Julia Strand  0:02  
Hello and welcome back to the juice and the squeeze. I'm Julia Strand here with my wonderful co host, Jonathan Peelle. Hi, Jonathan!

Jonathan Peelle  0:10  
Hi, Julia.

Julia Strand  0:11  
It's been a minute

Jonathan Peelle  0:13  
At least a minute.

Julia Strand  0:15  
That's what we call one year plus, which is how long it's been since our last episode. Did you miss us, dear listeners,

Jonathan Peelle  0:22  
We decided to move to an annual plan, and we started like recording every week back in the day, and then it was like every other week, and then every month, and now we're every year. But anyway, we're glad to be back, and hopefully it will not be a year till the next one.

Julia Strand  0:39  
Hopefully. Fingers crossed. Yeah, it has been. It's been a busy year for both of us. And, you know, as we, as we have talked with each other offline and been like, is it time for an episode? We have been making some, you know, juice and squeeze related determinations, but I'm really happy to have a little bandwidth back such that we can be chatting again.

Jonathan Peelle  1:03  
Yeah, same here. So, Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Julia Strand  1:08  
We are going to talk about how we know if we're doing a good job, broadly construed. So this the the idea for this came to me based on lots of conversations that I've been having with students, with my wonderful undergraduates, about their academic plans, and because it's a conversation I've been having a lot. Jonathan, what's that thing you say where like anytime you give somebody the same advice multiple times, you're obligated to cross stitch it or write a blog post or something,

Jonathan Peelle  1:43  
Yeah exactly. Write it down if you say it more than once, yeah.

Julia Strand  1:48  
And so this is a conversation that I've been having with students regularly, and but then also kind of parallels things I've been thinking about about my life. And then once Jonathan and I started kicking this idea around, we realized there's lots of places to take it. So the original idea came from this, from students making decisions about their academic paths. What classes am I going to take next year, next term? You know, what? What are these things going to do for me? And one of the things that I, that I that I feel from students, is that they feel this pressure to take a lot of classes at once. So at Carleton, we're on trimesters, the typical load is that students take three classes at a time per term during for our nine and a half week terms. So with three classes, is kind of the typical load people can overload. Take a fourth class, or, you know, take a couple of lab sections along with things and do research and, you know, couple together additional credits in this way. But there seems to be a bit of a culture of, like, aspiring for taking a heavier load than usual. And usually, when they talk about it, it's for, like, you know, I'm paying for it anyway, reasons I want to make sure I'm getting the most out of my college career and really taking advantage of these opportunities, and so that the thing that seems like what they are striving for is number of credit hours. Is this? Does this? Does this resonate with you? Jonathan, is this a thing that you like hear about from, from students?

Jonathan Peelle  3:23  
I haven't heard—no, the short answer is no, but I like relate to that, that feeling, even from when I was a student,

Julia Strand  3:33  
yeah, right. Like, if there's, you know, if there's opportunities out there, why wouldn't you take them?

Jonathan Peelle  3:37  
Yeah, exactly.

Julia Strand  3:39  
And, and one of the things that I talk with with my students about when I'm, you know, when I'm counseling them, is that one of the ways that you can aim for doing as much as possible is like number of credit hours that you were, that you were, that you're enrolled in. But I also see many students who are taking a whole bunch of credits, who are frustrated and overwhelmed and doing everything kind of badly or not to the level that they might otherwise be able to do it. And so the idea that I've come to is that, like credit hours is really nicely quantifiable. How many credits are you taking a thing that is not quantifiable is how slowly and deeply are you doing each of your readings? And when you get to a word that you don't know, do you take the time to look it up? And if you're not so stressed that you're rushing from one thing to the next thing, do you kind of like chew on those ideas as you're walking across campus in a way that leads you to have, you know, a more interesting idea and and those things are super hard to quantify, and I think in part because they're hard to quantify, they are they are valued less than things. That are easy to quantify, number of credit hours. Yeah,

Jonathan Peelle  5:03  
I thought about this a lot, actually, independently in the context of kind of, like faculty assessment. So I've been on the, you know, the department merit committee for the last couple of years, and we have a department rubric that kind of gives, you know, levels for meeting expectations or not meeting expectations or exceeding expectations. And luckily, we have a great department, and people just do tons of amazing stuff, but the things that got written down the rubric are mostly things that are easy to count. So for example, how many papers did you have this year? Or how many grants Did you submit things like that? And honestly, that's what I kind of think of for my own self, when I think, Oh, how productive was I? And I don't always think about, well, how much deep thinking time did I have, or, you know, whatever, what was the quality of the ideas in those, those outputs. So I think this is really, like, really applicable throughout anyone's career.

Julia Strand  6:09  
Yeah, right. And like, how many papers Did you, did you publish, rather than, like, were those papers any good? Yeah. And that's like, that's, that's a harder thing to quantify, you know, and like, were you using methods that are robust and rigorous versus what is the impact factor of the journal that it's published in?

Jonathan Peelle  6:31  
Well it's funny, because I don't know if this applies to the undergraduate situation, but I think a lot of faculty that I speak with, and including me, if you have a real conversation, people acknowledge, oh, counting isn't the best, and it doesn't capture all these areas. But then, like when it comes down to actually doing something where there's a proposal, people default to counting because it's, you know, quote unquote easy. It seems, quote, unquote, fair.

Julia Strand  7:05  
yeah. So this, it reminds me of Goodhart's law, which is when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. So, you know, it makes sense, when colleges were being created, that we should have some kind of unit for expressing the amount of time that people are spending taking classes, right? Like credit hours. It's supposed to be quantifying, you know what, what people are doing with their academic time. But if the goal is just to maximize the number of credit hours, then that leads to things like, well, this class is supposed to be an easy class, but it's worth the same number of credits, therefore, I'll take that over, you know, a harder class that's worth the same number of credits, or, you know, in the example that you just gave, if the goal is to publish a lot of papers, then that pushes toward salami slicing, right, trying to turn each data set into the maximum number of papers possible. And and, you know, toward publishing things that might not otherwise be as interesting, whereas, you know, and there's heaven. Have another ideas about how to evaluate faculty scholarship that rather than being how many papers did you write pre tenure? You know, it's show me your best three papers pre tenure, and we evaluate the quality of those, Yep, yeah. So I think a lot of it is like, where, where the incentives are, you know, that that push toward, you know, what, what, what the levers are, that are, that are influencing people's behavior?

Jonathan Peelle  8:36  
Yeah. And I do think a lot of times is, it's an unconscious, I mean, I'm conscious of counting papers, for example. But there's also the unconscious bias, where, if you know that there's a benefit one way and not another way, I think it's really hard to, you know, 100% just ignore that pressure.

Julia Strand  8:56  
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think one, one way of like pushing back against that pressure is to well, is to talk about it, if only some people record a podcast episode about it, to make people be thoughtful about it. But you know when, when students are talking to me about about registering for courses, you know, and they sometimes talk about, like, the the the fear of missing out, you know, like, we're just, like, leaving classes that you could take on the table and, and I always try to point out that, like, Yeah, sure. But like, if you, if you overload and take that extra class, you're leaving something else on the table. And that is peace of mind, yeah? And, I mean, and so part of it, part of it, part of the argument is, like, Sure, you can do that, but are you going to be miserable? But then there's also just, like a super, you know, if the goal is to learn a whole bunch, and, you know, gather a lot of information into your brain. Yeah, there's a host of research in cognitive psychology that you know teaches us about how information can be retained in long term memory, and things like stress are bad for it. Things like having to cram are bad for it. And so it's it's not even just like some kind of hand wavy you'll be happier if you're not overworked. It's also like you'll learn more if you're not overworked, yep. So I think it's, you know, looking at that like that, the opportunity costs, right? Like, what are, what are you missing out on? By by by taking that extra class is something that I think is is easy to miss. 

Jonathan Peelle  10:40  
Do you think, I mean, how? How do students take that, when you give them that, that pep talk?

Julia Strand  10:47  
It's, it's quite variable. I think, you know, many of them are like, oh, boy, I hadn't thought about that. And sometimes they're like, I hear you, and I'm gonna do it anyway. So, yeah, it's, it's, it's a mix. And also, like, I recognize that, you know, I'm speaking from this kind of, like idealized what's best for education and, you know, like, life of the mind, and, you know, this kind of, like idealized work life balance. But I recognize that there are also these other pressures on students that they're like, I really want to be employable when I'm done, and the additional class that I'm going to take might be something that'll like, look really good on my resume, or give me skills that I really need. You know, so like, I think there are certainly circumstances under which it does make sense to, like, take that additional course, it's more. I'm just like trying to draw their attention to the fact that sometimes more is less. Yeah, yep. The other, the other thing that that this makes me think about is when we talk about, like, faculty evaluation. And you know, how many grants did you get? How many papers Did you publish? One of the things, those things are much easier to quantify than how strong a teacher you are, right? Because for teaching evaluation, like we rely on student teaching evaluations, which we know are biased and problematic in a bunch of ways. And you know, you can have, like other faculties, observation of your teaching, but that is, it is less, I guess, objective measure than the average age index of the paper that you're probably the journals that you're publishing in. But even harder to measure and quantify is like, how supportive an advisor are you, and how much time do you spend with students crying in your office, trying to help them through hard times, or like, sitting down with them and helping them figure out how to do their FAFSA or something. And I think you know this is one way in which a lot of really important service that helps our students a lot goes unrecognized because it is so hard to quantify. Yep, and that's particularly problematic given what we know about the fact that women and people of color, and especially women of color, carry an undue an unfair share of that quote, unquote burden of like, helping, helping students in ways that largely goes unrecognized, yeah, for sure. And so you know, if, like, on the one hand, wouldn't it be great if we had a way of quantifying how, how many hours this week did you spend with students crying in your office while you helped them with stuff right in but boy, do I ever not want that to be kind of measuring that we aim for, right? Well, that's our target, but, you know? But it's, it's just like yet another example of this thing, where, if it's hard to measure, it seems less valuable but, but being measurable and being valuable are, like, totally unrelated. It's just, you know, a convenient shorthand that I think gets us into trouble in a bunch of areas.

Jonathan Peelle  14:12  
Yeah. So I think you know, one thing that comes to mind is that when we're in positions of evaluating people, whether it's, you know, students or colleagues or job applicants. You know, we can hopefully be a voice for thinking about a more holistic picture that that tries to not only focus on countable things. And I think you know, you and I, we've been doing the podcast for several years, and we keep getting more senior and on more committees and things like that. So hopefully we can kind of influence things a little. But I also one of my, I guess, worries, you know, when I think about students in my lab, for example, I have graduate students who are going to go off and apply for fellowships and jobs and. And, you know, I'm assuming that many people evaluating them will not have listened to our podcast. Guess what? You know, yeah, quick, have everyone listen to this and agree with us, but just trying to think about how to prepare people, you know, I want them to know all of these nuances. And I also want them to do well on, you know, stupid metrics, yeah, so I don't know, how do you, how do you, you know, it might not exactly be like credit hours, but there is, you know, there is competition, and not everyone is, you know, thinks deeply about this stuff.

Julia Strand  15:42  
Yeah, that's, I mean, that's, it's a tough balance, right? Because we want to, you know, we want to, like, spread the optimistic, idealized vision of what we want academia to look like, and we're training people who do not have all the privileges that we do, of job security and seniority, and we want to prepare them for the world that that actually is, despite the fact that that we want it to be different. And I think, I think part of it is like just pointing out, you know, like just pointing out these things, right, that and and pointing out these things and like emphasizing why we value what we do, why I am more impressed by a multi experiment paper, you know, like, given the same data, I'd be more impressed with, like, a multi experiment paper that has really robust methods than I would buy that same paper split into five papers, you know, even though that like makes it more and, and so I think you know, part of this is just like talking about it right and and pointing out and pointing out to students and other faculty, like the ways that that God hearts law plays plays out in academia, right? And that just that, like the the shortcomings, I mean, and there's been so much written about the shortcomings of things like Impact Factor and H index, and you know, the ways that those both encourage people to game the system and oversight themselves, and, you know, all of that nonsense, you know, but, but I think, I think you're totally right that when we are evaluating people, it's important to be pointing out, like looking more holistically, the concern though, about, you know, If I'm thinking about like faculty applicants or grad school applicants. And there are, there are the objective numbers that we can look at. If we talk about, like, looking more holistically and trying to see these other things related to service that are hard to quantify and all of that, that's also an opportunity where, where biases sneak in too, right? When you like thinking about faculty, you know, faculty job applicants, and you're like, well, some of it is about publications, but some of it is about like, fit with the department, which can kind of be a code for, are these people similar demographically, to all of the other people who have ever worked in this department, you know, or any other number, any other, you know, number of biases. And so it's tricky, because, on the one hand, objective things are nice because they're objective, and on the other hand, nothing is truly objective, right? Like, for sure,

Jonathan Peelle  18:37  
yeah. Well, that's that goes along with reminding people about that too, right? So you think, I, you know, you might think objective. Things are objective, even if they're not perfect, so they're, quote, unquote fair. But as you pointed out, we know there's all these systematic biases built in to, you know, all of these measures, including teaching evaluations and citations and things like that. So, so just what you said, the objective measures aren't actually even objective. So that's the goal. We know that's not going to work. Yeah, I, I don't know. So I want to share an anecdote over the last couple of years. So I don't think this is anyway, if anyone from my department is listening to this podcast, hi, and I don't mean to complain, but I will a little bit. So one of, one of the kind of unwritten requirements for our evaluation process is for every article you publish, you include the journal impact factor, which, if people aren't familiar with that, you can do a quick Google search, but it's basically the average citation rate for articles in a journal. And this is a horrible measure, which we've known for a long time. It's not also not objective. Journals negotiate this and so on, and also. Even if it was correct, just because the journal is quote, unquote good doesn't mean your paper is good. So there's a lot of just, you know, a lot of problems with it. And so for me, this is, like, a really obvious thing to get rid of. I said, okay, in our you know, maybe other people like it in our department, can we just leave it off? And I was overruled. And the reason was that at the higher levels of colleges and so on at my institution, apparently, the tenure and promotion committees talk about this, and the concern was, even if everyone in our department agrees it's not a good idea, will be disadvantaging our junior faculty, who then go up on committees with other people, which I'm sympathetic to that. And it also drives me nuts, because, you know, if we, if we can't even change like the, you know, get rid of the super obvious bad idea. You know, I feel like getting rid of some of these other measures is, you know, really far away. So that was, that was really depressing for me, honestly. But if I just grumble every time I have to read these things, and

Julia Strand  21:14  
it seems like, it seems like that's the kind of thing where, like, it is a fight worth fighting, but it's not a fight to have at the department level. It's a fight to have. It's a fight to have at the university

Jonathan Peelle  21:23  
level, right, right? And maybe I'll, I haven't had the opportunity for that discussion, but, but hopefully I will. And also, sometimes, you know, change is slow and people retire and new guidelines get written, so it doesn't mean it will never change. It just, you know, anyway, it was frustrating. Yeah, yeah. I hear that a positive anecdote is a few years ago. You know, I don't get asked to write a ton, but I get asked to write letters for people going up for tenure, and, you know, other other people I don't know very well, but I'm trying to evaluate them in different situations, and I stopped mentioning citation standard citation metrics. And what I do instead is I have a, you know, it's kind of like a cut and paste paragraph, but I say something about, you know, citation rates aren't always accurate and they're biased. And so instead, I pick a recent paper, usually one that they highlight, you know, something that they feel showcases their work, and I just read that paper and talk about that paper. And thankfully, most of the time I'm writing positive letters, so I'm just looking through the paper, and I pull out, oh, this is an interesting question, or good design, or I like the statistics, and sometimes there's some constructive criticism, because I try to be honest, but I find that much more satisfying than just, you know, kind of regurgitating their CV. And then I also think it's more helpful for committees, because, you know, the Dean might not know this area of research, but hopefully I can explain why it's cool.

Julia Strand  23:05  
Yeah, yeah. I mean, the other thing that's nice about that is that you're going to make a bunch of administrators read your objections to like site. Well,

Jonathan Peelle  23:12  
exactly that's that's part of it, too. Yep,

Julia Strand  23:15  
yeah. Another, another place that that this has come up with me in advising students, is when they're talking about whether or not to double major in something versus, just like, majoring in one thing, and, you know, taking some classes that they're interested in, in the other thing. And, and this is like, I mean, a very close parallel with like, how many classes Am I taking? But it's like, how many majors do I have and, and, you know when, when I'm helping them, like, see pros and cons of doing it. And talk about the fact that if you just have one major you get to take a bunch more classes that you might actually be interested in, and you can take classes that are like, related to your interests, rather than being, you know, like having, having a more constrained schedule based on the requirements of the two majors and and I think there's a kind of a misconception among many students that the only way to like, indicate that you are interested in something and like have experience with something, is to like have on your Transcript. I majored in this thing. Whereas, you know, if I'm writing a letter of recommendation for someone for grad school, and it says they majored in psychology, but they also took eight courses in the statistics department and TA for a statistics class, and, like, worked in a stats lab or something, that's, like, a very clear way of being, like, yeah, they were a psych major, but like, they are into stats and and you know that they can put that in their, like, personal statements and things too. And I always try to, like, describe other ways that you can demonstrate the fact of the thing I'm interested in statistics, other than just, you know, with an easy to measure label. Like, I have a major in that. And I guess, as somebody who looks at grad applications, can you tell me, like, how a student who has, like, a major in statistics versus the student I just described? Like, how those would look different to you?

Jonathan Peelle  25:21  
That's a great question. I think they would really both look the same to me, just you know, kind of what following on what you said, that there's two different ways of showing interest and experience and kind of intentionality about something. I think for me, there's a big difference between someone saying, Oh, I like a thing, and someone who has obviously gone out of their way to spend time, you know, learning about it. And that could be, you know, taking classes. It could be a major it could be, I didn't do any of that stuff. But here's my GitHub repository and a bunch of code that I, you know, I wrote, right? I think, you know, this is a little tangential, but the thing that always really is, you know, really effective when I'm looking at applications as people with life experience. And that could be, you know, being a research assistant in a lab. It could be, you know, an interesting job outside the lab, but things that demonstrate kind of maturity and independence and and things like that. So when you talk about opportunity costs of taking extra classes or, you know, a double major or whatever, I think there's, like, some really practical things that you you could argue one's missing out on, you know, either like, like, for what we're talking about, maybe being in a lab, or even just how much time you put in the lab, or are you, are you leading a research project in the lab, or just, you know, showing up for two hours a week for lab meeting. That's a big difference. And, you know, I know which students I can write better letters for.

Julia Strand  26:59  
Yeah, yep,

Jonathan Peelle  27:03  
Julia, one of our first episodes—Off the top of my head, was it episode six?—We talked a lot in the beginning of our podcast about saying no to things and being overwhelmed with opportunity, and we had a lot of great advice, which I don't follow. I feel like for me, this is still such a struggle of just trying to limit the number of things I do so that I can do everything that I say yes to to a higher quality. As, on the one hand, I kind of hate keep repeating it. But also, you know, I like being honest, and that's just my life. So one thing I did in the last year, which I think I mentioned to you, is I made these postcards with the word no on them. This was inspired by something I saw on on blue sky. Someone else had a version of this, and so, so I made a bunch, and I'm happy to send you one, or anyone just just write to me, but the idea was like a little punch card. So every time you say no to something, you get to punch the postcard. And when you do it 10 times, you know, you can give yourself a little treat. So you have to decide ahead of time what your treat is, you know, go out for coffee or whatever. And as I've been passing them around to mostly junior faculty at Northeastern, and everyone appreciates them. I haven't seen a lot of holes punched in them, but they they appreciate the idea that's awesome. So maybe you need to, you know, hand those out to students too, right? And just say, look, you're always going to have more opportunities. And you need to, sort of, you know, have some social reinforcement for, you know, saying no is a good thing.

Julia Strand  28:46  
Boy, I have talked about, like, having little gold stars that I give to people. That's that say, like, I'm taking 18 credits this term. But I like the idea of, like, every time you take the time to look up a word as you're reading it. That's like, as you're reading something, or, you know, some, some other way of like, trying to quantify those things that you know are worth reinforcing. Or, like, every time you go to bed on time, having done all of the work that you needed to do for that day, you know, like, yeah, just to rather than being like, you get in trouble every time you have to pull an all nighter or something. But like, you know, reinforcing the good behaviors. Yeah, for sure.

Jonathan Peelle  29:32  
I know we do this with kids, and then when we're adults, we stop doing that. I could use a sticker chart, you know, boy,

Julia Strand  29:39  
yeah. Yeah. But this, like, you've this is, this is a nice segue into kind of blowing this up bigger picture. When we're like, how do I know I'm doing a good job in my life, right? We've been talking about all stuff that, like relates to work, you know? And when I think about when I'm catching. With somebody that I haven't talked to for a while, and they're like, you know, how are things going? How's work and, and, and especially for us in academia, like, work is an easy thing to quantify. Like, you generally know, am I writing a lot of papers? Am I getting grants? Am I, like, meeting these metrics for success? But when I think about like, the kind of life that I want to live, it is much harder to quantify. Like, how much time did I spend truly being present while playing Legos with my sweet children? That's a much harder thing to quantify than how many papers did I publish this year. But oh my gosh. Do I think being present while doing Legos is like, a more important life goal than publishing a bunch of papers? Right? Yeah, um, and, you know, but, but, I mean, there's just another example, right? Of like, one is hard, one is harder to quantify. But that does not mean it has less value.

Jonathan Peelle  30:59  
I think a great point in there is, there's quantify, as in, kind of, you know, count things up, which is what we've been talking about. But there's also just being mindful of it. And I think, you know, okay, it might be hard to assign a number to how present were you while you're playing Legos, but I bet you have an intuition. If you, you know, if you step back and think about it, about, kind of generally where you are, and that's something I've been trying to work on, too, is just think about, yeah, think, think bigger picture, about goals. And even if I can't put a number on something, at least take the time to assess, you know, the Yeah, this is going well. This is a direction I want to move in more or or, or vice versa. This is something I'd like to do too less of, and that's at least maybe one step towards evening the I don't know, I don't know what the metaphor is, you know, but sort of bringing balance back to the evaluation. Yeah,

Julia Strand  31:55  
yeah. You talking about saying no to things reminds me of an awesome thing that happened to me last last fall, I was I was at a wedding, and I didn't know many people there, but I was seated next to or at the same table as another academic, psychologist professor, and she And she and I were just having a lovely conversation, and I asked her the thing that I ask all women that I have the opportunity to, you know, make small talk with who are older than I am, which is, what do you wish you knew when you were 40? And I love asking this question, because it is a way of, like, really getting, if you're, if you have the opportunity to talk to someone, and it's, you know, like you're sitting next to him at a wedding. It's not like, going to be a long term relationship. You could just be like, where are you from? How old are your kids? Remember? But like, this is an opportunity to, like, connect from someone and learn from someone. And when I you know, when I see, when I think about, like the advice I wish I could give my 20 year old self and the things that I talked to my students about i i don't know naive thing that I am, but like only recently realized that, like with age really does come wisdom. Like old people know more stuff than we do, and so you can't just say to somebody, what is the meaning of life or something, because that you know, right? But this really specific, what do you wish? And you knew when you were 40. I have gotten so much great advice from people, including, like, just, you know, the lady next to me at the airport bar, and you know this woman at a wedding, and just, you know people at restaurants, whatever. But So this woman at the wedding, she said, I wish I had realized what a short proportion of my career having small children was going to be. She's like, I felt like, you know, I had to write the book chapters, go to the conferences, be on the committees, do all this stuff. And I thought that, like when I when people ask me to do that stuff, I just, I had to say yes, because here they were asking me, and these are such great opportunities. And she said, but I wish I had realized that if I just said no to a lot of that stuff for like, these chunk of years when my kids are really fun and still want to hang out with me and, you know, like, are, you know, the real, like, sweet spot of childhood, she's like, then I could have started doing more committee stuff, you know, when they're in high school and Don't want to hang out with me anyway, right? And I was really struck by that, because I think it's so easy to have, like, this kind of myopia about, well, I guess if I'm going to be, you know, a working mom, I've just got to figure out a way to make it work, but not having that perspective that, like, things really. Do look different at different points in time. And so, I mean parenthood is the obvious one. I mean, you know, this, this obvious one here, but I think it also applies to, like, taking care of aging parents, and like going through hard personal stuff. And, you know, having the having cool opportunities to, like, train for a marathon, or go on sabbatical, or like, whatever the things are that that that aren't happening all the time, but that that conversation has really inspired me to say no more, because, because I have kind of, like, disentangled saying no in the moment from like, I am the kind of person who says no to this, you know, it's like, yeah, this is like, not a good time for this, but that'll probably come up again in the future. Yeah,

Jonathan Peelle  35:46  
that's great. Something I've been thinking a lot about and just kind of done baby steps actually implementing in my lab is having everyone do an individualized development plan and IDP, which is, there's lots of different, you know, approaches to this and lots of different things. Maybe we'll talk about it more sometime. But I think at the basic level, is just trying to help people be explicit about their goals, and also really concrete steps to reach those goals. And one of the things that I have been thinking about is it's really easy for that to be, you know, limited to work, and maybe in a lab or work situation it should be. But what I tell people in my lab is, in your life, somewhere, write down all your goals, you know, whether relationship or health or fitness or travel, whatever, whatever the things are, because, you know, like, to your point, Julia, I'm guessing that that you might have a goal of, like, spending a lot of time with your kids. But if all of your written goals are like, you know, be a good professor and a good department chair like, you know, it's easy to kind of flip the balance in a way that isn't right, when it's not like you're not meeting your goals, you're meeting a different goal because, because you can't do everything all the time, right? Yep, yep. And similarly, for like, in your students taking credits, you know, there's a goal of like, I imagine they might have a goal of, like, quote, unquote, getting a job, and somehow, oh, if I do a double major, I'll be more competitive or whatever. But they might also have a goal of enjoying their life, or, you know, sleeping or learning things or whatever. And so you're trying to put all that on the table, and then that might make it, you know, make make the trade offs more obvious, right? Again, this is not something I'm great at doing. I should do it more. But when we're talking I can at least, you know, aspirationally talk about,

Julia Strand  37:55  
yeah, I sometimes hear students say, like, do you think this is doable? Like, can I do this? And I'm always like, Yeah, but that's the wrong question. The question, the question is, like, do you want to do this? Like, what are the costs associated with doing this? But like, yeah, humans, humans have done harder things than, you know, taking four classes at once. But this is a choice you get to make. And, you know, is that something you want to do?

Jonathan Peelle  38:25  
So getting back to like, yeah, kind of this idea of quantifying things and counting things. What can we do? What's our challenge? You know, in our own lives, Julia for sort of, yeah, trying to not let that take over.

Julia Strand  38:45  
Great question. I mean, maybe identifying things that are super valuable, that are really hard to quantify. And, you know, and like training ourselves to remember that there are some things that we really care about that you can't put a number on. Because I wonder if you know, as with many like mindfulness exercises, you know when you're like when you I notice a thought and acknowledge a thought, that it makes it easier for you to notice, you know, and be mindful, like self aware about about other thoughts and and I wonder if there's another one of those things where, if I'm like, boy, I really value mashing my face up against my kids' faces and laughing with them. And that is a thing I will never quantify, but it's a thing I really value, I don't, I mean, I guess I don't know. I don't want to make us, like, distrustful of all things quantified. The psychometrics enthusiast in me is like, well, but, I mean, it is kind of nice to quantify things. But just remembering that, yeah, quantifiability, yeah. Is not perfectly correlated with value.

Jonathan Peelle  40:03  
Well, I think being explicit about things we value can be really helpful. You know, taking taking our conversation today is an example. I think you and I both appreciate scientific communication and publishing, but we've also both said that there's other things that we also value, like thinking deeply and making a lasting contribution to the to the field and things like that. And so I think social support is also really important. So you know, if I next time we talk Julia, if you say, how is work going, I could practice not starting off with like, here's how many grants I have or don't have. But maybe, you know, we should be asking each other, did you have any deep thoughts this week? Or, you know, how much time did you spend playing Legos? I don't know, you know, but I think we can, we can kind of enforce that culture, if not with everyone, at least with with, you know, colleagues who have similar values. I

Julia Strand  41:02  
say we start our next episode by saying, What's brought you joy recently? Oh, that's a good one. Yeah, focusing on that. Okay, that's a deal, dear listeners. And as part of getting back to getting back to the podcast, I checked our email, which I'm so sorry I have not done in a while. And you wonderful people who have asked for stickers and have just been neglected for these many months. I'm so sorry your stickers are coming. I wanna, I wanna say, and I'm gonna send you a present too, but I don't know if I can manage that, but your stickers are coming, and I hope something has brought you joy recently. If anyone else would like a sticker, please, please reach out. You can find us on our website, which is Jonathan juice and squeeze.net. That's right, or you can write us an email, pause for dramatic effect at our email address, which is, wow, this is taking longer than I thought it was going to hold on, which is the juice and squeeze@gmail.com perfect, if you would like stickers send your mailing address. If you have recommendations for things you would like to hear us talk about, or would like our take on, we would love to hear about those as well. And

Jonathan Peelle  42:33  
I'm also happy to send you a no postcard. Also, you can just put that in the email.

Julia Strand  42:39  
Great. So until next time, I wish you many things that bring you joy.

Jonathan Peelle  42:44  
Oh, what a great ending. And Same, same for me, Bye, bye!