Graduate student training

One of the things that I do as a professor is train graduate students to be productive scientists. There are many apsects to this: research, communication, and teamwork skills, and maybe even some teaching experience. The faculty-student mentoring relationship for these skills is well defined. Students expect to pick up these skills and look to the faculty member for help, either from direct instruction and feedback, or by following the example set by the faculty (hopefully a good example). In addition, over time, many people are working on resources to help with this.

But occasionaly I encounter a dimension that is more difficult: personality coaching. On one hand, many aspects of this are related to the other skills mentioned above. But on the other hand, when students have personalities that make it difficult for them to interact constructively with others, they have a hard time acquiring these other skills. It becomes a barrier to many of the other aspects.

More importantly, this aspect of the relationship between faculty and student is not well defined. It somehow seems more difficult to approach a student on this topic. Nevertheless, students who behave poorly can not only hamper their own professional development, but can interrupt the development of other students.

Perhaps there is room to develop resources to help us deal with this aspect too.

Mail Merging Postal Codes

I fought for too many hours trying to merge some labels and have all the postal codes be formatted correctly. Why does it need to be that hard? No matter where I looked, I could not find any information that made it clear how Word intepreted the columns of a data source and why it chose to force them to be numbers. As a result, no matter what I tried, Canadian postal codes came out as the number 0 in all cases. I had to give up...

RIP Oliver

Oliver was hit by a car and died two days ago. While it is true that we didn't always see eye to eye, I will miss having him around. Watching Moira's reaction has been fascinating. She has a very matter-of-fact sense of the whole incident and is anxious to tell as many people as possible about all the details she knows.

I am digging a grave for a soon to be held memorial. The vet suggested 5 ft.... That's a long way down. I think I will aim more for 3 ft, and put a big heavy rock on top.