I always knew I would be a scientist. I never intended to marry or have children (but did). When I became pregnant during graduate school, I was prepared for my life to change.
I was not prepared, however, for my child to have a potentially fatal congenital condition, nor was I prepared for the vehement backlash from my graduate adviser for taking time to care for my newborn. I now understand how priorities shift any time life changes occur. Sometimes the luxury of a single-minded focus on career must be sacrificed to balance other needs.
My husband also has a demanding career, though not in science. Before having children, we could be equally devoted to our work. But now, to maintain our sanity and a healthy marriage and family life, we negotiate constantly. Everything is on the table: household chores, parenting duties, our own personal demands.
At some point after we began to have children, it became clear to me that if I stayed in academe, I would always be competing with other academics for whom the career (or the science) would be the most important thing in their lives, bar none. I had to ask myself if I could do that, and if I wanted to. The answer to both questions was "no."
Throughout that personal and professional transition, from my darkest days in graduate school through the beginning of my career in academic administration, the X-Gals have been there to provide support and encouragement. If you've been reading our columns, you know that we are an informal group of nine female biologists who began meeting in 2000 and have been supporting one another ever since. It has been through our daily e-mail discussions, random visits in far-removed cities and virtual happy hours (now that few of us live in the same city) that I have found the confidence to both be true to my heart and enjoy the journey.
I first took a job in academic administration because I could not move away from the surgeon on whom my infant's life depended. It is, however, due to my training as a scientist, rather than in spite of it, that I have found a vocation I never expected to love. My contribution to the X-Gals series in The Chronicle looks at a career in administration for science Ph.D.'s.
My particular position involves teaching, student-program administration, running several of our summer research programs, soliciting grants for undergraduate science education, and helping students navigate the research enterprise at our institution (everything from finding a faculty mentor to submitting grants themselves).
One issue that has been revisited many times within our group is the definition of success. In our last installment, Meg Murray suggested that female scientists may need to modify their definition of success. "Success" in the sciences is often considered to be synonymous with "tenure track." I think the perceived misalignment of who we are and what we do (or can do) is the source of much of our personal struggle with defining such success.
We X-Gals like to say that being a scientist is who we are. But does that change with our job title? Our employment status? Our "track"?
For me, I haven't so much modified my definition of success as expanded my definitions of scientist, mentor, and teacher. I would argue that there are alternative careers to the tenure track that still allow us to be a scientist and are truly aligned with the fields we love and with who we are. We just have to open our minds to those careers.
Scientists have special strengths. We are trained to overcome boundaries and to both see and capitalize on interconnections, patterns, subtle parallels, and broad perspectives. We have internalized the logical progression of the scientific method and, as a result, make excellent problem-solvers, whether the challenge is related to research, pedagogy, negotiating bureaucracy, or outsmarting toddlers.
Perhaps because academe seems to be the last bastion of that mode of thinking, we isolate the relevance of our training to a tenure-track job. That is unfortunate. And wrong.
I think if we can see past the blinders we've inherited from our advisers and peers, we can make the transition to other roles and use well the strengths we have cultivated. For me, administration has been enjoyable and fulfilling, with benefits I never expected and could not have predicted. It isn't, however, research at the bench, nor is it a tenure-track position, and, as such, it has some drawbacks as well.
Let's start with the benefits:
Broad interactions within science. The focus required of dissertation research can lead to a myopic view of science. I had forgotten that before I began graduate school in biology, I loved all science. Where had my passion for astronomy, math, and chemistry gone? Working with science students in all disciplines has reawakened that core love of science for me.
Commonality of purpose without tenure pressure. One member of our group, Marypat, wrote in a recent e-mail message to us how surprised she was by the enthusiasm she witnessed at a recent meeting of nonacademic biologists in her area: "Pretty much everyone was happy. Really happy in their careers, and comfortable with changing jobs and learning new things. And it felt so different from the vibe I have felt at (academic conferences), in which there is so much angst about jobs and funding and tenure and being smarter than the next guy and making him/her look dumb." She added, "These folks all work hard. They do real science and publish and present their research. Many are involved with conservation groups or other organizations and do some form of teaching/outreach."
I feel the same way at the professional meetings I attend. The varied backgrounds of people in my field are amazing, yet they all are dedicated to supporting students in the sciences, excited by new initiatives, and willing to collaborate on every level.
Having an impact on large numbers of students. It was always important to me to be a mentor. I have found that encouraging students in the sciences is one of the most fulfilling things for me as a scientist. In my position, I teach and personally serve as a mentor for students in my classes. Those I have assisted individually who have gone on to graduate and medical school are dear to my heart.
But I am most proud of the programming I have helped put in place that affects hundreds of students each year. A recent grant has allowed us to greatly expand the interaction of faculty members with undergraduates in the laboratory. We have already seen an increase in the numbers of our students, especially women and members of minority groups, who are on a path to a career in the sciences.
If I had become a tenure-track scientist, I can safely say that neither my original research area nor my own personal mentorship of a few undergraduates and graduate students each year would have had that kind of effect.
Less stress. The level of stress I have in my job is nowhere near what I felt as I was finishing my dissertation. What caused me the most stress as I looked toward my career was the competition. I am good at what I do now, but I am not required to place my family on the back burner to be good at it. I have bad weeks or months, but I spend time with my children and love my job, so, for me, it is a trade-off worth making.
Using what you've learned. The Ph.D. is not wasted in an administrative career. I use my training as a scientist every day -- in advising students, in talking to faculty members, in writing grants, etc. Plus, the Ph.D. gives me the formal credential I will need to move up the ranks of academic administration. It has already given me a leg up over my administrative counterparts who lack a doctorate.
Now for some of the drawbacks, as I see them:
A less-flexible schedule. Most weeks I work more than 40 hours, but not much more. The workload is usually doable if I come in early or eat at my desk a few days. For the most part, I have to be in an office, on the campus, with little or no ability to work from home. I don't have a lot of time in my schedule to devote to my research; I have to take actual vacation time, usually scheduled weeks in advance, to chip away at my research or publications.
Research and administration occupy different worlds. Every process on the research side of a top university, from purchasing through appointments, is streamlined. Faculty members must be able to acquire equipment, supplies, and personnel efficiently and with minimal oversight. I was trained in a research environment but now I work in administration (at a research university), and that transition required a drastic shift in my thinking. In my first week on the job, I was shocked to find I could not simply order things I needed, as I had in the lab, and that doing so would alienate five people whose job it was to place, check, approve, receive, and verify each order.
As an administrator, key requisitions and phone orders take weeks, and posting a position and filling it has taken anywhere from six months to a year. I did come to terms with the slower pace when I realized that I would at least have plenty of advance warning should my job ever be in jeopardy.
Ownership of ideas. A good research idea, no matter how successful, still belongs to the researcher. It rarely becomes the "property" of the institution. But in administration, a good idea in student programming has to be subsumed and permanently institutionalized in order to become a banner program of a college or university and earn a spot in the institutional budget. The original "owner" of that idea is unimportant.
Then there is the fact that, by my position alone, I don't qualify to be a principal investigator on grants, despite my success in both federal and corporate fund raising. I have to submit a request for special permission to be a P.I. every time I apply for grants to support my programs, and sometimes it comes down to the wire without knowing if my name will be crossed off the proposal I designed and wrote because I didn't get the tandem approvals from the associate dean, dean, and vice president for research in time.
Credibility. Although my Ph.D. and my training as a scientist give me credibility at some level, the class system is alive and well in academe. Taking a non-tenure-track position, especially at a research university, cannot be about ego. While most faculty members are receptive to good ideas no matter where they originate, there are those who are condescending and disrespectful (sometimes for fun).
That attitude, when it arises, makes my job less pleasant and is ultimately counterproductive to the long-term quality of the university's programs as a whole. In a large research university, faculty members are unable and often unwilling (especially in the face of tenure review) to provide the services necessary to link education with research. However, some professors have realized that being collegial with people like me gets things done.
Sure, there are things I miss about the lab. Sometimes I walk through a hallway that smells of ethanol or a fresh autoclave and reminisce with a twinge of sadness. But I'm not sure if I'm sad for my research career or for the loss of the naïveté with which I entered research as an undergraduate.
I'm certainly not sad about where I ended up. I was, in my mind, a scientist before I was ever awarded my first grant or published my first paper, and I will be a scientist long after.
