The Broken Career Path, or "What She Said"....

A great post this week over at Women in Astronomy on what the current "Decadal Review" process in the US Astronomy Community ought to be addressing with regard to the career path in Astronomy. I especially relate to the quote:

Considering how I feel about being a postdoc right now, I'm not really looking forward to the future, if this is as good as it gets.

I said a couple of weeks ago (in this post) that I was starting to see the good side of postdoc life - but actually I think what I was starting to see is how much worse it will get if I ever manage to become faculty. Is that really what I want in life..... I'm starting to think not.

Hannah says:

it's a wonder that much astronomy gets done in the winter.

- I think it's a wonder any gets done by any postdoc! Perhaps this is the advantage Australian astronomers have and why there seem to be so many of them relative to the population of Australia (can't explain Holland though...).

Sometimes I think that the ones who get the jobs are the ones who are stubborn enough to just keep applying rather than the ones who are the best scientists.

This could have come right out of my mouth. So reassuring to know I'm not the only one thinking this!

Hannah goes on to suggest some solutions to the problem including:

to simply decrease the number of PhDs being produced to match the number of jobs. And now I hear all the department chairs out there laughing. Given that the number of students a department attracts is a measure of its success, I don't see that happening any time soon.

This I don't think is the answer at all anyway. I think Hannah's next point is much more important. My friend at the Visible Universe (who is too busy being a big TV researcher now to blog) put it very well in response to one of my very first posts here:

I don't believe that money is wasted if a student doesn't pursue a research career. There are many fields where individuals with real, hands-on science experience are desperately needed--science policy, science journalism, education--and having scientifically trained people in those positions can only be a good thing for the field.

I now firmly believe that the more science PhDs there are out in the world the better. But they need to be educated in such a way as to see the value of their training outside the narrow limits of academic research. There ought to be stipulations on funding for graduate students that they spend a certain about of time being educated about all the fun, exciting and worthwhile things they can do after graduate school. And the research faculty either need to be trained to do this, or forced to involve non-academic astronomers in the process. I shouldn't be sitting here today, a relatively successful scientist, with a PhD and lots of great skills wondering if I could get any job at all if I decide to "give up" on Astronomy. Who killed my confidence? I know it died in the last couple of years of graduate school.... was that my fault, or do I claim to be a victim of a broken system....

Hannah says again:

Now I hear all the professors grumbling, "why should we bother investing our time and energy to train graduate students in astronomy if they aren't going to continue in astronomy?" To which I can only say, "why are you training them for jobs that don't exist?"

Couldn't put it better myself.

Sorry for a slightly down post on a Friday. It's been one of those weeks.

11am is the New 3pm

My productivity has taken a dive lately (or maybe it just feels that way). I came to a realization as I walked home on Friday - most of my day is before lunch now. It used to be (before baby) I started work around 10am, had lunch at noon, then worked until 6-7pm. I was used to the normal mid afternoon lethargy and has adjusted to a 3pm tea break. However now I start work at 9am, eat lunch around 1pm (because of a change in country and lunchtime culture), and leave for the nursery at about 4.45pm (or a little later - I'm always running late for little one's pick up time!). Instead of 2 hours before lunch and 5 after it, I now have 4 hours before lunch and only 2.75 after it. So 11am is my new 3pm. Accordingly the past few mornings I had a coffee and snack at 11am (traditional elevenses even). Let's see if I suddenly get a lot done....

Stop Trying To Get "X" and Start Trying To Enjoy Yourself

I was lucky enough to attend a large university for graduate school which had enormous numbers of science graduate students. At some point a group of students set up a series of events about academic careers for scientists. This series brought Rick Reis in to talk - and as a result we all got signed up for his "Tomorrow's Professor" mailing list. Now I get emails from this list about once a week. Sometimes they're interesting, sometimes I delete them. Every once in a while I find one that's very useful and really strikes a cord. That happened this week with the posting on Stop Trying to Get Tenure and Start Trying To Enjoy Yourself. Not that I'm in a position to worry about tenure since I'm still just a postdoc - but I think the principle applies to me - in that I should "Stop Trying to Get a "Permanent Job" and Start Trying to Enjoy Myself". I'll see how that goes. "Trying to Get a Permanent Job" clearly isn't working out that well (another chance bites the dust...).

Related to this, I think I have just recently realised what a nice job being a postdoc is. (Apart from the uncertain future and the stress associated with that - especially in an era of job cuts and lowering funding). I can mess around doing research and for the most part not worry about faculty meetings, teaching when I don't want to, being nice to the university administration (or even meeting them), reading job candidate letters, calling prospective graduate students and all the hundreds of other non-research related items I see the staff doing. In a permanent position I know I won't be expected to do any less research, I'll just have all that stuff added on top of my already hectic life. I actually can't see where I would fit it all in.

So I think "Stop Trying to Get "X" and Start Trying to Enjoy Yourself" is probably good advice for us all in our jobs and throughout life.

Counting days

Like everybody else in this business, Boyfriend and I have to travel a lot; conferences, workshops, seminars, observing runs... Within a reasonable limit, we have tried not to let the fact that we have a child change that too much. Of course I didn't travel in the first few months, and there's the occasional heartache of missing some important milestones that goes with this. But overall it's been going well. I think part of the key to that was to get Chatton used from the start that maman and papa were going to be away from home sometimes. He's never made a fuss about it, and actually behaves extra-nicely with the one parent that stays behind to take care of him!

But now that he's older, he started missing us more and more when we are gone. I'm surprised by this, I thought if there would have been problems, they would have come up when he was smaller. It's not really a problem, he's still mostly as happy as usual when one of us is gone, but he mentions often (especially at night) that he misses us.

So we have come up with a trick to help him with that. Whenever one of us travels for more than a couple of days, we take a large piece of paper and make a calendar for Chatton, with one blank box for every day that Boyfriend or I are gone from home. Then each morning he gets to draw a picture in that day's box. This way he sees clearly how much time has gone and how soon the missing parent is coming home. Since time is a vague concept for young children, we find that this helps him a lot to keep track of what is going on. He can see that there are still X days left, so he's not asking us and himself all the time "when is mummy/daddy coming back?". Being aware of what is going on seems to make him feel more secure about the whole thing. Of course there's also iChat or Skype to keep in touch, much better than just the phone for small kids.

I was just away for almost three weeks on a work trip (the longest either one of us has been away from home since Chatton was born), and though he obviously missed me, everything went very well. He even found an idea for an Astronomy-related thing to draw each day on his calendar, so I now have this really cool set of drawings for my office wall!

If anybody has other tricks or ideas of things to do to make being away from home easier on the little ones, please share!

Designed to tempt me?

I haven't met a mother who's totally happy with her body image. I'm definitely not - although mostly I do nothing about it, even objectively I know I could use to lose 10 lbs or so. If found this Chocolate Blog today. which seems totally designed to tempt me. What is it about chocolate - why do I feel such a physical drag towards it....?

My 10 random things about being a mother

So I finally got around to tackle Astronomum's challenge of coming up with my list of 10 random things about being a mother. Here it goes:

1. I love reading stories to my son, and getting new books for him. I can spend a lot of time in the child section of a bookstore, and I probably spend more money than I should on that...

2. I both like and dislike always being the youngest mom out of all the parents of my son's friends. It makes me feel young and cool, but it's annoying because I often don't have that much in common with these people which are 10-15 years older than me.

3. One of the things I like the best is to watch my son and his dad play together. I'm amazed by how Boyfriend can get totally into these games, and give them his undivided attention. I wish I could do that too!

4. If I could magically change one thing about my life as a mother/scientist, it would be to get to live closer to family. With two careers and a child, I often wish we could get help from family once in a while, it would make things much easier I think.

5. I'm currently expecting a second child, a baby girl. I was so relieved when we found out, there was something about the idea of having two boys that was giving me nightmares.

6. Boyfriend and I have a tendency to spoil our son, not with sweets, toys or other things like that, but with our time and attention. I thought there was nothing wrong with that, but sometimes I'm afraid he will come to expect that kind of attention all the time and from everyone. Hopefully this won't be a problem when his little sister shows up.

7. I'm not much of a baby person. I'll gladly go through the first year with baby, but mostly because I know how fun it will be after that when she grows up a little.

8. Sometimes I get bored at the playground, which makes me feel guilty: shouldn't I be enjoying every single moment I spend with my child?

9. Like most women, the deadly sin I'm most guilty of is pride: I think my son is the most incredible person I have ever met, I can't even begin to explain how proud of him I am.

10. I'm glad I had my first child while in grad school since it gave me the chance to prove some people wrong (think older male faculty): it's possible to be a good mother and a successful young researcher at the same time! Actually, that's another thing I'm very proud of :)

Warming to my new Town...

Moving to northern Europe in winter was never going to be easy. OK, coming from the North East US it's not that cold here, but it's really dark and grey most of the time.

When you move (and as postdocs we get some experience of this of course) I think you go through 3 phases. To start with everything is exciting about your new town. Then everything sucks - you want your old favourite restaurants, and your old friends - and you can't have them. Finally you get used to the place, and it becomes home. The dark damp winter moved us quickly onto stage two... I think we might go back to stage one once the spring comes and we can actually do stuff, but for now we're right in stage two.

However, I did manage some exploration last week, and in walking for the first time through one of the city parks I discovered an aviary of parrots, budges, and bunny rabbits. This is just in the middle of a city park. This city can't be all that bad if it looks after bunny rabbits. :) I'm looking forward to find a chance to take little one to see them.