My Fulbright project was titled "Mentoring the next generation of Hungarian scientists", but I've talked very little so far about what I did with those scientists. The reason for that is largely just because it's not photographable, and I feel the obligation to put a lot of photos in my blogs.
But this time I'll try to push that feeling aside, because -- even though visiting new cities and having exciting adventures was great -- the real reason why the Fulbright was an amazing experience was because I felt like I made a difference in my students' lives.
I had two classes at the University of Szeged (SZTE): a class of Ph.D. students that met two times a week for 90 minutes each time, and a class of M.S. students that met once a week for 90 minutes. For this time I'm just going to talk about the Ph.D. class, since the two classes had pretty different foci.
First of all, I didn't just have Hungarian scientists in my class. Due to the enthusiastic recruiting done by SZTE, I also had students from Romania and Serbia (two countries that neighbor Hungary, and in fact that have borders about a 30 minute drive from Szeged), but also from Russia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, and Nigeria.
Early in the semester, my students just came to class, but not to my office hours. I was a little lonely, honestly. I'm a social person, and I needed more social interactions. Add to my specific challenge that we were not living in Budapest, where most of the rest of the Hungarian Fulbrighters were living. I eventually solved that problem by throwing some parties and inviting friends I'd met at the SZTE Summer University (Hungarian language intensive.) But I think loneliness is a pretty common experience for Fulbrighters who aren't students: we don't have an automatic social group, the way that students do. I talked with a couple of other non-student Hungarian Fulbrighters about this, and they concurred that it's common not to be included, and reported feeling lonely.
At any rate, we have an uphill battle to create our own. In the US, I have frequent interactions with my co-workers as well as my students, but it's a little different when you're a visiting professor. Maybe it's partially that we're there for such a short period of time that some people don't want to "waste" their energy getting to know someone new when we're just going to leave again. If so, I don't take this personally. I never mind getting to know some one new, but it's true that it is work, and it's sad to say goodbye to new friends -- I get it. I feel sad right now because I'm away from the new friends I just made. So I definitely get it. But whatever any individual's specific reason, it can be lonely to be a visiting faculty member.
But back to my students. For the Ph.D. class, we were focusing on the types of scientific communication that scientists need to master: writing journal articles, creating posters, oral presentations, and communicating with the public. Early in the semester I didn't have a lot of assignments due, but by October that changed. The first drafts of their journal articles were due, and that meant revisions. Although we did some peer editing, things really got going when I had them schedule one on one editing meetings with me. I read their articles and I'd mark them up, and then when we met I would have them tell me about their research. This helped me figure out what they really needed to include in their introductions, and helped me guide them through how to talk about their work.
As it turned out, I had an absolutely fantastic time with this class, especially once the editing started. In one particular week I ended up with several days that consisted of back-to-back meetings with students, some of them lasting over an hour. And I loved it. You know why? Because I could see the effort paying off. This is what mentoring is all about.
One of the things I noticed was that many of them had a hard time understanding that they had accomplished something important. For example, I had a student who had literally been working on a cure for cancer (well, for a particular type of lung cancer), and what they were doing was working! The student had come to me, concerned that they hadn't done enough, and that their results weren't very important. But it's actually really normal for Ph.D. students to have trouble with keeping this kind of perspective: during a Ph.D. one focuses in so closely on one particular problem that it's hard to remember why anybody else would care about one's topic, or to see one's progress.
So one of the most important things I did for students was to help them see what they had done, and help them recognize that what they were doing was important. And of course I also helped a lot of students with a lot of writing! And creating posters, and giving oral presentations. But I'll talk about those parts more another time.
For those who are interested, I used several books as resources. For general writing advice, I referred to Anne Lamott's book, "Bird by Bird." I highly recommend it, even if you aren't an aspiring writer -- it's a fun read.
For more science-specific writing resources I used, "English Communication for Scientists" (Nature publishing); "Writing Science", by Joshua Schimel; and "Doing Science" by Ivan Valiela. (Yes, I am linking to these books at Village Books, which is a lovely, independent bookstore in Bellingham, Washington. No, I don't get anything for linking; I just like them.)
"English Communication for Scientists" is a great resource for anyone who needs to do formal communication styles and is also a scientist, or doing technical writing. It's short, it has examples, and it's free. It also has a lot of very useful, specific advice for writing, giving oral presentations, creating posters, interacting at poster sessions, and more. It also has some very interesting tips for non-native English speakers, which I find fascinating, and helps me learn more about English (even though I am a native speaker. There's a lot of stuff we do instinctively when speaking and writing, after all. I'm finding that I'm pretty interested in that stuff, too.)
"Writing Science" was recommended to me at a conference session at one of the American Chemical Society Spring meetings (which I attend each year.) I'm very glad someone mentioned it; it's a great resource. It is a much more detailed analysis of how to create a good story while also writing as a scientist, or doing technical or scientific writing. It has a lot of examples from the literature, and I really like that it has end-of-chapter suggested activities, which encourages an interactive approach with the material. (Yes, that makes it more like a textbook, but that's what it's intended for, so it's appropriate.) It's also clear that Joshua Schimel also reads other writers about writing -- he references many of them. I think it also helps to clarify some of the differences in formal writing between science and other disciplines, so it might be of interest to non-science writers, too.
"Doing Science" was recommended to me by another parent at one of my younger son's swimming lessons (of all places!) The author of the book was his Ph.D. adviser (or post-doc adviser -- I forget which), and he said that it was the compilation of many years of wisdom gained mentoring graduate students. I can confirm that it's a really helpful book, especially for Ph.D. students in science. In addition to two very useful chapters on writing, it talks about experimental design, treatment of data, and more. The language chapters are especially functional because they have a lot of "common mistakes" explained, especially in terms of language that doesn't add anything to a paper. So it has suggestions for useless phrases to edit out, and words to avoid -- very practical things like that.
If you have favorite books on writing, whether or not they're about science, do share -- I'm always interested in more perspectives.
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