Category Archives: Diversity in science

Job opening to support STEM students who are low-income, first-generation college students, or have disabilities

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From Kim Hannula of All of My Faults are Stress-Related comes news of a position being advertised at her fair college as a director of a STEM student services program. Kim says:

We recently received a grant from the Department of Education, to provide support for science/technology/engineering/math students who are low-income, first-generation, or have disabilities. We have a similar program (the Program for Academic Advancement) for students college-wide, but this new program will support math, science, and engineering students. I’m excited about this program – our PAA program does a fantastic job helping students finish their degrees and move on to graduate school or the workforce, and I’m looking forward to working with the STEM3 program.

Here are the details (which you can also find here in the official job posting):

Director
STEM3 Student Support Services Program
Fort Lewis College
Durango, Colorado

Fort Lewis College invites applications for the Director of its new STEM3 Student Support Services Program (a federally funded TRiO program). The position is funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education that requires application for renewal every five years. The Director is responsible for organizing and managing support services for 120 academically and/or economically disadvantaged college students. Services include tutoring and academic, career, financial aid, and graduate school advising for eligible students in the STEM disciplines. STEM disciplines include the Sciences (Agriculture, Anthropology, Biology, Chemistry, Exercise Science, Geology, Geoscience, Physics, and Psychology), Technology (Computer Science Information Systems), Engineering, and Mathematics. The Director will also be responsible for approving expenditures, maintaining budget control and responsibility for the appropriate use of grant funds; facilitating and overseeing development and implementation of effective, objective project evaluation; maintaining data collection and a program database for monitoring and tracking of participant progress and outcomes; working closely with the Dean of the School of Natural and Behavioral Sciences and the FLC STEM faculty to ensure program delivery will meet STEM student needs; overseeing preparation of fiscal and technical reports for the U.S. Dept. of Education and Fort Lewis College; managing and supervising program personnel; providing intrusive academic advising and monitoring, and financial aid advising to a small caseload of participants; attending STEM Department Chair meetings; and serving on relevant college committees.

Minimum qualifications are as follows:

  • Masters Degree in Social Sciences, Education, Educational Administration, Student Personnel Administration, Counseling, or related field and a BS / BA in a STEM discipline (see above)
  • At least four years experience working with disadvantaged students (low-income, first generation, students with disabilities) in higher education
  • At least two years experience designing comprehensive programs that include courses, activities, workshops, tutoring or supplemental instruction, student monitoring, or other services that promote retention of SSS eligible STEM students at the postsecondary level
  • At least two years experience implementing procedures for delivery of services, data collection, program evaluation or similar procedures that enhance program effectiveness and promote student retention in SSS or similar programs at the postsecondary level
  • At least three years of administrative and supervisory experience that includes budget oversight and management.

Preferred qualifications include:

  • Experience as a disadvantaged (first-generation, low-income, or disabled) college student
  • Experience working with a TRiO program or other program with a similar mission
  • Ability to provide ad-hoc tutoring support, especially in mathematics
  • Successful grant writing and grant management experience.

This position is a full-time, 12 month position. Candidates must be willing to work flexible hours including evenings and weekends. Some travel is required to statewide, regional, and/or national meetings. Salary is $42,000 with full range of benefits. The position is anticipated to begin in November 2010. Individuals with experience as a disadvantaged individual or assisting disadvantaged students are encouraged to apply.

APPLICATION PROCESS
Interested and qualified applicants must submit: 1) a letter of interest detailing experience that meets the minimum and preferred qualifications, 2) a current resume, and 3) the names, addresses, email addresses, and telephone numbers of three professional references electronically to:

stem3directorsearch@fortlewis.edu

Deadline: Complete applications must be received no later than 5:00 pm on Monday, October 18, 2010 to receive consideration.

Fort Lewis College does not discriminate on the basis of race, age, color, religion, national origin, gender, disability, sexual orientation, political beliefs, or veteran status. Accordingly, equal opportunity for employment, admission, and education shall be extended to all persons. The College shall promote equal opportunity, equal treatment, and affirmative action efforts to increase the diversity of students, faculty, and staff. People from under-represented groups are encouraged to apply.

If this sounds like your kind of job (and the qualifications sound like you), for heaven’s sake apply!

If this sounds like someone you know (especially if he or she is currently on the market), please forward this information.

Is having it all impossible?

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One of the things I’m liking a lot about this new community at Scientopia is the fact that it has helped me find some cool new blogs that I might not have found in the vastness of the blogosphere. (It’s not the blogosphere’s fault — it’s just that there’s so much out there, and there are all these other things people keep wanting me to do besides just reading blogs.)

For example, check out Sanitized for Your Protection, a blog about “academic life and all the adventures that accompany it” by Rebecca Montague. In a post today, On being Superwoman, she writes about the challenges of the work-life balance thing, and notes that some of the advice one gets from eminent scientists is just not that encouraging. Specifically, an essay by Lynn Margulis struck her as more of a kick in the pants than a helping hand. Rebecca writes:

In the essay, Margulis discusses her roles as a mother and wife, and how they’ve conflicted with her scientific career. She relates this to the movie “The Red Shoes”, where a prima ballerina feels forced to choose between her life as a dancer and the man she loves. Margulis opined:

At age 15 I was certain that the ballerina died because of a silly antiquated convention that insisted that it is impossible for any woman to maintain both family and career. I am equally sure now that the people of her generation who insisted on either marriage or career were correct, just as those of our generation who perpetuate the myth of the superwoman who simultaneously can do it all–husband, children, and professional career–are wrong.

…

I disagree with her blanket statement that no one can “do it all”—plenty of scientists can and do combine success in their career with very happy home lives, raising well-adjusted children within supportive partnerships. Are they the exceptions that prove the rule? … But there are definitely days when I feel like I can’t handle it, and that despite knowing intellectually that it’s impossible to be a SuperEverything all the time and something’s gotta give…and I wonder sometimes, amongst the stress couched in chocolate wrappers and stacks of papers, if she wasn’t on to something.

While I don’t want to pretend that balance is brutally hard, I can’t help but wonder if part of our problem is setting the definition of “success” too high. The thing that’s done the most to reduce my parenting-partnering-work stress is to become comfortable with the idea that “good enough” (rather than perfect) really is good enough for most contexts. Sure, this means Casa Free-Ride has more dust bunnies than it might otherwise, but I’m comfortable letting that go if I can spend more time with my kids and my better half, and if I can get papers graded without staying up until 3 AM.

At the same time, I don’t think the burden of lowering standards ought to rest solely on the people trying to combine career, partner, family, and whatever else. It’s really hard to assert, “This is sufficiently good parenting/housekeeping/devotion to my relationships,” in the face of a whole society that sets the bar several notches higher (or in the face of a differing view of what would be sufficient, for example, from the people with whom you are in those relationships). It’s even harder to confidently assert, “This is sufficiently good teaching/research productivity/service,” when your retention-tenure-promotions committees have the final say on what’s sufficient (and where they may care not a whit that you are concerned to have a life outside of work).

Sometimes having multiple facets to our lives becomes impossible because we insist on trying to live up to unrealistic standards for each of those facets. Sometimes it becomes impossible because other people, or organizations, or societal structures, impose those unrealistic standards upon us. Working on the problem from both ends seems to me like the only hope if we want to make progress here.

Although judicious use of chocolate might help, too.

Anyway, go say hi to Rebecca and jump into the conversation on her blog.

Save us from the armchair philosopher with a blog.

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In what is surely a contender for the photo next to the “business as usual in the blogosphere” entry in the Wiktionary, a (male) blogger has posted a list of the sexiest (all-but-one female) scientists (using photos of those scientists obtained from the web without any indication that he had also obtained proper permission to use those photos in his post), and now the blogger says he wants to know what could possibly be wrong about making such a post.

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The blogger’s hypothetical imperatives.

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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:

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The work-life balance minefield.

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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.

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Pack your bags: assessing young scientists’ commitment to science.

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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.

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#scio10 aftermath: Continuing thoughts on what civil engagement could mean, online or offline.

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Back in January, at ScienceOnline2010, Sheril Kirshenbaum, Dr. Isis, and I led a session called “Online Civility and Its (Muppethugging) Discontents”. Shortly after the session, I posted my first thoughts on how it went and on the lessons I was trying to take away from it.
Almost two months later, I’m ready to say some more about the session and the issues I think it raised.

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#scio10 aftermath: some thoughts on “Casting a wider net: Promoting gender and ethnic diversity in STEM”.

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Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session’s wiki page.)
One of the things I found interesting about this session was that the session leaders’ approach to the broad issue of promoting gender and ethnic diversity in science, engineering, technology, and M [mathematics here? I get the impression that sometimes the M in STEM is math and sometimes it’s medicine, but I’m happy to set this taxonomic issue aside] was to look at particular initiatives, activities, or responses from smaller communities within the STEM galaxy.

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