more blood, which will be used for electrolyte analyses– again, this physiology data is super informative. I have more mouse cages as well, so I should be able to scale up the water supplementation experiments as well! When I get back, going to make RNAseq libraries STAT, as I’d love to include these data in upcoming job talk.

I’ll plan on posting some from the field, so stay tuned.

The job search…

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As some of you likely know, I’ve been applying for tenure track faculty jobs.  I’ve learned a ton, and trying to market myself has been a really useful endeavor… People always told me that the search was brutal, and more specifically the rejection is brutal, but I didn’t quite know the depth of the suckiness.. until it started happening to me. Rejection is hard, it’s really really hard. Even for jobs that I knew were a reach, either in terms of the department being able to attract the superstars (e.g Harvard EEB), or just that the search was just outside my focus (but close enough to apply to), its hard to hear no.. Even harder to be rejected in searches where I’ve been short-listed.  This is akin to a good hard kick in the nards..

To date, I’ve applied to ~20 jobs, with about 10 more to apply to in January and February. From these jobs, I’ve been short-listed 4 times, with one of those turning into an on-campus interview (have not gone yet)..  I’m still waiting to hear back from 9 jobs (plus the 10 i have not sent i yet).  I don’t know if this is, good, bad, or average, and the secrecy with which people approach the job hunt is offputting/strange/unnecessary. I’ve obsessed about checking the job wiki, and Twitter has been extremely helpful, but I guess I’m not sure what people are afraid of– it seems unlikely that I’d have much competitive advantage by knowing you, mysterious competitor, are applying to the same job.. Maybe I’m just naive about this.

Anyway, I’ve got several applications out right now that I’m really excited about. And I’m a reasonably impatient person, and the waiting is one of the hardest parts of this whole tenure track job search.

I’ve got a good amount of time before my interview, and man am I excited!! I’m busy working on a super-cool kind of side project that I’d like to talk about for the job talk, and I’ve been reading all the advice online.. I plan to give at least a couple of practice talks, so the talk should be OK (though I’m breaking out in a cold swear right now just thinking about it) ..

Ok, maybe I’m giving a talk tomorrow morning at the Computational Genomics Resource Laboratory at UC Berkeley. I better get to thinking about what I’m gonna say!