Sweet Katy

I took this photo of Kate and Leo about a week and a half ago with my new camera. Aren't they adorable?

Tonight as soon as I opened the front door, Leo thumped at me from the bunny room, which was unusual. When I went in, Leo was clambering at the door of the cage but Katy was lying very still. I wanted to think that maybe she was asleep but she didn't react when I spoke to her or hit the floor next to their cage. She must have died several hours before I got home because her back legs were very stiff, thus demonstrating how the "dead bunny" sleep position differs in one significant aspect from the real thing. I let Leo out of the cage and I couldn't tell at first whether he even knew that Katy was dead because he got up in my lap as usual for his evening papaya digestive pills and petromalt and hung around me to be petted. But later, when Robert had gotten home, Leo went into the cage again and sort of nudged at Katy in a couple places before coming out again for more petting. Then when Robert and I left the room, Leo almost immediately went back into the cage and lay down next to her for a while. I think he knows.

I had not noticed before how grey Katy had gotten, especially in the face and back. Our best guess is that the rabbits are about 7 years old, but it's very possible Katy could be older than that. She is (was) certainly old enough that it is not completely unusual that she could die suddenly.

Katy was a very beautiful bunny (so cute that she was frequently featured in photos on the House Rabbit website) who loved eating cilantro and dried strawberries, stealing carrots from under Leo's nose, digging in her litter box, destroying large cardboard castles, and licking Leo's ears. During her shed phase, she would lose fur on her face so that it had deep grooves in it; I would tease her about being a groovy old girl. When Katy first came to live with us 3 1/2 years ago, she was distrustful of people and disliked being touched in any way. By the end, she had become thoroughly comfortable and even seemed to enjoy it when we would pet her. As a rex rabbit, she has incredibly soft fur that prompted Tam to remark that you never actually touch her but rather feel the softness waves that emanate from her. If so, these waves are so powerful as to continue after death. I knew that I was going to take Kate and Leo home from the very first moment I touched them at the house where they were being fostered. It was wonderful to have Katy around and we are going to miss her, and seeing her sweet face, very much.

My Rice GPA 5 Different Ways

Since a lot of the materials I've been reading about graduate school talk about the extreme importance of one's undergraduate GPA, Robert dug out a copy of my transcript from a file cabinet I didn't know we had so I could figure out mine. I had a rough idea of my overall GPA but had never looked at the various different GPA calculations that grad schools use.

Overall = 3.64 [= cum laude]

Excluding freshman year = 3.88

Last 60 hours = 3.92

In major: Psychology = 3.80 / Economics = 3.81

I also did one calculation simply on quantitative courses, which Robert suggested - I was almost afraid to go there but I came up with a surprisingly okay 3.40. (Unless of course I did the math wrong. Heh.) This doesn't change the fact that my quant background is weak.

And yes, I did screw up in that adjustment period of my freshman year. It's too bad it took me 25% of the way through my college career to get my act together, but at least it happened at all.

About 1,880 Words on Skillscope

With my mind awhirl with thoughts regarding my grad school plans and my eyes gone half-blind with digging deeper into department web sites for more specifics of program curricula, admission requirements, and current grad student profiles/vitae (as a guide to how I stack up against the types of students they enroll, which, let me add, is not a very joyful exercise when looking at top 10 programs), I decided I needed to take a step back. So I am taking a little different approach to this today by getting a bit more holistic and a lot more self-assessing. I was considering doing a SWOT analysis on myself – this is a standard methodology often applied in the business environment to a company or brand, but also I think could be helpful on a personal level – to identify Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats in the context of successfully getting into a choice graduate program and excelling there. (Yes that is hopelessly wonky.) But even before doing that, I thought it would be nice to look at some more fundamental personal characteristics re: “who I am” and “who I seem to be” in a professional (i.e. not hanging out with my friends) environment. (However, I would expect that many of these characteristics are common across these contexts.)

As part of management training I took last year (which was excellent, by the way), we took a number of different assessments. One of these was the Skillscope test, a 360 degree feedback instrument in which your supervisor, direct reports, and peers in the organization (anonymously) rate you on various attributes covering 5 major managerial areas: information skills, decision making, interpersonal skills, personal resources, and effective use of self. You also rate yourself. I cannot vouch for the psychometric credentials of this test, but it looks reasonable and appears to cover the types of attributes that are commonly believed to be related to career/managerial success. The brochure claims that is based on “extensive research” and I am willing to propositionally believe that the industrial/organizational psychologists and other social science researchers who developed it knew what they were doing enough that looking at the results of the assessment will not be actively dangerous.

Here are is the explanation of how the scoring worked:

“Raters were asked to mark as a strength only those items that are definitely characteristic of you and to mark as a development need only those few items you especially need to work on. The absence of a response is ambiguous and intentionally designed into Skillscope. It can mean that the rater did not think the item applied to you, or it can mean that the rater could not clearly identify the item as a strength or development need.”

One thing I have to recognize when looking at this is that it is going to be a reflection of the salient characteristics most associated with my particular job. There are going to be areas that show up as neither a strength or weakness because this aspect is simply invisible to them or because it is not something that applies to my specific job but that may be a strength or weakness if I were in a position that requires it. For example, no one (including me) rated me for several characteristics that I more strongly associate with a person in a greater personnel management/leadership role: “Effective at managing conflict,” “Brings out the best in people,” or “Able to inspire, motivate people.” I did get ratings on the other 95 characteristics though. In many cases, only a couple of people termed them a strength or a weakness, such as “Introduces needed change in the face of opposition,” “Skilled at relating to many different types of people,” and “Good initiative.”

For each item, I could see how I scored myself, how my boss scored me, and how others scored me. Following the instructions, I categorized the items in four categories.

Good news and not surprising: You said an item was a strength and others agreed [I included only those with at least 4 of my 5 raters marking it as a strength.]

Probes, digs beneath the surface, tests validity of information (5/5)
Creates order out of large quantities of information (5/5)
In a new assignment, picks up knowledge and expertise easily; a quick study (5/5)
At home with graphs, charts, stats, budgets (5/5)
Logical, data based, rational (5/5)
Shows mastery of job content; excels at her function or professional specialty (5/5)
Good public speaker; skilled at performing, being on stage (5/5)
Isn’t abrasive; doesn’t usually antagonize people (5/5)
Has good relationships with peers (5/5)
Listens well (5/5)
Collaborates well with others (5/5)

Defines problems effectively; gets to the heart of a problem (4/5)
Adept at disseminating information to others (4/5)
Strong communicator on paper; good writing skills (4/5)
Structures direct reports’ work appropriately (4/5)
Has good relationships with direct reports (4/5)
Has good relationships with superiors (4/5)
Takes ideas different from own seriously, and from time to time changes mind (4/5)
Creates good give-and-take with others in conversations, meetings (4/5)
Willing to admit ignorance (4/5)
Has integrity; trustworthy (4/5)

- To me, this is saying that I am empirically oriented, I interact with people in an effective professional manner, I communicate ideas well, and I have a good level of credibility. For those of you who haven’t heard the speech before, credibility in the workplace is a highly significant concept for me. Credibility is the thing responsible for that wonderful EF Hutton experience: when you talk, other people listen. The great thing about focusing on credibility, rather than say authority or genius, is that anyone can develop it.

Good news and surprising: You said an item was a development need but your raters viewed it as a strength

Seeks information energetically (5/5)
Works effectively with other people over whom she has no direct authority (5/5)
Can organize and manage big, long-term projects; good shepherding skills (4/5)
Implements decisions; follows through; follows up well; an expediter (4/5)
Resourceful; can marshal people, funds, and space required for projects (3/5)
Action-oriented; presses for immediate results (3/5)
Team builder; brings people together successfully around tasks (2/5)

- People are giving me a lot more credit for project management and team management skills than I thought I had. Any success I have with marshalling people and building task-based teams, I attribute primarily to treating people with respect, having an aura of competence, and basically having my shit together so people don’t think I’m going to waste their time. I am certainly not getting it done by calling on a significant network of people who are just willing to do anything for me because I’m so friendly and nice or have some high level of charisma or political astuteness or status. As for “pressing for immediate results” – I hope they mean that in a good way.

In addition, some people (3/5 or better) did rate as strengths some areas I thought were neutral that could be categorized as “Good news and sort of surprising/heartening.” We didn’t go through the exercise of gleaning these from the list during my class, so this is actually new information to me; don’t you feel privileged to be here as I let these unknown strangers toot my horn:

Sets priorities well; distinguishes clearly between important and unimportant tasks (5/5)
Flexible; good at varying her approach with the situation (5/5)
Good coach, counselor, mentor; patient with people as they learn (4/5) [!!!]
Capable, cool in high pressure situations (4/5)
Establishes and conveys a sense of purpose (3/5)
Can translate strategy into action over the long haul (3/5)
Builds warm, cooperative relationships (3/5) [no, I did not make that up]
Thinks in terms of trade-offs; doesn’t assume a single best way (3/5)
Deals with interruptions appropriately; knows when to admit interruptions and when to screen them out (3/5)
Optimistic; takes the attitude that most problems can be solved (3/5)
Capitalizes on own strengths (3/5)
Learns from own experience; not set in her ways (3/5)

- The idea that I am patient with people as they learn surprises me quite a bit. This is not how I view myself and not, I think, very true of me in the past. But upon reflection, I can see that I have done a fair amount of training/educating at this job either in more formal talks/presentations to various groups of people on areas in which I am a subject matter expert or in one-on-one situations, so perhaps it’s not strange for this to be a salient aspect of my behavior. And I am glad to get feedback that I am being effective in helping people figure stuff out. Maybe one thing that helps here is that I am adamantly opposed to any style of training or instruction that treats people as they though they are morons just because they don’t happen to know something that I know. Ignorance is not stupidity. (As I recently told Robert, it would be like some Korean person treating him with contempt because he doesn’t speak Korean; even toddlers have mastered such simple things as that!) This is particularly true in a work environment. I mean, yes, it would be easy to get impatient trying to get non-technical people to understand technical concepts, or having to show the 9th person some basic thing in Excel, or explain yet again that target sample size is not based on a percentage of the population, but somehow, I actually don’t. I don’t know if I’ve said this before in this venue, but I am a firm believer that treating other people like idiots for not knowing the things I know is simply another way of denigrating my own skills and abilities. Even if I didn’t think it so critical as a matter of policy to treat other people with respect, I at least have enough self-respect to acknowledge that there are many things I know due to my own experience, study, and particular mental strengths that are non-obvious to the average person. I am much more patient with others than I am with myself, actually, and that’s pretty screwed up. I need to work on that.

Bad news and not surprising: You said an item was a development need and your raters agreed

Has vision; often brings up ideas about potentials and possibilities for the future (2/5)
Spots problems, opportunities, threats, and trends early (1/5)
Manages the process of decision-making effectively; knows who to involve on what issue (1/5)

- It’s unfortunate that I am lacking in some of this “big picture” stuff; in some ways, this is a reflection of my current job, which is mostly about execution rather than planning. (Hence the irony of my job title: Planner IV.) But I do think that I could do better in these areas; there’s not any real barrier holding me back from it.

Bad news and surprising: You said an item was a strength but your raters viewed it as a development need

NONE [woo hoo!]

- Many of my colleagues were really dismayed by the number of items that fell into this category for them. I was pleased to see that I don’t have any obvious blind spots where I’m oblivious to my ineffectiveness or negative image.

Not a Good Pick Up Line

A woman I know told me that when she was at a party recently, she met a college-aged guy who flirted with her a bit and when it came out that she was 32 (a most excellent age, by the way – it’s a power of 2), he was like, “Wow, I can’t believe you’re so old! That’s older than my mom…”

“What?” I said. “She must have been crazy young when she had him to be younger than you are!”

“Let me finish. He said ‘That’s older than my mom was when I was born.’” Apparently his mother had been 29 at that time.

It seriously took me a moment to process this statement because the idea of somebody being “older than somebody’s mom when she gave birth” does not strike me as a particularly weird or disturbing thing to provoke an excited, incredulous outburst of any kind. Especially given that women sometimes start having babies when they are teenagers, this is potentially setting the bar of old fogey-hood pretty low. The guy himself turned out to be about 23, which seems old enough to have a bit more maturity than this. And a bit more common sense, too. No woman who isn’t at a senior citizen singles mixer wants to hear “I can’t believe you’re so old!” She’s just not going to be thrilled with the compliment that she had up until that point been successfully passing as a woman in the bud of youth rather than an ancient, decrepit, one foot in the grave old-timer when she is still in the young adult 18-34 age bracket. There’s a reason Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate didn’t use this line on Mrs. Robinson. But maybe I’m just bitter because the kids at the grocery store don’t ID me when I buy booze anymore.

I’m very glad Robert hasn’t had this same freak out reaction to the idea of dating a woman who is older than his mom was when she gave birth to him since I had already passed that age when he and I met. And of course it would have been awkward for a 21 year old Robert in any case to have to limit his potential partners to high school girls.

Under what circumstances would you find the statement “I can’t believe you’re so old!” to be a compliment?

School List Update

Rather than narrowing down my previous list of 16 psychology programs this weekend, I have actually added in four others - Michigan, Illinois, Penn, and Cornell. These schools have decision-making programs that look interesting but that I didn't include in my earlier round when I was focusing on social psychology. Oops.

I would not have guessed that Ohio State has the #3 ranked social psychology program in the country (per US News &World report), but I had thought the program looked fantastic (at least for my interests) on their web site. Hmm, I wasn't expecting Ohio State to be a "reach" school. (Regardless of how much one believes that these rankings reflect the actual quality of the schools, they do constitute an important part of our shared, constructed reality about which schools are very good/desirable and which are less so. Even if you believe that the rankings are mostly a reflection of how good psychology professors think these schools are, and what the hell do they know about hundreds of different schools, the rankings still matter, since one's job prospects in academia are greatly influenced by the perception of how good your school was.)

After many, many tedious, headache-inducing hours, I have looked at 30 of the 57 marketing PhD programs on my list also. God, so many of these programs sound terribly boring. There's a surprising amount of variation in the background requirements of these programs - some are extremely quantitatively oriented and want a lot of math (application of social psychology - use percentage of current students who are Asian men as a proxy for the degree to which the program selects on and emphasizes mathematical ability over all else; Robert has independently come to this same conclusion with economics programs), some require a masters degree (preferably an MBA), and a few require competency in a programming language (this is usually for those taking the quantitative track rather than the behavioral track I am interested in). And the programs themselves vary a lot too, of course, but it's often hard to really tell much about the details from what they put online. I would like to be able to use the criterion "Immediately reject any program that will require me to take financial accounting, principles of management, or business policy and strategy" but the schools can be damn cagey about the specific requirements of fulfilling the programs. Failing that, I would like to just eliminate them all from consideration, but I don't know that I can do that yet. I had almost gotten to that point when I read some information for students interested in consumer psychology that strongly suggested we look at marketing programs rather than just psychology programs. So OK. There may be a couple of them worth looking at very carefully and eventually applying to. The process of getting there is turning out to be rather painful, however. And I've only done even a cursory glance at about half of the schools listed. I may have reached the point where I need to get serious about the remaining schools left to investigate and just decide, No, there is no way that this program could be better enough than the ones I've already identified as serious candidates to justify my having to live in Mississippi. Hell, I am willing to do that right now. 2 down. 25 to go.

Happy Texas Independence Day!

Thanks to those Texians who met on March 2, 1836, to sign the Texas Declaration of Independence from Mexico at the then-distinctly-undelightful town of Washington, TX (which is now a pretty state historic site). This both makes today a holiday from work for me (yay!) and gives nostaglic Texan die-hards an alternative romantic heyday superior to that of their southern brethren who like to go on in annoying ways about the Confederacy (double yay!).

When Praising Children is Counterproductive

Alethiography links to an excellent article about the differing outcomes of praising kids for their effort versus their intelligence. (I initially was just going to comment on her blog, but realized quickly that I could blather on for a year on this topic and that's what my own blog is for.) The article is well worth reading in its entirety, but the bottom line is that research has found that kids who are praised for their effort do better on later tasks and enjoy the challenge of harder tasks while kids who are praised for their smarts do worse on later tasks and gravitate toward easier tasks. They posit that this is related to the fact that kids labeled as “smart” want to maintain that image and thus avoid situations where failure could reveal them to be lacking in innate ability. However, even after parents and teachers are apprised of this body of research, they discount its validity or resist the implications for their own behavior; they continue to think it’s important to build the child’s self-esteem by (over-)praising their natural intelligence.

One thing I wonder about (and this has probably been investigated, but I am not familiar with this line of research outside of what the article described) is whether the effect of the praise is the same controlling for the kids’ actual intelligence or effort (it's easy to imagine interactions between these variables). And taking this outside of the lab, if you (as parent or teacher) consistently praise a child who produces a good work outcome specifically for his effort, when he does not put much effort in at all because he truly is quite intelligent and the work is not challenging enough for effort to be an issue, does that really work? At some point, can’t they see this is bullshit? (And I say “child” but is there any reason to believe this couldn’t also apply to an adult employee and his manager? I would like to think that we are not all stuck at our current level of self-efficacy just because we passed the age of 21.)

On an unrelated note, was I the only one who thought this comment from the writer of the article was kind of sad: “I recognized that praising him with the universal “You’re great—I’m proud of you” was a way I expressed unconditional love”? Maybe this hit me harder than it should have, but doesn’t it seem kind of a messed up way to say you love someone unconditionally, to imply that your attention and affection and care are tied up with them being “great” (whatever they think you mean by that) and making you proud? I’m not saying I can’t understand how this happens or that you should never tell your kid you are proud of them or whatever, but what a revelation to realize that you are expressing supposedly “unconditional” love with some very strict conditions. This unintentional and potentially mixed message is probably very common too.

I have to admit that I do have some of the characteristics of the “smart” kid they describe: I can easily be put off by something as being too hard too quickly and I don't like to look stupid or bad at something. I also don't think I'm very good at math, though by that, it is unclear whether I mean "very good compared to other people" or "very good relative to my other skills" or "very good where very good = insanely naturally brilliant as surely we can all admit some few people actually are"; also this reminds me of other research that showed, as I recall it, that kids who had lower confidence in math were actually the better mathematicians, so the upshot of this is unclear. (Good but unconfident, so when forced to do hard math, I will surprise myself by doing better than I would have expected, but when given the option to do hard math, I will be too scared to try?)

But I never got into the habit of undervaluing effort or wanting to appear that everything I did was due to natural ability. In fact, maybe I was just kind of unobservant, but I don't really remember encountering this attitude and related posturing until college, where it was common. (I remember that in elementary school, when the newspaper reporter came to take my picture and interview me for being the school Mathlete champion, they asked me whether I studied a lot in preparation for the weekly competitions, and vaguely uncomfortable about the fact that I knew a lot of other people did but that I didn’t study at all, I lied and said, “Yes.” Yeah, my mom did challenge me on it when she saw the article in the paper.) And in college I basically viewed this attitude and the behaviors that went with it (chronic underachievement, ridiculous competitive bragging on whose effort/success ratio was the smallest, etc.) with contempt. It seemed most typical, at least in its most aggressively in-your-face variety, among guys, too, many of whom (let’s be honest) were obviously smart enough and no doubt the big fish in their small high school ponds but weren’t godlike geniuses. (The girls afflicted with this problem may have been quietly doing badly in the privacy of their own rooms and with less macho self-delusion.) And when I think of the really super-smart girls I knew, the kind who took upper-level courses in engineering or math as sophomores, even though they were music or history majors, just because the classes sounded fun, and proceeded to kick everyone’s ass – these girls worked hard, but they weren’t mindless drones.

(OK, I’m going to have to make a special digression here to say: Those guys who want to attribute the school success of hard-working girls to a willingness to put up with endless, stupid worksheets and repetitive busywork – Screw you and the failing business you are running out of your or your mother's basement because you can’t work for other people and their “ridiculous” expectations of what you will spend your time doing and the computer where right now instead of getting down to the unexciting prospect of doing the paperwork that business requires you are having your fun posting your idiotic sexist statements on other people’s blogs. You did not get a C in 6th grade while Jenny got an A because you were a genius who was above that “crap” and she was an unthinking drudge. You were a fuck-up and you don’t even have the balls or the sense after all this time to face it.)

One piece of praise from school that has always stuck with me was when my 10th grade English teacher wrote “Sally is a tireless reviser of her work.” She then expanded a bit on this in the context of a few famous literary figures (Poe, Baudelaire, I don’t recall who else) who are well known for working away to improve their writing through revision after revision. (Remember that back in those days, you would sometimes turn in half a dozen drafts of an essay or paper before the final one?) Although this comment didn’t rock my world in some fundamental way, I think it made a lasting impression on me because I was glad that my efforts were noticed and seen to have a positive impact on my final product, it was basically new to me to think about the process that “real” writers used to create their work, I was particularly fond of EAP at that age so it was kind of a thrill to be compared to him, and it spoke to the part of me that wasn’t doing this work to get a grade (I could have gotten an A on my first draft) but the satisfaction of challenging myself to do good and then better work. And in retrospect, I greatly respect that fact that she didn’t give in to whatever temptation may have existed to simply say “Sally has a talent for writing.” It was a much larger compliment for her to call out my discernment and my high standards. (And in case you are wondering, I am not a tireless reviser of my writing [can’t call it work] on this blog. Sorry.)

I was initially disappointed, but later sort of cheered up, when several years ago I went with a bunch of co-workers to one of those Dave & Busters game/video places and in the basketball game (shoot as many baskets as you can within a given time frame), I did distinctly average. It had been a solid decade since I’d even held a basketball, but back in the day, I was a good shooter with an in-game free throw percentage to rival or outshine even the best NBA free throw shooters’ records. People now like to tell me that I have a talent for these kinds of tasks (ones which involve aiming for something then hitting it), which I think is probably true in a limited way, but I don’t remember hearing that back then, when I would sometimes start shooting baskets after school, would take a break for dinner, then shoot until it was so dark that I was relying on muscle memory to tell me where the basket was. There were times I was so in the flow of it that even when I would tell Mom, after she came out for the umpteenth time, that I would quit after I missed one, I eventually just had to stop because I had this deep feeling that I wasn’t going to miss, that I could not even miss if I wanted to. At Dave & Busters, it was weird to confront myself as just a regular person, not a prodigy, not a Shooting Machine, but it’s nice now to think about the truth: I was a normal kid, with a small knack for some kinds of hand-eye coordination and extremely slow foot speed, who regularly scored points in games, whose friends on the team would laugh and say “our strategy should be Sally shoots and draws the foul,” who was teased by unfamiliar girls at tryouts when I set up for my first (uncool two-handed) free throw but not for the rest, who had occasional moments of transcendence, because I had worked really hard. And because I had a good coach who has always demonstrated the value of effort and didn’t just preach it, who remains my go-to man for straightforward advice on applying basic principles of physics to sports, and who didn’t carry praise or blame too far. The Carver Middle School 6th grade volleyball team and I could not have done it without you. Thanks, Dad.