Helping the Minoritized Achieve in Academic Science

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Mentoring on the Fly

Just like mentoring in the classroom, mentoring does not have to formal or scheduled. Throughout my career, I have started a number of mentoring groups for women both in graduate school and as a professor. These can be very helpful, but I think I have had the most impact and success mentoring on the fly. Here are some examples of what I mean.

Whenever I pass a WomanGraduateStudentOfScience in the hall or stairwell, I ask them how they are doing, how their research is going, if they are writing papers, and what the next step is for them in their research or their careers. These casual mentoring activities do not have lasting impacts, but they show you care. Several of these students have turned to me when bigger issues have arisen in their careers.

I have a group of peer and near-peer colleagues in a variety of science departments on campus. I try to call them for lunch or meet them in the student center lunch room often to strategize about

Conferences are a time to see people from afar who you might not talk to usually. I always make sure to connect with any SeniorWomenOfScience mentors I have made over the years by having a lunch or dinner with them. I also connect with my broader peer-mentoring network to talk with others at the same stage as myself to exchange ideas of problem solving.

Small conferences, like Gordon Research Conferences, are another good place to do some on the fly mentoring. This can come through having lunch with graduate students and postdocs and having informal talks. Many of these conferences have open times in the afternoons. I once used that time to set up a meeting to mentor women at the conference. Several professors, women and men, came to offer their advice to the young women of the conference. We had over 20 people there from a 100-person conference. It was quite successful, and a number of women came out feeling like they knew better strategies than when they went in.

Do people have other example of mentoring on the fly? Comment or send a guest post.

Category:

Career, Mentoring

Mentoring Groups

Mentoring groups come in a variety of shapes and sizes. I have been involved in a number of these groups over the years, and have found them to be very helpful for problem solving and just plain bitching – both of which are needed to survive the academic career path.

In graduate school, I started a women’s group in the department I was in at the time. In grad school, it was for female graduate students. We had speakers and panels on these issues and met once a month. Some of the meetings were supported by the department with food (pizza). Sometimes the female professors would have us to their houses.

As a new assistant professor, I started a women and minorities mentoring group in my new department. After several years of teas, student talks, and student lunches with visiting women and minority scientists, I convinced the department to make it a true committee assignment that should be assigned to a male colleague as well as a woman. Thus, it was taken over a morphed by another, and they changed it. I was released from the extra organization, and made a sustainable contribution to mentoring in the department. The women who have run the group after me did not do the same activities as me, but that is good.

A couple years into my tenure track job, a couple of WomenOfScience at my university assembled two EveryOtherThursday groups for peer mentoring and group problem solving for professors. These groups are based on the book, “Every Other Thursday: Stories and Strategies from Successful Women in Science,” by Ellen Daniell. One group met after work. The other met during lunch. My group has women from all career stages, and their collective wisdom has helped me navigate through tenure. I am sure I could have made it without them, but it was a much better, more pleasant trip with their support. Further, despite my being on the younger side of the group, I felt I was able to mentor more senior women as they worked on issues that I had successfully navigated, such as the Two-Body Problem and juggling kids with work. I highly recommend getting into one of these groups or forming one of your own. They continue to be an essential part of my peer network on campus.

If others have other examples or mechanisms of group mentoring, don’t be afraid to comment or to send me a guest post!

Category:

Career, Mentoring, WomenRock

Mentoring in the Lab

One place where a lot of mentoring occurs is in the laboratory/research group. This is a classic place where the master (you) are mentoring and directly educating the apprentice (student) in a one-on-one setting. There are a lot of different ways to mentor students. Some people are very hands-off. Others are very hands-on. Also, each student is going to need different mentoring on different aspects at different times in their tenure in the group. It is very much a fluid interaction that is easy to mess up, even if your students consider you to be a great mentor.

There are a variety of items students need mentoring and training about and many different mechanisms to achieve this. I am going to report what I find works best for me, but different people are… different. Please post other ideas of successful mentoring strategies as comments, or as guest posts!

Meetings. There are a variety of ways to meet with students. Many people like to have one-on-one meetings with each student every week. These can take a lot of time, especially if you have a lot of students. Further, it may not be necessary for most students who are continuing fine on their projects. I recommend streamlining meetings by having a group meeting where every student gives one slide each week. During this time, it often become obvious who needs more attention, and I set an individual meeting during the lab meeting. The slide has a specific structure, again to facilitate the process. Every student must have a list of what they did the past week with a image, movie, of plot to represent their work. They must list their goals for the following week. If someone doesn’t have a slide, they must do an interpretive dance of their work, which is funny and encourages them having a slide the following week.

Writing. Science writing is hard. And most of us learned it the hard way – through terrible cycles of trial and error trying to write our first manuscripts. In order to help that issue, I have adapted a strategy from another SeniorWomanOfScience to have informal writing assignments from my students. The original idea was to have monthly assignments, but that was too often, and I couldn’t keep up with the reading! Instead, I have semester/summer reports. Each person in the lab has to write one. It must include:

  1. A list of goals that the student had for the previous semester/summer.
  2. The experiments the student performed to reach those goals with data results (images of raw data, examples of analysis methods, and plots). Publication-worthy level is encouraged.
  3. Any problems that the student encountered in attaining those goals.
  4. A list of unmet goals.
  5. A list of goals for the next semester/summer.
  6. Your view of your progress, what you have done well, and what you need to improve on.
  7. Any new protocols developed over the last semester, typed, and as separate word documents.

The students turn them in, and I make comments in writing and return it to the students. If needed, we have a one-on-one meeting to discuss the report writing and figures, progress, changes in the goals for the next term. At least once, after seeing all the results together in one report, we submitted a paper. These regular writing assignments help students get over their fear of putting words to paper, facilitating the manuscript writing process.

Speaking. There is a lot of public speaking in science. Ironically, many students in science are shy. Thus, they need to practice and not just in front of you and the group. In addition to our weekly lab group meetings, we have a a multi-lab group meeting where students present their work. It is a reasonable safe environment, and I expect students to have seminar-level talks that explain the background, aims, raw data, analysis, and results of their research.

Research Training. Training students in good research techniques is the obvious mentoring avenue of academic science, yet it is surprisingly still neglected. Maybe people believe that students will learn things through osmosis or from their peers. Also, teaching students one-at-a-time is time consuming. In my lab, I developed a week-long lecture and lab curriculum that I term a “Bootcamp” to train new students. I offer it 1-3 times per year to teach basics of laboratory research specific to my lab. I start with some really basic ideas and orientation such as how to keep a laboratory notebook and how to do the types of calculations we use most in the lab. The students work is small teams and do hands-on laboratory work. This way, students learn all together, can teach each other through peer-learning, and create a sense of camaraderie early in the lab. Students who go through bootcamp start their projects seamlessly and feel comfortable in the lab. Students that do not often have a hard time incorporating into the group, and have a higher likelihood of leaving the lab without significant progress being made.

Research Group Culture. Another part of research is knowing some of the social aspects of the lab. Many new (undergraduate or high school) students coming into the lab don’t know what a graduate student or a postdoc are or what they do. Many graduate students and even postdocs don’t understand how what the PI does all day, since she is not in the lab. Such gaps in knowledge can get people into trouble and cause bad feelings between lab-mates. The easiest way to combat this is to just communicate. Twice per year, I give a lab meeting where only I speak called the “State of the Lab.” In it, I define the roles and responsibilities of people in the lab. I also take everyone through the funding situation and how it works and each science project from 10,000 feet, how it started, its current status, and where it is going led by which researchers of the lab group.

Category:

Career, Mentoring, TimeManagement

Why Don’t Women Ask?

Although this is a little off topic for how and what to negotiate, I think it is worth some time to ask ourselves, “Why don’t we ask for more?” Seeing how well my daughter innately negotiates, I think the reason is that society trains women that it is improper to negotiate or even to ask for what you really want and need. We are trained to be quiet, good, and to make do with what we are given. Sometimes, this is definitely called for. Sometimes, you need to make do. But, doing this too often makes us complacent and gets us out of practice for negotiating when we need to.

This reminds me also of self-promotion. It is also improper to self-promote. It is trained out of us. But, like negotiating, it is essential to success in academic science. Perhaps also it seems a bit mean to self-promote, but propping yourself up is not synonymous with putting others down. In fact, self-promotion and good negotiating can have positive impacts on your department (more money to go around, more prestige, higher impact, better students).

When we are feeling weird about these things, try to remember the positive impacts they have not only for you, but for the people in your lab and department. By putting these actions into positive context with others, we can break through the self-imposed barrier on these crucial skills.

Category:

Career, Negotiating, Self-Promotion, WomenRock

Everything is Negotiable

When I was talking to the chair of BigCityUniversity about my start up package there, he said that “everything is negotiable.” At BigCityU, you could negotiate your housing, since you had to rent from the university. I have seen BigShotProfessors negotiate their parking spots. I negotiated for HusbandOfScience to be given a tenure track position. I truly believe that anything is negotiable.  Of course, different schools are more or less accustomed to negotiating for certain items. BigCityU was used to negotiating housing, for instance. My current department had never negotiated a spousal accommodation before, but they were able to figure it out.

Some common items you can definitely negotiate:

  1. Salary for you.
  2. Equipment. It may be easier to get if multiple people can use it.
  3. Salary for people in the lab.

Some less common, yet equally important things you can negotiate:

  1. Daycare access or rank on a daycare list, especially if the university runs the daycare, and the list is long.
  2. Housing. (Number of bedrooms, location to campus, view.)
  3. Parking. (Parking location, rank on a list of parking lot.)
  4. Your spouse’s academic position. (See two-body issues in previous posts).
  5. Your spouse’s non-academic job. (Some universities can place spouses in administrative positions, or have other “non-academic” departments that they can tap into.)
  6. Your tenure clock (and you can re-negotiate later, if you need to have it longer or shorter).
  7. Your starting title. (Associate Professor without tenure? Full Professor with tenure?)
  8. The classes you will teach and the number of times you teach them before you switch. Don’t underestimate the importance of this. Getting to repeat teaching a course is the key to getting better evaluations. Three times is usually perfect to get it right. More on these ideas later in teaching-related posts.
  9. If and when you will get relief from teaching during your first 5 years (many schools do this.)
  10. Your service duties. You can specify what you won’t do, too.
  11. Other future tenure-track hires that you will get to lead, or have say in recruiting and hiring. They can actually promise to make N hires over X years in your field.
  12. Space renovations. Double check if your start-up money has to pay for it, or if the university, dean, or department is fitting the bill.
  13. Office furniture and other amenities. (Do you need a mini-fridge for pumped milk and some curtains so that people can’t see in your office? They should provide that.)
  14. Travel to conferences.
  15. Career development opportunities, such as leadership conferences. These are pretty pricey (~$10,000), so this is no small potatoes to negotiate.

I say get as many of these thing in writing as possible, too. They don’t have to be listed in the offer letter, but get a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that is signed by you, the chair, and the dean (or higher ups, if the money is coming from them). Not all these things are for a start-up either. They can be deployed for retention if you are being recruited away or are on the market.

If others have examples, please share as a comment or make a guest post.

Category:

Career, Negotiating, Self-Promotion, Service, Teaching

Start Up

Let’s start with something obvious for negotiating: Your Start Up Package

When negotiating start up funds for a new position, you will likely be talking to the department chair. The chair should be your advocate with the dean and provost for these funds. He/She should want to help you succeed by getting the resources you need. Further, these are resources for the department that could be utilized by other faculty, as well, so it is in her best interest to negotiate well for you and the department.

Equipment: I recommend making a itemized dream list with equipment specified with dollar amounts. Highlight the items that are essential to your work. You cannot live without these items being right in your lab. Highlight items that could be shared as department resources. Highlight items that would be great to have nearby, but would be OK, if you had to travel to use them. Make sure they are able to be accessed freely in another department. If money is needed for these resources, ask for the money.

Space: Make a map of the lab space they are promising you. Place the equipment in the space to demonstrate how your lab will look when the renovations and installations are all done. If there is not enough room, or not what you need (a fume hood, for instance) point it out in that map. If you are given two split spaces, do it for all the space. If you are given two options, make up two to help you decide the best location.

People: Yes, you should ask for funds to pay students, technicians, postdocs, and YOURSELF! Ask for a certain number of students for a certain number of years. Ask to make sure that their tuition will be waved if you use start-up to pay. If not, you need to increase the number to pay for their stipends and their tuition. Make sure money for technicians and postdocs includes health care and other fees. Ask for summer salary for yourself, or make sure they are paying your salary (such as in a medical school) for several years before you will likely have independent funding.

Are there other items? Comment or write a guest post.

Category:

Career, Negotiating

“Women Don’t Ask”

The title of this post harkens back to the classic book about negotiation skills for women. Negotiation skills are important for an academic career for more than just making sure you get a good start-up package. Daily negotiations are needed to make sure you aren’t doing too much service, taking on a terrible teaching load, or otherwise being taken advantage of. I am planning to have a couple posts on negotiating. I hope others will comment or write some guest posts about this important topic.

Category:

Career, Negotiating

The Academic Game

These posts about publicity and self-promotion remind me of this idea that academic science is a “game” with specific rules and there are ways to “win” the game. Whether you like the idea of an academic career path being a “game” or not, you have to admit that there are certain unspoken rules and means to getting ahead. Despite how you feel about these rules, they are there. Your best hope is to discover the rules, and to try the best you can to follow them. I hope this blog will help some women to navigate these unspoken rules. It seems that women and minorities are often the last ones told of the rules and often only discover them when they misstep. Further, I would venture that the rules are actually different for men and women, based on a convolution of the system with the social moires of men and women. What do you think? Are there unspoken rules?

Category:

Career, Self-Promotion

Publicity Spot #3: Novel Self-Promotion

In addition to your personal website and getting nominated and winning awards, what else can you do to get good publicity for your work and yourself? Here are a couple of good, novel ideas for getting publicity that are fun, too!

1. Cover art. Many journals allow you to submit your own artwork for the cover. If so, you should go for it. If it gets accepted, you should put that on your news page, on your publication page, and in your talks. If it doesn’t get picked, use the pretty picture in your talks anyway and on your own website. Bonus, it is fun to put together some nice images from your work for a cover.

2. Tell others. Tell your department and dean about your good news. Many departments and colleges have news items on their own webpages. Sometimes they ask you to write up the short blurb and give them an image. Good thing you made that pretty image for a cover art, right? Many universities have a new office that will write press releases about publications. You should find out who is in the press office and contact them when you have a new publication out. They  like to write press releases about publications is high profile journals like Science, Nature, and PNAS, but they will also write press releases about other new-worthy items, too. Once they write a press release, if could get picked up by local or even national media. You could get an interview on NPR!

3. Mentor well. Your students who go on to do great things after being in your lab are your legacy. Being a good mentor to them is good for them, and it is good for you. While they are still working for you, send them to conferences, have them meet with speakers, and have them attend workshops and short courses. Their good abilities will reflect well on you. Let them graduate when they are ready. (More on mentoring topics in future posts.) When they leave and continue to do well, that will reflect well on you. I know this sounds selfish, and mentoring is certainly not typically thought of in self-centered terms, but you have to admit that creating amazing new scientists is good for your career, too.

4. Spoofs. This one is not for everyone because you have to have the right attitude and the right group of students, but a really fun way to grab a little attention is to make a spoof or parody of a music video or movie with your lab. You can put it on your webpage with your cool science movies. They could go viral, but probably won’t.

I am sure I have missed a huge number of other opportunities for self-promotion. If others have more good ideas, please share as comments, or write a guest post. Hope to hear from you!

Category:

Career, Self-Promotion

Publicity Spot #2: Awards

It’s a fact: awards matter. The department, college, university, and your senior colleagues from on and off campus notice when you win an award. It makes you more marketable to other institutions, and you are more likely to be asked to give talks.

It’s a fact: women are put up for and subsequently win fewer awards than men. It is true that there are fewer women, but they are also not thought of as frequently as men. So, you have to do some leg work to get nominated.

Women should try to win awards. In order to win, you need to get nominated. How do you go about getting nominated? I got some good advice from another WomanOfScience over a year ago. She said, if you want to be nominated for an award, just ask. I know it sounds crazy, but that is what you need to do. It takes out the inadvertent forgetfulness in the nomination process.

Who do you ask? Many departments have a awards committee. It is their job to nominate department members for awards. The problem a lot of women have is that (1) The committee often doesn’t think about woman-only awards, and (2) The committee is often not aware of awards within your specific subfield. That is why you need to tell them about the awards for which you should be nominated. You need to give them plenty of time, like 6 weeks. They will brush you off, but you need to remind them when there is 4 weeks until the due date. At the 4 week period, send to them your packet, with all the information they need and the list of the writers you recommend for them to ask. It feels weird to basically tell them what to do, but you are making it easier for them to nominate you.

If your department doesn’t have an awards committee to nominate you, ask your department chair. All the committee/chair needs to do is organize the nomination, put together the packet (which you will give them/him/her), and make it easy for the letter writers to write wonderful things about you.

Category:

Career, Self-Promotion

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