The Boreal Beetle

Throughout the year, but particularly during certain periods when students are applying to graduate or professional schools, I am asked to write reference letters or to fill out reference reports. As a faculty member, this is one of those jobs that can be a positive experience or, frankly, less than positive. But in either case, writing reference letters and reports is an expected responsibility of my job, and one in which I take considerable pride in putting out a good product. The quality of a reference letter says almost as much about the referee as it does about the applicant.

When I am writing about excellent students who I know well – e.g., students who have committed substantial time and effort to our research program here and whom I have interacted with on a regular basis – I find this to be a pleasant task. However things become much more difficult, verging on near-impossible, if all that I know about a student is that they were in my class and they received a particular mark.

One of the biggest questions that a student should consider before asking a faculty member to write a letter for them is “does this person know anything about me other than a mark that I received in their class?” This means that the student should also begin to think about references early in their undergraduate career. So they should also ask themselves, “if I were an employer or on a professional/graduate school selection committee, what sort of references would I take most seriously?”

Having been on the committee side of the reference letter equation, I know that letters from referees who have had substantial experience with the candidate are taken far more seriously than are more tangential relationships. Any good reference form asks for how I know the applicant, and for how long; and I always make that sort of statement in letters that I write. And most good reference forms give the option of “have not observed” when asking for rankings of various criteria. Too many “have not observed” marks on a completed form tells the committee that the referee knows only very little about the applicant.

When I write a reference letter, I commit to:

• being completely honest and enthusiastic about what I see as the candidate’s strengths and other indicators of excellence.

• being equally honest about anything that I feel the candidate needs to work on, particularly in light of the position that they are applying for. My credibility relies on my honesty, and I will be fully honest.

• delivering a letter or report that is clear, concise, and professional. I will ensure that whatever is asked for will be delivered in an appropriate manner and that the output will be a credit to the candidate’s application package.

• delivering the letter or report on time. I will not irritate selection committees by being “that” referee who they have to badger for a report.

• ensuring, if possible, that my snail mail or electronic letter reaches the recipients. Some organizations make this possible, others don’t. But if and when I verify that the letter has arrived, I will also notify the applicant so that they can cross it off of their to-do list. I will definitely notify the applicant that I have sent off the reference letter.

I expect the applicant to:

• think carefully – before approaching me for a letter – about whether or not I will have enough information to be able to write anything that will be useful for the selection committee.

• work with me to find a time to sit down and have a discussion about their plans, if we haven’t talked about this in the past. This allows me to write in a credible fashion and perhaps even include some tangential-but-relevant information that committees like to read about.

• provide me with unofficial transcripts if I request them. It’s hard for me to say much about what courses an applicant has taken and their trajectory over the course of a degree if I don’t have this information.

• ask me for the reference with sufficient time to spare before the deadline. In all honesty, if I don’t feel that I can write a good letter in the time that I am given, I will say no to the request. And keep in mind that reference letter requests often come near or during the end-of-semester rush when professors are under as much pressure as are students. Any deadline that is less than a week away is more than likely too little time, because by that time much of my upcoming week is already planned out.

• realize that if I don’t know them other than from a mark in a course, that I will do my best but will not be able to say much, if anything, beyond what their transcript tells me. The applicant should also then realize that my letter may be of less value to the committee than would be one from someone who knows them better.

Reference letters are an important part of career progression, and I take this task very seriously.

I’d be interested to hear from others – applicants and referees – who may want to add to either of my lists.

(Extinct) grizzlies, maybe-extinct aliens (or us?), prairie plants and pollinators, pollinator (and other insect) poetry, and a bit of balance.

Cloak and dagger natural history in California

When Johnson and Grinnell returned to Booth’s shop to follow up, they found Booth with a cleaned skull, which he promised to hand over when the job was done. But Grinnell recognized that the specimen was the skull of a polar bear. Grinnell kept quiet—he worried that confronting Booth would only diminish his chances of ever getting the real grizzly skull. Later Booth told Grinnell that if he wanted the skull (the polar bear skull that he was falsely presenting as a grizzly skull), he would have to bid against Grinnell’s good friend Frank S. Daggett at the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art.

 

ET may not be as nice as the creature in the movie

Possibility 5) There’s only one instance of higher-intelligent life—a “superpredator” civilization (like humans are here on Earth)—who is far more advanced than everyone else and keeps it that way by exterminating any intelligent civilization once they get past a certain level. This would suck.

 

You’ll probably spend the rest of your afternoon on this site.

Museums across Canada protect and preserve collections of plants and insects along with their collection data. These data are used to help scientists determine habitat preferences, and changes in species’ distribution and abundance over time. These specimens are therefore used to determine whether a species is in danger of becoming extinct! The gallery pages for each species will allow you to see actual Museum research specimens and photographs of the organisms in a natural setting.

 

Every insect order, in verse.

Now he is taking on insects in poetry as third co-editor of a new eBook called The American Entomologist Poet’s Guide to the Order of Insects, which includes about 90 poems that date from the seventeenth century up to the present, with at least one poem for each insect order. Contributors include three U.S. Poets Laureate (W. S. Merwin, Kay Ryan, and Ted Kooser), and luminaries such as John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, Jonathan Swift, John Donne, and many others.

 

Balance.

There is a blending of work and life that woos us with its promise of barbecues at work and daytime team celebrations at movie theaters, but we’re paying for it in another way: a complete eradication of the line between home life and work life. “Love what you do,” we say. “Get a job you don’t want to take a vacation from,” we say—and we sit back and watch the retweets stream in.

I don’t like it.

 

How to unplug. For a year.

One night, late in the summer of 2012, discussion at my dinner table turned to the venerable topic of What to Be When You Grow Up. My older son, Griffin, then nine years old, wanted to be an “underwater paleontologist.” His little brother, Huck, then seven, wanted to be a monkey.

“Do you know what I do for a living?” I asked Huck.

His eyes grew wide. “All you do is sit on your computer and say, ‘Blah blah blah Congress, blah blah blah Mitt Romney’!”

You never know when you’ll be bytten by a beetle. Turns out, today’s the day!

Canada’s coolest university towns

The Spruce Capital of the North (pop. 84,000) – locally known as PG or the Notorious P-I-G – is a frontier town turned fun zone. Surrounded by ancient forests and mountain peaks, the green-minded University of Northern British Columbia combines small class sizes with the great outdoors: on a clear day on campus, you can see all the way to the McGregor Range. Just watch for wandering moose on the hike up to school.

 

Get your hands dirty

“We don’t yet know how much exposure to environmental bacteria (for example, through activities that involve contact with the soil) is enough to confer health benefits,” says Lowry. “It is clear, however, that exposure through breathing or consuming specific types of environmental organisms has the capacity to reduce inflammation and confer health benefits.”

 

Experience dirt by getting out to play

“Parents should think about why their child is in a particular program and whose needs are being served,” she says. “Is the program to keep the child busy while the parent is busy? Is it something the child really wants to do? If so, how much time is taken up with activities during the week? Is it reasonable? Does the child have time to complete school work and take responsibilities for other commitments at home? What about time to engage in simple play?”

 

You’re going to have to wait awhile to read this

A forest has been planted in Norway, which will supply paper for a special anthology of books to be printed in one hundred years time. Between now and then, one writer every year will contribute a text, with the writings held in trust, unpublished, until 2114.

 

Poetry, translated from original bark beetle inscriptions

Translations from Bark Beetle (Milkweed Editions) is made up of two basic types of poems. In the first, Gladding translates notations left by bark beetle (those squiggly inscribed lines one sometimes sees in wood) into poetry; and in the second, she inscribes her own poems on natural materials such as quarried slate or found objects—a pair of tongue depressors, for example, or a scan from a doctor’s office. The collection is an ambitious work that presses the reader to see and read language (and resituate it in the world) anew.