Mom seeks tenure

My First PhD Student!

2006-03-17T10:54:00.000-08:00

My first PhD student just finished her defense! Whahooooooo!

I'm so proud. I can't believe it is over. She did a really great job, too. I think I was more nervous than she was. I had trouble sleeping last night. But the committee was really very kind, and they all signed off on her dissertation and did not even insist on seeing another draft.

I know I won't get any more work done today, so the whole lab is going to go out drinking. Good chance to bond.

Now I can start worrying about my next student, who should defend by the end of the summer if he can pull it all together by then. And I have to prepare my re-appointment package and write a CAREER proposal. No big deal.

But for now I plan to rest on my laurels. Yay!

So Very Busy

2006-03-07T07:11:00.000-08:00

Things have been crazy the last few weeks. Amy turned her dissertation in to her committee on Friday. I feel a huge sense of accomplishment but I am still nervous about the whole thing. It turned out to be 165 pages, and somehow that seems awfully short compared to the amount of work she did. Oh well.

My parents were here for the weekend and we did lots of fun things including a trip to the circus. I was tempted to stay home yesterday and go with them when they took the kids to a museum, but I looked at the calendar and realized that I have not worked a five-day week since the semester began due to holidays, sick days, and snow days.

Today I am teaching the dreaded back-to-back classes, so I'm lecturing and on my feet for 3 hrs straight. I did this for the first time on Friday and it really sucked. I'm not looking forward to it today.

We were supposed to hear about our proposals to an internal university funding program yesterday, and I'm anxious to find out if I got the grant. I could really use that money. Cross your fingers.

I got my course evaluations back from my "student centered learning" experiment last semester and they sucked. They were far worse than my average. I usually score above both the departmental average and the university average, but this time I was slightly below both. Of course they don't ask questions on the course evaluation form like "how much did you learn?" or "were you challenged?" They only ask how much the students liked the course. It looked as if 2-3 of the 15 students really hated the class and gave it low scores, but everybody else was generally happy with it.

Off to class. Yay.

Career Day

2006-02-15T07:05:00.000-08:00

Saturday I participated in a Science Careeer Day for high school girls, mostly juniors. I did this last year, too. It was actually quite fun. It was great to see so many young women who are serious about school and interested in having careers in science. We spent about 20 minutes with each of five groups, with each group having about 10 students. I asked them whether they felt discrimated against or if they were ever teased by the boys for being smart and they all pretty much said the same thing. There is no longer much of a stigma associated with being smart and getting good grades, and that most of their upper-level science and math classes had more women than men in them. Most of the top acheivers are women. On the one hand, this is great, because it means more women will succeed in science. On the other hand, it is a little troubling, because I think it means that the boys are giving up. As the mother of two sons, I worry a little that our culture is starting to believe that intellectually challenging endeavors should be left to women. Men are supposed to do (a) physically demanding jobs, and (b) jobs involving the brokering of money and power. Maybe we see science as too "wussy". Is that a good thing? Our country needs more scientists and engineers. period. not more women OR more men, but more of both.

One of the other insights that I took away from Career Day was that we need to go talk to girls who don't think they are interested in STEM careers. The girls at this Career Day had volunteered to come because they already had some interest in STEM. So they are low-hanging fruit. I think we need to get engineers and scientists to go talk to the girls who are interesting in fashion design, cosmetology, art, etc., and talk to them about how many of these careers are becoming more and more technological. To design formulations for new nail polish, you need to know chemical engineering. To be an animator or designer, you need to understand CAD. And if you study STEM, then if your girlish enthusiasm for nail polish wears off, you still have a solid educational background and the basis for a lucrative career.

On a (somewhat) related subject: In my local newspaper today, they ran an article about the fastest-growing careers. Among them: home nurses aid (annual salary about $20K), personal trainer ($25K) and environmental engineer ($66K). Which would you rather train for?

Another notch in the belt

2006-02-09T06:03:00.000-08:00

Monday I heard that one of the papers I submitted back in November was accepted for publication in the premiere journal in my field. Yay! Unfortunately my post-doc advisor is a co-author, so it doesn't count as heavily as I would wish toward tenure, but I am not complaining. I submitted the paper in Nov, got reviews back in Dec, and submitted the revised version 1/30, and got notified of its acceptance 2/6.

The other paper I submitted in Nov hasn't even come back with reviews yet.

When I made up my list of goals for 2006, it did not occur to me that I have to submit my re-appointment package in September. That gives me added incentive to get those four papers submitted for publication before then. I doubt I will be able to get all four in. I'll be happy with two. Student A's dissertation is coming along very well, and I should be able to get two good papers out of it (one without my post-doc advisor) fairly soon. I told her to go ahead and schedule her defense for mid-March. I'm probably more nervous than she is--she'll be my first PhD student to graduate. I'm so proud! But I am (irrationally?) afraid that her dissertation will be an embarrassment to all concerned. That's why I wouldn't let her schedule her defense until now. I didn't want to do to her what my advisor did to me and cancel her defense at the last moment. But she is working her butt off and has made enormous progress in the last couple of weeks, so I am feeling a lot more comfortable about the whole thing.

I am also trying to hire my first post-doc, which is a harrowing experience. Actually he or she would be only partly mine, and would belong more to my friend and collaborator, Donna. But it is still difficult, since the money we have is divided between two grants which require different skills and last for different lengths of time. It is a big responsibility to hire people. The worst part is having to disappoint the very qualified people who interviewed but don't quite fit our needs. That becomes especially difficult when they are foreign and must find a job or their visas will expire and they will have to return to their home country.

The funding situation in our field is dire and seems to get worse by the day. Exhibit A is Bush's proposed budget, which will once again cut back EPA funding. I have been advised not to bother applying for EPA money. One of our professors was "awarded" a $1 million EPA grant, but the money never showed up. After more than a year of waiting, he finally got the money by lobbying through our congressmen. It seems the only way you can get money these days is if your research is directly related to human health or homeland security. Otherwise you have to figure out how to do research with no money. Even graduate student fellowships are drying up. Many fellowships require that the applicant be a US citizen or permanent resident, which disqualifies about 75% of our graduate students. The few that are open to foreign students recieve hundreds of applications for one or two awards.

The only silver lining in all of this is that I haven't had to spend as much time writing proposals lately, so I can concentrate on getting papers out. Slim consolation.

Reading List

2006-01-31T12:57:00.000-08:00

I think it was YoungFemaleScientist who suggested that "Mr Darcy Takes a Wife" was a good book, so I decided to read it. I am enjoying it immensely. Also good in a juicy and decidedly feminist way is "A Great and Terrible Beauty" by Libba Bray. There is a sequel out now but the wait list for it at my library is very long indeed.

I've been reading more lately because I am making a lot of progress in getting my kids to bed without falling asleep myself. That leaves me with a precious hour or so to read. I suppose if I was more dedicated to my profession I would use that time to read journal articles or something, but I absolutely HATE to read that kind of stuff. I only do it when absolutely necessary, which usually means when I am writing a proposal. I can (sort of) get away with that because my research is pretty unique. There aren't any other researchers doing what I am doing right now. (At least, none that I know of. Perhaps if I read more I would find some!)

Must dash off to meet a post-doc candidate (to be paid from our $1.8 million grant). I still feel strange to be the one who is making the hiring decisions and not the one who is desperately looking for a job.

I can jump-start a car

2006-01-18T09:19:00.000-08:00

I was reading somebody's blog (sorry, can't remember who) and they complained that their female neighbor, who was plenty smart, had to ask the blogger's husband for help in jump-starting her car. Today I got the opportunity to prove to the world and myself that I can jump start my own car (in the rain, no less). My husband was actually right inside the house, but he screwed up his shoulder skiing and was heavily sedated, so I didn't want to disturb him. I'm so proud! But, at the same time, thoroughly annoyed that my son left the dome light on.

Anyway, the new semester started yesterday. Although I did borrow lecture notes off the internet, I did also give credit where it was due. Thank you, Sandra Porter, for pointing that out. If I may allow myself a little rant on the subject...

When my post-doc advisor (Big Famous Guy, BFG) left for Europe, leaving me to manage his lab and teach his classes, he had just hired a new post-doc. I hoped that New Post-Doc and I could work together to keep BFG's lab running. I was supposed to teach the same class I teach every year that spring, but I got pregnant and went on maternity leave instead. So New Post-Doc got stuck teaching the course. I had previously co-taught it with BFG, and he was of the old school and used overheads. Thus I had only a few lectures in electronic form, which I gave to New Post-Doc (along with the overheads). New Post-Doc then made up a whole new set of electronic lecture notes and used them to teach the class. A year later I had to teach the class again, and I asked him if he would share his lecture notes with me. He told me he had lost them. How does one lose electronic lecture notes? I knew he had to be lying, but I didn't say anything. He and I didn't get along too well anyway, so I kind of understood why he didn't want to share. So that was bad enough, but to make matters worse, a week or two later, when I was furiously making up my powerpoint slides for the class, he came and stood in the doorway of my office and waved a CD and said, "I do have these, but I put a lot of effort into them and I don't want to share them. " I told him I understood, and then he said, "I might be willing to share them if you had something to trade..." I was flabbergasted. As I look back on it, I realize that this might sound like some kind of sexual proposition, but I don't think it was. I still don't know what he thought I might trade for them. I just said, "no, I don't have anything to trade," and he walked away.

This was the same guy who refused to help one of my students (who was working on a BFG project, and therefore should have been deserving of help from BFG's post-doc) while she floundered for over a year trying to make a method work. He just didn't want to do anything that would make me look good, or even competent. When BFG finally inquired why the project wasn't moving forward, New Post-Doc told him it was my fault because I had never asked for help. I thought that was odd, considering that (a) I had asked for help, (b) I don't think I should have to ask for help from BFG's post-doc for a BFG-related project, and (c) I thought that he and the student were friends, and that even though he hated me he would help her. Just goes to show that he would even screw a friend to achieve the desired object of making me look bad.

Anyway, the moral of the story is to be generous. Give people your lecture notes! Help them! Don't be an ass. I would rather give someone help and not get credit for it and get a reputation for being a generous patsy than not help people and get a reputation for being a dick.

Lecture notes on the internet

2006-01-09T12:32:00.000-08:00

One piece of very useful advice: no matter what you are asked to teach, odds are someone has already taught it and posted lecture notes on the internet. Don't drive yourself crazy. Borrow them. If you make up nice notes of your own be sure to post them and return the favor.

I am being asked to teach a 50% of a course on Soil Chemistry. Like I know anything about soil chem. This is where the internet comes in handy. Google has made it so easy to find a lecture on soil pH. I just hope I survive this coming semester. I carefully avoided thinking about it until this week, but I have to teach 1.5 courses this semester. One is the same class I've been teaching for years, so it is kind of on autopilot, but the other is this soil chem class. Unfortunately it meets right after my other class on Tuesdays and Fridays, so on those days I will frequently have to lecture for three hours straight, only pausing to run across campus and eat my lunch along the way. Yech.

Does anyone else miss The X-Files? It's been off the air long enough now for me to forgive Chris Carter for the last couple of seasons, and now I find myself growing nostalgic. Maybe because it reminds me of the Clinton administration, when I felt the world was generally headed in the right direction. I may even buy the first few seasons on DVD, although when would I have time to watch it? Hmmm... d'ya think I could play the DVDs on my computer while I write soil chem lectures?

I don't watch much TV. Only kids shows. Is there anything worth watching on TV these days?

New Years Resolutions

2006-01-06T06:39:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year! I am free of the semester from hell, and the new and improved semester from hell has not yet begun, so it is time to indulge in a little goal setting. This year I have decided that I am going to have all my students set goals for the year with deadlines, and then I am going to post them on the wall outside my office so we can keep track of how we are doing. A little public shame can be a good thing.

Here are my goals for 2006:

Submit at least 4 manuscripts for publication on which my post-doc advisor is NOT a co-author. Three of these are chapters from the dissertations of my two students who are trying to finish. They are in really raw form, though. The fourth is a final progress report that is written and is in pretty good shape, although I will have to do a lot of re-writing.
Write a CAREER proposal. Still thinking of a good topic.
Write a proposal to HRF (if they ever put out their RFP). Have a good topic for this.
Write at least one additional NSF proposal. Still thinking of a good topic.
Get Saphira to work (get two important methods to work on her). Saphira is my new instrument. I call her Saphira because of her sapphire blue casing.
Have regular lab group meetings (which I didn't do last semester because I was so crazy).
Prepare my junior student for his qualifying exam.
Continue my BUFF meetings.
Take my kids camping in the Rockies.
Don't let my husband's negativity get me down.
Enjoy life.

Why are female profs so mean?

2005-12-21T08:42:00.000-08:00

Abel Pharmboy asks: "What do you feel were the barriers for The Big Hurt to feel the same way about you or other female grad students?"

Certainly the Big Hurt faced hurdles. As she was so fond of pointing out, she was (at the time, not sure about now) the only female prof in the engineering school with young children. She got her PhD from MIT, which had to be a real picnic.

Does facing and overcoming such hurdles give one the right to belittle others? Obviously not.

Does facing and overcoming such hurdles turn you into a monster? I hope not.

Does facing and overcoming such hurdles require the kind of personality that is domineering, perfectionist, and driven beyond rationality? Sometimes I think so. Our good friend Herman Melville said "all mortal greatness is but disease." I think things have gotten better though, which is why the second generation of female profs is now ... what's the word I'm looking for here? Sane?

A few entries ago I wrote about my Dad, and I included some info about my Mom. I just think she is so incredible that she got a PhD in chemistry, raised five kids, and worked full time. She taught chemistry at a nursing school and eventually became the director of the science division at her school. Did she face barriers? Oh yeah. Did they turn her into a monster? No. Did she have to be a bitch to succeed? No. But on the other hand, she told me once that she had no doubt that she had the ability to be a big-time professor at a research institution, but that she wasn't willing to make the sacrifices required. Her family was too important to her. (Incidentally, I think I was in high school when she told me this, and I gaped at her like she was insane because it felt to me that she had sacrified her family - i.e. me - greatly. Now I am older and wiser.) In addition to making the conscious choice to devote herself to her family, I'm sure two other factors prevented her from getting a job at, for example, Ohio State. One was the good old two-body problem. She went where my dad got a good job. The second was probably lack of opportunities. Not many schools would have even considered her. All these three issues are intertwined in complex ways, and they still are today. They resulted in my Mom working at a job she was probably overqualified for. And she did a great job at it and was at least partially responsible for the success and expansion of the school she worked for. One of the things I always admired about her was that her job involved educating people, predominantly women, so that they could get better jobs and be able to support their families. She taught and awful lot of recently divorced women who had thought they would be stay-at-home moms forever, and had suddenly realized that they needed an education to support themselves and their children. My mom gave those women better lives. She gave them the tools to live independantly.

But maybe my Mom was too nice to be a big-U prof. But even though she wasn't at a Big U, she was still a pioneer and she paved the way for me and my sisters, just as much as or maybe more so that the Big Hurt.

So are we supposed to be grateful to all the Big Hurts of the world for opening doors for us? Probably, yes. But does that make their demeaning behavior okay? I don't think so.

But let's cut to the heart of the issue--how does the mean behavior of those first generation female profs really affect us? If their behavior prevents some women from finishing their degrees, or if it scares women off from the profession, then that is bad. But maybe anyone who is scared off by such behavior isn't meant to be a prof anyway. I think one of the big morals of my Big Hurt story is that you can't let anything, especially not a difficult advisor, prevent you from reaching your goals. Remember, another good friend of ours said, "everybody takes a beating now and then." It is unrealistic to expect to get through grad school or get tenure with some humiliation. (and if no one is around to dish it out, I can usually be counted on to cook up something self-inflicted). To survive, we all have to learn to separate our personal feelings (of being belittled or humiliated) from the rational standards of our profession. In other words, if you are making good progress toward your goal, who cares what your advisor thinks? If you do excellent work, the world will notice, you will get a reputation for excellence, and there is nothing one psycho professor can do to stop you from attaining your goal. My point is that we can be grateful to the Big Hurts of the world without hating them if we learn not to give a shit what they think and not to let them stand in our way. I call this strategy "winning by losing". I let the Big Hurt win all the battles, even though it made me feel like dirt, because in the end I won the war - I graduated.

Of course, it is very easy for me to dispense this advice now, seven years later. At the time, I was wallowing in despair, and it is very difficult to put your personal feelings of humiliation aside and "take your beating and go" under those circumstances. That is why I actively sought out positive and helpful mentors. So another moral of the story is--seek out mentors, and be a good mentor because good mentors are so critical to success of both men and women.

Occasionally there will be circumstances where it seems that one psycho professor really can scuttle your career. For example, let's say that BPT hadn't helped me and I had been forced to leave EPPU. But that would have been a failing of the entire institution, not just the Big Hurt. I like to think that I would have gone and found another good school with a better advisor and would still be in roughly the same position I am in now. But in reality we know that if you discourage and delay people, they will eventually give up. So it is this kind of institutional failure that I think is less common now and has made it possible for us, the second generation of female profs, to survive without the prerequisite of being psychotic.

She Who Must Not Be Named

2005-12-15T11:43:00.000-08:00

The time has come for me to tackle a difficult subject: my PhD advisor. She Who Must Not Be Named. Or as I liked to call her, "The Big Hurt." The joke of this appellation was (and is) that she is barely five feet tall (and I'm 5'10"). She is still there at my alma mater, only now with tenure.

It’s so hard to go back to remember grad school and what she put me through. But I just came back from the dept holiday party and have a couple of glasses of red wine in me, and I feel it is time to try…

I was her first student. Those of you who know about these things know that the first student always gets hit with a load of sh*t. So that was bad enough. When I arrived at my grad school (Extremely Prestigious Private University – EPPU), we had a room full of crap from a recently deceased professor emeritus that I had to clear out before we could buy new instruments and generally get the place up and running. I started research immediately. The first semester, she seemed okay. The problem was me—I had worked for two years after college and I wasn’t used to academic life. Those two years gave me a great deal of lab experience, which was invaluable, but still, doing research and taking three grad courses was a lot. In addition, my husband had stayed behind in our old state because he couldn’t find a job near EPPU, so we were apart for about 6 months and we had only been married for a year. It was ugly. Plus, the grad courses were so much tougher than what I was used to. I had a 4.0 in college, but grad school kicked my ass.

The hardest thing about being your advisor’s first student is not having older students to mentor you. I went to two female students in another PI’s lab for moral support. They were great. Their advisor, Beneficent Prof with Tenure (BPT), figures prominently in this story. He was/is a big famous guy, highly respected in his field. Extremely weird, though, and incapable of speaking plainly on any subject. He is the king of circumlocution.

So anyway, by my second semester, The Big Hurt started to ride me too hard. I just could not accomplish everything she wanted. She met with me one-on-one every week, and frequently I began to cry before I had even left her office. She acquired a couple of MS students and some undergrads, so at least I had some people to commiserate with. But she began almost from day one to get a reputation in the department as difficult, and incapable of admitting when she was wrong. To be fair, she also was having personal problems. I won’t describe those in detail out of respect for her privacy, but they were pretty serious. Anyway, she worked seven days a week. She traded evenings with her husband: one night she would get home by 5 to relieve the babysitter for their toddler son, the next night she would work late (like midnight), while he went home early. Even when she was home, she would be working on her laptop. I just was not and am not willing to do that. Once when I was not able to produce data that she wanted for a talk on Tuesday, she came right out and demanded to know why I didn’t come in on the weekend to get the data. As it turns out, I was having a huge, knock-down, drag-it-out fight with my husband that weekend. I looked her right in the eye and said, “I was having personal issues, and I’m not going to discuss them with you.”

Things grew intolerable. I was avoiding her, and I knew that wasn’t healthy. So I arranged to meet with her on neutral ground (not in her office, which we used to call “the box”). We met in the cafeteria over a cup of coffee. I wrote down a list of the things I wanted to say, and I went through it pretty thoroughly. She didn’t like it much, but she listened, and she even said, “thank you,” in a stiff way, and shook my hand when we were done. I guess because I was her first student I felt that in some way it was my job to help her to develop into a good professor in the same way that it was her job to help me develop into a better student. This was my mistake. I also generally operate in life with the basic assumption that every human is worthwhile and valuable and has something to teach you, from the university president to the janitor. She apparently did not share this view.

This little intervention did no good. It changed nothing. Toward the end of my second year, she forced me to give a presentation at an ACS meeting. I didn’t feel ready, but I did my best. (I gave a practice seminar in front of our department at which she publicly humiliated me.) Things were getting worse and worse, so I devised a strategy. I would go to ACS and give a kick-ass presentation, then I would come back to EPPU and demand some concessions. Part of my plan was to have a evacuation route: I was going to ask BPT if he would be my advisor in the event that the Big Hurt wouldn’t listen to me (I had my own funding from an NSF graduate student fellowship—Thank You, NSF!). So I went to talk to BPT before the conference and described, in detail, my grievances. He understood; after all, he had to work with her pretty closely and could see what a nightmare she could be. He never came right out and offered to be my advisor, but at the very start of the conversation, he said, “you are a good student and you are making good progress toward your degree.” That meant a lot to me. The Big Hurt had never said anything like that to me. At the end of our conversation, he asked me to try one more time to talk to her, and if it didn’t work, he would talk to her.

So I made an appointment with her on a Friday after my hugely successful talk at ACS. Again, I had a written list of points to talk over. I told her things weren’t working and I couldn’t go on like this. She replied that everything was my fault—I wasn’t a good enough student, I wasn’t trying hard enough, I expected everything to be handed to me and wasn’t willing to work hard. I was pretty upset, but it was okay, because I had a plan. After we finished talking, I went to my desk and debriefed myself. I wrote down everything that I could remember her saying. Then I went straight to BPT and told him that I had tried to talk to her, but it didn’t work. I described our conversation in detail. By then it was about 5 pm on a Friday afternoon. He said he would talk to her.

Monday I went to our regular lab group meeting and the Big Hurt said she wanted to meet with me that afternoon. I thought, “great! She’s going to apologize!” I went to BPT and told him of the meeting and he thought she wanted to apologize, too. HAH!!!!!

Whereas I had spent the weekend calming down, she apparently had spent the weekend getting MORE upset. She had written a multi-page single-spaced rant about what a horrible student I was, and when I entered her office, she proceeded to read it to me, word for word. I was blindsided. I had expected some contrition, or at least some attempt to smooth things over. Instead I got my head handed to me. When she first started in on me, I said, “before you go any farther, I just want to say that it is clear that you have a lot to say, so I’m just going to sit here and listen, I’m not going to try to respond to any of this.” She went on for about half an hour. At the end of it, she said that I should (and this is a direct quote) “go find a second-tier school with lower standards” because I wasn’t living up the standards set by her and EPPU. I had a 4.0 GPA in college, I had taken about 12 grad courses and had gotten 10 A’s and 2 B’s, and I had an NSF graduate student fellowship. And she was ready to kick me out of the school. I always knew that she was mentally unbalanced, because she did things that were obviously not in her own self-interest. Now that I am trying to get tenure, I realize how utterly insane this was. I would be overjoyed right now to find a student with his or her own funding, especially an NSF fellowship! But here she was, kicking me out! At the end of the conversation she gave me an ultimatum. “Are you going to get with the program and improve your attitude, or are you going to leave?” (Obviously it hadn’t occurred to her that I might be able to get another professor in our department to take me on as a student.) I stammered something about needing some time to think about it, and fled. Of course I went straight to BPT and reported the whole traumatic incident to him.

To this day I do not know what BPT said to her. Basically I think he told her that she was being an idiot, but in his own circuitous way, so that somehow he got the message across without offending her. One of the many things about her that drove me crazy was her assumption that no one on earth had a harder life than her, and therefore no one could give her advice. She wouldn’t listen to the older professors in our dept because she felt that since they were men, they didn’t understand how hard her life was, raising kids and trying to get tenure. She frequently pointed out that she was the only female professor in the engineering school with young children. She was taking on three new students that fall, so I think BPT also told her that she was going to need me to help train them, and that even if I produced nothing publishable, I was still worth keeping around for that reason alone.

Two days later, BPT came to me and said that the Big Hurt would like to see me. I was so terrified that I refused to see her alone and insisted that BPT come with me. I expected her to apologize, but that day I learned a life lesson. There are some people who simply cannot say the words, “I’m Sorry”. They just cannot do it. She was one. She told me that she valued me and my contribution to the lab and said that she wanted me to stay, but she did not say she was sorry. She never did and never will.

I stayed as her student and three years later, I graduated. Not without pain. But I made it. I think the only reason I graduated was because I got a job. My post-doc institution required that I defend before starting my post-doc position, so I scheduled my defense for Nov 16 so that I could start Dec 1. Two weeks before I was supposed to defend, she cancelled my defense, saying I wasn’t ready. My parents and my husband’s parents had to cancel their flights and travel plans and everything. She postponed my defense by all of two weeks. I defended Nov 30, 1998. When I started to work with my post-doc advisor, it was like I had died and gone to heaven. He was so…rational!

But the Big Hurt wasn’t done with me. When I submitted my dissertation to the library in January, she objected to my acknowledgements. She made me re-write them, because she felt that they cast her in a negative light. She made me re-write my acknowledgements.

Seven years later, only two of my five dissertation chapters are published, because she is such a perfectionist. I have given up on them. Luckily I don’t need them, since I came here to do my post-doc with Big Famous Guy.

Not long ago I went to a conference in the same city as EPPU. I dreaded seeing her there. But she didn’t come. Apparently the two miles to the convention center was too far for her to travel. I was relieved. My friend and fellow Mom Seeking Tenure, Donna, was there. She had heard me tell stories about the Big Hurt, but she thought they must be exaggerations. At the conference she heard me talking to a string of other students and post-docs who have worked with the Big Hurt over the last few years, and we all say the same thing. She is mentally ill. She did things that were detrimental to her own efforts to get tenure, because she could not help herself. She is such a perfectionist, and so deeply, deeply insecure that she shoots herself in the foot.

But the good news is that I am FREE. I am free of her. Now that I have given up on ever publishing the rest of my dissertation, I never have to deal with her again.

Now I am a professor and advisor. I am trying hard not to be like her. But on some level I don’t think I have to worry about it. Because I will never be like her. She obviously has some serious issues that go way beyond science. I learned many things about life and about people from her. One is: usually you get to know someone intimately by being their friend or lover. But you can also get to know someone intimately by being their enemy. And when you learn about someone from that perspective, you see them in some ways more intimately that any of their friends. I know her and I understand her on a level that few people ever will. And once you know someone that intimately, it is hard to hate them. So mostly what I feel for her is pity. She got tenure all right. But her kids are totally screwed up, and I sense that her life is pretty miserable. For all her insight into the issues of her research, she is unable to see her own self in an objective way.

Once, toward the end of my 5 years at EPPU, one of the other professor in our department came to me and said, “I just cannot get along with the Big Hurt, and I see that you have a pretty good relationship with her. Can you help me understand how I can get along with her better?” My answer was, “I don’t have a good relationship with her. I just take my beating and go.”

My Dad (and Mom)

2005-12-12T08:57:00.000-08:00

Two weeks ago I went to a funeral for my husband's Uncle Rich. Funerals do make you think. I watched Rich's kids get up and talk about him, and I thought about what I would say when my father passes away (which, god willing, won't be for a long, long time).

Some wise person once said, "the older I get, the smarter my parents are". As a teenager I thought my parents were disastrous. But now that I have kids of my own, and now that I've learned so much about my husband's alcoholic father, my parents seem like saints. My dad grew up in a small town in Iowa. His father had multiple sclerosis. He was bedridden for most of my dad's life, and died when my dad was about 20. My dad had a much older sister and a much younger brother, so in a lot of ways he was an only child. I think he was incredibly lonely, which explains why he married my mom, who is the 6th of 7 children. Anyway, he didn't want to be a farmer so he decided he should get an education. He had a cousin who was going to college across the river in Nebraska, so on the first day of classes my dad packed up his car and drove over there to see if he could enroll. They took him.

My mom, by contrast, had already watched her five older siblings go through college. Two of them already had PhDs and were teaching at the college when my mom went there. So my mom was already planning on getting a PhD when she met my dad. She is a year older, so when she graduated from college, they got married and went straight to the University of Nebraska, where my dad finished his degree, and my mom started her PhD in chemistry. This is Nebraska, people. In 1961. My mom got pregnant instantaneously and had three children by the time she finished her degree. (Incidentally, on their two graduate student stipends they rented a house and employed a live-in au pair to help with the kids.) Back when there was no powdered formula or disposable diapers or microwave ovens or Barney videos, my mom got a PhD in chemistry in five years while raising three kids. Not that I feel inadequate or anything.

When it was time to go looking for jobs, everyone wanted to hire my dad and no one had much interest in my mom. They found a place that would take them both, but my mom didn't last there long because of all the male chauvanist bullshit. She got a teaching job at a nursing college and did that for the next 20 or so years. She had me shortly after starting her teaching job. My little sister was a huge surprise to everyone 15 years later (when my mom was 45!).

So my parents have four daughters and one son. My brother is a little ... different. He was never the typical boy. He never played sports or excelled at school. So maybe it was because he didn't have a typical son that my dad treated us girls the way he did. I think the biggest gift my parents ever gave me is that they never once, not for a fraction of a second, not overtly, covertly, subliminally or otherwise, led us to believe that there were things we couldn't do or shouldn't do because we were female. It wasn't that they were big cheerleaders. They never said stuff like, "go on, you can do it, go for it!" They just assumed that we could do whatever we set our minds to. If I went to them to ask for permission, they would just give me blank looks and say, "of course you can do it. why wouldn't you be able to?" Once, when I was about 10, my dad bought a lawn spreader which required "some assembly". Looking back I think he must have had a bet with my mom that I could put it together. But whatever the motivation, he just said to me, "put this thing together. Your mom and I are going out for a cup of coffee. Try to have it done by the time we come back." And I did.

When I was in college I told them I wanted to go visit some of my friends who were studying abroad in Europe. They bought me a Eurail pass and let me go to Europe for three weeks alone. At the funeral two weeks ago, my husband's cousin, who is 40, was told by her father to hit the road early because of the threat of snow. And she did. That episode reminded me of the song by No Doubt, "I'm just a girl in the world, that's all that they'll let me be. They won't let me drive late at night." Once my husband and I were going to dinner at another relative's house, and their daughter, who was in her 20's and sharing an apartment with a friend, came over for dinner, too. When she showed up she apologized for being late but said that something odd had happened to the electricity in their apartment. Some of the outlets worked and some didn't and their were no lights in the bathroom. Her dad said, don't worry, punkin, I'll go back there with you after dinner and find the fuse box and fix it for you. Rrrrrrr. Is it so much to ask that fathers treat their daughters like adults? My dad showed me how to flip the switch in the fuse box when I was tall enough to reach it. He showed my how to use a volt meter and wire an outlet and fix a toilet and anything else that had to be done as a normal part of life. And my mom taught me to cook and bake and sew and convert grams to moles. Nothing was off limits. Nothing was "a man's job" or "women's work". My mom often taught evening classes, so my dad did a lot of cooking. My mom even sewed him a frilly pink apron to wear that said "Dad's the cook". My dad changed dirty diapers and got up to feed the babies at night. I have often asked my mom how she was able to raise five children and get a PhD and have a career, and she always says the same thing: "Your dad helped and made it possible."

The other thing my dad did which I think has helped me be successful in life is that he never punished failure. He never punished us for stupid mistakes. Bad behavior, yes. But not accidents or stupidity. Once I was backing "my" car out of the driveway and I sideswiped my mother's car. He came out and looked at it and said "Oh well. It's only money." And that was it. He knew I already felt very stupid. He didn't need to punish me or belittle me by asking pointless questions like "what were you thinking!" Whenever I made mistakes he would say that same things, like "now you know why we don't let you kids do X." Or "that's one mistake you'll never make again." He never yelled. I was probably 12 or so when I first heard him cuss (he said "damn").

I'm a mom now and I know how hard it can be to judge when your kids are ready to take on different responsibilities. I think, having 5 kids, my parents just couldn't do everything for us, so they made sure we learned how to take care of ourselves. Plus I think the fact that they both grew up on the farm gave them a decidedly UNromantic view of childhood. Children on the farm work, and we were expected to work too. I did my own laundry by the time I was 13. When I started highschool I signed my dad's name to all my notes from home (with his permission), so that I could take care of that bit of business by myself. That way the people at school didn't know what my dad's signature looked like. My signature was his signature as far as they knew. My parents raised me to take care of myself. I was a straight-A student, and if I wanted to take a day off from school once in a while I was free to do it. And I did, because I hated high school.

I think these days we really infantalize kids and teach them to be dependent and to feel entitled. I think that if I had had one of those overprotective fathers, I probably wouldn't be a professor now, or even a scientist. I would probably be a real estate agent or a CPA or something. I might still be successful on a lot of levels. But I'm not sure that I would feel that I had the right or ability to choose whatever I wanted. I think I would feel more as though I did what society expected me to do, and I might always wonder if I could have been something different or something more. I don't wonder about that now, and I think I owe a lot of that to my dad.

The Shocking True Story of How I Became a Mom...Seeking Tenure

2005-12-02T10:32:00.000-08:00

My mother and father are both PhD chemists. This explains much about me. When we blew a fuse I got a lecture on electricity. When my mom made gravy she talked about starches polymerizing. My dad measured crisco by water displacement and explained the concept of specific gravity as he helped my mom make apple pies. I am the fourth of five children.
Three of us are scientists.

Yes, my mother has a PhD and raised five children. Not that I feel inadequate or anything.

I went to a small liberal arts college because I had so little confidence in myself in high school that I couldn't face a large school. I went there because my English teacher recommended it (I had an enormous crush on him). I was always little miss straight A's. Quite annoying. In college I wanted to major in English, then psychology, then Russian, then, finally, Chemistry. I switched my major at the end of my junior year and therefore took nothing but chemistry my senior year. I squeeked out a 4.0 anyway. My senior year I also started dating my husband. When I graduated all I wanted was to be with him, so I moved to his state and got a job with a pharmaceutical company. We got married and I decided I wanted to go to grad school to do "something environmental". You must recall that this was in the days before the internet made finding and applying to grad school really easy. I ended up at my grad school at Extremely Prestigious Private University (EPPU) quite by accident. I was my advisor's first graduate student. She turned out to be possessed by the devil, but that is a whole other story. I am also leaving out the mess that our move to EPPU wreaked (wrought?) on my marriage.

After the standard 5 years, I was very near to graduating. My husband was offered a chance to transfer within his company to the land of his birth. I looked for a job there and was extremely lucky to find the ideal post-doc at Fatherland State University (FSU), working for a big, famous, guy (BFG). By the time I defended (Nov 30, 1998, I remember it well), I was 2 months pregnant.

First day of post-doc:
BFG: "I'm going on sabbatical."
Me: "I'm pregnant."

The first two years at FSU were mostly spent falling asleep in various seminars. I wrote only one paper. But a funny thing happened in year 3. BFG took a job on another continent in order to be near his family (who had for years been living on said continent, thousands of miles away). BFG left behind a fully-equipped lab, several students in various stages of their studies, about $1 million in grants, and contacts with various people who control the purse strings of local funding agencies. I pretended that I knew what the hell I was doing and took it all over. I figured as long as I paid for the pizza at the lab meetings, they would believe that I was in charge and take orders from me. And they did! FSU made me a "Laboratory Researcher" and then a Research Professor (about 60% of my salary was "soft money"). I got grants. I published. My department chair loved me, especially because my department started to lose all the people in my specialty and had no one to teach classes. I taught two classes per year and my course evaluations were good. The Dean knew who I was because I analyzed samples for some of his research. My dept chair played an astute political game and got me hired onto the tenure track despite a FSU-wide hiring freeze.

So here I am. When BFG left, I wasn't sure if I could handle being a professor. Especially when I got pregnant about 3 days after he jetted into the sunset. I promised myself that I would give it 40 hours a week. If I couldn't get tenure on that, then I would quit and go into consulting (thereby tripling my salary, by the way). I never really wanted to be a professor, especially after watching my PhD advisor work seven days a week for five years. But when they drop an opportunity like mine in your lap, you'd be an idiot not to at least give it your best shot, right? and so far I am doing pretty good.

There were many times that first year when child #2 got 7 ear infections and had four bouts of the flu that I thought about quitting. But when I seriously started to consider what I would do if I quit, I realized that I couldn't afford to stay home, and there was no other job I could think of that would give me the flexibility of schedule and the first-class medical benefits of the one I've got. So I decided to stick with it until they fired me because my performance was so bad or because I didn't get tenure. I figured by then my kids would be older and life would be easier.

My friend Donna was telling me that every time she complains to her mom about how tough it is to be a professor, her mother just laughs, because her mom worked factory jobs and night shifts and stuff. We forget sometimes how easy our jobs are. In college I worked in the meat department of a grocery store. This job is much easier. I come and go as I please and I can wear jeans to work. What more can a girl ask for?

BUFF lunch

2005-11-29T10:39:00.000-08:00

We had another BUFF lunch today and it went really well. We had 6 women there, including myself and the woman I invited, Dawn, who recently got tenure here. That's a great turnout by my standards. Dawn says the magic number is 8. That's 8 peer-reviewed publications that do not include your PhD or post-doc advisor. Right now I have zero, since my post-doc advisor is on everything I write. But I have three dissertation chapters that are supposed to be finished soon. Problem is that the timetable for them is at the mercy of the students who are writing them. And they are moving slowly. So very slowly. Ugh.

Well, they ain't gonna write themselves. I'd better get back to work.

Back from Balmer

2005-11-21T07:29:00.000-08:00

Well, I survived Baltimore. I used to live there, so it was actually nice in some ways to go back. I got to go to some of my favorite restaurants, including Egyptian Pizza and Bill Bateman's. Bateman's has great wings, if ever you are in "Balmer". I miss Baltimore. The city has a character all it's own. Not always a good character, but always interesting. The conference was good for me. I schmoozed like crazy. I was there from the first talk to the last minutes of the poster sessions every evening, which is very unusual for me. In the past I have felt out of place at these conferences because I didn't know very many people, but at this conference I seemed to be constantly running in to people I knew or people I wanted to meet. I guess that means I am becoming integrated into the vast scientific machine. This would appear to be a good thing.

When I got back on Thursday I was totally baked, so I was glad that I had decided to bag the NYC meeting. I participated by conference call, which is kind of useless, but it did assuage my conscience. Then I had to run to my son's parent-teacher conference (he's at the top of his class!), then I ran to the faculty meeting, driving 30 minutes each way to catch the last 10 minutes of the meeting. Oh well. Such is (my) life.

My technician also survived the cruise. He says the gale they got caught in was pretty bad, and it knocked the power out on the boat for 45 minutes. You can imagine how terrified he was, lubber that he is.

Saturday I bought almost $200 worth of groceries to get ready for Thanksgiving. Spent most of the weekend cleaning the parts of the house that I usually ignore. I'm staying home Wednesday to bake pies and brine the turkey. Just one more lab exersize to go, and a proposal due 12/7, and this accursed semester will be over!

Survival

2005-11-11T03:01:00.000-08:00

I think my head is going to explode. I have only ever had one semester worse than this one. That was Fall 2001, when we had the 9/11 attacks, anthrax, I was pregnant, and I was teaching the lab class for the first time. It helps me to reflect on that awful semester, because it makes this one seems not so bad by comparison. But it has been bad, mostly because of all the travel. I was supposed to go on that cruise in the Atlantic. Well it left on Sunday, and since it conflicted with (a) three days when public schools were closed, (b) my husband's three day business trip, and (c) my leaving for my week-long meeting in Baltimore, I did not go. I sent my technician instead. The boat was supposed to return on Saturday, but my tech called yesterday and told me that bad weather had driven them back to port and they were going to extend the cruise through Tuesday to make up for the lost time. I could hear the seasickness in his voice. I still wish I could have gone, it would have been exciting. But there is only so much one human can stand.

So now I am preparing to leave for my big trip to Baltimore. This is the one big conference that I hit every year, and for some godawful reason they have to schedule it the week before Thanksgiving. I was asked to be on the planning committee for this year's meeting, and I niavely said yes, not realizing the effort involved. No one explained to me what my duties would be at the meeting itself. They have been having conference calls to plan it all, but this Fall they have all been on Fridays, when I have my lab class. So last Friday I actually listened in on the conference call while I was watching my students do their lab. I missed a couple of conference calls, so I obviously missed some important information, but the communication is so bad within the Program Committee that I did not know until Monday that I was expected to be in Baltimore by Friday at 2. Hah! I guess they assume no one on the program committee has a life. So I told them I couldn't be there, and politely informed them that they need to give people a little more notice on these things. I am leaving Saturday at noon, which is bad enough since it means my husband has to spend pretty much the whole weekend alone with the kids. He is very frustrated with me right now. I am also leaving the meeting a little early so that I can get home on Thursday in time to pick up the kids from school. That should really endear me to the program committee. I was supposed to turn right around and go to NYC on that Friday, but I have made an executive decision that I'm going to bag it. I just can't handle it. I will participate in that meeting by phone. I'm not going to commute 2 hours each way for a 3-hour meeting.

Today I have to once again bluff my way through lab class with no data, since the HPLC is not working. Last night I went to the grocery store, and I am working on the laundry so that I can lay out the boys' outfits for all the days I am gone. I already made out menus.

If I can just survive the next week things will start to get better. Wish me luck.

Reflections on Halloween

2005-11-02T12:58:00.000-08:00

I've been so busy lately I haven't even had time to watch streams of the Daily Show. I've had a lot of things on my mind that I wanted to write about but I just haven't had time, so I am wasting the last 30 minutes of my day to post.

Friday night was a Halloween party at my son's elementary school. He also had karate graduation that night, making it a festival of fun for the whole family running from place to place, switching out of school clothes to karate uniforms to Halloween costumes, but that's another story. I was a little shocked at the party at some of the costumes the girls were wearing. His school only goes up to the 3rd grade, so these were 6-9 year old girls wearing sexy kitten costumes and gyrating to the pop songs that the DJ was playing. I'm so out of date that I didn't recognize most of the music. Was it Britney Spears or what? But the girls already knew all the moves and were swinging their hips around in alarming fashion. All I can say is, I'm glad I don't have any daughters, because I would dress them as nuns and not let them leave the house. When my boys watch Cartoon Network they see adds for those Bratz Babies. I find those totally offensive. They are sexualizing little girls. It is so wrong. I am as blue state as they come, but even I feel that pop culture is undermining my attempts to raise my children with healthy attitudes about sex and the role of women in our society. My roommate in college was sexually abused as a child, and I've seen what it did to her psyche. She will never lead a "normal" life. I'm not saying that eliminating sexual images on TV would have prevented her abuse, but I also can't believe it is a good idea to advertise dolls of babies with pouty lips and revealing clothing on TV, either.

Whew. It feels good to get THAT off my chest.

I also had my mentoring committee meeting on Halloween. I was stupid to schedule it at 1 pm on Halloween. That was my fault entirely. So the whole time I was in the meeting I was looking at my watch wondering if I was going to make it to my son's Halloween pageant. Generally the feedback on my CV was good. They told me a lot of things I already knew--I need to publish some papers without my post-doc mentor (so far he is co-author on virtually everything). I need to court my potential letter writers, which means more travel to conferences and to give invited seminars and stuff. I immediately pointed out that travel is very hard for me. And we talked about my need to get some bigger funding fish. All the grants I have come from state or local agencies. I have nothing from NSF or EPA. And although we did just get that huge grant from a federal agency, I am #5 out of 5 PIs on it. So hey, I'm working on it. What else can I say? I have no control over when NSF decides to fund.

When I first walked into the meeting, my dept chair (who is on my mentoring committee) asked me how I was, and I said I was a little stressed out because I have a lab class with 15 students, and my TA just had her baby over the weekend, so she's out of commission for the rest of the semester and the HPLC isn't working. After about an hour, the one male on my committee of 3 mentors had to leave for class. Then my two female mentors and I continued to talk, and dept chair asked what else the dept could be doing for me. I said, "you can pick up my kids when I have to go out of town." I was joking, of course, but then, damn it, tears started to leak out of my eyes. Where did they come from? I blame my hormones, which were crazy because my period just started that morning. I never really cried, I just dripped a little, but that was bad enough. I told my mentors that I'm having a hard semester and I worry that things are only going to get more intense in the next few years. I can handle things right now, but if they get worse, I'm not sure I am going to be able to balance everything. My dept chair says I need to get more help with childcare. That would be in addition to full time day care for child #2 and after school care for child #1. I need help for when I go out of town and I need a baby sitter so that my husband and I can occasionaly spend time alone together. It just seems ridiculous that the $13,000 per year I am already spending on childcare is not enough (and remember that figure is half of what I paid last year, when both boys were in full-time daycare). Plus I cannot muster the time and energy it would take to find someone reliable to care for my children. And I know that my husband would give me greif about not spending enough time with the kids.

Oh sh*t, I just realized that I missed my childcare committee meeting, which started 50 minutes ago. Oops. F***ing irony!

Well anyway, too late to go to the meeting now. On with the show. Maybe it was a good thing that I showed some emotion in my mentoring meeting. Recall that one young female professor in our dept just quit to spend more time with her family. So it's not such a bad thing for me to show my dept chair that I am under a lot of strain, too. This balancing work and family thing is hard. I buzzed out of the meeting to go to son #2's Halloween pageant. I missed the pageant but arrived in time for cupcakes. Then we went home, ordered Domino's, took the boys trick or treating, and managed to get them into bed, with scrubbed teeth, by their usual bedtime and with no major meltdowns. All in all, a good Halloween.

And during all this, it occurred to me: I am giving my boys a happy childhood.

So screw tenure. My life is pretty good.

James Spader's divorce

2005-10-25T12:25:00.000-07:00

I changed the settings on my blog so I won't get any more blogspam comments about James Spader's divorce. Like I care. I can barely keep my own, unfamous, marriage together. It's no wonder celebrities can't stay married with reporters constantly writing about their problems. I try to imagine how I would feel if, after I had a huge fight with my husband, I stopped by the grocery store on the way home from work and found that pictures of us fighting were all over the tabloids. I remember when we were trying to get pregnant (the first time) and were having a lot of trouble. It was so emotionally difficult to be constantly wondering, at every little pang and burp, whether "this is it!" Then to have your fertility problems broadcast to the world on some idiotic tabloid show would have been devastating to me. This is just one of the many reasons I have virtually stopped watching TV. Now I only watch a little with my kids (Teen Titans, Go!).

I have my mentoring committee meeting on Monday, and I had to turn in my package for our pay-for-performance review, so I was forced to take stock of my situation. By the numbers:

Peer-reviewed publications: 15
Book chapters: 3
Total Grants: 16 ($3.4 million including the whopper last week)
Grants with me as PI: 6 ($1.19 million)
Students currently: 5 (4 PhD, 1 MS)
Students graduated: 2 (both MS)
Courses taught: 2 per year
Courses developed: 1
Courses significantly overhauled: 1

On paper it looks pretty good, doesn't it? But then when I talk to my mentors they say I need to get an NSF grant, chair some sessions (which means more travel), and start sucking up to the bigwigs who may someday write letters for my tenure package. ugh. I'm trying to think of something less fun . . . my mind's a blank.

Today my "little" sister called me today to ask for advice on applying to grad school. (Although 15 years younger than me, she is 6 feet tall). Her GPA is not so hot because she is going to an extremely tough school, and her GRE verbal score was marginal (490). Her professors are telling her not to bother applying to grad school. I told her not to give up and give it her best shot. If she doesn't get in the first time around, take some grad courses as an non-matriculated student, get good grades in them, and try again next year. I think she will find grad school a breeze after the college she is at. It's so strange to have people asking me for advice. It's almost as though they think I know what I am doing. Why? Do I look like I do?

Another big fat notch in the belt

2005-10-20T11:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we drove down to DC for the day to present our proposed research in front of the Science Advisory Board. And, miracle of miracles, they voted to fund out proposal to the tune of $1,880,000 over four years. Yay! Much rejoicing and drinking of beer followed as all 5 PIs celebrated. In some circles, $1.8 million may not be a lot, but for us it is huge, quite possibly the biggest grant the entire department brought in this year. I'm still in shock. And this happened just in time for my mentoring committee meeting (on Halloween) and in time for me to add it to my package for this year's pay-for-performance adjustments. Life is good.

Also today I submitted my re-worked Career proprosal to the NSF unsolicited category. I'm asking for about $500,000 over three years for me and one co-PI. I feel that this is one of the best proposals I have ever written, and I will be crushed if (when?) it doesn't get funded. I got lots of good advice from my senior co-PIs on the way down to DC yesterday about the "broader impacts" part of the proposal, so I re-wrote that section and took it to one of my designated mentors to look at this morning. He gave me even more good advice (list the undergrads and high school students you have mentored by name and give a sentence explaining their projects). And I even remembered to include the mentoring I did for Chem 200, which is a new class run by the Chemistry Department with funds from NSF for their "Undergraduate Research Center." That ought to help, right? I never really understood that "broader impacts" stuff before. Now I'm finally starting to get it.

I have two PhD students who are trying to finish by Christmas. I doubt that both of them will make it, in fact I think the odds are high that both will miss the deadline and have to pay tuition for next semester. They are both sending me new drafts of their papers every week, which is a little overwhelming for me. But I'm eager to get them out and get their papers published.

My student centered learning experiment in my lab class is going really well. The students turned in their lab reports last week, and then they turned in their grades of each other's lab reports this week. I still have to do the final tallies, but they frequently gave out lower grades than I did for the same lab reports. At least they are taking their grading responsibilities very seriously, and I think they are learning A LOT. Not enjoying it much, but learning a lot. And after all, isn't that what it's all about?

The Doctor is In

2005-10-11T12:08:00.000-07:00

One of the things I wanted to do with this blog was dispense useful advice, and having nothing better to write about today, here goes.

To be successful as a woman with children on the tenure track, I advise you do three things:
1. Do not be a perfectionist. If you are a perfectionist by nature you should immediately quit your job and stay home with your children, because just keeping your house clean and your children clothed with take all of your time.
2. Delegate, delegate, delegate. Find a graduate student to do most of your work for you.
3. Say no to every request from professors (they can get along fine without you) and other adults. Say yes to students only on rare occasions. Say yes to your children only about 70% of the time. Before agreeing to do anything for professors or students, ask yourself, "how is this going to help me get tenure?" If the answer isn't obvious, say no. Before saying yes to your children, verify that their request complies with all local and federal statutes and is covered by your health insurance and/or homeowners policy.

Following these three simple rules will ensure that you do not end up overburdened.

Rule #3 tends to be the hardest for people, so as a companion, here is a list of things NOT to do.

1. do not read anything that might be educational.
2. do not write progress reports (students should be doing this).
3. do not prepare for class.
4. do not clean up after your children if they are 3 or older.
5. do not clean up after your husband.
6. do not cook meals with more than 4 ingredients.
7. do not answer the telephone.
8. do not check your email more than twice an hour.
9. do not watch television.
10. do not throw parties.

My embarrassing CAREER story

2005-10-06T08:26:00.000-07:00

Here's a lovely story to prove to y'all that people with PhDs are occasionally idiotic, too. I wrote a CAREER proposal. Had it all ready to go. Clicked the "allow SRO access" button in Fastlane and everything. Then things went horribly wrong.

But let me back up for a moment. The CAREER proposal (for me) was due on a Wednesday. I had been invited to a planning workshop for a funding agency on Tuesday and Wednesday, so I carefully planned my time so that the proposal would be finished by Monday afternoon (since, as you all know, I almost never work past 4:30). This is how I manage to work only 40 hours a week and to keep my life sane. By planning ahead. So Monday afternoon I clicked the "allow SRO access" button, and thought I was finished.

Then, on Tuesday during the workshop in another city, my cell phone rings. It's Mary (name changed to protect the guilty) from my university's SRO. She tells me I can't list another professor as senior personnel on a CAREER proposal. Okay, so maybe I should have read the program announcement a little more closely. So I tell her to take him off. That's okay, right? He knows he can't be a PI, and he won't mind having his name disappear as long as he gets some money if the grant is awarded. Plus, this is the CAREER award, people! My odds of being funded are approximately one in a gajillion. Crisis averted, right?

Later that day, my cell phone rings again. It's Mary from SRO. My font size is too small. Okay, so maybe I should have read the program announcement a little more carefully. It is pushing the page limit as it is, and an increase in font size will require some cutting. Okay, don't panic, I tell myself. I can leave the workshop, go back to my office, edit the proposal down to size and still get it in by the deadline. I leave the workshop at 7 pm, get back to my office at around 9, to find that the air conditioning in the building is broken. My office is 85 degrees. I increase the font size from 10 to 12. The proposal goes from 15 to 22 pages. I must now cut one third of my proposal away. By 10 pm I realize that this is hopeless. I'm hot and tired, and I have to leave the house at the crack of dawn Wednesday morning to return to my workshop. I decide to retreat and live to fight another day. I can submit the same proposal (without the educational component, which will allow me to meet the page limit) to the unsolicited RFP in my NSF section (which is due in October). That way my "senior personnel" can be the co-PI that he deserves to be. I leave a voice mail for Mary at ORSP telling her to scuttle the whole thing.

I e-mail by senior person and explain what happen and apologize for putting him through weeks of editing for nothing. He is older and wiser and writes back that Mary has her head up her ass, and NSF accepts 10-point font all the time. I am embarrassed, but I soothe my ego by thinking that the unsolicited section has a better funding rate (10%) than the CAREER award (like 0.000001%) and is more fair to my collaborator.

Last week I got a newsletter from one of my professional organizations informing me that the CAREER program in my area got about 40 proposals and expects to fund 15-20% of them. Mary in SRO, how I curse thee!

So today I am re-opening that sealed document, the proposal I haven't looked at since July, to edit it for submission to the unsolicited program. Sigh. I am an idiot.

Happy Anniversary

2005-10-03T10:04:00.000-07:00

Today is my 13th wedding anniversary, and so I thought this would be a good time to explain why my marriage is a mess. I have been seeing a marriage counselor for about 3 years, since shortly after my second child was born. In retrospect, it is clear to me that our problems began when we had our first child, and that I glossed over them shamelessly in order to convince myself that our relationship was stable enough to handle a second child, which I wanted very badly. Three years of marriage counseling has taught me so much about marriage and life (and, as we shall see, about alcoholism) that I feel totally removed from the woman who was afraid to pick up the phone three years ago and seek help. In fact counseling has been good for me in many ways that go way beyond my marriage. I highly recommend it. One of the best things I learned in marriage counseling is that my marriage isn't as bad as I thought. So go figure.

Here's what is wrong with my marriage: My husband's father is an alcoholic. He was a salesman in the days of the three-martini lunch, and regardless of what he did during the day, in the evenings he would come home from work and begin drinking his vodka martinis until, by dinnertime, he was smashed. Then he would sit down to dinner and survey his family: his enabler wife, his eldest son (my husband), his middle son, and his youngest daughter. For complicated reasons, having to do with the fact that he himslef was an oldest child, he focused his displeasure on his eldest son, spouting verbal abuse nightly that was all the more difficult for my husband to bear because, when sober, he was such a nice guy and good father. And my mother in law watched it happen and did little to stop it. She did make some attempts to control her husband but they were ineffective. To make up for her shortcomings in that crucial area, she mothered all of her children, but especially my husband, with fervor. As a stay-at-home mom, she did everything for her children, except teach her sons to iron or cook or clean up after themselves. She baked cookies and sewed Halloween costumes and paid their bills and washed their laundry even when they were old enough to do it themselves. She was especially protective of my husband and tried to shield him from all of the shocks of life, except, of course, her own husband's destructive tirades.

I'm not angry at my husband's parents. My father in law's own mother apparently drank herself to death when he was 16, so it's easy to see the issues that drove him to drink. And my mother in law is a thoughtful, kind woman who has been wonderful to me. But they both failed what was probably the biggest test of their lives. And they continue to fail every day as my father in law continues to drink, grows morbidly obese, and won't leave the house without his wife. He won't visit us (we live about 4 hours away), nor will he visit his other son, whose wife just had their first child (they live 2 hrs away). And he certainly won't visit his daughter and her four kids, who are far enough away to require a plane ride. He can't walk through the airport, and can't fit in an airline seat. As a result, my mother in law won't visit us either, unless she can drive down and back in a day, and even that she does rarely. I could really use her help (see recent Boston trip as exhibit A), but she is not available.

All this has left my beloved husband as the classic adult child of an alcoholic. He is a perfectionist, yet also a procrastinator. He complains but does nothing. He expects me to fix everything. He is the most psychosomatic person I have ever met.

But, happily, all I have to do is completely ignore his bad parts and our marriage is actually quite harmonious.

Top ten things I have learned from marriage counseling:
1. he will never, ever, in a million years, leave me.
2. even though he wants me to be perfect, I don't have to be perfect because he will never, ever, in a million years, leave me.
3. no matter how long you have been married, you probably don't know your spouse as well as you think you do. Especially in alcoholic families, who don't talk about the problem, you can be married for a decade (as I was) and still have no clue about your spouse.
4. your spouse does not have go with you to marriage counseling. It can work just fine without him/her.
5. no one talks about their marital problems. we all pretend to be blissfully married to a perfect mate. we may complain about small things, like who does the dishes, but people rarely admit that they are having problems, until one day, all of a sudden, they are divorced. in this sense, having a troubled marriage is more difficult and more damaging than stuff you are "allowed" to talk about, like major illness, or a death in the family.
6. as soon as you tell someone that you are having marital problems, you find out that they are, too. it's extraordinarily cathartic.
7. putting 5 and 6 together means that anyone who tells you that s/he is having marital problems is much less likely to get divorced than all those other people who pretend to be fine.
8. http://www.babeland.com/
9. often we marry the person we need, not the person we want. My husband wanted Martha Stewart/Stepford Wife. Instead he got me. I will never decorate our house to his satisfaction or cook a pot roast, or bake 30 different kinds of cookies at Christmas, but I also will not let him become an alcoholic like his father.
10. there are many ways to be married. some married couples live in different countries. some dads stay at home, some moms get thrown in jail for not revealing their sources. everyone is different. and hey, if it works for you, go with it.

I was watching something on the Discovery Channel about the evolution of the brain, and they pointed out that animals that live in packs invariably have larger brains than those that fly solo. This is because managing social relationships is the most intellectually challenging thing living creatures do. And the hardest relationship of all is the one with your spouse, because it is voluntary, and therefore easily (too easily) dissolved. Thus when I die, I think the proudest accomplishment of my life will not be that I got a PhD or got tenure or raised two kids. It will be that I kept my marriage together.

Happy anniversary, honey.

Dean Aftermath

2005-09-30T12:29:00.000-07:00

We had a very good lunch with the new Dean. I got about 10 women to show up (many had conflicts but wanted to come). The Dean spent about an hour with us. I had planned to have a low-key, get-to-know-you kind of session, but a few attendees decided to jump right in and start voicing concerns about the tenure clock and tenure expectations. At our university, anyone (male or female) who has a baby while on the tenure track and extend the clock by one year. Whether they choose to do that depends very much on how they think that decision will be percieved by the tenure committee. Donna has chosen to take her year (and so will her husband, who is also a professor here), but she recieved a lot of conflicting advice on the subject. I don't face that choice since I was not on the tenure track when I had my two boys. Donna and I discussed it and we agree that it's not the maternity leave that gets you. It's that 6-month period that every baby goes through when s/he is sick all the time. Every day you show up to work wondering whether you're going to get the dreaded call from your daycare center and have to rush off to pick up the baby. Extending the tenure clock for one year helps, but my fear is that the Dean and many other well-meaning people will reduce all of our discussions of the barriers we face to this one issue.

We also discussed the difficulties associated with child care. The Dean set up a task force on the subject (I got myself volunteered for that one which met that very morning before the Dean lunch). I had to laugh when, at lunch, he said something like, "I'm gathering this is an important issue." Like, duh!

After the Dean rushed off to his next appointment, many of us stuck around to talk more. Mostly to just vent, but some constructive things were said. One of the women at lunch was Dana, who has a big two-body problem. Her husband is a professor at another university and they live halfway between the two schools, giving each of them a 90-minute commute. They have a 19-month old daughter. I had heard that Dana was leaving her job here, and she confirmed that at the meeting. She said she wants to have another child and just can't handle the commute any more. She is hoping to get a job at her husband's school and to work part time in a 20% hard money position. They are moving so that they will both have only a 5-minute commute. Privately she told us that one of the senior faculty in our dept told her not to have any more children. I can guess who it was, and I have to say he is kind of a nut job anyway, and I wouldn't pay too much attention to anything he says, but it's still very discouraging to be told that by anyone. We talked about the idea of having a fast tenure track and a slow tenure track. I like that idea.

On a personal note, during our conversation after the Dean left, I talked about my frustration with the fact that my husband feels that I don't spend enough time with my family when I only work 9-4:30 most days and I never take work home with me or work on weekends. Everyone at the table was shocked that I could survive working such few hours. So on the one hand I feel proud of myself that I can manage on less than 40 hrs a week. But on the other hand I feel somehow guilty that I don't work harder. Am I a great role model who is successfully balancing work and family? Or am I a traitor who gives all female profs a bad name for not working hard enough? I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't. No matter how hard we try, no matter what we do, it is never right, never good enough. So I always choose to just completely ignore what everybody says and follow my gut. My gut says 40 hrs a week is enough. I haven't worked more than that since I came to this school as a post-doc 7 years ago, and I'm not going to start now. In the immortal words of Sid Vicious, "all you cowboys can kiss my a$$".

Here's what I think we need to do: blow it up. I don't think we should try to tweek the current tenure system, we need to blow it up and start over. Why? 1. Tweeking says the current system is basically okay. It's not. 2. Tweeking will never be enough. Bigger changes are needed. 3. People need to know that major changes are coming. Tweeking allows them to be complacent and not really face the issues. 4. The current system doesn't work very well for men either. They just don't know it. It sucks and it is unfair to everyone, not just women.

Blow it up. Here's what I'd like to see. A variable tenure clock for everyone of 5 to 9 years. You choose when to go up for tenure, and you don't need an excuse to take a little longer. Some people are just late bloomers. Plus, we need more hard money non-tenure track positions. In exchange for the hard money, these non-tenure track people would teach more. Plus there should be a process by which people can jump back and forth from tenure to non-tenure track positions by petitioning the university. Again, you shouldn't need an excuse (like birth of a child) to do this. All kinds of stuff happens in life that might make a person want to puts things on hold, or speed things up. Universities ought to be flexible in these days when the job market as a whole has become much more flexible.

Do I have time to agitate for these changes? Nope. Maybe after I have tenure...

Back to normal?

2005-09-27T09:22:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm back from Boston and survived my trip to NYC yesterday. Note to self: don't forget to put that down as an "invited seminar" on your CV. Today is a typical up and down day:

My student, SD, has excellent research results to show me!

Have to take car to body shop to fix major dent resulting from Boston trip.

Ion Chromatograph (this week's lab for my lab class) is acting up. Spent two hours on it and now it seems to be fixed.

Computer on one of my instruments died. Two weeks to fix. (Remember "The Money Pit"? everything takes "two weeks". )

The meeting I arranged between our new Dean and the untenured female faculty is tomorrow at noon. I thought we were going to the Faculty Club so there was no need to arrange food, but while I was in Boston I got an email informing me that we were NOT going to the Faculty Club, and since I was in NYC yesterday, today was the first chance I had to arrange catering. Luckily I found a place that can do it at the last minute. I printed out the tally I did of the female faculty ratios on our campus (Campus wide: 20%. My dept: 35%), so I think I am ready for the meeting.

Due to my interaction with the Dean, he volunteered me to serve on some panel addressing childcare issues on campus. So that meets for the first time tomorrow at 9:30. Then at 2 I agreed to do an interview with someone who is doing a dissertation on mentoring issues in academia. So it is a busy day tomorrow.

What about Thursday? See allergist in the morning (pick up referral before I go over there), take care to body shop, then meet with marriage counselor at 4. I may not come in to work at all. And Friday of course is my lab class. If the IC works today, I am ready for class. If not, I fall back on the last refuge of the incompetent: using last year's data.

Stormy weather

2005-09-20T10:23:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm in Boston getting trained to use my new instrument. I haven't posted in a while because I've been in the middle of a difficult time in my personal life. Maybe it was because of the tension caused by my upcoming trip, but for whatever reason my husband and I had a huge fight last week that left me barely functional (emotionally speaking) for several days. And now I'm in Boston. this morning he called me to ask where younger son's shoes were. How am I supposed to know, I'm in Boston for god's sake! Before I left I laid out outfits for both boys for every day I'll be away, and we made out menus for lunch and dinner for everyone. Since we had just made up from a big fight I was careful not to sound totally exhasperated (sp?) with his "feigned incompetence." I love my husband, but he is, by his own admission, very high maintenance.

I am staying with his cousin and her family in the Boston area. She is a stay at home mom with one daughter (5) and they just moved into a huge McMansion, where she is remodeling everything using mostly the Restoration Hardware and Pottery Barn catalogues. Everything is so tasteful. It really does feel like a 5-star hotel to me. They drive twin Lexus RS330's. But her husband works in Boston proper and never gets home before 8 pm. So all in all, I prefer my 3-bedroom ranch and getting my whole family together for dinner at least three nights a week.

The October cruise has been postponed due to the Hurricane Katrina cleanup, so I can stop worrying about that and find something else to fret about. Thursday night we are supposed to finish training at 5, so I will drive straight home, getting in around 10, then Friday I teach lab class starting at 9:15, then take myself and both boys to the dentist in the afternoon (missing the faculty meeting). Monday I get to go into NYC for the day (lovely 2-hour commute each way). After that, my life can get back to "normal". Whatever that is.

Training on new instrument

2005-09-13T12:52:00.000-07:00

Spent all day training on new instrument. Brain fried. Going to Boston for even more training all next week. Husband is not happy. Worked out emergency child care for Monday night when I am gone and hubby is playing golf "for work". Much marital strife. Do not have heart to tell him that boat is scheduled to leave Oct 8 for 8-9 days at sea.

Have to get instruments working for my lab class before I leave. Will work on that tomorrow.

Brain fried.