Helping the Minoritized Achieve in Academic Science

Archive for the ‘Career’ Category

Publicity Spot #1: Your Website

One of the easiest places to create and maintain your profile for self-promotion is on your webpage. I think this one is obvious, but most people don’t realize how much extra information they can put online that will go a long way to bolstering your career. I think most people have a research description, their publications list, and perhaps a CV linked online, but do you have a personal profile page? Do you have a news page that highlights the accomplishments of your group members and yourself? These pages are not just good for publicity, they are good for group morale, and let your students know that you are proud of their accomplishments.

A good way to get started is to look at the websites of your peers, colleagues, and others within your specific field. What types of pages do they have? What is the style? Is it eye-catching and attractive? These ideas may seem shallow, but if you are selling yourself and your work, it doesn’t hurt to look nice and professional. Make sure your links to and from your website work and are up-to-date. Always update as soon as you publish any papers. If you should update your CV, you should update your website. Don’t wait! News items include: publishing a paper, student poster prizes, awards for you or other lab members. Having a short news feed on the very front page is also a good idea. It can have short highlights of the most recent news items and a link to the main News page that has all the news.

I know that this takes time, but this is worth it. Plus, like anything else, you will get faster with practice. Having a nice website can be a spring board invitations to give talks and serve on panels – essential components to any academic science career.

Category:

Career, Self-Promotion

Publicity Whore: Self-Promotion

I am a proficient publicity whore. That is a comedic and eye-catching way to say that I am good at self-promotion. Yes, sometimes it feels weird. Like recently, when my face was on the university’s front webpage (revolving). But, self-promotion is important for your career. Women typically don’t do this enough. It may be even more important, since the first assumption is that women are less competent than their male counterparts. Further, if you don’t do it, who will do it for you? Maybe you are lucky with a proactive department, but I think the norm is for everyone to be busy. So, I will have a couple of posts about different ways to self-promote. I understand that not all ways work for all people, but maybe a few will be interesting for you to try.

Category:

Career, Self-Promotion

Two-Body Solutions Bring More Problems?

This was a comment left by another WomanOfScience. I decided to repost to share with all. Enjoy!

Hello, WomanOfScience, this is your friend SeniorTrailingSpouse. I am not sure I like this name! I made up another one, below. For those of you who could not glean from my given name, my husband and I are both academics in science/engineering. We were apart for several years, during which time I had two babies and raised them up to school-age and almost-school-age largely on my own. After lots of looking, drama, negotiation with both institutions, we are now together at his institution.

I have so much to say on the Two Body Problem that I am not sure where to start. I will get around to writing the guest posts I have promised you, WOS. However, today in particular I am struggling with something, and I thought I should pose the comment/question to you and hopefully your blogosphere.

If you are lucky enough to have the Two Body Problem solved, how to then balance both of your ambitions? Suppose we both have the opportunity to submit (different) big grants, both with deadlines around the same time. Our own individual research programs are fine in terms of funding, so working on these grants would be a choice. These are both large-scale proposals that actually won’t give us much money directly, but are great for the institution and would be high-profile wins in terms of reputation if we get them.

But we are tired, and we want to spend some time with the kids this summer, now that we are finally together as a family. One of us could definitely work on a proposal like this while still leaving us collectively with enough “family time,” I think. But if we both choose to work on proposals like this, it will mean a lot of craziness this summer. So which one of us “leans back?”

Strangely, I never thought about this much when I was living apart from my husband, even though I was solely responsible for the kids during this time. My ambition was really only limited by what I could physically handle. Kids were in daycare a lot. If I had a big deadline, I hired extra babysitting help. If a particular project required consistently working after-hours, well — I couldn’t do it, or rather I was not willing to be away from the kids more often than I already was. Similarly, for travel, if I was invited to give a talk domestically, well fine. I made these trips as short as possible and cobbled together some solution — leave the kids with grandparents, bring Grandma along on a business trip with me, find a daycare in the area willing to do drop-in care. But if I was invited for an international trip — no, sorry, I could not manage this. (Saying no to these kind of trips was a choice, but again it was more than I felt I could handle at the time — I do know a single academic mom who did manage to take her daughter on international trips).

Now, living with my husband means I have more choices. He can of course watch them if I have to work late or if I am out of town. But when we both need to work, how do we balance this? I don’t want to just hire babysitters a lot so that we can both work like crazy — then our life wouldn’t be all that different than what we had before, honestly. It defeats the purpose of living together!

On a mostly separate note, I think work-life issues are one area where more senior women in science can benefit from mentoring from younger women. Mentoring does not have to go one-way, only from senior women to junior women. The culture has changed dramatically in the time that I’ve been in academia — negotiating for a position for your spouse was unheard of when I started. I think younger women have a better idea of how to navigate and negotiate issues around this than senior women do.

Category:

Career, Kids, TimeManagement, Two-BodyProblem, WomenRock

The Importance of…People

Guest Post from another WomanOfScience – Thank you!!

When I got to grad school I was lucky to already be a part of a research group (I had arranged with a professor to work in her lab the summer before my first year). I was even luckier that another student, one year ahead of me in school, had also recently joined the group. She quickly became a good friend and I honestly don’t know if I’d have a PhD today if she hadn’t. She helped me navigate the large state university 3,000 miles from my home. She helped me find an apartment. She introduced me to her friends (some of whom would be my TAs once school started). Just having her in the lab made it easier for me to show up to work. She was my friend, and she was my role model, guide, and mentor.

She also helped me in the lab, and I helped her too. We enjoyed working together. Our research projects were completely separate but we used similar (large) equipment and often needed a second set of hands. So she and I would help each other out occasionally, but our experiments took place in different rooms (on different floors) and soon we’d need to go our separate ways and return to work. Alone. A senior graduate student once commented to our advisor that he thought my friend and I would be unstoppable if we could do research together, but obviously science needs to be done alone. *Obviously*

So, most of my memories of graduate research are of being alone in a large, grey, chilly lab. It was not all bad. I am an introvert. I like having my own space and my own tools and equipment, organized in my own way. And when you’re getting good data everything is good! But it was common for me to spend days by myself, and I was lonely a lot of the time. I was also the only student in my group working on my project, so I didn’t have colleagues to run ideas off of or troubleshoot or be creative with. I was envious when my advisor hired a postdoc to work with a labmate on part of his project. They always seemed to be having fun!

I realize now, years later, that science does not need to be done alone and it is fun and rewarding to work with others. Ideas evolve when you work with others. You can be an independent scholar and have collaborators. You can be a scientist and be a person. Science should be done with others! I liked my PhD advisor in many ways, but I wish she had recognized how isolating our work conditions were. People are important.

Category:

Career, Mentoring, WomenRock

Women Are Awesome

I think women in science are awesome! They are highly competent, smart,  quick, and able to multitask in amazing ways. I don’t mean this to be sexist, but in my opinion, on average, women are typically better than their male colleagues. I think the reason is because the bar is so much higher for women. In order to be taken seriously and be seen as competent, women actually have to be better than men. It’s true! There was a recent paper about it in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA. See the paper here.

So, that means that by the time a woman has gone through all the trial and tribulations of graduate school, postdocing, and finding a position, they are probably pretty excellent. Now, this is not always the case, and that is OK. But 90% of the time, woman are absolutely fantastic.  I will be spending a couple posts on women.

Category:

Career, Mentoring, WomenRock

Surprise! I have a husband!

When on the market with a TwoBodyProblem, at some point you must reveal that you have a two body problem. But how and when are still a mystery. Multiple WomenOfScience, I have talked to have said that they faired best when they revealed it late. Yet, I talked to a WomanDepartmentChair, and she said that knowing earlier is better for her, since it would give her more time to negotiate and line up the second position. Now, this was a clearly enlightened chair who herself had a two body problem that was solved in that department.

Personally, I tried several different reveal times. For a couple, they knew or found out that we were together. For these three schools, I had two offers, and they both worked out something (one was tenure track and the other was soft money – I am sure you can guess which we picked). For one, I told them I had a spouse at the first interview. I was second on the hire list, but did not get an offer. For a couple, I didn’t tell them until the offer was made. One said it was impossible; the other offered my spouse a postdoc. From these experiences, I concluded that it is OK if they know already or find out through “natural” means, but if you are a complete stranger, it is best to not tell people too early.

Do others have stories or options that would work? What about telling the chair only, to enable some early probes before negotiating, but not telling the hiring committee?

Category:

Career, Negotiating, Two-BodyProblem

The Importance of Mentors

I feel very fortunate for having had a mother who worked. She was not a Ph.D. or a scientist, but she has had a career for my entire life. She was also very technical, as a computer programmer for many years. (Interesting side story: She was the only woman chosen to learn programming at BigTechnicalCompany where she and her entire family worked on the assembly line.) Although my mom always said she wished she could have been home with us when we were little and in school, I am very happy about the way things turned out. Her example of a woman with a successful career who was a fun and caring mother, set the example for me with my career and kids.

I had some minor anxiety and guilt about going back to work, when my kids were babies. But then I decided that I was giving my daughter a role model for how to be a mom with a career. Much like men, women do not have to CHOOSE between having a family and having a career. We can HAVE BOTH! We should not feel guilty for having both, but be happy that we are setting an example to the next generation.

Category:

Career, Kids, Mentoring, WomenRock

Start Early

When thinking about your career, you cannot start too early. HusbandOfScience and I started planning in graduate school. As soon as we realized that we were planning to get married, we began to think about how we could achieve our career goals together. It is extremely important that your spouse is supportive and knows what the plan is. You have to make a plan and StickToThePlan. You and your significant other have to trust each other to StickToThePlan. We would chat 2-3 times per week about the plan, how to implement it, and the myriad of contingencies that could trickle down from not making it. Further, we always talked about “what if we don’t…” Like, what if we don’t get jobs; what if we don’t get two jobs together; what if we don’t get tenure. This is the same type of systematic planning we all need for scientific problem solving, research, and grant writing, so we should be very good at it. We had a whole decisions tree going on. I think it is important to have a back-up plan. I know some people think that having a back-up plan means you aren’t committed to the main plan, but that isn’t true. Having a back-up plan is just swinging on the trapeze with a safety net. It doesn’t mean that you aren’t going to try to stay on the trapeze.

Category:

Career, Negotiating, Two-BodyProblem

Don’t Assume they Know

Although the two-body problem is obvious to many of us – especially younger and minority applicants – the people who are doing the hiring are not always so with it. This is especially true if your hiring committee is composed of mostly OlderWhiteMales. Most OWMs are not trying to keep out women and minorities, but they are oblivious. Most committees are required to have women or minorities on them, but they might not have a strong voice, if they are a minority voice. Further, they might also be ignorant of university policies or avenues that can lead to a double-hire.

At the BigStateUniversity that my husband and I ended up at, the hiring committee and the department had no idea how to go about trying to get a spousal accommodation. I did a number of things to help them.

First, at my interview, I asked to meet with other women in physical and life sciences. At those meetings, I asked about being a woman at the university, and I found out that several had two-body problems that the university had solved. This gave me evidence that the university could solve the two-body problem and that these other departments knew how to do it.

Second, I talked to the woman on my hiring committee about the possibility of solving the two-body problem during our meeting. I was lucky that she was senior, and she knew a lot about these issues.

Third, we StuckToThePlan. When the department called with the news they would make an offer to me, I asked about my husband’s search. He had a separate interview at the same place. They said that he wasn’t the top candidate. I told them that I would say “no” to all offers unless we had two positions.

After several weeks of chatting with the Department Chair, so he could negotiate with the Dean about my start-up, it became clear that he had no idea how to negotiate for a two-body hire. I told them it had to be possible because other departments had done it recently. I gave them the department names of the women I had talked to. I contacted the senior woman on my search committee, and asked her to talk to my chair about different options they could exercise. With her help, they figured out how to approach the Dean, and were able to make the spousal hire. HusbandOfScience did not get to negotiate for start-up. They gave him the same package as the theorist they hired for the same position for which he interviewed. Other than that, the solution at BigStateUniversity was ideal. We have been very successful.

Category:

Career, Negotiating, Two-BodyProblem

Other Ways: Lessons Learned

Although we were successful at solving the two-body problem by applying at the same time, we also learned of another way to go about it. While I was on my second interview at MiddleRoadIvyLeagueInstitution, I told the chair that (1) I was pregnant (more on that in other posts), (2) I had a husband who needed a tenure track position, too, and (3) I had two other offers. They were most concerned about the other offers, especially since one was in the BigCity, also.  This motivated them to try to solve problem 2. After searching, they found that MiddleRoadIvyLeagueInstitution had a policy of allowing lateral moves for spouses. This meant that, if HusbandOfScience was already a professor, they would give him a professor job. Since he was currently a postdoc, they would only give him a postdoc.  Thus, we learned that there was another way to do this – the leading spouse could pull in an older, trailing spouse.

I should mention that this does not always work because some places are not as open to bringing in a senior person as a trailing, but MiddleRoadIvyLeagueInstitution was up for it. If this had been our case, and we had gone there, I have no idea how this type of trailing spouse is treated or feels. I have a friend who recently moved as a SeniorTrailingSpouse, and it doesn’t seem to be super great there, but it has barely been a year, so maybe it will get better. Hopefully, my friend will be able to post about her solution to the Two-Body Problem herself.

Category:

Career, Two-BodyProblem

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