Administrative myths

Being an academic is strange. It is hard to explain to in-laws that we do have work to do over the summer. It is hard to explain to parents that being a post-doc is not the same as being a student. I will not have to live in a dorm. It is hard to explain to friends that I do not have a boss. It is hard to answer the question "When do you have to get that paper/experiment/data analysis done by?" because the answer is always "last month."

I have no boss. This is wonderful. I have no deadlines. This too is wonderful. I have an administrator who want me to declare which 20 days of vacation I took last year. This is confusing. I have a contract that says that I am being hired to work 39.5 hours a week. That is laughable.

I dream of that job. I dream of being able to work 40 hours a week and take 4 weeks off, and still be competitive enough to give my child a school that he can go to for years and years and years without having to move, to give myself a neighborhood I live in for years and years and years so that my partner and I have friends.

I know it is a fiction. I know that I can count the number of academics I know who can do what they want to do in a 40 hour week  on one hand. I know that this year, like last year, I will make up dates of my vacation to make HR happy.

There should be something illegal about this. At least my department chair at a previous university had the spine to admit it. He told me that he knows that I am a postdoc at University A, and that post docs here do not tend to take as many vacation days as all that, but that this is something passed down from the University's legal office. It is a safeguard against people being denied their vacation rights. He said the last in a way that implied that it might be the department administrators and security staff being denied their rights, rather than post docs working for demanding heads of labs. Whatever, at least there was a breath of honesty in his admission.

I was talking to a friend of mine who claimed that in his pre-academic industry life, he regularly worked 60-70 hour week as a banker. It was a high pressure, highly paid job. I wonder what his contract looked like. Did it have a list of hours that he is supposed to work listed on it? Did it have vacation days that he had to take, or lie about taking?

I am not complaining about the hours I work. I do so mostly because I love my work. I am complaining about the contract I sign, about the myth of a normal life I am supposedly allowed to have. I have strong opinions about not giving labor away for free to "THE MAN," and I voice it strongly to friends who agree to work overtime without extra pay for nice bosses or managers at the local bookstore, or coffee shop.

In my case, it is the university who is turning a  profit from my teaching and research. I would be much happier with a contract that states that my university cannot bar me from taking X days of vacation if I so chose.

Except, I know that it is not the answer. In my current emotionally exhausted state of mind, I am tempted to let this rant morph into one about taking steroids in sports. People argue that we should let professional athletes take steroids. I argue that if it were legal, then those that did not want to would feel pressured to, in order to compete. In the end, it would be a de facto requirement, even if one's contract read that it was not.

My contract states a 40 hour week with 20 vacation days. Competitive academics don't work those hours. If I want my next post doc, or my first TT position, or tenure, or a nice grant, or the named chair, or the pay raise, or the extra funding for graduate students, or, or, or... I will not work according to my contract either.

This is not just a problem with me. It is the same dilemma my banker friend faced, I am sure. It is the same problem my friends working extra hours for nice bosses at the local book store face. If they are nice to their boss, even though it goes against contract, they are more likely to be promoted.

Life goes on. I need to find 20 days.

Clean Plate

Where has the time gone?

Somewhere in the beginning of February, I thought I'd be able to take some time to catch up on some academic reading. But, as these things always go, one deadline blurred into another. Surprises popped up, projects became more interesting, and warranted more time that I'd originally allotted them. Nothing bad, but no time for reading.

I sent off the zombie manuscript yesterday. The only other project that is really hot on the burner has just hit a dead end until a collaborator can clearly define what needs to happen and why. I may have time to read today! Furthermore, the sweater I'm wearing today has a sticker on it, given to me last week by Epsilon to indicate that I joined the clean plate club by eating all my dinner. I think I'm good to go.

The cost of my ambition

Easter Monday found me alone in my apartment in My City editing a zombie manuscript, with no internet. It found Epsilon and my partner travelling to the US for a visit with grandparents. The solitude has me thinking about the price we've paid for our ambition. It is easy at times like these to slip into feeling sorry for myself, from the sheer loneliness and boredom of the day. I will try to keep this post from drowning in my self pity.

I have a running daydream of I life I could have lead if I were a slightly different person. I could have become a trailing spouse. If work was not a calling, but something to do to fill the empty hours of the day, if my mothering instict was stronger, I could be satisfied with a job whose primary purpose was to keep a roof over our heads. If I were to step deeper into fantasy, I'd be in a position to quit my job after my partner had tenure, to be the mother I wanted to be, and to dive deeply into a local social issue that interested me.

At this point in my daydream, I've completely lost touch with the economic realities I live in. There is very little for which I would trade the financial security that my partner and I enjoy. There are other jobs where we could find this security, but in this great recession, very few have the flexibility required by the previous paragraph.

Still, I see friends from highschool find jobs as nurses and journalists, in the publishing business or the non-profit sector. I see them lead comfortable lives in large cities with shimmering night life and a deep circle of friends. Or I see them raise kids near their parents. The distance I keep from my family that I call independence and breathing space, looked at in another light, serves to deprive Epsilon of valuable time with grandparents.

If I'm honest with myself, I recognize that my friends from highschool grew up with well off parents. Living near parents has the additional advantage of getting financial support, directly or indirectly, from them. Friends who do not come from the same econimic background as I, but hold the same jobs as my friends struggle more, or they live with a much smaller savings buffer than my fiscally risk avering psyche can deal with.

At this point in the discussion, my partner usually points out that many of our friends have chosen free time over job satisfaction. He's right, but I think there's more to it than that. As much as I complain about this job, I am aware that no one is pinning me here. What I hate most about this job (and this reveals that I am not mired in comittee work and other requirements of a tenure track professor) is the payoff structure. There is an intense period of misery in the early career, that one gets through by keeping one's eye on the holy grail of the permanent position. I am gambling everything on the story that life gets easier with tenure.

How much am I putting on the table? I do not even explore industry jobs when the opportunities present themselves in the wrong city. "Short of making me independently wealthy, money cannot solve my unhappiness" I tell people surprised at my disinterest. Stability in the wrong part of the world is not worth a 20% pay increase. Put it that way, I can't actually be all that unhappy with my position.

We will never see Epsilon look up at a plane and say "no money, no money", because he wants to, but can't visit his grandparents. On the contrary, in the three years he has had it, he has filled 6 passport pages with stamps.

It remains to be seen whether we will be turn out to be a contorted stereotype of the parent(s) in high power careers. Not ever quite around or available as much as we need to be, electing instead to buy off the time we are unavailble, through trips, toys or camps. Time and Epsilon's inevitable therapy sessions will tell.

Seeing Mini-me's

Being asked to write a letter of recommendation for a student for something other than a gradschool or summer job application is, I think, an interesting way to get to know someone. I've been lucky enough to not have a student who did poorly in my class ask me for a letter. There are a few students who ask me for a letter, and I tell them that I don't really know them outside their good grades in my one class, I don't think I can say much about them. Most of the people I write for, I feel like I know a bit of their academic capability, as well as their hopes and ambitions. I like chatting with my students, so if I see them often in my office hours, or if they ask questions before/after class, pieces of both our personal lives sneak into the other's knowledge.

But letters for scholarships that judge on more than just a student's ability in my field require more knowledge. I've been asked to do this twice now, and both times I've conducted a bit of a lengthy interview with the person I'm writing for, so I can say something about the other relevant aspects of their life. And both times* I've come out seeing shadows of my (younger) self in the person I'm writing for.

It may be that I remember going through some of the same trepidations about balancing science and family, or having the same favorite poem, or caring about the same social issues. Whatever the case, it leaves me feeling more invested in the success of the student, which (I hope) causes me to write better letters. It also makes me want to become friends with the student. Between being a postdoc and the fact that letters are usually written at the end of a student's tenure at a university, this hasn't caused me to cross anything that might be misinterpreted as a professional line. However, I wonder if other people have the same experience when writing letters for undergrads.




*Yes, I realize this is a tiny, very biased sample.

A gift from my father's side

After dinner, my father used to sit in his easy chair and listen to music and watch TV while we kids played in the living room. "Barefoot," he'd regularly call. "Come pluck out my white hairs." I'd run over to him, and he'd move to a position where I could reach better. As the years rolled on, he realized that he was fighting a loosing battle. A decade later, a few of the cousins, with goading from the aunts got his brothers and him to dye their hair. But at this point, all the men in my father's side of the family would do as well to have their few remaining dark hairs pulled out to leave a full field of snow on their heads.

I thought of this sequence of events as I stared, flabbergasted, at four white hair front and center on my head.

"How old are you?" He asked. Shocked, I could not find the wits to politely tell him That should be irrelevant. "28." I answered. "Huh. People often don't want to take post docs who are over 30." Back in the visitor's office, his grad student assured me that he was just trying to be fatherly, and that this mindset was true in his home country.

It doesn't matter I tell myself, staring at the white cluster. I'll be moving to his home country in September, 5 years after that conversation. I put my date of birth in the application, and I got the post doc.

Shocked choruses of "you're old," and "I would have guessed you are much younger" from colleagues who, never deviating from the academic path, entered graduate school at 22 and post docs at 27 fill my head. I respond with a memory of walking home from a friend's house when I lived abroad after college. I was giddy with the realization that I was finally living in a society where my age and waistline did not anti correlate with my desirability in society. At 23, I was devastatingly young, to young to be deemed able to do anything. At 40 a man comes into his own, and stops being one of the younger generation.

Which of these would I give up, I ask myself. The fifth year of undergrad to complete my second major? My years abroad? My year studying something completely different? None of these are worth the possibility of tenure before 40, of being rid of my student status before the greys appear. No, I've made the right decisions. These few years are just a rough patch. Once I am through this, I will wear my experience and my hair proudly.

Jealous

When my mother was visiting, she borrowed my computer to finish up a review for an article. We talked about the article some, and about the review processes in her field versus mine. She mentioned that when she says that she will review an article, the journal usually gives her a deadline for when she has to finish the job. This particular journal gave her 3 weeks.

THREE WEEKS!

I submitted an article 3 weeks ago and have yet to get an acknowledgement of receipt!

Faculty Committee

Neither my partner nor I have ever sat on a faculty committee before, never having actually been faculty before. Until now. ....

And in spite of how horrible my partner makes the first meeting sound, I find myself swelling with a bit of pride for him.

"Awwww.... he's all grown up, doing grown up-like things."*

Okay, those of you who have actually been to faculty committee meetings should feel free to smack me now.



*This blog is still free of gushing about toddlers. Gushing about adults is fair game.

On dogs and children

Some departments are really cool about bringing children to the office. Other departments are really uptight about the noise that an infant or toddler might make. The same analysis applies to dogs, plus some arguments about sanitation/allergies. I think it is important to gauge the norm before bringing either over.

I've brought both to the various places I've worked, including yesterday, to a department where I've seen more dogs than kids around.

I brought Epsilon by the office after daycare because I'd forgotten to grab a few things. While I'm getting things together, the guy a few doors down walks down the hall with his dog and a graduate student he seems to want to talk to (or maybe its the grad student who wants to talk to him?) The owner and parent introduce the dog and the child to each other, and watch them play, while the graduate student awkwardly stands by. The owner goes into his office, the dog and Epsilon follow. When I go to retrieve Epsilon, the owner welcomes him in. The graduate student awkwardly tries to talk to Epsilon. The owner apologizes to the graduate student and plays with Epsilon and the dog. Eventually I decide that risking upsetting Epsilon's by the lack of a dog is better than taking up more of the graduate student's time, and take my (predictably screaming) toddler away. If I knew who the graduate student was, I'd write him an apology.

This entire interaction made me feel intensely awkward. Maybe it is because I am very sensitive to Epsilon screaming in public spaces, especially work spaces. Maybe because I didn't know how to respond to being an intruder in someone else's professional interaction (where I don't know either party particularly well). Maybe it's because people act very strangely around dogs and children.

Bleh.

on meeting housemates on campus

I've been telling this story to illustrate a point a lot recently.

I had a housemate who I haven't had much chance to see since she moved out several months ago. Earlier this term, I invited her to swing by my office to have lunch, and catch up a bit.

She parks her bike, and not being part of the campus community, asks around to figure out where I'm located. She realizes that people are staring at her. She tells me this when we meet.

My stomach sinks as I realize that she is probably the only undergrad aged African American female on campus.

I've had several conversations about diversity on this campus recently. When we (the general public) tend to think of diversity on college campuses, especially expensive colleges that undergrads and their parents work very hard to get into, we still tend to think about diversity in the same terms that we think about it in our neighborhoods and public schools. "What percentage are non-white?" And schools come up with numbers of "minority" students, the overwhelming majority of whom are some stripe of Asian, Depending on the school, they may throw foreign students into that batch, the majority of whom are European of some stripe.

This type of rigging the books hides the key point behind the point of diversity pushes on campus. It should be about the underrepresented populations.

This diversity problem seems to be worse in the sciences and engineering than in the arts and humanities, which is one reason for the very undiverse undergrad student body at my campus.
In the interest of keeping this post from going the way of a rant, I'll end with a question.

Dear readers,
How many african american or latino academics do you know? How many do you know of? How many are female? (If you are not based in the US, feel free to insert your favorite socially and economically disadvantaged minority into this question.)

My answers are, if I restrict to STEM fields, (2,1), 0, 1.

On being one with the tumble weed

Posts on Academic Jungle, Alethiography, and Academic-Garden have very different thoughts on the omni-present issue of moving cities as one changes universities and gains seniority as an academic. It got me thinking.

In college, a friend of mine told me that he measured his happiness by how few keys he had on his key ring. Each key represented responsibility, and he wanted the freedom to pick up an leave and see a different part of the world whenever he wanted. I wanted to embrace that outlook, but the first time I found myself key less, I felt stranded, rootless, homeless. I am not good at being one with the tumbleweed. But as scary as it was, at one point in my life, I liked to think of myself as an explorer, armed with my courage (and of course the financial means to travel) setting out to learn what I could of the world. Ah, the heady days of I-just-graduated-college naiveté.

I'm currently living in my sixth metro area, the fifth of my adult life. I used to embrace each move as an opportunity to seek out a new city, discover new things about the world. Learn to live as the locals do of each country and city I've made my temporary new home, and suck it dry, like I was scouting it out as a potential permanent home. It was a grand adventure, I learned more about myself, my heritage, this great country I am a citizen of with each move. The heartbreak of losing touch with friends scattered over the globe is real, but worth the excitement of a new experience.

But this last move to my post-doc has been incredibly hard. It's been nearly two years, and I haven't adjusted. I haven't been able to do make the friends and find that local haunts and search for the heartbeat of my new home in the same way I dove into my last several. My current exploration of cities seems limited to finding which parks are best for which age of infant.

My brother had a different experience. He went to college in the same metro area we grew up in. Instead of traveling and working after college, he went straight to graduate school after college to the second metro area of his life. Recently, he's had to weigh the options of moving away to a different city for a post-doc versus staying in the area to resolve his own budding two-body problem. While I find myself craving the constancy of a permanent position so that I can again find the rhythm of a community, not with the rush and fervor of my past, but with, and on the time frame of my toddler weekend planner, my brother is full of what ifs and regrets about the lost opportunities (the undiscovered coffee shops, the unexplored used record stores)
of not building a home in a new city. What we wouldn't do to change places.

Percunctor Primoris Potissimus

There's a certain species of seminar attendant that is a very effective hunter. It is rare for members of this species to hunt in packs, though not unheard of. If you are speaking at a department with a pack of these creatures, be very certain of every word of your talk.

They start circling their prey early, asking innocent enough questions about first principals. And like a great cat wearing down its prey in a chase, the questions never end. I have seen one of these creatures stall a speaker for nearly half an hour over the definition of velocity. Be even more afraid of these hunters if you do multi disciplinary work. They may want you to bring them up to speed on the entirety of the discipline they are not in before you reach slide 3 of your presentation. Beyond the scope! you cry to deaf ear. The hunter has caught its prey.

A key characteristic of these creatures is their ability not to care what the other seminar attendees think. Whether the other attendees are annoyed at the derailing questions, or whether they think the questioner is not up to speed on the literature and therefore they need to ask basic questions. The speakers that most effectively avoid being derailed seem not to be the best at answering the first principal questions, but the ones that are most able to give slippery answers that may or may not actually answer the question, but point the interrogator in the direction that the speaker wants to proceed in.

I do not think that the hour alloted for a speaker to present his/her research is the best place for acquiring in depth knowledge about their field of research that I lack. However, since I was embarking on a new project with a collaborator who knows the subject matter better than I do, I decided that I would try to pin down a few things that confuse me over the course of an afternoon. I had no intension of being the type of ass that the questioners above seem to be at times, but I had resolved to get answers to some questions, no matter how stupid I looked in asking them. The result of the exercise was a few answers (YAY!), exhaustion at having to constantly ask the same questions and get psuedo-answers to them (GRR!), while having the conversation redirected to the matters my collaborator wanted to talk about (admiration at the skill with which he changed the subject).

I've been told that I am more aggressive than other females in my manner of speech. However, I must be doing something wrong when I can't seem to get straight in depth answers from people when I speak to them (I do better over e-mail). I also seem to get eaten alive at presentation by first principal interrogators. Do other people have this problem? Have other people conquered this beast?

The academic rythm

On the first calendar day that I wear a summer dress,
I can taste the pleasure.
Tulips, daffodils, the rains letting up,
the light green leaves finally in a full canopy,
birdsong replaces my radio.
Its all about freedom:
the end of finals
(oh wait, I'm done with that).
The memories of heat and beaches and hiking trips.
The early early mornings,
the sunsets that seem an eternity away.
Shorts and lemonade.
As a friend said
"Spring is when the beautiful people come out."



Actually, it took me a long time to come to terms with the reality that the fact that I don't have classes doesn't actually mean that I have as much time as I'd like to do all the things I love doing during the warm weather... If I have come to terms with it fully. But now I have a window in my office that OPENS. And damn is it a gorgeous day outside.

Campus Queer Training

The center for diversity at my current university had a training for building safe zone's for the queer community on campus. It was open to all faculty and staff. I must say, it was one of the least diverse events I have ever gone to.

Since I am not in a lab science, I am considered a faculty at this university, even though I am a post doc. However, actually being a post doc, I am spared the endless boredom of faculty meetings and committees. I went to this out of my (possibly naive) desire to be the type of professor I wish I had (and in some cases, did have) as an undergrad.

I was the only "faculty" present. All but one of the rest were staff. The exception was a graduate student. I don't know how he got onto the list. As a corollary to "the rest were staff," (at least at this university) there were 2 males in the entire room. And since I'm tallying diversity, let me also add that there were only 2 non-white faces in the room. LGBT being a relatively invisible minority, I don't actually know how many were present at the training, at least one other.

The target audience for the training, I think, said a lot about the actual level of awareness about LGBT issues on campus. Lots of discussion about what LGBT is, and the difference between alternate sexuality, and alternate gender identity. And lots of discussion of labeling, and what different labels mean.

Maybe this is an indication that I spend too much time in my isolated slice of society, but I would have thought, that since I'm not in a small town in the middle of nowhere, that much of this discussion would be unnecessary. That with several states having same sex marriage, and more having civil unions, this need to explain the definition of lesbian is a relic of past decades. On the other hand, given my university's record on other issues of diversity, maybe it is, and maybe its still necessary here.

I'm not saying that the training was bad. It forced me to think about my coming out process, and the others that I have observed, and what the different needs of students may be. It also gave me a list (pitifully small) of places and resources for students, if ever the need arose. (This was one of the main goals of attending).

I guess my question is, how common is it for faculty to not attend voluntary diversity trainings such as this one. And is this a glimpse into my future for when I have a more permanent academic home, and become the token member of diversity committees?