Author Archives: ibartomeus

Why Postdocs are the teenagers of academia.

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I’m starting my third postdoc. After two postdocs, I thought it would be nice to have my own lab, but given the situation in my home country, doing another postdoc is more appealing, specially in a good lab and with a flexible project. Then, I realised I should stop thinking about the future and enjoy up to the last second of my postdoctoral stage. What’s the hurry? We, Postdocs are the teenagers of Academia. We are not leaving with our parents anymore, but we still don’t have family responsibilities. And just to be clear, by parents I mean PhD advisors, and by family your own grad students. All teenagers want to grow fast, but hey, once you’ve grown you miss your teenage instability, experimenting with new things, the lack of long term responsibilities, the hormonal up-and-downs with high days just after submitting a ms to Science and the down days where you get rejected and nothing makes sense. I don’t want to be a teenager forever, but while I am here, I will use my time to hangout with other teenagers, keep trying new risky things and enjoy this period I know someday i will miss.

Something to say

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I enjoy reading scientists blogs. They made me think, they amused me and sometimes they make me feel understood. Most importantly, they help me see that ecology is dynamic and at least some ecologists are thinking out of the box about how to do and discuss science. I was also taking notes and ideas to myself in a variety of physical supports, including napkins that unfortunately I will never find again. I think it’s time I open my ideas and participate in this growing community of ecologists at once. Open ideas, open science and a feeling I have something to say. As scientists we have good formal ways to communicate our final, carefully thought and highly curated outputs, but science also needs a more informal and less serious fast forum. This will be a place to keep an informal open notebook for me. I hope you find something useful too.

Why marginally significant? ok, I know that there is not such a thing as a marginally significant result in statistics. If your p is 0.06, that’s ok, don’t complain, look at your effect sizes, see the power of your analysis, discuss it. Hey, but If your p is 0.04 you should do the same, so it’s not that important. I am not sure if my posts will be always significant for you (and I am not going to test that!), but I want to report them anyway, and I hope discussing them will increase the power of the ideas…