Helping the Minoritized Achieve in Academic Science

Archive for November, 2015

Sabbatical Preparations – Part 2

Sabbatical-1In the spirit of travel blogging, here is part two of my N-part series on planning and being on sabbatical. Sabbatical seems glamorous and exciting, but I just  spent 2 hours last night on paperwork. Ah, paperwork. Essential parts of bureaucracy and essential for you to go where you want. The paperwork I filled out last night included:

  1. Paperwork to have a complimentary appointment at the university I will be visiting. This wasn’t so bad, just a page or so.
  2. Paperwork to enroll my eldest in public school. This was a lot of paperwork. Plus, they wanted a birth certificate, immunization records, and three people to contact who were not me or my husband in case of emergency. These people must be local, and I am lucky that I know three people there already.
  3. Paperwork to enroll my youngest in pre-school. This wasn’t a big deal yet. It was just name and our names and what days of the week we want. I will have more paperwork to fill out later.

This paperwork is all important and needs to be filled out so I can work and my kids can go to school. It is about a month and a half before we arrive there, and the paperwork had to be done. But, I also had to get the paperwork. In order to get the paperwork, I called the schools about 2 weeks ago to inform them of our impending move. This timing seemed good, so I would say that you should call the public school about 8 weeks ahead of time to inform them about registering your kid for public school. You must have your rental set up before this. They won’t register your kid unless you have proof that you will actually be living within the district. In fact, we had to send a copy of the contract for our rental as proof of address. As for the private preschool, I called them 6 months before because I wasn’t sure about availability. Sometimes daycares – especially if you are trying to get into university schools, are difficult to get into. Infant care might be close to impossible because many places need to be on the waiting list several years in advance to get a spot – and by that time, you aren’t an infant anymore. Preschools often have more availability because the student to teacher ratio is larger.  Our new preschool costs significantly more than the one we are leaving – adding a big expense to our sabbatical costs (on top of double housing costs!).

Once we contacted the schools, they sent the paperwork either by email or in the mail. I got it all, and decided to spend a couple hours filling out the paperwork. After filling it out, I scanned each document in and saved it as a pdf. I scanned everything I filled out, so I could save it for my own records in case it got lost in the mail.

The next step is to actually go to visit and register my kids for their schools. I will do this in about a month. I could probably do this via email completely, but I am going to be somewhat close for a conference, so I am going to swing by and visit in person.

Another thing I am doing now is getting our tickets for our actual trip to our sabbatical location. It is far enough that we will need to fly, and we will not be taking our car. I am starting to figure out how we will get our stuff to the new place. Also, the new place’s climate is very unlike the climate we are leaving behind.  I think I am going to request to ship some of our stuff to our new place before we leave so we have the right kinds of clothes there.

What am I forgetting? I am sure there is something. I have a dinner planned with a family who went on sabbatical a few years ago, and I am planning to grill them to figure out how best to “close-up shop” in my house. I have never, nor has my family, ever owned a second house that needed to be opened and closed for specific seasons. I certainly haven’t gone away from my home for such a long time before. I am trying to figure out how to ensure my electrical doesn’t blow up my house and my plumbing doesn’t freeze and crack pipes while we are away. One thing that makes me feel a little better is that our house manager will continue to be around and manage. So, the house will (hopefully) not truly blow up, nor be abandoned.

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Career, Kids, Research

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Labels – good and bad

Tibbs-Edited-01I recently went on an enjoyable double-header seminar trip hosted by two fabulous WomenOfScience. Because I was giving two different talks, and thus staying a little extra, I was asked to chat with their women in science group over one of the lunch times. The group was a nice mix of undergraduates, grad students, and professors (I didn’t see any postdocs, but may have missed them). It also had men and women, which is very heartening. We had some good and interesting discussions. Many thoughts for this blog were generated, and I have two good ideas that I am excited to write about. This post was spurred by a brave undergrad who, toward the end of the lunch, asked a very important question: “When am I a scientist?” As she was already a science major, all the faculty and senior students piped up to tell her that she was already a scientist. She didn’t really seem to believe us, but I really think it is true. Any student studying science, learning to think like a scientist, being challenged and excited by science, is a scientist.

That night, three different friends who happen to be faculty of color sent me an interesting article about cultural taxation whereby faculty from under-represented groups are overly burdened with advising and mentoring students from under-represented groups who come to them with higher frequency. It was a fascinating article, but one thing about it really irked me: the article referred to every single professor as “Ms.” or “Mr.” but never “Dr.” or even “Prof.” I mentioned it to my friends and even left a comment, and multiple people agreed with me. Apparently, that is a journalistic style to only refer to medical doctors as “Dr.” and all others by Mr. or Ms., but what about Prof? Ironically, by following some silly, antiquated journalism rule, they undermined the point of their own article which was partially that minority professors don’t get the respect they deserve. It was so frustrating.

The next day, I was chatting with a lovely person who is compassionate and interested in diversity issues. I mentioned that the undergrad student from the day before had asked when she was a scientist. He thought it was interesting that she asked that. I told him that I typically address my students as scientists in emails to get the point across to students that they are scientists. Like a nice person, he said that when he leads, he likes to keep the hierarchy very flat.  In order to achieve this, he often leaves off people’s titles. I agree that level playing fields with little hierarchy is a really great way to lead, but to me it mentally hurt to remove people’s earned titles. When I got my Ph.D. it made me feel special and proud. That title of “Dr.” was important to my psyche to help empower me to start a postdoc and know I had significant knowledge and training to back up my ideas. It actually helped stave off imposter syndrome for about a year. The same thing happened when I got my job as an Assistant Professor and when I got tenure. Those milestones were more important to my self-esteem than as hurdles to overcome.

Anyway, what do you think? Are labels and titles important or should we remove them? I kinda think that if you are already a majority person with assumed competence and authority, it is easy to throw away your title. But, if you are an under-represented person who people automatically think is less competent or perhaps “doesn’t look like a professor,” I totally understand wanting to hold on to, hold up, and brag about your title.

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Career, ImpostorSyndrome, Networking, Self-Promotion, StereotypeThreat

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