Career sustainability and the ideal worker norm

“Whether discussing an individual career, a lab, funding, the academic research system, publishing, peer-review, or scientific innovation, at the heart of the issue is often the question of whether current practices are sustainable and what changes need to be made to ensure sustainability… From an individual to a more global perspective, definitions, successes, diversity, barriers… what makes–or breaks–sustainability in science?”

That’s the question biochem belle asks for Scientiae this month.  It’s an interesting question with many layers. Unfortunately, with the start of a new term today, including a new class prep (solid state physics—yay! enjoyable, but also lots of work), I don’t have the time to do justice to the topic. I occasionally consider the question of career sustainability, what it means to me and how to achieve it. In my eyes, a sustainable science career allows for balanced professional and personal growth and satisfaction that can be maintained over the long term. I struggle with how to create a sustainable career when too often my personal time gets gobbled up by job-related demands. Granted, some of it is my own fault–I find it challenging to set boundaries, to ask for help, and to cut myself slack. Yet the issues of creating sustainable academic science careers are broader than individual circumstances.

Robert Drago’s book, Striking a Balance: Work, Family Life, provides a particularly thoughtful presentation of the challenges. Drago discusses the increasing emphasis on the ideal worker norm, the demand that professional workers exhibit total commitment to their career, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for years without interruption, and how it conflicts with other societal norms. In a report on work/family issues for NCSU, Drago makes an interesting comment on how the tenure process is set-up to promote the ideal worker norm in academia:

“[Tenure track faculty] are typically told that quality research, teaching, and service are all required to achieve tenure …[T]o produce tenured academics who have internalized the ideal worker norm, then the process needs to remain a mystery to those on the pre-tenure side. The individual is given the consistent message that more work, longer hours, and more research are always desirable.”

As a junior faculty, I certainly feel the pressure to do more, but observing my tenured colleagues, it’s clear the pressure doesn’t diminish with seniority. Academia seems to select and support those who have taken to heart the idealized worker norm, but at what cost to promoting diverse and sustainable academic career paths?

Ada Lovelace Day: Women in physics

It’s Ada Lovelace Day today, a day to blog about the achievements of women in technology and science. Many bloggers choose to celebrate by writing about a woman in technology or science whom they admire. In outreach activities, I’m occasionally asked what woman physicist I admire most, and I always stumble over the answer. Marie Curie is the obvious choice as a famous woman physicist, but she never held much fascination for me. Rather, the biographies of Lise Meitner and Chien-Shiung Wu captured my attention, in part because they both made significant contributions to physics developments for which others received the Nobel prize (the 1944 prize that went to Otto Hahn and the 1957 prize that went to Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee). The stories of these women awoke me from my naiveté that science is a field were hard-work and dedication always pay off.  Their tales introduced me to the idea that a career in science involves politics, and if you are a woman, the political landscape is often different than it is for men.

As I’ve continued in physics, I’ve had the chance to interact with a lot of impressive women in both formal and informal settings. I never fail to be amazed by Vera Rubin and Millie Dresselhaus, by their research accomplishments, their success at breaking down barriers, and their commitment to improving the situation for women who have followed them. Laurie McNeil and Meg Urry are of a younger generation than Rubin and Dresselhaus, but both have influenced my vision of women in physics. In the condensed matter physics community, there are a number of junior faculty, including Nadya Mason, Jenny Hoffman, and Alessandra Lanzara, who are doing outstanding research and serve as a reminder that women can be successful on the tenure track at top tier research universities. And there are many talented undergraduate and graduate women just starting their careers. Both of this year’s Apker award winners are women’s college graduates, Bilin Zhuang of Wellesley College and Kathryn Greenberg of Mount Holyoke College, and they worked with two women who successfully balance the teaching, research, and advising demands of being a faculty member at an undergraduate institution, Courtney Lannert of Wellesley and Janice Hudgings of Mount Holyoke.

During my career, most of my mentors have been men; both my undergraduate thesis advisor and my PhD advisor were male. As a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, there weren’t any women faculty in condensed matter physics so all of the professors for my graduate courses and my dissertation committee were men. Nevertheless, by keeping my eyes open, I’ve found it’s not hard to see the many women who are making contributions to the physics community — something that should be acknowledged everyday, not just on Ada Lovelace Day.

“1945-1998″ by Isao Hashimoto

An animated map of the 2053 nuclear explosions since 1945 by the various nuclear powers,  un-scrolling in time by compressing a month to a second. Informative, sobering. Wonderful example of using a wide array of visual techniques with quantitative information to tell a compelling story. Courtesy Christopher Tassava.

Non-monotonicità nella transizione quantistico-classico (cross-cultural talks)

I am currently in Como, Italy, visiting Giorgio Mantica at the Universita degli Studi dell’Insubria. A major part of my post-doc work picked up and extended Giorgio’s work with Joe Ford, one of the legends of chaos/quantum chaos, but I hadn’t actually ever met Giorgio until my trip to Trieste last Fall. Giorgio’s work and mine have continued to parallel each other over the years, but when I heard him talk in Trieste, it struck me that his techniques of computing the Alicki-Fannes quantum entropy and its rate of change could help more carefully characterize chaos in quantum mechanics, which I’ve been struggling to do for my work with Arik. And so here I am.

A lot of what Giorgio and I do together is horribly similar to the ‘Eye of the tiger sequence‘ from ‘Big Bang Theory’ where you’ve got to add the nice red couches they’ve got, as well as my jet-lag, to the mix. That is, sometimes I *was* thinking deeply, and sometimes I was actually — albeit briefly — asleep while Giorgio thought on. Giorgio is a gregarious and outgoing person, and it’s fun hanging out with him. I learned a lot already, and have enjoyed meeting the larger group, particularly the brief time with Giulio Casati, whose work I’ve been reading since I was in intellectual diapers (first couple of years of graduate school).

I gave a talk as well, on non-monotonicity in the quantum-classical transition, almost exactly the same talk I gave in Toronto a few weeks ago, except that the first page was in Italian as a silly attempt to acknowledge that although all but one of my audience was Italian speaking, my talk was in English. The talk went fine, including decent response all around, in particular from Giulio (read ‘a searching question that had me defending myself by pointing out why I was in Como talking to Giorgio’). But it didn’t feel like it ‘landed’ in quite the same way that it had in Toronto, though I may have been deluding myself about TO. And that got me thinking about cultural differences, and other such things when it comes to talks.

I have a feeling that I’d tuned my talk a little too well for my TO audience. Or alternatively, and perhaps more appropriately, that I’ve become more North American in my style of talks. My jokes completely flopped here (admittedly no one was actually rolling in the aisles in TO, but I got gentle smiles and so on when I expected them) — not even close to a smile from most people. And by instinct — and by now by training from my years of teaching undergrads at Rice and Carleton — I have a far more pedagogical style than most physicists I’ve heard give talks: I stop periodically to check for comprehension and solicit questions, explain concepts and review ideas slightly more than I need to, etc, etc. It’s not clear to me that this works all that well in my community, but now that I think back on all the talks I’ve heard, it’s particularly different from how Europeans in my field present talks (to generalize wildly).

Ah well, live and learn.

Tomorrow, more whiteboards, and plenty o’ coffee. Giorgio, weirdly for a physicist (or academic, for that matter) and Italian, to boot, doesn’t drink coffee, but has introduced to me to one of his colleagues who has offered to make me good strong stuff whenever I want it. Onwards through the fog!

HHMI Fellowships, Carleton news

A quick link to a Carleton story: http://apps.carleton.edu/news/news/?story_id=614312

Gen X faculty, community, and social media

This week COACHE (the collaborative on academic careers in higher education) released a study of Generation X faculty, “New Challenges, New Priorities: The Experience of Generation X Faculty”, based on interviews with a small group of faculty and administrators at three mid-Atlantic institutions.  One of the themes that emerged from the study, particularly interesting in light of my last post, is the strong desire for community.

“It is perhaps the lack of community, and X’ers’ attempts to find it, that truly define the generation, providing a unifying theme for their experiences, and encapsulating what has changed for them from previous generations… Even once they have landed geographically, work-life balance is a serious challenge; the ever-increasing demands of work often leave faculty with little time and energy to build the relationships and connections necessary to establish a sense of community — particularly when combined with having to balance dual careers and childcare responsibilities.”

I’ve been thinking about how this desire for community intertwines with current trends in social media. I hear conflicting messages about whether social media (blogs, facebook, twitter, etc) bring us closer together, or replace genuine personal interactions with less meaningful virtual interactions. Like the faculty members surveyed, I long for a more genuine sense of community, but I acknowledge some of the difficulty in establishing connections is my own fault as I try to deal with a seemingly overwhelming list of obligations that eat up my energy and my time.  However, I do find having colleagues as facebook friends allows me to solicit advice or keep up with people who I may not run into for days at a time. Reading blogs, some with authors I know personally while others I only “know” virtually, helps me remember that my experiences are not unique and puts my own situation into perspective. In many ways, I feel less alone on account of social networking, but feeling less alone is not the same as feeling connected. Do social media allow us to be lazy about making time for informal conversations with colleagues? Or with the current reality of overbooked schedules and family responsibilities does moving interactions into the virtual realm make sense?