35 Cynical versus acynical advice to grad students
Stephen Stearns and I were Miller Postdocs at UC Berkeley (1975-77). We hit it off well and talked on many, if not most, days. Steve was and is exceptionally smart and literate. He was the intellectual highpoint of my two years at Berkeley.
Just before the start of our second year (fall 1976), Frank Pitelka – a senior ecologist on the faculty – asked Steve to give the first ‘EcoLunch’ seminar of the year. Ecolunch is a weekly lunch gathering of graduate students and faculty, and speakers would give a talk on their own research or on some hot ecological topic. The atmosphere was usually constructive, so Ecolunch was rarely ‘Ecolynch.’
Steve was not thrilled by Pitelka’s request, as he’d given a Departmental Seminar plus an Ecolunch the previous year. Even so, he said, OK, but only if he could talk about how to be a graduate student. Pitelka liked the topic and scheduled Steve’s presentation.
Steve came up to my office and told me about his forthcoming talk. We started discussing what we’d done right and what we’d done wrong as grad students or had witnessed being done (or not done) by others. We were only 1+ years out of grad school, and our memories were fresh. Our conversation was interesting and constructive.
Later that day (or the next), Steve returned to my office and handed me a typed outline for his upcoming talk, titled: “Some modest advice for graduate students.”. The subtitle was “Always Prepare for the Worst,” and carried forward that cynical theme!
My first thought was that Steve’s basic advice was great but that the tone was consistently and overly cynical. I told Steve that his outline bore little resemblance to the positive discussion we had just a few hours before.
I promptly sat down at my typewriter (personal computers had not yet evolved) and started typing a counterpoint to Steve’s outline. I titled it: Reply to Stearns: Some acynical advice for graduate students.
We decided that it would be fun and instructive to do back-to-back presentations of our two “opposing” views, which we saw as nonetheless complementary. Steve gave his talk and at the end said to the assembled students and faculty:
“You need to learn how to be efficient with your time. I know what Ray is going to say, so there is no point in my staying here.”
And Steve left the room, much to everyone’s astonishment. I was sitting next to Professor William Lidicker, who looked at me and asked, “Is he really leaving?” I said yes. I got up and gave my counterpoint responses.
We handed out mimeographed copies of our individual outlines, which somehow made it into the graduate network. That was difficult in a pre-internet era. People in attendance shared copies with others, and those copies were circulated far and wide. They struck a chord with grad students and even with some advisors who would give them to their own students.
In the early 1980s, Peter Morin suggested that we flesh out our outlines for publication in the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America. We took those outlines and converted them into text.
With the Internet, our companion Advice to Graduate Students papers became readily accessible and are still widely read, even though our original talks were given almost 50 years ago. Some parts are obviously dated (see Huey, 2011), but the key issues and suggestions are germane, even for fields far from biology.
Years later Steve told me, “Those are our most widely read, but least cited, papers.”