proposal preparation dynamics

For the past couple of weeks, work has been consumed with trying to prepare a proposal with nine PIs. Yep, nine. As you can probably guess from the number of PIs, this is a pretty big proposal--over two meeellion dollars. What makes the proposal interesting is that it's not a straight-up science project. We've got a few social scientists, a few natural scientists, and a few geographers who I never know how to classify in the social-natural scientific spectrum. Oh, and me. I get to be a PI, which is pretty cool, though I won't be doing any of my own research as part of the project.

So this is a diverse group, academically speaking, and my job is to draft the proposal and budget from all of the tidbits that the other PIs are theoretically sending me. I've never written a proposal that's supposed to be a team effort, so this is all kind of new to me.

Predictably, we have the classic conflict between the natural and social scientists. The natural scientists can't imagine that the social scientists might actually need resources and money to perform their studies. The social scientists keep referring to the scientists as "autistic" and suggesting that the scientists are out of touch with how the world actually works. Having spent the past few months meeting individually with natural and social scientists, none of these slanderous comments come as a surprise to me. In fact, they're sort of memes that people in each discipline spout without actually thinking about what they're saying or who they're saying it about.

I also probably could have predicted that getting people to contribute text to this proposal was going to be involve a delicate combination of nagging and groveling. With the proposal due in a couple of weeks, I'm in this strange position of not knowing whether I should be writing furiously and fudging my way through topics I'm not even close to an expert in, or whether I should continue to wait for text from the people who actually know what they want to see in the proposal.

What I wasn't quite prepared for, though, was the number of times one PI would--in confidence--tell me of his or her issues with another PI. It started to weigh on me that so many of our PIs have issues with each other, so I made a chart to see how bad the problem really was:



Each PI (with the exception of me) is listed as a potential badmouther on the left. The PIs that they have badmouthed are on top. Red is a badmouthing, green is a goodmouthing. There are four people (B, D, F, and H) who haven't said anything about anyone, so we can't really say much about them.

B has been badmouthed by three different people, and I'd make that four if I was represented here. In some of the badmouthing cases, the complaints are somewhat personal--"I don't like her style" kind of stuff. In other cases it's more extreme--"I don't trust him to do good work." And if I had a dime for every time I'd heard something to the effect of "He's a very difficult person to work with," well, I'd stop that ice cream truck every day and buy myself a Chipwich.

As with many aspects of my job, I find these dynamics kind of fascinating. What does it take to bring someone to the point of saying "I vowed I would never work with him again?" Are there any natural scientists who actually understand what a sociologist does? Are there any who would deign to ask?

But it's also kind of sad. The Initiative I'm coordinating, and the proposal I'm drafting, are intended to be truly multidisciplinary. The PIs recognize--or say they recognize--the fact that they need to present their proposals as collaborative and multidisciplinary in order to stand a chance of getting funded in this harsh, harsh world. But they haven't made the leap to actually being collaborative or even wanting to be collaborative.

So what we end up with is a line dividing the social and natural scientists. And we end up with lines drawn between individual PIs from the same discipline who are supposed to be working together but don't actually want to.

The chance of getting funded on this one is probably about 10%. But if we do, it'll be an interesting five years.

"Me teach good. Me get job. Me kill self."

I've become slack about blogging. Terrible, no? Life has been kind of crazy in a good way, and I've been enjoying my job more than ever. Last week I had the opportunity to go to a conference convened by one of our state senators (interesting, good schmoozing) then the very next day I was helping elementary school teachers develop lesson plans for their science classes. The conference crowd was your typical suit and tie kind of group. When I arrived for the teacher training session, they were testing out finger paints made from algae. Needless to say, it was a lot of variety for one week.

Also, I recently checked out Chronicle.com for the first time in a while and was reminded of some of the funniest pieces I've read about stepping off the tenure track. These are all by Harrison Key, and they are (I think) hysterical: The Happy Question, The Dentist and the Oracle, and The Bow-Tied Penitent. Check them out when you need a break from all your worries.

welcome home

This creepy thing was on my stoop when I got home tonight. I think it's the exoskeleton of a bumblebee, or maybe a honeybee. It's clearly hollow and, uh, dead, but strangely intact.

Perhaps it's a sign of my infinite nerdiness, or perhaps it's a reflection of how dull I am, but this specimen brightened my day a bit.

Being the new kid in town is tough, man. I keep waiting for the day when I don't have any more IDs to obtain, trainings to go to, and insurance forms to fill out. The day when I don't have to look at my well-worn campus map to figure out how to get to yet another introductory meeting with yet another new face. Then there's the more elusive stuff. Will there come a day when I have friends here? Will I someday feel like part of a community?

Forms or friends, I know that these things just take time. I will complete the 8-hour defensive driver training course that will allow me to drive our departmental truck. I will somehow find like-minded people who have stories and bottles of wine and time to share.

Right now, with the boyfriend away fixing up our escape pod, and the neighbors chattering away in a language I can't understand, it feels like just me and what used to be a bee.

organizing your references (i heart citeulike.com)

My move to my current undisclosed location has been taking place one carload at a time. Just before the car was loaded up for the first time, I was telling a friend that the first carload would carry several of the boxes containing my collection of references. "There are about 700 articles in those boxes, and who knows if I'll ever even need them again," I told him. To my surprise, his eyes lit up. "How are they organized?" he wondered. At first I thought he was humoring me, just carrying on conversation. It takes a true geek to want to talk about the pros and cons of different reference organization systems, but a true geek he is. So there we sat, chatting over milkshakes about my references.

Keeping your references organized is a bit like being on a stairmaster: you can keep climbing, but you're never going to get to the top. The way I see it, there are a few major challenges here:

1. Taking the time to put a system into place and stick to it. It's relatively easy to alphabetize your references, but is that any good if you can't remember authors' names? Or if you tend to accumulate piles of papers on your desk that you then don't have time to file away?

2. Being able to find a particular reference once it's filed neatly away. I've never met a scientists who is completely happy with his or her organization system, and most of them admit that it's often faster to find the article again online and print out a new copy.

3. Unread vs. read articles. For me, filing away unread articles means that I'm never going to read them.

4. Digital vs. hard copies. I still can't fully digest papers that I'm reading on a computer screen, and I print a lot of papers out that I never read. As the stacks of unread papers grow, so does my liberal enviroguilt.

Half my references are currently filed alphabetically, and half are by topic. I've lost track of which ones I've read and not read and which onces have been entered into BibTeX. Things are complicated by the fact that, in my new position, I need to be reading articles on a wider range of topics but in less depth. So my current system is useless.

Enter CiteUlike, a free, online system for your references. After signing up (which takes 5 seconds), here's how it works:

1. Enter the URL of the article you want to add to your reference library. CiteULike parses the information on that page, pulls out the title, authors, journal, even the abstract (!) and creates an entry in your library.

2. Add tags. This is the feature that makes the site powerful. Let's say you're adding an article on The effect of ancient population bottlenecks on human phenotypic variation. In my old, topical file system, this might fall into the bottlenecks folder or maybe the phenotypes folder or maybe the evolution folder. The power of tagging is that I can add the tags "bottlenecks," "phenotypes," and "evolution" to this paper and then search for it later using those categories.

3. Rank your reading priorities. Some papers, I'll never read, and I know it. Others I want to read ASAP. CiteULike gives you five options from "Top Priority" to "I don't really want to read it."

4. Upload a personal pdf of the article, if you want to.

5. See who else has that article in their library. Unlike most social networking sites ("We both love soup...and snow peas..."), this actually seems useful because I can get a glimpse into the libraries of other people who are reading the same articles I am. In other words, I might actually learn something.

6. Export references to EndNote or BibTeX.

So CiteULike addresses a lot of the challenges of developing and maintaining a functional a reference system.

On the eve of new organization projects, I always feel a bit giddy. I don't have any interest in entering all of my old references into CiteULike, though they do have an experimental 'Import from BibTeX feature.' For me, the real value here is going to be organizing new references, many of which I only need to read at the abstract level.

If you're into this idea, Connotea is also worth checking out. It looks a bit slicker than CiteULike, and has the benefit of having an "Add to Connotea" button that you can stick on your browser that makes adding references super-easy. I'm a bit turned off by Connotea's 'Recently Used Tags,' though, which include Britney Spears and Pamela Anderson. CiteULike's users look like straight-up geeks who wouldn't mix their Britney clippings with their articles on Boltzmann brains.

when the line between faculty and staff gets blurry...

Despite the feeling of slowness brought on by the kind of weather that makes you feel like you're walking through a bowl of beef broth, things have been rather busy -- and rather interesting -- on campus lately. More and more, I find myself treading a very blurry line between faculty and staff. And while it's not at all unpleasant -- kind of nice, actually -- it does make me think a lot about where this job is headed and where I want it to be headed.

When I interviewed for my current job, almost all of the faculty members I met with asked something along the lines of "Are you going to continue your research?" To which I politely answered, "Well, I think this position will keep me more than busy with other things," while I tried not to look too wan as visions of sample vials danced menacingly in my mind.

People have continued to ask the research question since I arrived, except now it's usually followed by "Will you be teaching?" I suppose these are natural questions, given the fact that I work at a university and have my Ph.D. Admittedly, I was starting to think that these people were missing something when I introduced myself as a program coordinator rather than an assistant/associate/full/research professor. Didn't they realize that coordinating was a full-time job? Then after a conversation with X a few weeks ago, I realized that it was me who had been missing something.

I've seen the official, administrative description for my position. It lays out a wide range of duties and responsibilities, none of which mention the words "research" or "teaching." So imagine my surprise when X says to me "I'm teaching a class on [basically the research you did as a grad student] this fall. Do you want to co-teach it with me?" Before I could even think about it, I had agreed. On some gut level, I really want to teach, and I'm really psyched to have the opportunity to.

A week or so later, I was even more surprised when X said "Would you be interested in working on this little research project I've been thinking about?" To my amazement, my gut and heart (and mouth) said yes. Granted, X caught me at a weak moment -- I'd been on a journal reading binge for the first time in years, and scholarly research was looking kind of interesting again.

So here it is, mid-summer, and I'm looking at the September calendar wondering how I'm going to pull off co-teaching a course, spinning up a little research project, and putting together three (yes, three) proposals for our interdisciplinary initiative.

Before you know it, I'll be editing thesis proposals and telling concerned parents that their sophomores did actually earn those C minuses.

when in doubt, don't be subtle

The authorship awkwardness has ended! In my last post, I mentioned that I was preparing a new report for our dean and one of our state senators. In a not-so-subtle hint that I wanted credit for the preparation of the report, I stuck my name on it...twice. And it seems to have worked. After passing along the final draft to X, he forwarded it to the dean and said that I had written it. Better still, he said that if the senator's office needs more information, they could contact one of *us*.

The question still remains as to whether X realized that he had stolen my thunder regarding the first report to the dean. My guess is that he didn't think of it at the time, but that a very important seed was planted in his mind when he saw my "Prepared by Ivory Shower."

Thanks for your advice and suggestions on my last post :)

authorship awkwardness

The academic storybook is full of tales of advisers who mysteriously become first authors on their students' papers at the last minute and students who don't get credit where credit is due. Authorship and attribution are frequent topics of angst on the ScienceCareers forum, and stories like this one and this one are as common as tales of alligators in the sewers of New York City*.

As a grad student, I was lucky in that I never had issues with authorship. Sometimes I included people as co-authors because it seemed like good karma, and sometimes I just needed to do a little groveling. Whether it was out of appreciation or duty, one of my thesis papers ended up having five karma co-authors in total, though 100% of the writing and 100% of the data generation was mine. But I was first author, and I no one disputed that I should be. My adviser never insisted on being first author on my work, and never left me off of papers I'd contributed to.

My current boss, X, and I published two papers together while I was a student. I was first author on one, and second author on another. We collaborated well on those papers, and in each case the issue of first authorship was always clear cut. Because we never even had to discuss authorship before, I'm bewildered to find myself having authorship issues now, when the things I'm writing aren't entering the academic journal circuit.

A few weeks ago, X was asked to provide a report of our Initiative's recent activities to the dean and the president of the university. At this point, I'm more familiar with recent activities than X, so X asked me to write the report. But somehow, X was the one who sent it to Dean, who passed it along to President as X's work. Dean also sent the report to our U.S. Senator, who apparently is curious about what we're doing. So suddenly, I find myself in a position of having a senator (!) reading my work and thinking it's X's.

The senator's office was pleased with this report, and promptly asked Dean who asked X who asked me for a more detailed report. This one is much more work, and I'll be damned if my name isn't on it somewhere.

How should I deal with this? X isn't a power grubbing kind of person, but is clearly fine with attribution on the first report. Since we've dealt with attribution seamlessly in the past, I'd like to believe that this was just an oversight on X's part. But I don't want this to become a pattern, and I sense that it easily could.

I'm trying to figure out a way to bring this up casually, but clearly with X before we send of the latest report. Anyone out there have advice?


* Turns out that there actually was an alligator in the sewers of New York in 1935. If you've got Times Select, the article is worth a read.

an expert jackass

When it comes to the concept of expertise, there are two types of academics: those who would never claim to be experts in anything that lies outside of the papers they're currently writing
and those who think that being an expert in one thing (e.g. histone deacetylace inhibitors) makes you an expert at everything else (e.g. parenting). You can probably tell which group lies within my crosshairs this evening, but the reality is that I don't think either attitude is healthy.

The first type of "expert" is one I can sympathize with. As an academic, your research becomes more and more focused with time. Eventually it becomes a stretch to say that you're studying an overall concept -- say, malaria, for instance -- when you actually spend your day analyzing the mechanics of flight of satiated female mosquitoes. Because science is constantly evolving, your knowledge of every other aspect of malaria quickly becomes dated, and you wouldn't dare to call yourself an expert on malaria.

To some degree, I fell into this category when I was a grad student and a postdoc. My field owed its existence to current problems facing society, and we used those problems as a justification for funding, yet I wasn't comfortable really discussing that current societal problem because I didn't consider myself qualified.

This is kind of a sad way to be, as it implies either that you don't have a sense of how your work really fits into the real world or that you don't have the confidence to discuss topics that you're not intimately familiar with. Either way, society loses out because you're not sharing your knowledge.

But the academic that's more dangerous is the one who thinks that being an expert in one thing makes him an expert in, well, everything. I started thinking about these toxic experts after I had a email spat with one of these self-aggrandizing windbags last week. Here was the situation:

Our university recently adopted a system of templates for university web pages. They're really nice, and were even vetted by a web designer friend of mine. The goal is to make all of the university's web pages look and feel consistent so that we're sending coherent signals to our visitors. Makes sense. The templates also make building a new website really straightforward. Since I, having basically never built a website, was charged with building one for our new multi-disciplinary initiative, I was relieved to have these templates at my disposal.

Last week, I emailed a few people who need to provide content for the website. And the first comment I get about my weeks of hard work was from Windbag, who didn't like the template. I begged off, explained the university's policy about website styles, etc., thinking I was in the clear. He spat back that no one had consulted him when these templates were being developed, so he doesn't think we should use them.

Uh, right. So we should let the professors decide on how the university presents itself to the world? Better yet, we should just let Windbag decide. He seems to know a lot about nanotechnology, so we should definitely have him make that final decision on what color the navigation bars should be.

Everyone is entitled to an opinion, even crazy Windbag professors. But these "experts" don't seem to recognize the difference between opinion and expertise. In thinking that he was an expert of web design, Windbag was essentially saying that his opinion should be given the same weight as the opinions of the graphic designers and web developers who came up with the templates. Academics like Windbag have a lack of respect for different types of work, for different avenues of research, and for different opinions. On a deeper level, they fail to recognize that the experts in any field have worked hard to become so.

This is a bit of an extreme example -- my jaw literally dropped when I got these emails from Windbag. But the Ivory Tower is crawling with Windbags, some more subtle and some less. These are the creatures who go to talks on topics unrelated to their own research and then harangue and belittle the speaker without having any basis for doing so. Their voices drip equally with impatient condescension whether they're talking about the papers recently published in their field or the relative merits of the Bahamas versus the Florida Keys for sailing.

They're also the creatures who decide to leave academia and are then shocked when people out in the real world aren't clamoring for their knowledge (guilty).

unsticking your job search

Dave Jensen over at ScienceCareers published a nice article this week in his Tooling Up series. The article is entitled The Slightly Irreverent, Shake 'Em Up Job Search, and it's definitely worth a read. The title turns me off because it sounds like he's trying to be cool, but his larger point is that sometimes you have to bend the rules a bit to get past the inhumanity of online job searching.

Scientists aren't generally the most outgoing, personable lot, so online job applications hold a lot of appeal. I'd so much rather email someone than talk on the phone or (yikes!) just go knock on their door and say hello. But only 3-5% of job seekers actually find employment through online ads. So it's probably not a surprise that the 40 or so resumes I submitted electronically during my job search yielded nothing.

Despite not being very fruitful, I think that online job ads are really useful, particularly if you're looking for a way to leave academia. Even just a few hours of online job hunting gave me a sense of what was out there, what sorts of jobs I should be applying for, and what sorts of things employers value (communication skills and demonstrated experience seem to trump all else, including your doctorate).

The problem is that any old schmuck can apply for a job online, and someone has to sort through all of those resumes. Jensen's point is that you have to worm your way in an any way you can in order to make yourself a real person in the eyes of that HR person sorting through applications. His number one suggestion is to call the company, but *don't* call the HR department. Start talking to people in the company -- anyone in the company. Don't even mention that you're applying for a job, as they'll likely just forward you to the HR department.

I think this advice is solid. It's unfortunately hard to swallow, at least for me. I'd like my resume to stand for itself. And I'd like to believe that my experience and qualifications make my resume glow like a beacon of light in that huge stack of resumes. But perhaps the best way to show off your communications skills isn't with a bullet point on your resume but by, well, communicating.

moving and writing

This past week was an interesting one job-wise. I was at the state capital one afternoon with my boss, talking to some folks at a state agency who we'd like to collaborate with and potentially get funding from. The next day I went to a workshop about corporate, foundation, and donor relations that was conducted by our university's foundation. I've heard many academics talk about how the world outside of the Ivory Tower is full of money grubbing misers. It took about 10 minutes for me to realize that the money grubbers are in the tower as well, and that's actually a good thing for the university.

Anyway, both of these experiences deserve their own posts since each was interesting and noteworthy. But my mind is on different, semi-job related things:

1. National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a novel (175 pages) in one month: November. Unlike most Americans, I don't have any grand ideas for a novel...yet. But NaNoWriMo appeals to me in my gut. I first learned about it last year, on October 30. Though the concept struck a chord with me, I gave myself an out because 2 days to come up with an idea and start writing seemed, well, crazy. But I vowed that I would come up with some ideas and participate this year. I'm under no illusions that anything I could slap together in a month (or two months or two decades) would be any good, but I want to go through the process and to spend a month writing intensely. Academia seems like a potentially good setting for a novel, which is why I referred to NaNoWriMo as semi-job related. The personalities, the incestuousness, and the nomadic lifestyle lend themselves to strong characters and interesting situations. It's also a world I know fairly well, which makes it a safer bet for coming up with a realistic plot. Kind of lame, but it's a starting point.

2. We're trying to figure out where to live. University towns usually have some sort of appeal -- Ann Arbor, Madison, Northampton, and Austin all have it. My university town does not. In the not too distant past, the town was somewhat dangerous, which led most of the university faculty to seek housing outside the town. The town has cleaned up quite a bit and is undergoing massive McGentrification, but still doesn't draw much of the university crowd.

This summer, we're living in a sublet that's in town and walking distance to my office. Being a short walk away from work is fantastic, but the town makes me sad. Come September we have to move, and we're trying to figure out where to go. We've been scoping out this area and the nearest big city, where my boyfriend will be working. There's no absolutely ideal situation, so we're choosing from a few acceptable options, knowing that there are up and down sides to each one.

In my head, these two topics -- housing and NaNoWriMo -- have become linked, as if our decisions about where to live are part of a larger story I could write that says something meaningful about relationships and modern life. Realistically, I think I'm just trying to create a story about moving and transitions that will help me to figure out what to do. But if that story can fuel a month of writing in November, so much the better.

baby? or rent?

I had lunch today with two women in my department, both of whom have two kids in the 7-13 age range. After giving them a brief update on the status of my move, how I'm settling in, etc., the topic quickly turned to summer camps. More specifically, what to do with your kids during the summer while you're working*?

I was having a rough day in the halls of the Ivory Tower, so I nearly offered to quit my job and babysit for these four kids for the summer. I'm looking forward to having kids of my own someday, but until today I hadn't really stopped to think about the actual costs of having a childcare. So let's do some simple math.

One of these mothers puts her kids in a fantastic day camp that's run by our university for the summer. It sounds like a blast -- field trips, daily swimming, art projects -- and the it runs from 7am to 6pm daily. For faculty members, the camp is a steal at $300 per kid per week. That works out to 55 hours of childcare per week at just $5.45/hour. But for two kids, that comes to $2400/month, which is exactly double what I'm paying in rent for my apartment here.

The second mother also sends her kids to camps during the summer...but she has a nanny who drives them to and from camp and watches the kids on non-camp days. I suppose there's no tactful way to find out what she's paying, but my guess is that it is more than $300/week.

The summer is the real killer. Once the little money suckers are in school, it's probably just a few hours a day during the school year. Again, a little math.

Back when I was in junior high I babysat for my neighbor's daughter, who envisioned herself a 10-year old Bette Midler. The tasks were pretty straightforward, which was good because I was only 13. I met her at the bus stop, walked her home, fixed a snack, and clapped at her every rendition of "The Rose." At $5/hour, 3 hours/day, 5 days/week, it was a total racket. Maybe the parents saw it that way as well -- $75/week for childcare seems pretty reasonable. But then again, they were leaving their little prima donna with someone who couldn't even drive yet.

According to PayScale, the going rate for a babysitter in my part of the world these days is $8-10/hour. So after school daycare for 15 hours/week would cost about $600/month, or exactly half of my current monthly rent.

So for two kids, we're looking at a total of $5400 during the school year and $7200 for the summer. Grand total = $12,600.

I suspect that this estimate is on the low side for those pre-preschool years, and on the high side for the high school years. But according to the National Child Care Information Center, I'm not too far off.

Is this worth it? Not being a parent myself, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's the price you pay to stay sane and part of the adult working world. And maybe if you absolutely love what you do, you'd pay twice as much. But what if you just *like* your job? In that case, there's no way to know for sure whether you want to keep working or drop out until the kids arrive.

This topic is way to rich to cover in a single post, huh? It will be a long while before my boyfriend and I actually have to make decisions about childcare, and a long while before we have to answer the question "Is this worth it?" Until then, I'll try to glean as much information as I can from the successful women around me.


*Families around the world have been thinking about this for decades, I'm know, so I won't even pretend to be original in this post.

looking for that special microbe?

In case Perlmutter's wife leaves him, maybe he can find a new symbiotic relationship here:

http://sciconnect.com/

you think you're soooo special

In the past week or so it has begun to sink in: I'm once again surrounded by weirdo academics. I suppose that this shouldn't be shocking since, after all, I work at a university. But there's a air of arrogance and self-entitlement that many academics carry around that I had kind of forgotten about.

Sure, there are the big egos and big heads. And there are the eternally awkward conversations -- I recently met one of my colleagues who introduced himself as "very dynamic" before he talked at me for a solid five minutes. Whew. But the thing I had forgotten about is how many academics act like they have the most difficult and demanding jobs in the world, as if they're the only ones working more than forty hours per week.

Exhibit A: A piece published yesterday on Chronicle.com. The article is about how in "mixed couples" -- meaning one academic, one non-academic, lest you thought that academics and non-academics were the same species -- the non-academics might be preventing their academic partners from reaching their full potential.

The author, David Perlmutter*, gives a number of reasons why your non-academic partner might be "sinking your career," all of which revolve around not fully comprehending how academia works. From the arduous tenure process to having to work at home after 5pm, the academics have it so rough and the non-academics simply don't know how to help their partners succeed. Perlmutter's article reeks of academic martyrdom.

My favorite part is when Perlmutter coaches his colleague's non-academic spouse on "the particular nature of the sacrifices we need to make and that our loved ones need to accept." We all make sacrifices, and we all need to figure out how to support our partner's needs and goals. Aside from accepting that their academic husbands will probably start sleeping with their graduate students in a few years, academic sacrifices are completely unexceptional.

As I write this, my programmer (read: non-academic) boyfriend is working. It's 11:30pm, and he'll likely be up for another six hours, making this his second all-nighter this week.

My mother is a high school teacher who comes home every day after an eight hour day with a stack of poorly written essays to grade.

News flash! There are people working really hard outside of the Ivory Tower! In fact, roughly 30% of Americans work more than forty hours per week, and most of those people can't go home in the middle of the day and work from sun porches drinking iced tea.

I'm not sure why academics tend to feel like they're the only ones whose jobs are demanding. Perhaps they have to make themselves feel relevant somehow, since what they're so focused on so often isn't.



* Perlmutter is a dean at a journalism school, and yet he managed to write the worst piece I've ever read on Chronicle's website.

what do i do all day?

Today marked the end of my fourth week at my new job, so I thought it would be a good time to describe what I've been doing. Doing this without revealing my identity will be an interesting challenge.

Last year, the my university started an institute focusing on a major problem that is facing society. Let's say that problem is obesity. The institute is sort of an umbrella organization for all of the faculty members who are studying obesity at the university. There are people from purely scientific disciplines who might be looking at obesity by studying neurohormones and genetics, but there are also sociologists who aim to understand obesity by looking at the way that we as a society interact with our food. Throw in a few economists for good measure.

This fictional Obesity Institute has a number of goals. One is simply to facilitate interdisciplinary research on obesity, essentially to make it easier for the scientists and the social scientists to work together. Another is to develop new undergraduate and graduate courses at the university on obesity (as viewed from many perspectives). A third is to provide information about obesity to communities, businesses, and policy makers throughout the state.

The founders of this institute have a very broad vision and lots of great ideas. But both are full-time professors at the university, so they don't have a lot of time to spare. That's where I come in. I was hired as the coordinator for this institute, which means that I am trying to take those very broad visions and make them happen.

Over the past few weeks, I've had a few different tasks. The first is to figure out who all these obesity researchers are and what they're doing. So I've become the queen of meetings (this week's count: 7). Having been an obesity scientist myself, I'm very familiar with the science research. But the sociological and economic research is totally new to me, and it's really exciting. As I meet with everyone, I'm figuring out what they need from this institute. Is it money? Is it more interaction with their colleagues from other departments? Is it more graduate students?

The second task I've had is to act as a representative of the institute at several one-day conferences. These have been on topics that are of interest to all three of us that are working in the institute, but the two founders don't really have the time to participate because they're working on their own narrow obesity research.

Finally, I've been building a website for the institute. I've never done such a thing before, but it's coming together nicely. It's one of those projects that has its fair share of grunt work (html coding) but also its fair share of interesting tasks, such as writing all of the content.

Then there are a bunch of other little things -- researching funding opportunities, attending workshops on the university's donor and foundation relations practices, talking with informal K-12 educators on developing new obesity outreach programs, etc.

As time goes on, I suspect that the job will become less administrative. Right now it's a bit like a small startup company -- everyone takes out the trash.

the mooching continues

Much to my dismay, I learned last Friday that it would be another two weeks before I received my first paycheck. Schmower readers, I implore you: Is this fair?

Overall, I have been amazed at the speed at which things have moved since I arrived here at Big U. My office was furnished within a day. I had an email address, a phone number, and a voicemail account before I could say "bureaucracy." But five whole weeks of work before I get a penny? This seems unjust. The mooching off the boyfriend will apparently have to continue unabated for a couple more weeks.

There was a point toward the end of graduate school when I realized that my salary would double if I became a postdoc, but my work wouldn't change all that much. Suddenly a postdoc seemed like a fantastic idea! Even if I found my work dull and isolating, at least I'd be getting paid more for it, right? In the end, my relatively lavish salary as a postdoc didn't make a lick of a difference in my level of job satisfaction, but the promise of a higher salary did help me barrel through those final months of thesis writing.

The payroll situation now at Big U. isn't really an issue. After all, it's just a delay in receiving payment. But I have to admit that I had a moment of decreased job satisfaction when I realized that I wouldn't be getting a paycheck for a while. I started to feel (irrationally, I know) that my job was just the latest in the string of volunteer positions I'd had since leaving my postdoc.

In talking with a few people who have made the switch from research science to science education or science administration, I learned that it's not uncommon to have several volunteer or contract jobs before finding a permanent position. One woman I talked to said that she had spent about five years earning minimum wage after leaving her postdoc. Zoinks! My own period of unemployment was similar. I did spend a fair bit of time reading novels and taking afternoon naps, but I also had two fairly demanding volunteer positions that kept me busy for a few months.

The first position was as a grant writer for a small, informal education* non-profit. The company was just getting started and needed help raising money for their programs. Although there were some academics involved who had experience writing grants to large government agencies like NSF, no one -- including me -- had any experience raising money from small family foundations. Helping them out was a good experience in the sense that I learned about a side of the philanthropy world that I hadn't been aware of. I also learned how to write proposals about things that I didn't know much about. Good resume builder.

At the same time, I started going around to middle and high schools giving presentations about my brand of science. This was actually a really rewarding experience in a lot of ways. The teachers were so thrilled to have me visit their classes, mostly because I could talk to the kids about what it was like to be a "real" scientist. (I suspect that they were also thrilled because they were off the hook for a class period, since a couple of teachers actually fell asleep during my presentations.) But it was also fascinating to visit a bunch of schools within a three hour radius of where I was living and see the differences between them. Good resume builder.

Going into both of these situations I knew that I would never get paid for any of it, and that was okay. Both were good learning experiences, both look great on my resume. But I also needed to keep myself from going crazy, and they gave me a sense of purpose.

But given that my degree was a big factor in obtaining these volunteer positions, and given that I was spending about 20 hours a week volunteering, I got a bit sensitive about how much of my time I was willing to give for free. So I have to keep reminding myself that I am actually being compensated for the work I'm doing now, even if it's taking a while to turn the cranks of the bureaucratic machine.

*Informal education refers to education programs that are outside of the traditional classroom. Museums, camps, that kind of thing.

can i come too?

Being a non-faculty Ph.D. at a university is definitely interesting. It seems that my department and I are both still trying to figure out who I am exactly. I'm not a faculty member, but I have more publications than some of the young faculty members here. I'm on the staff, and I'm doing lots of staff-type work, but I'm geekier than most of them.

This morning I had a meeting with a young, female faculty member in another department who is part of a large project that I'm working on. About halfway through our meeting, she said "Oh, you should come to this picnic with me after our meeting! It's for female science faculty members...you know, a chance to meet one another." Being new here, I was thrilled at the prospect of being able to meet a few new people. But would I be crashing the party like a faculty member's kid sister? Once it sinks in that I'm not simply a secretary here, people seem to treat me like a faculty member, which is great, but I feel a bit awkward about it. I also recently found out that I can be a PI on grants, which both pleased and daunted me.

I wasn't sure what to do about the picnic, so I just went back to my office. Waiting for me was an email from our department chair, inviting me to the same picnic. But it was a funny invitation. She had sent it out to the female faculty members in our department early in the morning...then sent it to me a few hours later. So it seems that I'm not the only one who can't figure out where I fit in!

At this point, being in between faculty and staff feels just about right. I have no faculty-envy as I peek into their offices and see them with their noses to those esoteric grindstones. And I'm very much enjoying how varied and challenging my work is these days. But I'm also very glad to have a department chair who holds me in high enough regard to invite me to the geek girl gatherings.

timing + more good blogs

I got a great comment from a reader asking why I left my postdoc before I had secured another job. I've often asked myself whether that was a good decision, especially since not having any structure to my days generally makes me unhappy. There were two very good reasons why I left when I did: I was going crazy; and I could.

The first reason is one that I've talked about before. Though I'd toyed with the idea of leaving graduate school, my emotional sunk costs were high enough that it was worth sticking it out and getting the degree. My work environment as a student was pleasant in that I had a wonderful group of friends around me. As a postdoc, I no longer had that nice social workplace, and I no longer had interest in my research. Going to work each morning involved an internal battle between emotion and obligation. And by about 4pm each day, emotion won out and I'd come home. A lot of things came crashing down at once: I was living in a strange new place, I didn't know anyone, my building was like a prison, and my research seemed worthless.

I thought a lot about whether research had to be this way. Perhaps if I'd really sunk my teeth into new research projects I would have enjoyed going to work more -- and, looking back, I sometimes think I should have tried a little harder to get new projects going. I also considered changing research directions so that I was working on something that I found more engaging. This would have involved finding another university and advisor to host me as well as transferring my fellowship to another university. While I spent many days and weeks pondering these options, in my heart I knew I wanted to cut bait.

What I ended up doing was giving myself a set date for leaving my postdoc. If I'd found another job by then, great! But if not, I'd leave anyway. I set that date about three months in advance and spent that time applying for jobs and learning some new skills that I thought might make me more marketable. When the three months were up, I didn't have a new job, but I did have two interviews lined up in the town I was moving to.

The other reason that I left when I did was that I could. The numbers for the percentage of Americans who report being satisfied with their jobs are all over the map, but I think it's safe to say that there are plenty of people out there who either detest or simply tolerate their jobs for the sake of having an income. I certainly could have just joined their jolly lot and kept getting a paycheck, but I fortunately didn't have to.

I was raised to believe that women shouldn't be dependent upon men for, well, anything, but money especially. My boyfriend knew that I didn't have the money to quit my job and continue paying my half of the rent for more than a few months. And while I didn't want to mooch off of him indefinitely, I also didn't want my extended job misery to affect our relationship. So he offered to pick up the tab for a while, and I gratefully accepted.

Had I known that that tab was going to accrue for as long as it did, I probably have stayed in my postdoc longer. But the interviews I had lined up had made me very hopeful. During my time of unemployment, my boyfriend and I developed a de facto division of labor: he worked and earned money while I did most of the cooking, cleaning, and reading of novels. Not a fair trade, by any means. But maybe someday he'll want to quit his job, and he can be the novel reader for a while. If that day comes, I'll be happy to pick up the tab.

Thanks to a comment left by DayByDay, I discovered a bunch of great blogs written by female scientists. Once I have a chance to read them a bit more, I'll add some to the blog roll. We're not alone, ladies.

blatant discrimination against women

My interview for my current position was an interesting one. Clocking in at 10 hours, 2 meals, 2 deans, and 6 faculty members, it felt a lot like what I imagine a faculty position interview would be like...minus the job talk, of course. The day held a number of surprises, mostly pleasant, but a few nervous-making. Some of the questions that X and Y asked that day were difficult, and I had to choose my words carefully. The interview as a whole probably deserves its own post -- and I'll get to it at some point. But I was reminded today of the question that surprised me most during my interview: Have you ever experienced discrimination in academia because you are a woman?

I have an answer to that question that I give to my friends: Uh, yeah. We recount experiences with advisers, interviewers, and colleagues. We shake our heads and wonder when it will end. We cringe at the revelation of our own subconscious gender biases.

This issue infuriates me so much that it's difficult to talk about it without getting up in arms. So how to answer a question like that during an interview when you're face to face with a male interviewer? For that matter, how should you answer any sort of question that hits the nerve of all womankind?

This blog could easily become a litany of experiences we've had, incidents we've witnessed in which our female colleagues were treated unfairly. We could write ten blogs about all the things we do subconsciously, if only we knew what to write. But I'd probably start foaming at the mouth and biting if I made that the focus of this blog. So I'll limit myself to the extreme cases, which hopefully will only happen every once in a while.

Today was one of those extreme cases. I was at a symposium that was tangentially related to the work I'm doing. The event included a really really cool mix of people -- from museum educators to real estate developers -- and was focused on a big report that just came out of the university. In response to this report there was a panel of four state senators (two men and two women) who were responding to questions and offering their opinions. The panel was moderated by a male professor at the university.

The panel members sat at a long table at the front of a packed auditorium. In order from the moderator's podium, they sat male, female, female, male. The moderator asked the male senator closest to him for his opening comments. He spoke. The logical thing would have then been to move on down the line, asking the next senator -- a woman -- for her comments. Everyone on the panel was certainly expecting that. But the moderator chose to jump to the end of the panel, to the other male senator, for his opening comments first. Both he and the women that were skipped seemed surprised.

"Okay," I thought, "don't get all worked up about this. He'll come back to her." And he did. He introduced this woman -- a state senator, remember -- as being the mother of a graduate from our university. Turns out that she herself had gotten a law degree from our university.

When I see things like this, I hear the voices of my mother and grandmother in my head. I hear my mother telling me to be ambitious and career oriented as she cleans the house and cooks us dinner every night after getting home from her full-time job. I hear my grandmother telling me how glad she is that I have a nice fellow in my life as I set off for a new graduate program. With every generation, we get a little bit closer to equality, but there is still so far to go.

With those voices echoing in my mind and my own experiences stored within me like heavy black coals waiting to be stoked, answering the discrimination question with grace wasn't easy. I said yes. I gave an example of an extreme incident that occurred in a foreign country, something so clearly cultural that it almost didn't apply to American academia, hence letting the male interviewer off the hook. Then I moved the discussion away from myself to gender in general in our society because most of the discrimination I've witnessed and experienced has been subconscious on the part of the perpetrator. These guys aren't mean. They aren't chauvinists. They're just fucking clueless.

First Impressions

As I mentioned in my last post, week one of the new job went really well. On a very basic level, it just feels good to be working regular hours -- and earning money -- again. But even after having a long period of unemployment, routine and income alone wouldn't be enough to make me optimistic about this new career direction. (That may not be entirely true. At some point while looking for a job, I was really keen on working for the U.S. Postal Service. I needed the money, and there's probably nothing more routine than carrying letters. And after all, you get a $404 uniform budget your first year...and they sell skirts now!) This past week, I was encouraged by a number of differences between past employment situations at universities and my current situation.

First off, people knew that I was going to be arriving. Not just my new boss and the administrative assistant, but most of the people in the department. So as I roamed my new halls looking for the printers and the paperclips, the people I met all said "Oh! You're Ivory Schmower! We've been waiting for you to arrive!" They have made me feel welcome, which makes all the difference when you're the new kid in town. In a week or so, my department is having a little welcome party for me. I've never had this experience before. When I arrived as a postdoc, I didn't actually see my new adviser for a few days. And I never actually met the people whose offices were on either side of mine. So the fact that one of my new bosses here told people about me, explained my background, explained what I'd be doing, etc. was really thoughtful.

I have two what I guess you'd call bosses, though they don't really seem like bosses. We'll call them X and Y, though suggestions for better names are welcome. Anyway, in my initial meetings with X and Y, they made it very clear that they have some ideas about how we should proceed, but they really want to hear my ideas as well. They also don't want me to let them dictate what I do. Because of my background, they trust that I can figure out what's important or interesting on my own, and they trust that I'll figure out how to act upon those interesting things. Which is great. At times in the past, I felt like I had no collaborators, no one helping me to find direction. So to have X and Y's input is wonderful. While they are clearly in charge, we all have a lot of respect for each other and I think we'll work well together. So far it seems like just the right level of autonomy.

There aren't many young scientists in my department, so I can't say that I've met anyone yet that I really connected with on a more personal level. Although one of the secretaries is going to give me some Indian cooking lessons :)

I hope to post more this week than last week. I basically collapsed at the end of each day last week and could barely keep my eyes open long enough to unpack my pyjamas from my suitcase. But things have calmed down a bit, so I have high hopes.

Informational Interviews

I'm almost through with week one of my new job, and it's been fantastic so far. Almost a full year has gone by since I've really interacted with scientists, and I forgot how strange most of them are. (I mean that in a good way.) I haven't had any time to write in the past week, but I'll start sharing my impressions soon.

In the meantime, someone asked whether I was doing anything beyond sending out resumes and cover letters during my job hunt, which is the perfect follow up to my last post about talking to people.

Most of those 50-ish resumes and cover letters that I sent out were met with a resounding silence. Never heard a peep. There's nothing worse than spending a few hours perfecting a cover letter and then not even being met with a rejection letter. After sending a couple dozen applications out into the black hole, I had some great templates for my cover letter and a few different resumes that were tailored for different types of jobs. For instance, I had a resume that I submitted to academic publishing jobs that highlighted my writing skills and experience. That resume was very different from the one I sent for jobs that were education-oriented.

Despite all of the great application materials I had, I didn't appear any closer to actually having a job. When you look at the numbers, the percentage of people who are hired through online job applications is relatively small*. This is a fairly major difference from the academic world, where lots of jobs get filled by people who simply sent in applications in response to an ad. When I started really reading the ScienceCareers forum, it became clear that I had to change my strategy a bit.

The word "networking" always sounds cheesy to me. Worse than cheesy, actually. Sleazy. But it doesn't have to be. During my job search, I built up a network of people in my area who were doing interesting things, working at interesting places, or seemed well-connected in a given field. Looking back, this kind of happened naturally. It started with one woman I met who was working in science education/outreach at my postdoctoral institution, then she gave me the names of a bunch of other people working in that arena. Slowly, I contacted all of them and set up meetings with them. These are often called informational interviews, and they can be really interesting.

There are a couple of schools of thought about how you should approach informational interviews. Some people feel that you should approach informational interviewers and new contacts without telling them that you're actually looking for a job. Others feel that you should be up front about the fact that you are job-hunting, though you shouldn't expect that the person you're meeting with will actually do anything about it. I opted for the latter approach, because it seems more honest to me. You can tell someone that you're looking for a job and think they're company is interesting without sounding like a bozo. I also suspect that people can see right through your request for a meeting...they know on some level that you're gunning for a job.

During my job hunt, I had about 15 informational interviews with people from state agencies, nonprofits, research institutions, universities, and schools. Almost everyone I contacted was happy to meet with me, and most of them gave me the names of a couple other people to talk to. These interviews also gave me a good sense of what was going on in my community. One of the interviews led to a conference for science educators, which I attended at the expense of the school that invited me. The conference led to more contacts...and so on.

Because I was living in a fairly small and economically sleepy town, I started to feel like I'd exhausted my network. Luckily, the interview process for my current job started just as I'd run out of people to talk to. But one way to take the sleaziness out of networking is to actually keep in touch with people. Networking is a two-way street, so keep the lines of communication open.

Tips for Informational Interviews:

1. Keep your initial email to someone you don't know short, but put the text of your resume in the text of the email.

2. Coffee shops make good venues for meetings, but always offer to meet the person at his or her office. Essentially, make the meeting as easy for someone to attend as possible.

3. Dress nicely. For most meetings, there's no need to wear a suit. Nice pants and a button-down shirt (or something along those lines) sends the message that you have your shit together.

4. Do your research. Make sure you know what the person you're meeting with does and how it fits in with the rest of the company, just like you would if you were visiting a university department for an interview.

lesson #1: talk to people

At some point, I'll write more about strategies for finding a job outside of academia and such, but for now let's start with a few statistics about my job search:

- Number of months between leaving postdoc and securing new job: 8 1/2

- Number of resumes with customized cover letters sent out during this time: about 50

- Number of formal interviews: 4 1/2 (I never figured out if my third interview was for real or not, so I'm counting it as half an interview)

- Income during this time period: $0

- Number of part-time (10-30 hours/week) volunteer jobs done during this time: 3

Scientists out there, you could interpret these results in many ways, no? In terms of how these numbers fit in with the experiences of other academic refugees, I'm not sure. The only thing I am really sure of about my refugee status is this: It fucking sucked.

For 8 1/2 months, I felt like I had severe head wounds from banging my head against the wall that I had to neatly cover up each time I went begging for a job in my new suit. I jumped up and down screaming "I'm here! I'm smart! Hire me!" until I was hoarse. I put on song and dance routines for the many kind strangers who granted me informational interviews (another topic for a future post).

In the end, though, the head-banging, the screaming, the singing, and the dancing, didn't get me a job. What got me a job was all of the genuine hard work I'd done as a graduate student.

When I started applying for non-academic jobs, I sent a quick email to the three people who had furnished letters of reference for all of my academic job applications asking them if they would still provide letters for me for this new breed of applications. They all said yes, but only one of them -- committee member X -- asked what kind of job I was looking for. I emailed him some of my general ideas, and never heard back. In my mind, I thought "It's true. They all think I'm a failure."

About five months after I sent that email, I got a call from X out of the blue. He was calling to find out whether I would be interested in a job at his university. He described the job and I nearly fell over. It was *perfect*. I had described a job like this -- but not quite as cool -- to friends and family. My qualifications were perfect. He hadn't called anyone else. I am starting on Monday.

Having spent over 20 years in school, I really wanted to believe that the old adage "It's not what you know, it's who you know" wasn't true. I wanted my resume to speak for itself, and to some extent it did. On its own a resume can say a lot of things. Mine basically says "I'm a nerd, but I just got my braces off, so I'm cool now." X knew that I was a nerd, and my qualifications were a big part of why I got the job. As important, though, was the fact that we had worked together in the past. X and I wrote two papers together -- I was first author on one, and he was first author on the other. We worked well together and had a great deal of respect for each other. There are plenty of other people out there with resumes like mine, but X hadn't worked with them before.

And so we come to the first, and most important lesson when looking for a job:

Talk to people. Every single person you know is an important contact, and they need to know what kind of gig you're looking for. Even more fundamental than that, they need to know that you're looking for a job. Don't be afraid to tell them, whether they are former advisers or relatives. These people already know you and, hopefully, think well of you. So if they are ever in a position to suggest someone for a job, they'll think of you.

you can take the academia out of the academic...

I recently mentioned that less than 20% of science and engineering doctoral recipients are in tenure-track positions 4-6 years after they graduate. According to survey of 2003 graduates, though, 80% of those who don't go on to do a postdoc after graduation are still employed in their specific field of science*. In trying to find people who'd left the ivory tower from my super-specialized niche, I only found a few. So where are all these people going? Do they go into hiding after leaving the tower?

Data from 1996 to 2003 from this same report shed light on where these mystery folks go. It turns out that a majority (40-68%) of those fleeing academia find jobs in...drum roll please...academia. Yep, you read right. The survey doesn't go into any depth about what these non-academic roles in academia are, so they could be anything from technical research positions to janitorial jobs. Who knows.

The fact that there are people doing jobs aside from research and teaching at a university often goes unnoticed by the faculty members, postdocs, and students. As a graduate student I -- admittedly -- assumed that pretty much everyone who wasn't a researcher or professor at my school was a secretary of some kind. But when you start to really look around your university, you'll find people working on the periphery of science in all sorts of roles. There are grant writers, journalists, science communicators, K-12 outreach specialists, academic administrators, lobbyists, event planners, caterers...the list truly goes on and on. They are truly working on the interface between the research world and the real world.

In my experience, these people are an incredible font of information about leaving academic research. Many of them have their doctorates, but either lost interest in their research or simply wanted to explore different positions. I met with many such people at both my graduate institution and my postdoctoral institution, and I found that they were always happy to share their stories, experiences, and, most importantly, their Rolodexes (Rolodices? Rolindices?). Best of all, these are people who are actually at your current institution. You can just stroll into their offices in your lab coat and start asking questions.

This is a good time to announce that I, too, will be joining the ranks of the non-academics in academia. I start at my new job (!) at a large R1 university on Monday. I started this blog at the prompting of friends who are curious about what it's like to work on the periphery of science, so I'll finally start writing about that on Monday. For those of you who have read about all of the emotions that lead up to my decision to leave academia, I hope you don't feel betrayed by the fact that I'm headed back into the halls of the Ivory Tower.

* If I site this survey, it will be revealing too much about who I am, and we can't have that. But if you'd like me to send you the published data, leave a comment.

can they do that?

I had a pretty good idea of what my perfect job would entail. The question then became "Is that possible? Is there anyone out there actually doing this?"

When you've spent your life in school -- and always assumed that you'd spend the rest of your life teaching and working at a school -- it's not surprising that you don't know about careers that exist outside of school. As part of this process of figuring out what went on out there in the real world, someone suggested that I find some role models, essentially people who had studied what I'd studied and didn't end up in academia. Reasonable, yes, but easier than it sounded. On my first pass, I found a science writer and a TV personality, and that was about it. No joke. There was no obvious industry drawing people away from universities.

Lacking role models, I spent every waking hour looking at job postings and reading job descriptions. There's the Chronicle of Higher Education job board (which has separate sections for non-academic careers). Science and Nature have job listings, some of which aren't at universities. But more interesting were sites like Indeed, which searches listings from tons of job sites and aggregates them for you. Here, I found job titles I'd never heard of: Program Coordinator, Assistant Editor (different from Editorial Assistant), and Awake Overnight Life Skills Coach (also known as your boyfriend/girlfriend).

I also made lists of companies I admired for whatever reason, whether they had anything to do with my specialty or not: The Gates Foundation, United Nations, Wikipedia, and countless others. I made lists of places I liked to spend time: Museums, national parks, libraries, cafes. For each of these companies and venues, I checked out their online job listings to find out what people there actually do. What are their job titles? What sorts of backgrounds do they have? What value would they see in a niche-geek like me?

When I started looking outside of the academic bubble, I got really excited. There are thousands of interesting companies out there and millions of people doing really interesting things. But I also got worried because I didn't see many job ads geared toward people like me.

In reading my posts about this whole process, you might get the impression that I approached it all rationally and intelligently like a good scientist should. And to some extent, that's true. I knew that I needed to figure out for myself what I wanted in a job, and I needed to figure out how those desires fit in with the already existing working world. But at the time it felt like utter chaos, and there were many times when I was hard on myself for not knowing what I wanted to do next. It didn't feel rational or intelligent to give up things like money, health insurance, and direction in hopes that I'd find something better. It was kind of a mess, and I can't claim that I navigated the process with grace, but I did eventually find a job that met all of my criteria.

do what you like

So I knew that I wanted to do something that kept me in touch with the big-picture scientific questions. And I wanted to be able to draw upon that well of scientific information in my head lest it become like a bottomless cup of decaf coffee -- completely useless in most situations. To avoid falling into another unsatisfying job, though, I had to figure out what I did and didn't like about academia.

I've mentioned some of the aspects of research science that I disliked. At first, I was so consumed with the idea of escaping academia that it was difficult to look objectively at my job and see the things that I did like. But there were actually a lot of things that I liked about it and that I wanted to find in a new role.

Writing. Those days and nights of writing papers, of being knee-deep in references, of trying to put my own meager contributions into the context of decades of work, and of tweaking sentences and paragraphs were my favorite part of the scientific process.

Being around smart people all the time. Academics are generally pretty intelligent, and I like being around smart people.

Variety. I like to dabble in a lot of different projects and do a variety of tasks. Writing is great, but I can't do it 8 hours each day. Teaching is fun, but teaching the same thing year after year doesn't appeal. Ditto for data analysis, labwork, and putting together prensentations. I do best when I have a lot of variety in my day.

I could also identify some qualities I wanted in a new job: I wanted to talk to people during the day; I wanted to have a more obvious connection to what was going on in the real world; and I wanted to work more collaboratively, so that whether or not I showed up to work actually mattered.

fantasy vs. reality

In thinking about what I wanted to do next, there were a few things that I had to figure out for myself:

1. Did I want to leave science all together and pursue one of my butcher/baker/candlestick-maker fantasy careers? Or did I simply want what's usually called an "alternative career" in science?

2. What was it that I liked about my job in academia? What didn't I like? These likes and gripes would serve a purpose in evaluating future job possibilities, should any actually arise.

3. What do people actually do outside of academia? Aside from the professions in which the tasks are fairly well-known -- doctor (the real kind), teacher, lawyer, etc. -- I really didn't know what was out there or how I might fit in.

In the next few posts, I'll look at each of these in more depth. For now, we'll just look at the fantasy career question.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'd come up with a lot of careers that I thought would be more fun than being a scientist. This was not a difficult thing to do since everything looked more fun than what I had been doing. I'd wander through Williams-Sonoma silently choosing the Wusthof knives for the kitchen of my haute-vegetarian restaurant. Or I'd read a Kristof piece in the New York Times and spend hours researching careers in public health. Most of these fantasy careers involved working more directly with people -- feeding them, serving them good coffee, helping them. But another thing these jobs had in common was that I'd never done them before.

If you've never done something before, it's very easy to fantasize about it. In these daydreams, it somehow never sinks in that bakers actually have to get up at 2 a.m. to prepare those lovely warm croissants they serve you in the morning. Or that many chefs work until 2 a.m., sleep for a few hours, then get up early to get the freshest fish at the market. If you've ever fantasized about owning a restaurant, I highly recommend reading Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential. Bourdain bills himself as a renegade chef, which gets pretty annoying, but he describes his life as a chef, and it's horrifying. All the things you never thought about in your glowing vision of chefdom are brought out into the light.

The greater message here is this: Really think about these fantasy careers. Are these jobs things you'd like to do for an afternoon or for a month? Or are they really something that you want to do day-in, day-out for years to come. One of the best ways to figure this out is to actually talk to someone who does that job for a living. Talk to your barista, and you'll realize that she's making minimum wage and has coffee burns on her hands. What are these jobs really like? Stop fantasizing.

The other thing I realized about my fantasy jobs was that I wasn't qualified for most of them. Sure, I'd waited tables for a summer in college, cooked dinner for friends, and made truffles for my valentines, but did that mean that I could effortlessly slip into a glamorous career as a personal chef? No. Did my Ph.D. qualify me in any way for a career in public health? No. In the course of getting a Ph.D., you realize that you can pretty much learn anything. You learn how to learn, and you learn how to learn quickly. You figure out how to learn on your own, with a book and a stack of journal articles. So it is easy to think that you can do anything you want. And you certainly can. But when I looked at many of my fantasy jobs and what it would take to actually do them, I realized that many of them would require more school. I love learning and all, but going back to the classroom to learn held no appeal for me. At some point you have to stop loading and start firing.

Crazy (okay, nerdy) as it may sound, in college I fantasized about becoming a science professor. I now knew that that fantasy career was unsatisfying, but there were aspects of science that I was still drawn to. I kicked and screamed my way through labwork, but still loved to spend hours puzzling over the big-picture questions that had been challenging scientists in my field for decades. I still had a sense of wonder about the overall concepts in science. And over the years those questions and concepts had come to shape who I was and how I viewed the world. I didn't want to leave them behind completely, but I did want to change how I approached them.

There are a few well-trod paths into the world of alternative careers in science. Science education and outreach. Science writing. Science policy. What these all have in common is, well, science. They offer the opportunity to stay in touch with those seductive big-picture concepts, while trading the nitty-gritty details of academia in for other nitty-gritty details that might be a better fit.

I loathe the phrase "alternative careers in science," so you won't see it here again. With less than 20% of science and engineering doctoral degree holders in tenure-track positions 4-6 years after graduation, it's clear that academia is just one of many choices that are out there*. To describe non-academic careers as "alternatives" is silly and only furthers the perception that those who don't pursue the tenure-track are failures.

* In 2003, the actual number for the physical sciences was 16.7% [National Science Foundation, Division of Science Resources Statistics, Science and Engineering Indicators 2006 (NSB Publication 06-01, Arlington, VA, 2006)]. For more statistics, check out the National Postdoctoral Association.

pleasantly surprised

Telling my parents that I was leaving my job rated about a 7 on the Dread Scale. I knew they thought I was crazy for doing it, but I figured that they saw my leaving a "perfectly respectable" job as the latest in the slew of questionable decisions I'd made since leaving their house to go to college. The conversations I was really dreading were the ones I had to have with my postdoc adviser (an 8.5) and my graduate adviser (10).

I started with my postdoc adviser, since he'd only invested a few months in me. I had been spinning up a new project in the lab, and we'd gotten a proposal funded for it, but I hadn't actually done anything in the field or in the lab yet. When I told him that I was leaving, he seemed completely unfazed. We talked about the reasons why, and he suggested some alternatives. Would I be happier at another university? Different projects? Then he said a couple of things that gave me the nerve to talk to my graduate adviser. First, that you have to try to find something that will make you happy. If it isn't academia, bail! Second, that he's had about a dozen students and postdocs at this point in his career. Some have stayed in academia, and some have left. In each individual case, he was completely unable to predict whether a student would stay or leave based on that person's performance or intelligence.

With that conversation out of the way, I composed an email to my graduate adviser. Over the years, she and I had had a few personal conversations, but our relationship was primarily professional, and we weren't very close. Yet I couldn't imagine her freaking out or getting angry with me for what amounted to a personal choice. And I was right. Her response to my email was truly incredible and extremely kind. She wrote that she thought it was a good time to be exploring all my options. She herself hadn't really done that at any point in her academic training and career, and had wondered if she'd be happier in another field.

Telling my mentors that I was leaving lifted a huge weight off my chest. Instead of constantly looking backward (Should I not have wasted all those years in school?) or fantasizing (Oooh, maybe I'll go to culinary school!), I started looking forward to what I really wanted to do with my life.

why we stay

Over the years, I've had countless conversations with friends about leaving academia. We'd have long talks over too many glasses of wine detailing our fantasies of becoming pastry chefs or farmers. The next morning, hungover, we'd schlep back into the lab and into reality again.

Despite our earnest and frequent musings, academia had a steely grip on all of us. I know a couple of people who left graduate school to pursue other avenues, and a couple who were asked to leave. But most everyone I started school with did finish, and did go on to do postdoctoral work. Yet many still toy with the idea of leaving their research behind. Why is it so difficult to leave? Why are there online forums for people considering leaving? Why am I blogging about it?

One word: Tweed. We stay because we want the tweed jackets as badly as medical students want white coats. Professors are admired, respected (though this generally has nothing to do with the tweed jacket itself or any other item in the professorial spring line). That respect is deeply ingrained in communities, families, and individuals, who regard academic work as pure and, therefore, somehow noble. Money? Pah! They don't do their jobs for the money, they do it for the love of knowledge, for the raw intellectual challenge.

A number of people have also echoed a thought I've had myself --one that always makes me cringe -- that they stuck it out through their Ph.D. to prove that they could do it. As a student, math was always my worst subject. So when I got to college -- freshman flagellant that I was -- I signed up for Honors Calculus I&II, taught as a one semester course for math majors. This sort of attitude stayed with me through college and graduate school, through my first months as a postdoc. Some part of me hung onto the idea that if I could be successful at something that was both challenging and highly regarded by society, then I'd be happy.

About five months into my postdoc, my parents came to visit. I wanted so badly to convey that I was doing well despite being so far from home. But I also wanted to talk to them about my plans to leave my postdoc. Until that point, the conversations I'd had about leaving were mostly sardonic, mostly with friends. I needed new sounding boards, fresh ears who could hear me out and provide support. The subject came up over dinner one night during their visit. I resolutely presented my case to the judges who had been assigned to me for life. And as I described how unhappy I had been with research, I watched their faces stiffen. It was a blow to their bragging rights.

Over the next few months, as I went through the motions of being a postdoc and began to translate my CV into a resume, I thought a lot about failure. My gut told me that I had somehow failed. My parents' faces had seemed to confirm that. I obsessively read horror stories online of people whose advisers labeled them failures when they announced that they were not interested in the tenure track. But after some serious wallowing and visits to a couple of shrinks, I realized that I'd be failing myself if I stayed. Sometimes it takes a lot more faith in yourself to leave than it does to stay.

eager emigrant (part II)

So, there I was at my new university to start my postdoc -- new lab, new projects, even had a month of exotic field work to motivate me. It seems like most people I know *loved* their graduate institution and had, at best, middling feelings about their postdoctoral institution. It's possible that my year as a postdoc is colored by the things any postdoc has to deal with: Leaving behind the comfort and familiarity of your old home; Not knowing anyone in a new place; Having to figure out where the printers, paper, and staplers are. These things, and the impact they have on your happiness, are not to be underestimated. But beyond those normal transitional things, I noticed some very disturbing things about myself and my new institution:

1. I was very carefully avoiding talking about science with my new adviser (to the point of sneaking past his office quietly). He didn't seem very eager to talk to me either.


2. I was constantly bored and fidgety during seminars. I started leaving early.


3. Everyone in my building worked with their doors closed. Aside from some of the graduate students, almost no one said hello or smiled when we passed in the halls.


4. The graduate students were afraid to give talks about their research in departmental seminars.

We could debate the meaning and significance of each of these observations, of course. But what they added up to was simple and clear: Isolation. I worked alone. Days would go by and I wouldn't have talked to a single person about what I was doing. So there was an intense physical and emotional isolation. But there was also a practical isolation from the real world.

By definition, the Ivory Tower is a place in which people focus on subjects that are far removed from the concerns of the layman. And many academics seem to enjoy this. My work was no exception in that there was no obvious connection to what went on outside of the university walls. So when I stopped caring about what I was doing, there was really no one left to care about it.

The Ivory Tower is kind of like a Club Med resort on a poor Caribbean island. While you're visiting, you can fret over whether to spend the day snorkeling or sailing, or whether to drink Cuba Libres or apple-tinis. Because you are surrounded by other vacationers trying to make equally critical decisions, you can easily begin to believe that these decisions are meaningful. But one step off of the Club's groomed beaches tells you that they are not.

Lots of academics are fully aware that their work has never had -- and will never have -- any tangible impact on the world. It's not my intention to criticize them. On the contrary, I fully believe in knowledge for knowledge's sake. It's simple. It's beautiful. And in some cosmic way, a greater understanding of our environment at any level advances humanity as a whole.

During my time as a postdoc, I sincerely wished that I could be satisfied in my esoteric niche. I was doing well at it. I had a steady job, a steady stream of publications. The problems that commonly plague scientists, such as difficulty writing or feeling pulled in too many directions, were not issues I was having. But I wasn't happy. At 28 years old, I couldn't see the point in staying the academic course (tenure-track professorship! tenured! emeritus!) for the next 40+ years.

When you step off of the Club Med beach or get away from the gleaming white walls of the Tower, it can be a bit of a shock. You realize that you speak a different language than everyone else. You don't quite know where you fit in. And you're no longer treading the predictable, well-worn path from the baby pool to the big wide ocean.

from eager beaver to eager emigrant

Each Ivory Tower exile has his or her own reasons for leaving. There are some common themes in their stories: Lack of desire to compete for an ever-shrinking pot of federal grant money; failure to receive tenure; a lack of passion for teaching, research, or some fatal combination of the two that leads to the failure to receive tenure; research projects failing or never making it to publication; money, and the perception that you could be making more of it outside of academia. While many of these played bit roles in my own departure drama, they weren't the primary players. In these next few posts, I'll write about why I decided to leave despite being relatively successful at what I was doing.

My ambivalence toward academia became firmly rooted mid-way through graduate school. I had finished up all of my coursework, and was in the early stages of my dissertation research. In other words, I was far enough along to be invested, but far enough from finishing that it seemed implausible that I ever would. Each time I glanced at the hundreds of samples in my "to analyze" stack, my heart felt heavy. It wasn't so much the time that it would take to analyze them or all of the failed experiments and instrumentation issues that would inevitably occur in the course of the analyses that gave me pause. I simply didn't care anymore.

Not caring about my research saddened me, even depressed me for a while. For years, I had soaked up all I could about my field, reveled in it. I knew what it felt like to stay up all night reading journal articles like they were steamy romance novels. My college roommates had made fun of my insatiable desire to learn. Losing that desire was unsettling because I knew what it was like to have it. Without it, I felt like a fake who was simply going through the motions*.

Over the next few years, as I completed my thesis, I had moments in which I truly enjoyed my work. My friends and I propped each other up when necessary, and the bonds between us were genuine and lovely. My mood lightened considerably when I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. By the time I defended I was, by most standards, one of the most promising new scientists in my field. I had published four first-author papers by the time I finished school, and had one more in the pipeline. I had received a highly coveted postdoctoral fellowship -- the kind of fellowship that you don't turn down. Despite my very deep concern about whether or not I wanted to continue in academia, I did. Hoping that a new research direction -- in a new lab, in a new part of the country -- would reinvigorate me, I took the fellowship. Once I arrived at my new university, it became strikingly clear that I needed to leave academia.

* Interestingly, the phenomenon of feeling like a fake who could be exposed at any moment is so prevalent amongst students and faculty members at high-level institutions that it has a name: The Impostor Syndrome. I'll write about it someday.

hello world

Geez, setting up a blog was easier than I thought it would be. If I'd known it would only take 30 seconds, I would have been blogging my heart out all winter as I looked for a job.

I have high hopes and many ideas for this blog. Aside from the requisite posts about myself and my experiences, I'll be writing in general about the transition from being an academic researcher to being, well, something else (dear God, anything else!). Since leaving academia last year around this time, that transition has mainly involved becoming a professional job hunter and chronic volunteer. But that, my friends, is about to change. So welcome, and stay tuned.