not all who wander are lost...

...except clearly you, since you've wandered into my little backwater of the interwebs

[a1tg]

Still stuck on sleeve number 2. I think I bit off more than I could chew with this project -- I've had to put it down and walk away multiple times. So close now!! #knitfastdiewarm #knitting #tricoter #tricopines #handmade (à Paris, France)

[a1tg]

Un petit chapeau: traveling cables hat. #knitting #tricoter #knittersofinstagram #handmade #dermercerie #purlsohobusyhands

[a1tg]

#vacation #knitting #drunkknitting #knittersofinstagram (à Munich, Germany)

[a1tg]

Starting a new project before we head to Munich tonight. This yarn was originally destined for another project, but it was not meant to be. A bit of a bummer, since I was really excited to do my first cardigan, but now I get to go yarn shopping again, so I can't complain too much! ;) #knitting #knittersofinstagram

[a1tg]

#latergram but my Dessine-moi is done! I'm super happy with it...and just in time for autumn. (also, French labs love super crazy colors for their walls. Enjoy) #knitting #handmade #knittersofinstagram #madelinetosh #maisonrililie #tricoter

[a1tg]

New projects... #knitting #knittersofinstagram #tricoter #handmade #knitpicks

[a1tg]

Made this and have been wearing it all weekend. Pattern Vaara from #pompommag and yarn from #ladroguerie #knitting #knittersofinstagram #tricoter #handmade

[enfiber-deactivated20170817]

Today, I wanted to do a collection of patterns that include plus sizes.  One of the things that perpetually frustrates me about buying clothes is the seeming lack of willingness of clothing manufacturers to admit that women come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Honestly, there’s a great deal more variety to our bodies than there is to the gents.  I believe that all women, regardless of size or shape, deserve to feel beautiful and confident.  So today, it’s all about that.  It’s all about no shapeless sacks for any size that you are.

Kanti Mama

Gemini

Emelie

Rosina Pullover

Baby Cables and Big Ones Too

Winterberry

[a1tg]

admirable, but it would be really nice to see these on larger women, then. just because a pattern has the stitch counts for larger sizes doesn't mean it will actually look good. 

[a1tg]

Easy lace in a gradient yarn

[a1tg]

Sleeve detail on my new sweater #knitting #tricoter #knittersofinstagram #handmade #madelinetosh #maisonrililie (à Paris, France)

[a1tg]

Afterthought lifeline #knittersofinstagram #knitting #tricoter #handmade

[adventuresinchemistry]

At the risk of being incredibly whiny, what exactly is everyone's beef with med students? D: I just finished my biology degree with pre-med and I guess I was just surrounded by med students because I do not understand

It’s just exhausting to be in a class you enjoy and are taking because you want to do science and be surrounded by students who are constantly complaining about how much they hate it, and don’t need it, and are only taking it because it’s going to be on the MCAT. Certainly not all pre-meds are like that, but even the 10% who constantly ask questions about if they’re going to get an A and look down at the mere science students kind of ruin it when you have to deal with them in every class.

I will say, a large part of the problem isn’t even pre-med students themselves, it’s the fact that biology departments have to bear the burden of the majority of their students being pre-professional in some capacity, who have completely different needs than pre-doctoral students who want to be biologists. Bio programs end up teaching to the MCAT almost out of necessity, which does a disservice to the students who want to be scientists. 

I know that at my university, I considered switching to bio from chem, but ended up staying in the science and engineering college because the bio college was so focused on pre-professional students that they did a really poor job preparing you to be an actual scientist. Just based on the classes I took for my biochem minor, it was really obvious. I suspect that this is the case at a lot of schools, which sort of compounds the issues and makes pre-doctoral students frustrated with pre-meds, even though it’s not their fault directly.

[chemysteriously-blog]

I can also speak from teaching organic chemistry to pre-meds over multiple semesters, which is, for the most part, really un-fun.  

So here’s some of the things I have had to handle because my students were premeds (in various tenses)

• ask if I could teach closer to what’s on the MCAT in class

• ask if they could do extra credit to boost their GPA (because this is THE class that will keep them out of med school) (you can include actual begging for an A or telling me they can’t get anything BUT an A in this bullet point)

• phone calls from angry parents whose child got an F in organic but is supposed to go to medical school and I am the reason they’re not

• nitpick every cent of my grading, which is fine, but they get angry about having a wrong answer be, well, wrong, and will fight me on it.  Like they will raise voices and tell me I’m wrong and show me examples from (incorrect) online videos about why they’re right… which they’re [insert overwhelming majority of the time] not right.  (I’ll admit that I have made mistakes grading, and I don’t mind people asking me about it respectfully.)

• tell me they should get that half a point back on a 200 point exam because *their* handwriting is nearly illegible and the answer is unclear or entirely wrong.

• tell me “it’s unfair that pre-meds have to learn as much organic chemistry as people who care about it”

• tell me “this isn’t necessary for any class I have to take in med school, so I don’t know why I need it now” (because medicine is a lot of biochemistry and biochemistry is a lot of… guess what? ORGANIC CHEMISTRY.)

It’s not great to generalize, no.  For every 10 pre-meds that act like this, I have maybe 1 non-pre-med student do similar things.  But all of those things have happened to me from pre-meds multiple times.   HOWEVER, I’ve had some really wonderful pre-meds who I’m really happy are going to be/are MD doctors.  A few of the pre-meds have asked way better questions than the chemistry majors, and are actually insightful.  But the majority are terrible.

[unsympatheticchemprof]

I can confirm this as both a teacher and professor. My roommate in college was a pre-med major and used to spend the week after final exams visiting every single professor he had (in person and not through email) in an attempt to get his grade changed to a higher one. I just laugh when I get calls or emails from parents. Legally I don’t have to talk to them unless their kid waved FRPA rights

[johnskylar]

The problem as I see it is a broken system that keeps the supply of doctors low and emphasizes GPA and MCAT score over things that would bear an actual relationship to future quality of patient care.

[a1tg]

Or the fact that pre-meds are tracked into university at all? Why are pre-professional students forced to get academic (i.e. bachelor's) degrees first? It compounds their potential debt load, especially given how expensive higher education is in the US. It's also an exception in how many countries train their medical staff.

[a1tg]

broken seed stitch all the way! Body done…now the sleeves!

[jacfruit-tree]

SCIENCE… TOO STRESSFUL FOR HULK… HULK NEED HUG…

[a1tg]

Work in progress. #knitting #tricoter #madelinetosh #handmade (à Paris, France)

[adventuresinchemistry]

I have a lot of relatively complex feelings about the overrepresentation of women in science outreach 

[abandonthefort]

to add on to your tags, i also think that women are more likely to volunteer for outreach as well? because they are acutely aware how important representation is for kids and want girls to see that they can be scientists (especially because it wasn’t something THEY saw as kids and feel like they could use it?)

[adventuresinchemistry]

Yeah that’s definitely a big part of it. But I wonder if more women volunteer for outreach (specifically at the graduate student/postdoc level) because (in part at least) we know that it’s much harder for us to get academic jobs and it’s a way of credentialing either to boost our resumes for the academic job market or to network/credential for the case that we don’t stay in academia

[femscinerd]

maybe this is just me projecting my own feels, but i feel like it’s also a space where women feel like they can excel and get the feel goods of doing good things for people that we were supposed to get from academic science, which turned out to be a space where we’re frequently expending time & energy combating sexist judgement of our competency and impostor syndrome

[staypuftmarshmallowqueen]

I feel like there’s also a component involving men choosing to not do it. My own read on this is it’s back to a core issue of society not expecting men to do this sort of ‘extra’ work above and beyond what they have deemed their own fair share. In this case, that would be showing up for and doing their job (competently, one hopes). 

I think of this sort of like how so many men in relationships with women don’t do anything remotely akin to an equitable share of the housework, and consider it nagging when they’re asked to. Someone else has always done that before (because many of them were probably raised by a het couple where the mother did most if not all of the hosuework and any time dad did something it was only at her request, not because it was just a thing that needed doing and he did it). Why should they not think this will always be true? 

And so I think this attitude of shunting emotional labor onto someone else bleeds into this professional aspect of our lives. Outreach is, in effect, the laundry and sweeping and dishes of the field one has a career in. Someone needs to do it, sooner or later, or the field will die, and women are trained by society to take up those unattended tasks automatically.

[techno-gal-deactivated20191104]

YES

[astronomnomy-blog]

It’s also increasingly frustrating when Universities are now vaguely aware of outreach and it’s general importance but aren’t willing to pay more than lip service. Not just outreach, but student care and mentoring is disproportionately performed by minorities in science as people see a need to help people below them navigate hostility and find success quicker than they did. Pastoral care, teaching and outreach are, by pretty much every panel, considered “nice to haves” in faculty or post-doc candidates. For those not in the know, grant money income/awards and the H-index are considered the most important. H-index is a measure of your “success” and “productivity” in the field; someone’s H index is the number H of papers that have H citations each (so someone with a H-index of five is on at least five papers with five citations each). That’s it that’s how it’s done. It’s one of many metrics, but it’s taken too rigidly by everyone. It’s sometimes (often?) used as a cut. “Lottie, how is this related?” Well, the more time you spend churning out (decent) papers, the less time you have for teaching or taking proper care of your students (so much rage for other students here) or disseminating your work to the public, or taking proper care of yourself now I think about it. So those who didn’t value outreach - and got their higher H-index because of that - are more likely to be interviewed. And those that spent time doing outreach and pastoral care? More likely to be cut. Not everyone who avoids outreach undervalues it, some people would be too nervous etc, but I’d rather it be that they give a damn good reason they weren’t involved in their department in some fashion rather than outreach peeps explaining and apologising as to why they only have twelve not thirteen papers or whatever. And it gets worse, because if you’re in a discipline like astronomy or theoretical physics your work does not have easily quantifiable impact. Impact is a word that strikes fear into the hearts of many UK scientists, it’s part of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) university ranking and determines department funding. One of the three measures, (research quality (papers) and environment (money) are the other two) and gaining massive importance is what the impact of your research is on society. It’s a daftly short-sighted thing as if you’re in a physics department with idk a tech group who are coming to market with products your dept can get a really high score, but if you’re in my old widdly department that has astronomy, theory and expt particle physics and quantum computing, you’re going to have a hard time. So, what can we use for impact case studies? We use outreach. And, even though in the past seven or so years undergrad physics numbers have more than doubled in our department, the REF panel decided the case studies were “okay, I guess…” and were weaker than other depts. (For the record, Brian Cox got 4/4 stars for Manchester IIRC, so someone did well). What impact we do have is usually undervalued anyway as it’s hard to quantify, so people who do outreach have to work harder to have the same “impact” according to funders. FTR if you had a good experience with an outreach event, email the team and say “your event changed my mind about X and made me do Y and Z science-related things and career choices” because they can use that in the REF and they’ll love you for it.

I can rant forever on the REF but my eventual point is, disciplines like astro and particle physics NEED people who do outreach, and, looking at the stuff coming out of the woodwork with astroSH, NEED proper pastoral care at all levels. Hiring panels say they care but they only use it as an “if all else is equal” metric, by which point it’s too late really, you’ve lost a lot of decent people. You need people focussed on it. :( Top that off with full-time outreach positions being really underpaid and the impact and importance undervalued… no wonder, even with “unbiased, we promise” hiring panels, minorities in science aren’t being selected. ::throws table::

[adventuresinchemistry]

File this under: academic science is pretty fucked up

[adventuresinchemistry]

#i somewhat object to the idea that outreach is laundry#you can build an entire career out of doing outreach#it is not just minimally essential to keep the wheel turning#it is fundamentally valueable to maintaining a scientifically literate society#and we certainly value it when it’s neil degrasse tyson or carl sagan or brian greene doing it don’t we#how weird our most valued outreach people are all men#when women dominate the area otherwise (via @femscinerd)

You raise an important point here. Outreach is a realm of academic science where women are often in leadership roles (by choice most of the time I think), and yet the most well known science communicators are all men. It’s almost like we value men’s voices more than women’s in our culture or something….

[itsokaytobesmart]

This is a very interesting and important discussion that I think everyone should take the time to read and think about, regardless of whether you’re in science, or you simply enjoy science.

[a1tg]

This has been a weekend of ripping out parts of various projects and putting them back together, better than before. If that's not a metaphor then I don't know what is... #knitting #tricoter #handmade #madelinetosh