My Education: Celebrating the Village That ‘Raised’ Me

It Takes a Community (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

by squirrelyred, Tenure She Wrote: https://tenureshewrote.wordpress.com/2016/04/01/celebrating-the-village-that-raised-me/

Earlier this week, Professor Terry McGlynn shared his story of how he found science as a career path on the Small Pond Science blog. As a woman in the academy who is also a scientist, I wanted to share some of my story.

Why? It’s not that I think I have a particular unique path to where I am now. Mostly I want to share it because there can be so many difficult things about being a woman in science and a woman in the academy. I’d like to take this opportunity to celebrate the path that led me here, to a mental and physical place where I work hard to do work I enjoy while mentoring women students in science - and to thank (although anonymously here) the many women mentors who helped get me here. It takes a village!

There’s certainly a stereotype that kids who have chemistry sets or collect fossils are the ones who grow up to be scientists. Maybe that’s true, but that wasn’t my path - and it wasn’t the way I was brought up.

My family members couldn’t identify trees, never went hiking or camping, don’t work in science, and don’t have graduate degrees. I’d never gone to a national park or even a state park until I was an adult living on my own. Those activities and places aren’t accessible to many people for a variety of reasons - in my family’s case, my parents’ work schedules and (lack of disposable) income meant that joining extracurriculars or going on weekend trips were out of the question.  So I spent a lot of time playing with dolls and, as I got older, reading.

I was very lucky that we lived in a place with very good public schools. So my first exposure to science was in the classroom - I remember a third grade project where we had to invent something and build a prototype. In retrospect, it was also my first exposure to people with PhDs - I had several middle school and high school teachers with doctorates, including women with PhDs.

I was also very lucky to live in an area with a good public library. As I got older, especially as a teenager, I spent a lot of time there - checking out books and CDs, discovering new authors and new musicians. I also was able to use the internet there, something we didn’t have at home. I think it’s important to acknowledge these great public resources that open doors. I am happy to pay taxes toward them, for my own use and for future generations.

Speaking of public goods, I also benefited from being encouraged to consider college at a public university. In fact, I only applied to public universities in my state, in large part to take advantage of the reduced tuition for in-state residents. Only in retrospect can I fully appreciate how important that was - state universities (despite now most getting so little state funding) on the whole provide excellent educations for comparably lower costs - and many have lots of opportunities to get involved in research.

As a work-study student, I worked my way through college from Day 1 (literally the day I was dropped off for orientation, I signed up to start working). At first I worked in the dining hall - hardly glamorous, but it helped pay the bills. Then I realized that there were jobs in laboratories. This seemed better - I wouldn’t be covered in dirty dishwater or work until late at night cleaning a dining hall - but in a vague sense, I really didn’t know what being in a lab meant.  So I applied to all the open entry level positions in the biology department. I had an interview in 2 and was accepted into 1.

I couldn’t have imagined then that the lab I started washing dishes in would become my academic home.  First I spent a summer doing research there instead of going home to be a camp counselor. Then I applied to a summer fellowship that gave me a small stipend to carve out an independent project. The PI thought that went well enough that she supported me in applying to a university-wide undergraduate research fellowship.

Receiving that allowed me higher wages (it subsidized PIs hiring those folks), critical for a work study student (since the higher my wages, the fewer hours I had to work each semester to meet my quota towards tuition  - I was working 20 or 30 hours per week) and the ability to carry out more independent research. With the help of an amazing mentor who was a PhD student, I wrote a senior honors thesis.

Note that I said she. I had NO IDEA at the time what a rarity it was to be in a lab that was entirely composed of women and nonwhite men. I can’t know how things would have been different if I had had a male PI or male mentor for my undergraduate research experiences, but I do know how powerful it was to have women mentors. Powerful in that gender was a non-issue in our lab. Powerful in many small, silent ways, if that makes sense. It was supportive in ways I can only point to in the past, because I wasn’t fully aware of them until I was in workplaces and labs that lacked these supports. Several of the lab members were also mothers, the first people I’d met who were trying to figure out how to “balance” academic life and parenting. I still look to these amazing women for career advice and research insight.

I still thank my lucky stars for great public support structures (like libraries and federal loans) that put me on a path towards a career in science. And I firmly believe we need to support these and advocate for them, even in times of strained and finite financial resources. But I am most thankful for the network of amazing and kind women who shared their expertise, their time, their energy, and their insight into work and life. They’re why I am where I am so far, and I try every day to be paying that forward to the students I have the privilege of working with in the lab and classroom.

Controlling the Emotion of Doctoral Writing and Supervision

Robert Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions (Wikipedia)

by Susan Carter, Doctoral Writing: https://doctoralwriting.wordpress.com/2016/04/05/controlling-the-emotion-of-doctoral-writing-and-supervision/

Several triggers prompt this post. One is my own data from a set of questionnaires seeking supervisor experience [n226]: frustration, anger, despair and resentment came through significantly.

So did supervisors’ perception of how hard it is to give constructive feedback when doctoral students respond with alarmingly negative emotion. The causes of student emotion were also anatomised. This confirms findings with data from 36 doctoral students and 29 supervisors (Aitchison, Catterall, Ross, & Burgin, 2012).

The second was a conversation with a doctoral student colleague. Usually our talk is cheerful and agreeable. But when it came to her doctorate (she’s at the end of her third year) and her inability to write, we stopped the conversation, both cautious about a sense of rising emotion and difference of perspective.

She described how it is simply not her style to crank out writing - she wants to be innovative and do something special, but that causes indecision and she is not progressing. I was firm that she had to find a way to just get on and do it. She looked hot and bothered. I was too - why couldn’t my intelligent colleague see she needed to apply the lovely grounded logic she usually showed in her work? She sounded increasingly ditzy; I sounded increasingly authoritarian. Neither of us wanted to be like that, so we changed the subject.

The third prompt was a different conversation about teaching, and the way that to some extent a teacher’s expertise limits their teaching skill if they don’t take heed of their students’ perspective. Often we teachers need to consciously remember to define terms or acronyms that are household words in our own minds, or explain connections.

Threshold concept theory pins down the fact that each discipline has some hard concepts that are obstacles to learner progression - teachers do well to carefully explain these once they recognise what the learner problem is likely to be. I think this principle applies to doctoral emotion, where supervisors have difficulty remembering the emotions of being a doctoral writer.

As an academic now of some years standing, I don’t get emotional about writing. I know I need to do it; it’s part of my job. I like doing it more than much of the work I do each week, but even when writing is not a pleasure, it is still a job that I am responsible for completing. And I expect to be hammered by reviewers, including kindly peers. I see writing feedback as a gift (Guerin, 2014) even though, like others, I mutter abuse when reviewers seem to want to colonise my articles with their own voice or their own approach.

The gift of rigorous feedback takes some getting used to. Gifts like chocolates cause pleasure, but are not that good for you, nor, as a gift, do they show real engagement with who you uniquely are. When the gift of feedback includes a real pounding, it is like deep tissue massage and acupuncture: it hurts, but usually it helps and feels so much better later.

So I am aware of harbouring unkind thoughts when doctoral students appear to be drama queens about how impossible it is to write. Although I am outwardly patient, I know inside that all I want to do is find a means of getting them writing again. I want them to learn to handle emotion, control it and move to where they see it as just part of the weird career choice they have made: to become proficient in academic literacy.

Supervisors are usually more aware than their doctoral students of the need to take a practical, workerly stance to writing. We forget that the construction of identity through voice can be deeply troublesome. As a friendly colleague, I was able to simply back out of an emotionally charged conversation - as a supervisor, I cannot.

As a supervisor, I express empathy so as not to seem monstrous, but I’m always looking for the opening to move the student back into productivity as soon as possible, with ‘why don’t you try …’. Probably there is always an emotional disconnect between how the student and the supervisor feel whenever student writing stalls.

Do other academics have a way of working with student emotion itself? If supervisors talk overtly about the emotional stress of self-creation through writing, would that help to move the student through that stress, or provide justification for continued non-productivity? Should doctoral students think about supervisor emotions, or does that just heighten the power inequity? Any suggestions? Comments or other posts on this topic would be welcome. 

Works Cited

Aitchison, Claire, Catterall, J, Ross, P. I., & Burgin, S. (2012). ‘Tough love and tears’: learning doctoral writing in the sciences. Higher Education Research & Development, 31(4).

Guerin, Cally. (2014). The gift of writing groups: Critique, community and confidence. In C. Aitchison & C. Guerin (Eds.), Writing Groups for Doctoral Students and Beyond (pp. 128-141). Oxon and New York: Routledge.