Academic editing for those whose first language is NOT English (or, for that matter, for anyone else)

Dear International Students, Faculty, and Scholars:

I edit documents for students, faculty, and scholars whose first language is not English. My goal is to make your document read like it was written by a native English speaker. Most of my clients have been from China, Taiwan, Korea, India, and Latin America, but I will work on documents for clients of any nationality. I edit statements you write to apply for grad school and for faculty positions, papers you intend to submit for publication to an English journal, business reports, letters, white papers, dissertation chapters, job applications, statements of purpose, and research proposals. 

I edit documents in all fields. I have edited papers in engineering, nanofabrication, statistics, plant pathology, city and regional planning, food science, history, plant genetics, biotechnology, plant breeding, wildlife biology, biomedicine, near eastern studies, theatre arts, psychology, and more. Clients simply send me their document (tag1@cornell.edu) as an email attachment, I edit it in MS Word using Track Changes, and I return the document, usually within 48 hours.

Most documents take less than three hours of editing to complete, unless they are unusually long. My clients pay me by sending me a check or depositing money in my PayPal account, which is very simple to do. Also, if you want to send me your document, I can provide an estimate of how much it will cost and how long it should take me to complete the job. As I edit, I also suggest ways to improve your writing in English generally. If desired, I can provide references from recent clients.

I am currently Professor Emeritus from Cornell University.  I have published dozens of papers in refereed journals over the past 40 years, and I served as Associate Editor for the journal Ecological Applications for three years. I taught university courses for 30 years, and I conducted ecological research throughout the U.S. and in Costa Rica. I lived in Korea and Costa Rica for one year each and, recently, I have been visiting Taiwan to teach short courses on conservation biology at National Taiwan University.

All correspondence between the author and me, including the contents of any document, is kept strictly confidential. So if you think this is valuable, please pass the word along.

My charges for this service: individuals-$50 per hour; institutions-$75 per hour.  When I return your document, I inform you how much the bill is and I can provide an invoice if desirable.  I also have an express service.  For $75 per hour, I will guarantee that I return your document within 24 hours of receiving it.

DrTom's Youtube videos

The following DrTom videos are available on Youtube:

1.  Lecture to the Cornell Association of Professors Emeriti, given Dec 2011, titled "My life as a field biologist: from deer to digital book in 40 short years".
          A summary of DrTom's 40-year career as a field biologist.

2.  "Impromptu interview at the slide"
          DrTom has some fun at the playground while being interviewed by his son.

3.  "Cornell University's sensational professor, Tom Gavin!"
          DrTom on a field trip with his Field Biology class, where a student filmed his "choir" practice with students.


I hope you enjoy these.  Stay tuned for updates.

The stress that university students endure

(University students are under stress that is more or less constant, but so much of it is self-imposed.)

The pattern was the same nearly every year that I taught.  Classes started in late August, students were full of vim and vigor, and mostly tan.  The honeymoon lasted about two weeks, and then the work load began to take its toll.  My field biology course was not difficult, but it included a hell of a lot of material, weekend field trips, tons of memorization, an outside research project, and keeping a field notebook of every walk in the outdoor environment the student took.   By late September, students were noticeably fatigued, as they stayed up later and later to do the work from all their courses.  Less sleep, colder and rainier weather, more stress from getting behind, even less sleep to try to catch up, and then the viruses.  By mid-October, my class looked and sounded like a tuberculosis ward of the 1920s---sneezing, coughing, hacking, tissues everywhere.  I could almost see the germs in the air.  Most years, at least one student contracted mononucleosis at this time, missed two weeks of class, and found themselves in one heck of a hole.  Some missed so much school that they had to drop out and lose the entire semester.

This process is probably repeated across the country at universities and colleges everywhere.  Generally, students inherently want to do well, and there is often tremendous social pressure, real or imagined, on them to succeed.  Their families are paying a huge sum of money to send them to the school and they have worked hard to get there.  Students believe that their entire future depends on their academic accomplishments; in short, they believe that life will be miserable if success is not attained in the hallowed classrooms of America's institutions of higher learning.

The following paragraph is an email message, reproduced here verbatim, sent to one of my Teaching Assistants near the end of the fall semester a few years ago.   The student was taking my field biology course, and the Monday deadline was due for handing in their field notebook, which was worth 15% of their entire grade for the course.  To get the full effect and tone of the message, you have to read it as though you were this student: female, slight Puerto Rican accent, high-pitched voice, and read extremely rapidly:

"Hi Viviana,
I recently emailed Emily and Florian about this but didn't get a reply.  I'm really freaking out right now because I woke up at 10pm tonight....I got back to Ithaca around 4am Monday and started doing work the minute I got back because I have a lot due this week, and then I decided to take a quick nap before field bio.  I don't know how I did this but I must have been so tired that I turned the alarm off in my sleep and just woke up at 10pm Monday night.  Needless to say, I am freaking out about the field notebook.  I've been trying to get in touch with a TA to see if I can hand it to one of you tomorrow morning/tomorrow sometime.  I will seriously walk over to your place tomorrow anytime or whatever it takes even if you live in the boonies---I'm just freaking out and Gavin's going to kill me.   And I worked so hard on this thing--it took so long to put together.  I don't have the species accounts from the project since those were collected with out project but I think you graded my project, so perhaps you have them already.  I understand if I lose points on the journal because it's technically late by several hours, but I don't want to lose 150 points!  Omg, let me know what I should do...Thanks so much."

Although this is a somewhat humorous message, you can hear the panic in this student's voice.  She must have been exhausted, because the "quick nap" turned out to be 10-12 hours long.  Needless to say, I was reasonably lenient on her missed deadline, and this student is now in vet school at Cornell.

I have told the following anecdote many times before, but it is worth repeating, in brief, because it is relevant to this blog  I was an undergrad at Ohio State University in the 1960s during the Vietnam War.  If you were not in college, you were almost certainly drafted into the military by Uncle Sam, barring some kind of serious physical affliction.  In those years, the probability was very high that you would be sent to Vietnam, where there was risk of death or serious injury.  Also, state universities like OSU actually flunked out students who did not maintain the published minimum GPA.  I believe that nearly 1/3 of all freshmen left the university due to poor grades in those days.  I can distinctly remember going into a final exam with males whose GPA was on the borderline.  If they got a D on the final exam of that particular course, their GPA would fall below the minimum needed to stay in school, they would be drafted into the Army, sent to the war, and possibly killed.  In other words, for some students, their performance on a test was literally a matter of life or death.  Can you even imagine that kind of pressure?

I used to repeat this story to my field bio class every year, about the time I thought the stress was getting thick.  I asked them what is the worst thing that could happen to you IF you were not successful at this place?  You would be embarrassed?  Your parents would be disappointed? You would be physically separated from your boy friend or girl friend?  You would no longer get to play on the basketball team?  Or, you would never get a good-paying job and, therefore, not live happily ever after?  All of those things may be true, but compare that to having your arm or leg blown off, or being a parapalegic, or having mental trauma that lasts the rest of your life. I'm not a psychologist or a guidance counselor, although I often played one at the university.  But it is apparent that each of us tends to let our current fears and concerns become as large as all outdoors.  They can consume us as though we were the only human on earth who was feeling stressed.  But it is all relative, and a modicum of stress is probably adaptive.  Stress keeps us somewhat sharp, alert, and ready.  It is just a matter of balance, I suppose.

So, if you are a university student reading this, and you tend to let the work and the expectations get you down, ask yourself this question.  What is the worst that could happen?  An even more interesting question is this.  What is the best that could happen, even if I left school?  Remember that Steve Jobs dropped out of college during his freshman year, and he seems to know a thing or two about success.

Birding "au naturelle"

(A Sean John underwear model.  Now, this man is dressed appropriately to go birding in DrTom's woodlot.)

I like to sit on my deck in the nude on a warm, sunny day.  Nothing wrong with this.  It feels great and no one can see me except the Management and Zeus, although low-flying aircraft that circle overhead make me wonder sometimes.  I hate having a "farmer's tan", so either get a complete tan or don't get one at all.  On occasion, I will even venture out into the yard to check the garden donning nothing except a pair of Crocs.  Pretty bold for an old guy, but I've earned the right.  After all, it is not like I am strutting around naked in a national park or anything.  This is MY property, and no one can see me from the road.  But there is a potential glitch in the security of this activity.

A few times, I have even gone further from the house than my psychological tether normally allows.  Once I crossed over the driveway and a little wooden bridge over a drainage ditch, and entered the forest 150 yards from the house, walking along a path I keep mowed there.  On this particular occasion, I had taken the hand-set phone with me, thinking I would call one of my sons and brag how I am bird-watching in my birthday suit.  They think I am half crazed anyway, so why not really give them something to talk about.  It is always enjoyable to me when I can shock the younger generation, who thinks that senior citizens sit around and listen to polka music all day.  But at that moment, I heard a very disturbing sound--a car was coming up the driveway, which is located between the house and me.  The path to my pants was disrupted big time, but the flow of adrenaline was not.

The car drove up to the house, and three people got out.  I saw clearly through my binoculars that it was some former students of mine, two females and a male.  Ouch!  What to do?  Think MacGyver, think.  The problem was that Robin did not know I had taken this little safari nude, so when she saw the students, I was sure she would just tell them I was in the woods and to go find me.  I had only seconds to figure this out.  I got it.  I used the intercom feature on the phone (please do not be talking to your sister in Ohio), called my wife, and told her to take a pair of my pants and a shirt and to throw them down the basement stairs.  I would explain later.  Then, take the students onto the deck at the back of the house and keep them there until you see me.

I waited a couple of minutes for my wife to complete her assignment.  As long as my wife did not do something dyslexic, like throw my clothes on the deck and take the students into the basement, I should be ok. I sneaked through the woods to the side of the house opposite the deck, avoiding thorny raspberry bushes at all costs, zipped into the basement, got dressed, and came upstairs as if I had been organizing my tools down there.   Fortunately, Management had executed her instructions properly, and we lived happily ever after, although the students wondered why I appeared from the basement with a phone in one hand and binoculars around my neck.  Since then, I don't take excursions around the property without, at least, wearing a pair of my Sean Johns.