One of the most interesting sessions at the NSF IGERT 2010 Project Meeting was a panel of men and women who participated in the IGERT program as students and are now working in a variety of different careers. The point of the panel was to hear about the ways that they felt their experiences as IGERT trainees prepared them for their current positions, as well as to identify aspects of their current jobs where more preparation might have been helpful.
The session was moderated by Judy Giordan (President and Co-Founder, Visions in Education, Inc.). The IGERT alums who participated in the panel were:
Fabrisia Ambrosio (University of Pittsburgh)
Abigail Anthony (Environment Northeast, a non-profit)
Edward Hederick (Congressional Fellow)
Lisa Kemp (Co-founder, Ablitech, Inc.)
Henry Lin (Amgen, Inc.)
Yaniria Sanchez de Leon (University of Puerto Rico)
Andrew Todd (U.S. Geological Survey)
Marie Tripp (Intel)
What helped you prepare for your current role?
Category Archives: Tribe of Science
IGERT meeting: the Digital Science panel.
As mentioned in an earlier post, I was recently part of a panel on Digital Science at the NSF IGERT 2010 Project Meeting in Washington, D.C. The meeting itself brought together PIs, trainees, and project coordinators who are involved in a stunning array of interdisciplinary research programs. Since the IGERT program embraces mottos like “get out of the silos” and “think outside the box”, my sense is that the Digital Science panel was meant to offer up some new-ish tools for accomplishing tasks that scientists might want to accomplish.
The blogger’s hypothetical imperatives.
In the midst of the ongoing conversation about managing career and housework and who knows what else (happening here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and likely some places I’ve missed), ScientistMother wondered about one of the blogospheric voices that wasn’t taking an active role in the discussion. She mused in a comment at Isis’s blog:
Do we ever get a post from DrugMonkey about how he does it? He has kids and a wife (who I think is a scientist) but he rarely talks about balance issues. I’m sure its been an issue. Until the MEN start talking about its not going to change.
When DrugMonkey demurred, she followed up with a post at her own blog:
You have stated on your blog that you believe that gender equality in science is a good thing. Yet you rarely talk about some of the balancing issues or the parental issues. I have the link up that shows you think its important. Yet outside of that post originally done 2 years ago, you don’t talk about fatherhood or balancing fatherhood and partnerhood with science.
In the discussion in the comments following her post, ScientistMother quotes from the post from the DrugMonkey vault she has in mind:
The work-life balance minefield.
That all said, as a woman in science, it is sometimes disheartening to almost never hear an article suggest that a woman in science discuss household duties with her partner and split them evenly. The author of your article makes the statement that women bear the burden of household labor, but until scientists begin to tell other scientists that this isn’t right, women are going to continue to leave academic science for fear of not being able to “balance” work and family.
You can be right and be practical at the same time. These need not be mutually exclusive. I also think that you need not choose between achieving tenure and advocating for social justice. And, until you stop choosing, the pipeline is going to continue to leak like a sieve.
–Isis the Scientist, “A Response on Men, Women, Housework, and Science”
I feel compelled to add, as I have written in many blog-post comments over the last few days, that I deeply respect the value and autonomy of individual relationships — and this, too, is an important part of this calculation. Asking a woman to do more because she is a woman is never fair. But personal relationships are not appropriate places for philosophers or career advisers to lurk. It’s up to each couple — not me, not feminist critics, not tradition — to negotiate housekeeping, childcare, or other domestic responsibilities, and the other aspects of personal relationships. The goal is for those choices to be freely made and not coerced. So men, and women: It’s up to you and your partner to set the terms, but please make sure those decisions are made as freely as can be achieved.
–Jim Austin, “A Special Message for Men: Do Your Share”
While a robust internet discussion about careers and home-life and gendered division of labor has been going on, I have been sitting on the sidelines. (And baking cupcakes and making other necessary preparations for the joint birthday party we hosted for the Free-Ride offspring this past weekend. Plus wondering if this is the year that the social judgment will be spoken aloud, whether by someone outside the family or by one of the sprogs: “How is it that you can make them share a party like that rather than giving each of them a distinct birthday party close to their actual month and day of birth?” How indeed.)
It’s not that I don’t know something about trying to combine a career with family and obligations outside that career (although balance is not the right word to describe that kind of task). But it is hard to speak of these experiences without someone feeling as if my “is” is intended to have the force of an “ought”.
And that jump is pretty hard not to make, given that one thing that girls and women in American society are socialized to do pretty darn reliably is to judge other girls and women (and, of course, to judge themselves as girls or women). Is there a downside to a particular option? We will find it, even if it is just hypothetical. (And laboring under the burden of hypothetical downsides can be its very own downside.) We can speak about what works for us individually, but do so with the awareness that it might stop working, at which point we have to figure out some other option.
IGERT meeting: some general thoughts.
About three weeks ago, I was in Washington, D.C. for the NSF IGERT 2010 Project Meeting. I was invited to speak on a panel on Digital Science (with co-panelists Chris Impey, Moshe Pritzker, and Jean-Claude Bradley, who blogged about it), and later in the meeting I helped to facilitate some discussions of ethics case studies.
I’ll have more to say about our panel in the next post, but first I wanted to share some broad observations about the meeting.
IGERT stands for “Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship”, and the program is described thusly:
Shrinking budgets + skyrocketing subscription fees = UC boycott of NPG.
Economic recovery has not yet made its presence felt at public universities in California. (Indeed, at least in the California State University system, all things budgetary are going to be significantly worse in the next academic year, not better.)
This means it’s not a great time for purveyors of electronic journals to present academic libraries in public university systems with big increases in subscription prices. Yet Nature Publishing Group has, apparently, done just that by some 400%. And, as noted by Christina Pikas and Dorothea Salo and Jennifer Howard in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the University of California system has decided that what NPG is offering is not worth the asking price.
Which means a system-wide boycott of NPG journals is being organized, as outlined in this letter (PDF) from the executive director of the California Digital Library, the chair of the University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication, and the convener of the University Librarians Council.
Interestingly, the boycott goes further than just encouraging UC libraries to drop their costly subscriptions to NPG journals. From the letter:
Ethics case study: science goes to the dogs.
I want to apologize for the infrequency of my posting lately. Much of it can be laid at the feet of end-of-term grading, although today I’ve been occupied with a meeting of scientists at different career stages to which I was invited to speak about some topics I discuss here. (More about that later.) June will have more substantive ethics-y posts, honest!
Indeed, to tide you over, I want to ask for your responses to a case study I wrote for the final exam for my “Ethics in Science” class.
First, the case:
Pack your bags: assessing young scientists’ commitment to science.
DrugMonkey has a poll up asking for reader reports of the science career advice they have gotten firsthand. Here’s the framing of the poll:
It boils down to what I see as traditional scientific career counselling to the effect that there is something wrong or inadvisable about staying in the same geographical location or University when a scientist move across the training stages. From undergrad to grad, grad to postdoc or postdoc to faculty.
First, if you’ve gotten advice on your scientific career, go respond to the poll. Then, come back and we’ll chat.
The corresponding question for the science PIs: graduate student work hours.
From the last poll you probably guessed that this one was coming.
I expect my graduate students to be working:Market Research
I’ll be interested to see whether there’s any correspondence between the hours demanded by PIs who read this blog and the hours demanded of graduate students who read this blog.
Once again, feel free to discuss the issue of appropriate student workload and/or humane management of graduate students in the comments.
A quick question for the science graduate students: work hours.
The issue came up in my “Ethics in Science” class today, so I figured it was worth mounting a quick (and obviously unscientific) poll:
My graduate advisor expects or requires me to work:survey software
Feel free to discuss in the comments.