Beta Blog v 0.0.01

Just. Put. Some. Words. On. The. Page. NOW!

The Story:

Okay, here’s the story this time: I can think about ideas all day. I can talk about my thoughts confidently. Hell, my ideas even sound pretty convincing–I’m told. When it’s time to write them up, in any format: I choke. Why?

This problem proliferates all parts of my life that involve writing a thing. I simply put off putting the words out there in the world in written format. I thoroughly think them through, but I won’t write them–cards, letters, emails, outlines, papers, blog posts (especially blog posts). I had to make myself neurotically repeat this PhD lesson aloud; the self-inflicted embarrassment prompted me to finally begin this post.

Typically the stress of imminent deadlines gets me past my issue long enough to be productive as far as coursework and academic papers are concerned, most of the time. That won’t hold for much longer though, as I am now embarking on that journey through the self-managed portion of the PhD adventure. This behavior gets me into trouble sometimes, especially with email. I tell myself it’s because I want to compose a thoughtful reply, and I suppose that’s true. How long does it really take though–surely not a week, two weeks, a month. Sometimes it does. This really is a serious problem.

Hold on, this is not just serious because it’s odd, it’s serious because correcting this quirk will make me a better PhD student. Here’s what I’m doing about it.

The Lesson:

Solution: Repeat after me. Just put words on the page. Just sit down, right now, and put some words on a page this instant, right now. Now, now.

Look, I know you can do it. You’ll be so happy you did.

Simple enough, right? No, this is HARD, very hard. This is especially hard when your own ideas are like putting a piece of you out there–however that may be. This happened to me most pronounced when it was time to write an outline and abstract of my (brace yourself) dissertation. (I know, I wasn’t ready for that word yet either.) I could talk about it all day. I could make lists about it and sticky notes about it. I COULD NOT WRITE IT UP. Correction: … I would not write it up.

Writing was to make my thoughts real, to put them out there in the world. When the thoughts are in my head they are mine, safe, and plastic. Now, I have to share them with others, open them up to critique, and make them rigid. I have to focus my thoughts, narrow my point, be specific, be concise, be confident, be clear… That’s just asking way too much for my little ideas; they are not good enough for that kind of pressure. They aren’t ready yet. They will just stay safely tucked away in my head. (Okay clearly I need to revisit my own PhD Lesson #1.)

Okay, My Point:

So what happens when you just put words on page?

Believe it or not: your work gets done. Oh, you forgot: you’re pretty smart, you kind of know what you’re talking about. When you sit down and start to put words down, the words are not all that different from the ones you confidently spout off in meetings. Saying that you are not yet sure what to say, or that you aren’t sure where to begin just is not a good excuse. You do know. Put the words on the page. You’ll see.

[Image Credit: Samantha Merritt. This image is just my keyboard, pen, and sticky-note pad. Consider it a Creative Commons image for your use.

Acknowledgements: Thank you to Erik Stolterman for beating me over the head with this when I need it, and thank you Nina Mehta for being my role model and example for this lesson.

The 12th biennial Participatory Design Conference (PDC 2012) at Roskilde University in Denmark is coming up! At that conference, I will be presenting an exploratory paper (entitled Cultural Hybridity in Participatory Design) on Thursday, August 16, 2012 at 11:45am in the “Out of Scandinavia” session. The paper, coauthored with Erik Stolterman, is the result of thought project that I hope to turn into a larger project. Here is the abstract:

In this paper we examine challenges identified with participatory design research in the developing world and develop the postcolonial notion of cultural hybridity as a sensitizing concept. While participatory design intentionally addresses power relationships, its methodology does not to the same degree cover cultural power relationships, which extend beyond structural power and voice. The notion of cultural hybridity challenges the static cultural binary opposition between the self and the other, Western and non-Western, or the designer and the user—offering a more nuanced approach to understanding the malleable nature of culture. Drawing from our analysis of published literature in the participatory design community, we explore the complex relationship of participatory design to international development projects and introduce postcolonial cultural hybridity via postcolonial theory and its application within technology design thus far. Then, we examine how participatory approaches and cultural hybridity may interact in practice and conclude with a set of sensitizing insights and topics for further discussion in the participatory design community.

The paper will be available (with the rest of the PDC proceedings) in the ACM Digital Library as Proceedings of the 12th Biennial Participatory Design Conference (PDC), Volumes I and II, 2012.

At PDC, there will be some wonderful papers I’m looking forward to, and I will be catching up with some of my favorite scholars. Furthermore, this humbled grad student will get to meet the authors of some of my favorite research, and I’m particularly looking forward to the closing keynote by Nicola Bidwell (though I’m sure the opening one by Geoff Cox will be wonderful as well).

Now, I know that I’ll be in Denmark out of sync with everyone else who is going for NordiCHI 2012 and 4S Annual Meeting in October. I hope to have some useful travel advice for anyone interested, though sadly, I won’t be joining you in October.

The Set-up

This post serves as an example of how I was struggling with the “Ph” in my “PhD” (look for a “PhD Lesson” blog post on this topic very soon), and what follows here was one of my recent attempts to sort it out. Here I am posting an assignment that I completed and submitted in the Spring 2012 semester in my graduate class: Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology (ANTH-E 606) under Catherine Tucker at Indiana University. For this assignment, we were asked to reflect on a Francis Bacon quote (below) and write one to two pages answering the following questions: “Why and/or how does this quote provide useful insight(s) for social science research? In what ways may the quote be misleading for social science research, especially for ethnographic fieldwork?” The references used here were relevant texts from the course—though I sincerely recommend both of them (citations at the bottom). I thought it was an interesting enough exercise that I should share it here. I’ve made a few edits, but generally left it as I turned it in.

The Assignment

“Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.”  – Francis Bacon

Before beginning a response to this quote attributed to Francis Bacon, I want to explicate some select words from the statement. I would like to approach these concepts in a slightly pedestrian manner—specifically for the words error and confusion. Then, I will highlight a multiplicity of truths as a conceptualization of truth. After exploring these concepts, I will present some beneficial and misguiding insights that might be derived from this contemplating this statement in the context of ethnographic fieldwork.

Drawing my own connections to Gardner and Goffman’s introductory chapter in Dispatches from the Field (a book centrally concerned with ethnographic field work): an error is a “mistake,” a thing which is, the authors argue, endemic to ethnography, particularly for new researchers. Mistakes will likely be “omitted or skirted” when final research results are formally reported or published. (Gardner and Goffman 2006:3) (Admittedly, error could be defined many other ways, including measurement, Type I, Type II, or statistical errors, but those types of errors shall be relegated a sidebar for the present discussion.) Confusion, I define as Gardner and Goffman’s “difficulties” “problems” “dilemmas” which “may emerge as central to some portion of [research].” (Gardner and Goffman 2006:3) Errors are distinct from confusion in that errors are accepted as an instance or moment of mistake—a singular occurrence, which will likely have consequences, but may or may not lead to correction, learning, or a change in behavior. Confusion, by contrast, problematizes a situation—bringing about motivation toward actionable solutions, perhaps through reflexivity or further inquiry.

Truth varies. I will define truth as a standpoint-based set of definitions because truth carries different definitions that are contingent upon which epistemological standpoint a researcher embodies. Thus, one simple definition of truth is not sufficient. I draw my set of standpoints from Bernard: rationalism, empiricism, positivism, humanism, hermeneutics, and phenomenology. The table below identifies truth according to each of these positions. (Bernard 2011)

The above conceptualizations are critical to interpreting Bacon’s quote; in applying these understandings of error, confusion, and truth, many possible interpretations and insights can be derived from Bacon’s statement—some perhaps beneficial, and others misguiding (especially for ethnographic fieldwork). For one to say, “truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion,” is to say that one of the conceptualizations of truth (the speaker’s own) is more easily apparent when making a research error, than it would appear if you were experiencing confusion during research. A pioneer of empiricism and the scientific method (and evidently a positivist by today’s definition), Bacon would likely view truth as singular and existing universally outside of the humans, which known through approximations. I argue, from a positivist, empirically-grounded position, Bacon is encouraging scientists to march boldly into research experiments in pursuit of inductively arriving at an approximation of truth. Making an error in the process would likely more immediately result in an iterated hypothesis and further testing; thus, researchers should not fear errors. However, being in a state of confusion is not a productive state and will likely stall the creation, iteration, and testing of hypotheses. In the pursuit of truth avoid confusion.

That interpretation is problematic for ethnographic field researchers conceptualizing truth via humanism, hermeneutics, or phenomenology, acknowledging multiple truths (much as I have just done) leads to confusion while coming to understand a truth other than the researcher’s own. Confusion is, after all, as Gardner and Goffman argue, ultimately central to research, while the errors are “skirted” and to be avoided. Confusion problematizes understating alternate truths. In the pursuit of truth embrace confusion.

References

Bernard, H. Russell
2011   Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches, 5th Edition. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.

Gardner, Andrew and David M. Hoffman, eds.
2006   Dispatches from the Field: Neophyte ethnographers in a changing world. Long Grove, IL:  Waveland.

Soon, I’ll be on my way to Austin, Texas for the annual ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). This year, I am presenting the paper “In Dialogue: Methodological Insights on Doing HCI Research in Rwanda” on Wednesday, May 9 in the ICT4D Session at 11:30 am [conference program]. It is the product of a collaboration with a team I worked with for a summer internship at the University of Nottingham (Horizon Digital Economy Research). Thanks to the help and guidance of many people there, the people of the Kigali Memorial Centre, and Aegis Trust, we were able to write and share this case study with the CHI community. Personally, I leaned and grew from working with my mentors (Abigail Durrant, Stuart Reeves, and Dave Kirk, with some help from Tom Rodden), and I simply cannot thank them enough for my time there (and their patience with me).

Now, I just have to present our work! No small task, I’m afraid.

Here’s the abstract

This paper presents a case study of our recent empirical research on memorialisation in post-genocide Rwanda. It focuses on the pragmatic methodological challenges of working in a ‘transnational’ and specifically Rwandan context. We first outline our qualitative empirical engagement with representatives from the Kigali Genocide Memorial (KGM) and neighbouring institutions. We then describe our application of Charles L. Briggs’ analytic communication framework to our data. In appropriating this framework, we reflect critically on its efficacy in use, for addressing the practical working constraints of our case, and through our findings develop methodological insights with relevance to wider HCI audiences. [1]

I cannot say enough about how wonderful our collaboration turned out, and I am excited to share our ideas. Even more, I’m looking forward to taking the methodological ideas presented in this paper forward in my future work. I cannot speak for the rest of the research team, but this project has had an integral role on my own trajectory and work, and I hope it proves useful to others as well.

Also at CHI this year, I am looking forward to my participation in the Qualitative Methods in HCI workshop on Saturday, May 5. This will be an opportunity for me to explore my own research agenda as well as find out how other colleagues are tackling the qualitative methodological issues in HCI.

Bring it on CHI 2012!

[1] (forthcoming) Merritt, S., Durrant, A., Reeves, S., and Kirk, D. In Dialogue: Methodological Insights on Doing HCI Research in Rwanda. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA 2012). ACM Press.

For the summer 2012 term, I am honored to receive a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship to study Swahili from the Indiana University African Studies Program (a participant of the US Department of Education’s Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships program). Thanks to the assistance and guidance Eden Medina (who initially encouraged me to pursue this opportunity) and Erik Stolterman, I will be able to begin learning a new language this summer and receive a (much needed) stipend.

Anxious to get stared on my summer goal, I have already started gathering Swahili books and materials. Here we go! Napenda kazi yangu!

Original Map Image Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maeneo_penye_wasemaji_wa_Kiswahili.png

In reading a new book, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor by Paul Farmer, I have run across a breath-stealing excerpt the author quoted in his introduction: “The Nobodies” by Eduardo Galeano.

It’s a poignant composition reflecting on the emotion of being in poverty and the labels applied by those who are not.

Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that one magical day good luck will suddenly rain down on them–will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t rain down yesterday, today, tomorrow, or ever. Good luck doesn’t even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day with their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms.

The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way.
    Who are not, but could be.
    Who don’t speak languages, but dialects.
    Who don’t have religions, but superstitions.
    Who don’t create art, but handicrafts.
    Who don’t have culture, but folklore.
    Who are not human beings, but human resources.
    Who do not have faces, but arms.
    Who do not have names, but numbers.
    Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police blotter of the local paper.
    The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.

I went to Botswana and South Africa in December and January (with this fantastic travelmate). Planning and taking a trip to southern Africa taught me innumerable lessons. One of the most salient lessons concerned the concept of “staying outside the velvet ropes,” not exiting through the gift shop, and not being one of those tourists who tries too hard to pretend or force exoticism.

To be clear:
I did not go to Africa to see the animals.
I did not go for safari.
I did not go to “help” the “needy.” ⁽¹⁾

I wanted to meet people. I wanted to get my body and mind in that place and feel what it feels like to be there. So, this is the gist of it. I want you to understand, that my primary objective was to be present with my eyes open. Officially, I was there to participate in life as an observer of technology usage and appropriation; I was on the lookout for research questions and curiosities and reflections and insights. Emotionally, I was there to just be, for as much being as could be had.

Now, I should provide another disclaimer: I completely understand that I’m white—not black, not African, and utterly different than the majority of Africans; I stand out. I am not in denial of my race. I also know that the status of my white-ness is completely loaded in Africa. Depending on the country and region you are in, being a white chick from America can cause a range of stereotypes about me and elicit a range of thoughts and emotions within people who live there. I will explain how that changed as I traveled in later posts.

Now I want to tell you a story that will get you in the moment and help illustrate the general context of my experiences.

The Story:

In the village of Serowe, through some connections we made in Botswana, we visited another American, Patti, who was living in Serowe and loved to visit the Khama Rhino Sanctuary nearby, which I discerned as something like the Botswana version of the Wild Animal Park in San Diego; it’s not a major tourist attraction for foreign visitors though. It’s a sanctuary that makes some operation costs with visitors and aims to “protect and nurture endangered rhinoceros.” This visit was my only intentional animal encounter, and I went mostly because Patti and some other guests of hers were interested in going. I’m glad I did, but not for the animal viewing (though it was pretty neat).

The most fantastic thing that happened occurred after we left the rhino sanctuary and went outside the front gate to the road. I hadn’t thought of it when we left Patti’s place that morning (I’m not much of a sharp thinker in the morning): we had gotten a ride from a neighbor to get to the sanctuary, but we did not arrange a ride home. Patti, having been in Botswana for a while, understood that wasn’t necessary. Turns out Patti planned to hitchhike home. In the spirit of being there in the moment, I went with the flow and resisted the urge to panic and attempt manage the situation. (Though, obviously, there was absolutely nothing I could have done that would have changed anything. Also, in preparation for the trip, I read that it was normal and relatively safe to do that in Botswana.)

So, five white ⁽²⁾, American females ranging in age from 50-something to 20-something are standing on a roadside at 9 a.m. (that’s right, we were finished by 9 a.m.) waiting for car to come by and take us back to the village. Here is where I would like to tell you where I was waiting (pictured in the image above), but the road, as far as I can tell, has no better label than: “the main road between Serowe and Orapa.” (I could not find a name for it and never heard it referred to as anything else.) So… we were somewhere on the main road between Serowe and Orapa.

We stood there for more than an hour before we figured out that traffic was not only light that day, but no one had space for five people. We saved a giant caterpillar from being potentially squashed (by non-existent traffic); I photographed some weeds and a CocaCola can; and we waited. Despite our best efforts to look in need of a ride and our vibrant signaling (which in Botswana is putting your hand in the air and waving your hand up and down, bending at the wrist with your palm facing the road), no one stopped to pick us up. We split up. Three people stayed in the original spot and two would go across the street and down a bit. I picked the wrong side.

After another thirty minutes or so, the two people on the other side found a covered army truck full of soldiers being dropped off at the sanctuary (apparently soldiers were security there) to take them. Originally, the soldiers said there was not room for the other three, but we apparently looked desperate or pathetic. After they drove past us about 100 feet, they reversed and squeezed everyone together and two soldiers stood up and held on to the canopy frame so we could sit. There were two other hitchhikers, two off-duty soldiers getting a ride, and a few other soldiers (in addition to the five of us) in the back of an army green canopy truck driving down the main road between Serowe and Orapa. Everyone talked and listened as much as possible–everyone: soldiers, strangers, and friends. It is as if we all knew we had just a limited time to learn from one another, and we did. As the truck slowed, I was told we would be dropped off at a kombi ⁽³⁾ stop, and though there would be no kombis today, we could probably have an easier time hitchhiking from that location.

And so it was. We were dropped off at a metal and cement structure with a red dirt pull in next to the road. There were more weeds to look at and a goat across the street. Traffic was a tiny bit busier there, in about twenty minutes, a small red Toyota pickup truck with a couple in cab and a family of three in the bed of the truck came along. They said they would take all of us if we could fit in the back of the truck with the other hitchhikers. We made it happen. I’m not sure either the driver or the family of hitchhikers knew what to make of us, or what possible situation led us to that circumstance. It was impossible to make much conversation, it was windy, hot, and dangerous in that truck. No one flew out of the bed of the truck, though it was a valid concern. When we arrived in the village commerce and market area we each gave the driver a small amount of money and said goodbye. It was now about 12:30 pm.

The Lesson:

I have only just described a little over three hours of just one day in Botswana, and they were all kind of like that. We woke up with a rough plan, set out with a general destination in mind and took what the day had for us. Panic and stress were useless emotional states. Alertness and perpetual satisfaction in any circumstance were required. By that I mean, panic and stress were dangerous and generally caused poor decision making and should be avoided at all costs. Being alert means being aware of the richness of the situation around me and all the positive and negative components of a situation at once. Being perpetually satisfied means remaining cognizant and respectful of the goodness of every circumstance, even if you are working to change it or get out of it.

I want to live every day of my life by those rules: do not panic and do not stress, just remain alert and satisfied. I lived my life that way for 33 days in Botswana and South Africa. I still cannot manage it here at home. Returning from my trip, I was sure I could keep it going, but I failed. I have tried to figure out why, and I have not yet decided I know the cause. Perhaps life is just different here. Perhaps my culture doesn’t allow it. Perhaps I am too familiar with my surroundings. Perhaps I feel that I have more control of my circumstances here.

I don’t know why it’s so difficult to live by my new rules here, but it remains a perpetual goal.

Image Credits:
Roadside Image: Samantha Merritt
CocaCola Can: Samantha Merritt
Army Truck: Nina Mehta (cropped by Samantha Merritt)

Footnotes:
^1. I have a particular feeling about the concept of help and of the widely accepted label of needy placed on people in non-Western cultures who have different consumer cultures than we do. I put them in quotes because that’s what some people might say about a trip to Africa to do “volunteer work” that can actually do more harm than good. I’ll save that for another blog post. If you want to hear more about it or get a blog post on the topic faster, contact me. My trip had nothing to do with helping or philanthropy in general, I was there to learn.

^2. For those of you who know that I traveled with Nina Mehta, you might not consider her “white.” People in Botswana do. It has very little to do with the color of her skin, and more to do with the appearance of her face and hair. So for the purposes of this story, Nina is white. :)

^3. I cannot spare the space here to tell you all that you need to know about the kombi (or combi, depending on where you are), but know that it is loosely a form of public transportation run by independent people/companies running along sort-of standardized routes with a flat rate for rides. The vehicle is typically an unattractive version of the Volkswagen Type 2 vehicle (or alternate make/model with similar features). Riding the kombi taught me so much about myself, humanity, and the world as a whole… but that’s definitely another blog post (or more).

I’ve planned out a set of books to read this summer while I’m working on my ICTD 2012 submission and other papers. …well, these books in addition to A ZILLION papers, of course.

• The Reflective Practitioner (D.A. Schon)
• Michel Foucault (B. Smart)
• Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity (M.A. McLaren)
• Women Fielding Danger: Negotiating Ethnographic Identities in Field Research (Huggins and Glebeek, eds.)
• Learning How to Ask (C.L. Briggs)
• The Professional Stranger (M.H. Agar)
• Feminist Fields: Ethnographic Insights (Bridgman, Cole, and Howard-Bobiwash, eds.)

In a few short hours, I’ll be on my way to Vancouver, Canada for the annual ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). I’m more excited about it than I can admit without being embarrassed. This year, I am presenting a poster for the Work-in-Progress (Group 1), which will be on display at the conference on Monday and Tuesday (May 9 and 10). I will be present and ready to talk about it on Tuesday 10:00 – 11:00 am. The title of this work is: Postcolonial Language and Culture Theory for HCI4D.

Here’s the abstract:

As technology design spreads to less technologically developed countries, issues of cultural identity, language, and values manifest in the form of methodological and ethical challenges for HCI4D designers. We offer a new theoretical perspective, in the context of HCI4D design, to advance the HCI postcolonial critique and highlight fundamentally Western design practices. Application of Thiong’o’s language and culture theory provides a tool for designers and researchers to face assumptions, cultural communication, and the potential repercussions in cross-cultural design. Upon future development, this postcolonial orientation could be used to create responsible, successful designs and create awareness of inadvertent Western language culture embedded in HCI4D design. [1]

Through talking to people about the draft of this paper and poster, I have learned that I am involved with some ideas that can be controversial depending on what discipline you come from. I will be working to refine this idea and figure out what tangible examples point to the issues I raise in this work. Right now, I am having trouble designing a way to collect and observe examples that specifically show a duality of culture caused by technology design. I will find a way.

I also want to make sure that I can adequately explain what I mean by including “language” in this theory. The language itself is not the issue, words can be translated; it is all the culture that is comes with a language that is of concern here. Ultimately, I am concerned about empowering non-Western cultures during HCI user research and design methods. It is my position that methods that do this properly cannot exist until there is a deep understanding and identification of causal variables.

[1] (forthcoming) Merritt, S. and Bardzell, S. 2011. Postcolonial Language and Culture Theory for HCI4D. In Proceedings of the 29th of the International Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’10). ACM, New York, NY, USA.

It’s all just pay grades now!

You’ve made it. You are doing what you wanted to do with your life.
You are.
You just make less money right now.
Think about it…

The Story:

Living on the edge of your thirties (or in them) most of my peers are in a realm of nearly constant career life planning and improvement. We’ve all been out there in the world a bit—long enough to be wise enough to know we are not doing what we planned, or where we thought we’d be, or who we thought we’d be at this age. Time to evaluate, strategize, and keep moving forward.        Now that’s the spirit!

Recently having one of these career planning conversations with a friend, I realized: I’m there. I’m where I’ve always wanted to be, and I like it. Weird.

Let me explain. I am one of those lunatics that always wanted to be an academic (even when I was fighting the nerd urge and trying to work my way up the proverbial ladder in industry). Even if you recently learned you are the “academic type”, when you decided to be a PhD student you basically announced that you like to do the following things (the common goals of research-oriented universities):

• Research: You like studying and contributing to a topic you are passionate about.
• Teaching: If you were going to academia with that PhD, you’ll likely teach somewhere in there.
• Service: Face it, you’d make a lot of money a lot faster in industry with those brains; you work in service of knowledge and others in the same pursuit.

As PhD students, what do we do? We do the same stuff (that list above) that we are going to do as tenured faculty members… we just do it with guidance, training wheels, a lot more mistakes, and a LOT less pay. (The obvious caveat here is that you are a PhD student aiming to be a tenured faculty member somewhere, someday. If that’s not your goal, well, Sam’s PhD Lesson #2 just doesn’t apply to you, sorry about that.)

The Lesson:

It’s all just pay grades now. This brings me to that magical, admittedly oversimplified, happy realization that I am already doing exactly what I want to be doing, just for less money.

Obviously, we are not very good at it yet—at least I know that I am not. We have a few long years ahead of us to learn how to do this better, to earn our way into the next pay grade: post-doc or maybe Assistant Professor. Then, we will be in training mode again, still getting better and putting in the time to prove you are ready for the next pay grade: Associate Professor …and so on until we are rich, famous, old Distinguished Professors.

This whole idea came from a simple, genius piece of advice from my advisor while I was preparing to apply for my PhD program. She said something like (paraphrasing here), “as a PhD student, you are essentially a junior colleague to us.” Until she said that, I had not thought about it that way before. That’s right. I am. Weird.

Note: I’m in the United States, so all of this stuff is referencing the research-oriented universities in the United States. As much as I cringe saying this, there is a pretty good summary of all of the academic position ranks on Wikipedia.