Transitions… ever on and on

Posted on March 10, 2011 by biochembelle

Wait a minute, you might be thinking, I was on my way to There and (hopefully) back again-what’s this?

I realized that the name of this blog no longer truly reflected its evolving nature. You see, I started this project at a time when I was just beginning to feel doubts about my career and my new city. It was accompanied by a sense of longing for the way things were. There was an intense desire to return to the place and person I had been. Sure, I would endure “character building” experiences and some things would change, but there was a clear idea of who I had been and wanting to return there.

I realize now that the adventure isn’t about going back. It’s in moving forward. It’s about forging a path that carries me not to who I used to be, but to who I strive to be. That striving has been and, I suspect, will always be perpetual. I’ve never been one to be satisfied with where I am, and in some ways, I hope to never be. I keep moving down the road that goes ever on and on.

The URL remains the same. I will continue posting about my experience in the life of science. But it’s time for something new and different, as well.

Posted in blogging | 9 Comments

The terrible beauty of change

Posted on March 2, 2011 by biochembelle

It just changes – that’s all

Over the weekend, I was enjoying a typical quiet Saturday morning, drinking a delectable cup of coffee and catching up on blog reading, when I came across this post by David Kroll that really struck a chord.

In the post, David writes about career goals and transitions and how sometimes, just when you get everything you’ve worked toward, you realize that it’s not what you want at that phase of your life. The title of his post says it: It just changes – that’s all. For a little more context, consider these opening lines from David’s post.

My friends: changing your career path is okay. It really is. What you wanted at 21 may no longer serve you at 41. It’s okay.

Some people always know exactly what they want. Most people don’t. It just changes – that’s all.

This piece should be required reading for every scientist. In fact, we should revisit it periodically, because the message is just that important. Go on. Go read it. I’ll be waiting when you get back…

Surprised by the positive responses to the post, David asked me why I thought the post had resonated so. I had an initial gut reaction that took time to transform to words, and of course, I can speak only for myself, from my experience. Much of what follows is from my initial response to David. Some has been said before, but the context is the only way I know to share my feelings on why David’s post is so important. Understand that this is solely my experience, and although it may not reflect that of most scientists, the feelings are probably more prevalent than any of us would care to admit.

Change is terrifying

Expectations for careers in science are changing slowly, but we haven’t reached critical mass yet. Despite the claims of being more open-minded, there is still much of this sense that there is only one true shining path-the tenure track to full professor. It becomes deeply ingrained, often by the most subtle, subconscious, and unintentional means. Most scientists are… well, almost obsessive people. We become fixated on a goal, and even when we begin to have doubts, we often remain committed to that goal. We attempt to rationalize our doubts.

“I only feel this way now because experiments aren’t working/project isn’t taking off.

“Once things get rolling, it will be better.”

“What was the point of all this time and education if I walk away now?”

“(Adviser/parent/prof) will be so disappointed.”

“I can’t just give up. I don’t want to be a failure.”

I should know-I think I said every one of those things in the months leading up to my decision to leave my first postdoc.

Like many senior graduate students, I had a roadmap to success: a good postdoc (or two, if necessary) in a different field at a high profile institution to create a kick-ass research niche for my tenure track adventure. Then that vision came crashing down. I remember agonizing over the decision to tell my PhD adviser that things weren’t working out. I was lucky because he was extraordinarily sympathetic and supportive. Even so, it took a few more months for me to fully commit to deviating from the grand plan I had when finishing my PhD.

There was a particularly absurd rationalization that was my final holdout… one that I’m not quite ready to share with the whole world wide web (or the five readers here). The gist is that I transformed my own personal fears, doubts, and feelings of failure into a conviction that I would reap disapproval from someone important in my life–who wasn’t around to debunk the ridiculous notion. A few hours after reaching my breaking point and irrevocably initiating that walk away from my first postdoc, I realized that person would have really told me to stand up or move on.

In other words, I was carrying a lot of baggage, mostly of my own making and mostly born out of my deep, personal fear of failure.

Change can be liberating

That painful experience cause me to reevaluate just how badly I want a career in academia, how much I am willing to sacrifice for the “holy grail”. I’d rather not end up like Elsa of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, who falls into a bottomless hole in her last attempt to grab hold of the prize. I can deal with putting in hard work and long hours and not making a lot of money… but being miserable most of the time while doing it is something I can’t tolerate.

My experience opened my eyes and my mind to other possibilities. I did something that I wasn’t supposed to do-leaving a postdoc without a single publication or recommendation-and, in some ways, this makes it a bit easier to consider doing something else that, in the eyes of academia, I’m not meant to do.

I’m much happier in my new postdoc. I like the environment, the project, the approaches. In my earlier postdoc, my coping mechanisms were pretty horrendous, and the stress took its tolls. Now I’m taking better care of myself, Paramed, and our relationship. I don’t feel like I need a drink most nights.

My passion for research has been reignited, and I haven’t given up on pursuing an independent academic career. I have reconsidered what that path might look like. I know that I don’t want to destroy my body or my relationships for it.

I also know that I could be happy doing other things. While I’m trying to establish a track record, connections, and mentoring relationships that could advance a research career, I’m also trying to pursue opportunities that could benefit an alternative career path.

Change is anathema – to some

The St. Kerns of the world remain. They impress upon us that those with interests outside of research are shirking social responsibility and are simply not committed enough to science, maybe even to humanity. I don’t buy it, but I think it’s an idea that’s exploited by certain individuals to excuse pushing people beyond normal limits and to get those people to think that they should take it, and take it gladly, because it’s going to get you to the prize. It’s a stick they hit you with while dangling the carrot in front of you. Nonetheless, they possess rather strong voices–and sometimes large venues in which to voice their opinions. Thus the message and expectation persists.

It just changes – and that’s okay

The culture of research science sometimes makes us feel like failures for pursuing or even considering any other path. Or that it’s wrong to expect some level of personal satisfaction from our work.  It may be cliche, but life is too short not to do what you love. Many people think they’ve got all the time in the world. Some of us carry reminders that there’s not nearly as much time as we thought.

Those who have attained that great expectation–or are certain that they want it–need to understand that it’s not for everyone or every stage of life, that uncertainty and alternatives are not a reflection of work ethic or commitment.

Those of us who are open to other paths and (probably moreso) those who have chosen other careers know what David is talking about. That post expressed much of what we feel.

Those who are in the position of uncertainty need to hear that it’s OK to think about something else, to do something taboo.

It helps to know that we’re not crazy and we’re not alone. Thanks for your wonderfully articulated reminder, David.

Posted in attitudes, career decisions, do what you love, doubt, for the love of science | Tagged | 16 Comments

Reining in the defensive line

Posted on February 16, 2011 by biochembelle

You do great work. You have beautiful slides. You’re giving a brilliant, clear description. You exude confidence.

And then someone asks you a question. How you respond has a profound impact on how your audience will view you and your work.

The great orators respond with ease and a cool, confident manner. The inquirer is left satisfied, feeling as though s/he has raised an excellent point and contributed to the scientific discussion. These orators are like great quarterbacks, thinking on their feet, buying time when they need to, wooing the crowd with the graceful arc that lands the first down or touchdown.

Others don’t respond so well. They come across as though you’ve just threatened to kill their firstborn. They become defensive, locked in a struggle with the inquirer, losing momentum and the ability to effectively control the direction of the discourse. They are more like the blockers on the offensive, aiming to protect their quarterback by brawn, stopping the blitz by brute force.

These are rather hyperbolic descriptions, but the two ends of the spectrum exist: confident to defensive. It may be an inaccurate generalization, but it seems that more than any other group, many young female scientists take the latter approach. It’s something that I have noticed myself do on occasion.

Responding defensively makes us look guilty, so to speak–as though we’re trying to pass off data that we know is shoddy or incomplete, or that we don’t know the topic as well as we should. Often this isn’t actually the case; we know the data, the literature, the models, but there’s something that keys us up for a fight. Maybe it’s simply nervousness, that little shot of adrenaline before we put our work out there for people to critique. Perhaps we think the data–and thus our work and its quality–should speak for itself, and in asking about the data or its interpretation, we feel that our personal scientific merit is being questioned. Or it could be a case of impostor syndrome, a sense that we really do not and never can know as much as we should.

Regardless of our reasons, we need to realize when we respond in this manner and adjust accordingly. We have to learn to take a breath, gather our thoughts, and reply with a clear, concise, and confident answer. We’ll have an easier time convincing people that we know what we’re talking about not when we beat them senseless with information, but when we sound like we believe the answer we’re giving.

Posted in personal style, presentations | 13 Comments

On where I come from and why I (don’t) talk funny

Posted on February 13, 2011 by biochembelle

The Blue Ridge Mountains - A beautiful place to be

I was born and raised in a southern U.S. state–not the deep South, but in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was, and still is, a very rural place. When people ask where I’m from, I never respond with a town or city; I respond with a region. The county where I grew up covered well over 450 square miles, but the population was well below 20,000. One high school for grades 8-12 served the entire county, and there were still only 1000 students. Drive a few hours north, and people don’t believe I’m from the same state because of my accent.

At least that’s the way it used to be.

Over the past few years, whether owing to the influence of science, academia, or living in progressively larger and less conservative cities, my accent began to neutralize. Without a conscious intent, the drawl has diminished to the point that few people now recognize it’s there. On a rare occasion, someone will pick up a hint of something different, though they’re nearly as likely to ask if I spent time in England growing up as they are to guess I’m from the South.

I haven’t cast aside the accent completely. When I’m talking with family or back in the South–where three letter words can take on 4 syllables–my Southern speech comes out in full force. But put me back in the lab, and the lilting drawl goes back into hiding. There are a few words that retain their unique Southern flair (such as my pronunciation of “naked”, which greatly amused a friend and former colleague). Or should you be so foolish as to incite the temper that those ginger strands hint at, that drawl is likely to find its way out.

For the most part, though, there are only small vestiges of my Southern accent in my everyday life. Before my accent became more neutral, it occasionally became a focus for attention from others–mostly good-natured teasing. But the attention made me uncomfortable, nonetheless. And sometimes it was accompanied by the implication that it was unusual for a Southern girl to become a scientist or simply to be smart, or the assumption that I was too timid or well-mannered to stand up for myself or anything at all.

In the United States at least, there is a distinct cultural stereotype associated with the South, especially the rural South. David Kroll recently caught Stephen Colbert in a slip of his Southern accent and posted this quote from 60 Minutes interview with Colbert:

At a very young age, I decided I was not gonna have a southern accent. Because people, when I was a kid watching TV, if you wanted to use a shorthand that someone was stupid, you gave the character a southern accent.

Agent Pendergast, the protagonist of this and other novels, is one of the few smart Southern characters I've encountered in fiction. And it's OK, because he came from money.

In TV and even many books, portrayal of intelligence among Southerners is often reserved for the aristocracy. The rural Southerner is often painted as the bigoted village idiot with a deep Southern drawl chewing tobacco, listening to country music with NASCAR on in the background.

The stereotype takes on even more nuances for the girl from the rural South. I use girl, because it really doesn’t change from adolescence until she becomes the family matriarch. The Southern woman is demure, waiting for her husband or father to make decisions or form opinions for her, doing what she is told. She isn’t terribly interested in education. She’s polite to the extreme, not one to disagree often and certainly not with a man. In other words, she is weak and basically empty save for the edicts of Southern hospitality and the occasional baby.

If you were to ask my father, grandfather, brother, or husband, and they’d tell you a different story. Each has been husband, father, and/or son of a fierce Southern fem. The women of my family have been (mostly) punctual and polite, good cooks, hosts, and caregivers. But should you ever mistake our hospitality as a doormat, you could quickly learn just what a fiery spirit we possess. They were nurses and secretaries and are some of the strongest women I’ve ever known.  They taught me about resilience, doing what needs to be done, not letting others take advantage of me, going after my passion… In short, they taught me that to do what I set my mind too. Among those ladies, there was never a question, never a doubt that I had what it would take to follow a career in science.

All our lives are governed by unwritten rules, many of which we’re not even consciously aware. Still it makes me a little sad to think that I drop my Southern accent when I go to work, that I basically hide a part of my heritage without even intending too. It feels like a bit of a betrayal to my family, and particularly to those women who showed me so much. It also makes me more acutely aware of the stereotypes ingrained in my mind–and try harder to check those assumptions at the door.

Posted in attitudes | Tagged , , | 24 Comments

My favorite things: A quick tour of There and (hopefully) back again

Posted on February 5, 2011 by biochembelle

There and (hopefully) back again was initially an outlet, a product of a feeling of isolation from starting over in a new place and a new field. This blog has been around for over a year and a half now (including its start on Blogger and a short stint at LabSpaces. To be honest, when I made that first post, I don’t think I really expected it to last this long, and I certainly had no inkling of the community I would find.

This blog has developed into a place for me to hash out ideas, to learn more about issues postdocs or scientists in general face, to solicit advice, to share some of my philosophies of science, and–yes–to kvetch occasionally. Here are few of my favorite posts that I think are worth revisiting or for introducing you to my (mis)adventures in science.

The practice of research has evolved over time. There still questions regarding how science has been, is, and should be done and the motivation behind it. For two different perspectives, consider the humanization biomedical research and ethics in research and innovation through the lens of Fritz Haber.

Like most in the field, I want to be recognized for my work as a scientist. Period. Bit by bit, though, I’ve become more aware of what it means to be a woman in science. Sometimes there is an undercurrent that women and minorities in science are second-rate, and the power of the unspoken can be debilitating. Being a woman in science does subconsciously affect how I am perceived–even by myself. I have become conscious of how these perceptions influence my (and other women’s) behavior, such as how we simply don’t ask.

After leaving my first postdoc, I recounted a few lessons learned from the experience on the Benchfly blog. (If you arrived here via a link from a careers feature in some science-y journal about switching postdocs, this post is the reason; it’s also the source of the quote in the opening paragraph.) The Postdoc’s Tale is a collection of links about the postdoc experience in general and from my personal point of view.

But it’s not all seriousness around here. Occasionally I have a little fun, such as my Martha Stewart-inspired list of six things to do in the lab everyday and my coverage of the shock after the 2010 Nobel Prize announcements.

I hope you find something you like!

Posted in blogging | 6 Comments