Guest Post: Searching for an academic position on maternity leave

Today’s guest post is by Chicken_little. Chicken_little is a postdoc in clinical psychology in the midst of an existential career crisis – but officially in search of an academic position. She studies the impact of mindfulness interventions in various populations, although she very often forgets to practice mindfulness in her daily life. When she is not working or reading funny academic tweets, she is the proud mom of a baby boy. 

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I’m sitting at the kitchen table trying to finish a manuscript. I can hear my son yelling in his crib, refusing to take his nap. As I try to concentrate on bringing the finishing touches to my soon-to-be submitted paper, I can’t help but feel incredibly guilty of, once again, favoring my work over my son. The appeal of a tenure-track position is big, and so is the pressure to be productive and to get out several manuscripts this year, even though I am (supposed to be) on maternity leave.

Thank goodness my spouse is home and is there to soothe the baby. Being a postdoc and working from home does have benefits : I was able to transfer my maternity leave to my partner, so we can both spend some time with our son in his first year of life. But let’s be honest here : having him at home only means that I can get more work done, as he watches the baby. I am trying to make things happen for my career all the while he is putting his own on hold. This better pay off.

This is what I have learned so far on being a mom and a postdoc in search of an academic position at the same time :

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Guest Post: The Banality of Toxicity

My personal statement glows with enthusiasm. My commitment to neglected infectious disease and immunology, and thus academia, is abundantly clear. At twenty-one I am confident my self-declared global citizenship would be unappreciated in the sterile cubes of industry. At twenty-two, before leaving the hallowed halls of elite undergraduate studies, I am self-assured a PhD is the best way to become a game-changing expert in a world of inequitable health care. At twenty-four, mid-way though preliminary exams, I feel the same. My twenty-third year, I did not. What was different that year, was who I considered my mentor.

I was a mentor for the first time in 7^th grade. I was bad at it. The guidance counsellors saw the obvious maturity differences between the newly arrived 6^th graders and the departing 8^th graders at our junior high school and devised a mentorship program to create a stronger community. While I can explain a lot of my shortcomings in the program by my universally shared social discomfort and the internal conflict between my desires to academically excel and rebel, my lack of training certainly didn’t help.

Guest Post: Quitting a PhD

It’s been over a year since I decided to quit my PhD. There are so many things I’ve learnt from reflecting on what made me feel like such a failure, and many things I wished I knew at the time.

The most important thing to realize if you are thinking about quitting a PhD for any reason is YOU ARE NOT A FAILURE. This is the feeling that stuck with me the longest and is really counterproductive to making any decisions about quitting and what you might do after. There are so many reasons to abandon a PhD, all of them legitimate, and none of them are failures. I mostly conquered this thought of failure through realizing that I am not the first, nor will I be the last PhD student to move on.

Guest Post: The Storm Is Coming

Today’s guest blogger, Fernside, is a PhD student in Ecology

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This past year has brought an increasing number of highly visible cases of prominent male professors accused of sexual harassment and/or assault. First it was astronomy with Geoff Macy and Timothy Frederick Slater. Then Christian Ott in Astrophysics. In February it was Jason Lieb, molecular biologist at the University of Chicago, and paleoanthropologist Brian Richmond at the Museum of Natural History in New York.

I watch the media storms getting closer and closer to my own discipline and wonder whom it will hit first.

Believe me, in ecology we have stories too. The lack of public stories does not mean we do not have them. For every Geoff Macy or Jason Lieb there are dozens of cases that get hushed up, settled quietly, swept under the rug. And for every formal report that is filed, hundreds of incidents are never reported. They range from a senior male professor physically blocking you in a corner while talking during a departmental happy hour to inappropriate comments about a student/employee’s looks or sexual activity. From the supervisor who stares at his post doc’s breasts during meetings to the guy with wandering hands at conferences and retreats, to attempted rape, to rape, and everything in between.

Guest Post: Implementing boundaries as a PI

Graduate school was a rough transition. After college, I struggled to find my footing with the relative lack of structure of a graduate curriculum. The lab I chose for my thesis research turned out to be a powerful source of support that grounded me as I navigated this transition. The incredible group of grad students, post-docs and research technicians in this lab made failed experiments and projects, uncertainty about whether I could be a successful scientist and other struggles more manageable. They also contributed to a fantastic intellectual environment that was utterly rigorous, willing to question accepted scientific premises, pushed members to think critically and deeply about their own projects and celebrated hard-earned scientific accomplishments. This environment seemed to me the best of what science could be and convinced me that if I could, this was what I would want to do as a career.

The lab that I performed my post-doc convinced me that my experience in graduate school was not an anomaly. I joined a young lab, which included one other post-doc, a graduate student and a research technician. I confronted additional failures (an inability to get funding in my first year, dissatisfaction with my project and its progress, difficult conversations with my advisor). However, being able to talk about these issues with the other members, who were experiencing similar challenges, eased any sense that there was something wrong with me and my approach to thinking about and doing science. In addition, as my and other projects in the lab began to blossom, the intellectual excitement and thrill were palpable and cohesive forces.

This emotional reliance on other lab members, people who were usually at somewhat similar life and career stages, became obvious to me when I began staffing my own lab as a PI. I was suddenly aware as PI that I occupied a very different place in the relationships amongst the members of my lab.