Rocket Scientista

I’ve got a few posts sitting in draft, but they will have to wait, because in less than 7 hours, I will be on my way to Caribbean paradise, and most importantly, on a boat. I hope to shift to more themes of rockin’ science and science based rock n’ roll, but until then, good luck to all those rockin’ the rocks (and other neat science things) at AGU. I hope to hear all about it when I get back. But, I must leave, and I must leave you with this- when you read this, I’ll be singing, “I’m on a boat.” (Much to the chagrin of my husband, but he knew what he was getting into, right?)

*Phew*. It’s been quite the week and the schedule will continue to be taxing until my HONEYMOON a whopping 11 days from now. My husband is finishing up, graduating, looking for a job. I’m trying to get my project ACTUALLY off the ground, getting back into the lab to get things done. Which reminds me I have to find someone to let me into the freezer.

Today was a huge event that I put a lot of time into, and while I just want to decompress, there is more work to be done. And I keep having big ideas. As do others. I love taking on projects and organizing things, and whatnot, but when do I say no? I’ve been offered a very part time job to organize a science education effort, and I want to do it. But I’m wary- I already have one part time job at the science museum, and this would add another to that list. And while the time itself is fine (sure, I can be at available at those times, nothing is booked in solid), the total time out of my research day would make the other days possibly miserable. But I want to do it, I do!

Do I say no? It’d be great for a little extra money, and some more experience in organizing science education programs (which I may one day pursue as a career), and these sorts of things are always super rewarding. I love getting out and spreading the word about awesome science. But I’m pretty close to completely maxed out as it is. And I have my comprehensive exam in early May and I MUST PASS or I’m kicked out of my program. But then, I’m not taking courses. But my project is supposed to be ready to go A YEAR FROM NOW and I have NOTHING ready. NOTHING built. I have so much work to do.

So in my heart, I want to do it. I’d be perfect for it. But I’m maxed and while I know I could juggle it, I’d likely be sacrificing what little free time I do have, and some research time. So, as I type this, I realize I’ve probably made my decision. But how does one ACTUALLY say no?

My mother was always bad at it when I was a kid- she wound up volunteering for everything. She was my girl scout leader, she helped with the lunch program at school, she went on field trips. She wound up running the PTA. If there was an “event”, she was there. So in terms of saying no, I have no role models.

It’s a problem I have. I want to do it all and have it all, so I think I need to beef up my skills in everything. I need to be that master of all trades. There is just not enough time. I’m involved. I’m working on my science skills, my programming skills, my lab work, my networking, I’m trying to write more often, I’m getting involved in women in STEM projects, I’m doing informal science education. I’ve found a few fellowships I want to write proposals for, I want to work on my presenting, and I’d really like a clean house and reasonable food. Recent health issues have made things more difficult by enforcing a much more strict diet and exercise program that tax my little available time. When is being the best I can be AM at something enough? When can I say no to something that will help me get better at X?

Oh, and how do I tell someone no? I don’t want to sound disinterested, or incapable of balancing it all. I mean, I can juggle with the best of ‘em, but there is a limit. When there are things to be done which take 30 hours a day, even when done most efficiently, how can you stop adding more? And how do you tell someone this without feeling guilty, without feeling judged?

I have all of these dreams of improvement. I want to read that book and go through detailed calculations. I want to collect all my links to papers on topic Y and compile them with short summaries. I want to clean out all my code and directories and make things usable to others. I want to go to both sets of seminars in my department, and the interesting ones in the 5 related departments on campus. I want to go through my old foreign language text books and reteach myself the conjugations I have lost. I want to go to the talks across town at another awesome science place. I want to help plan events and run things. I want to fix curricula. I want to fix the university. I want to fix academia. This, my friends, is the problem with being taught you can do anything. You think that ANYTHING means EVERYTHING.

Maybe this is a time I should heed my own advice from awhile ago, and stop trying to get a job, stop caring too much about the future, and focus on the now and what I can do day to day that makes me happy. I should focus on getting through my project in a way I like, I should focus on trying to be a reasonable person. I do enough that I should be prepared for what comes my way.

I love what I do. Not just what I’m going to do, but what I’m doing right now. No matter how much I groan about the workload, I love it. I love the juggling, the thinking, the complete information overload. But most of all, I love the science. So to all you out there, worried about future prospects, take a minute to stop and smell the rosette nebula. It’s pretty neat what we get to do.

Listen to yourself, RS. Learn to say no and get on with the good stuff. Anyone want to tell me how?

I just got back from an awesome brunch with a fabulous group of ladies. We had some great food, great conversation, and lots of coffee. Who was this group, you ask? Why it was my AWIS (Association for Women in Science) mentoring circle. And what’s a mentoring circle? The Mass-AWIS website says that it’s, ” a collection of mentoring relationships that meets together on a regular basis for an agreed upon length of time.” In our case, this is a group of female scientists who get together once a month (usually for a weekend brunch) to talk about our careers, the goals we’re setting, and issues we face.

At the beginning of the “school year”, if you were a chapter member who wanted to participate, you filled out a survey. This survey asked the issues important to you, your stage in your career, if you were interested in meeting with people in your discipline or in other disciplines, and if you wanted to be a mentee or a mentor (great way to practice!). A committee then used this data to form the individual circles. Everyone in the program met for a night of snacks & discussing the important role mentoring can play in the careers of minorities in STEM fields, and of course, with women in particular.

Today was the second meeting of my group and I am *so* glad I signed up for this. Our group is a wonderful collection of interesting women at all stages of their careers. Near the bottom, you’ve got me, a less senior graduate student. Then, there’s another student who is graduating this year and currently looking for jobs. Move up one more rung, and you’ve got a girl in the middle of her first postdoc, wanting to produce some good results to get a continuation of funding. Then, you’ve got someone who finished her first postdoc and moved to industry. We’ve also got a first-year professor, just setting up her lab, teaching her first courses, and getting settled. And finally, we have a tenured professor with lots of wisdom (and her own hectic life balance issues) to share. We have two astronomers and four bio/biochem/chem type scientists. Within such a small group of female scientists, there’s still a lot of diversity in job rank & goals & ways to success.

These women amaze me. Each has such a different story on how she became to be interested in her science, and how she’s taken her path to where she is. It really enforces the idea that you can make your own path if you’re willing to persevere and take a few chances. I’ve already managed to learn oodles about negotiating with colleagues and institutions, balancing work and family and a life, prioritizing, and it’s also helped me feel less of the stigma of “non-traditional” career paths (I’ll get to my hatred of that term in another post). It’s really opened my eyes in a lot of ways, and it’s somehow very uplifting. I walk away from our meetings feeling a better sense of resolve, feeling more understood, and feeling like I actually can do this.

Oh, and it’s wonderful to get out. This afternoon was like going out to brunch with a bunch of girlfriends who happen to have similar interests. We met at a winery restaurant a little ways out of town introducing us to a wonderful new restaurant. We shared some great food and even talked about things other than our careers- movies, sports, family. It was a great way to spend an afternoon.

So, to all you ladies out there looking for a bit more guidance, I highly suggest seeing if there is a program similar to this in your area. It is WELL WORTH the time out of a busy schedule to sit back and have a supportive environment like this. It is another commitment to add to the list, but again, its value becomes more and more apparent each time we meet. Check out your local AWIS chapter, women in networking, or even just Google “mentoring group science” and your geographical area. There are some groups at universities, some on meetup.com, or you can always start your own or ask your local women in STEM group to start one. Thus far, it’s been a wonderful experience.

I wound up getting roped into an online survey the other day, and one of the questions it asked was,

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

I almost had a heart attack. Never before has that question seemed so unanswerable. 10 years down the road? That one, I can answer. It’s somewhat vague, but you ask me about what I’m doing in 5 years? HA! It’s just the right length of time so that I’ll be hopefully a year or two past finishing up my dissertation– maybe I’ll be post-doc-ing, maybe I’ll be in a real full time job? Maybe I’ll still be searching for the perfect job? Who knows where I’ll be living, or even if my husband and I will have a house by then. Kids? What’s that? Five years is a very worrisome time frame for me right now.

That question totally threw me off guard. I’ve been thinking about it for days and I still don’t have an answer. Do you?

Oh, and I almost forgot– THANK YOU SO MUCH to all of you who donated to Donors Choose. The turnout for the Social Media Challenge was huge, and so many fabulous projects got funded!

Now here’s a thanks to those who donated and a chance for those of you who didn’t have a chance to, to get something pretty neat–

GAP (+ Banana Republic & Old Navy) are offering a 30% discount this weekend. Just use that coupon or go here: (http://www.gapinc.com/giveandget/donorschoose/) , get 30% off, and 5% of your purchase will go to donors choose!! More cool school projects get funded and you get discounted clothes. Pretty sweet, right?

Jack: “We may not be the best people.”

Liz: “But we’re not the worst.”

Both, in unison: “Graduate students are the worst.”

That’s all for now.

I just wanted to give a shout-out to the awesome science & awesome science writing of a friend of mine, Ryan, who’s in the running over at Scientific Blogging for his awesomeness on MSL: Mars Action Hero. You should all totally go over there and vote for him. And check out his blog over at the Martian Chronicles.

It definitely doesn’t feel like 4 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon.  I’ve been so unproductive today that it almost hurts.  However, it’s all in an effort to try to combat some stress by feeling like I have to fill my weekends with cleaning and productivity.  But now I really do need to get cracking- there’s dinners to be made (ridiculous new diet making me make everything from scratch), and I do need to get on some laundry before I can actually breathe that sigh of relief.

So to get it started, I’m putting on one of my favorite get-up-and-moving songs, Jump in the Line by Harry Belafonte. I’ve got tons of posts in the brain pipeline including a post about WIA2009 and nurses.  But for now, let’s get down this lovely Saturday afternoon.

I’ve managed to take on a research project as big as my head.  Or bigger.  I always have these grandiose ideas that I can somehow learn everything I need to and as I put it last week, be the master of all trades, not just the jack.

I encounter a problem when in trying to master all trades– I can’t even be the jack of them.  There are too many different technical & scientific areas I have never studied prior to this project.  I now need to know optics, electronics, aperture photometry bits of spectroscopy, vacuum technology, materials science, and the list goes on.  If I make it through all this in one piece, it will be great.  The amount I’ve learned already is astounding.  But in this habit of mine to work on a research project for two years, I always tend to leave once I hit the point of actually being useful.  And getting to that point is so painful.  So the slow work and progress right now is killing me.  I just want to be good at something right now.  I just want to be good at something FINALLY.  I want to enjoy the fruits of my labor.

My pain with all of this only amplifies my questions of what I should do with my life.  Slow progress in the lab and on the science makes me doubt my capabilities (hello, imposter syndrome!).  While I intelectually know that this is what’s going on, and that all grad students hit walls like these where they feel so far behind, I can’t help but feel completely pathetic.  As much as I’ve been trying to figure out the whole academia/elsewhere question lately, this situation only helps push me out of this world.  And while that might be for good reason, I could just be giving myself issues because I know about how few jobs there are and how much time they take to get to.

Having a real life just seems so absolutely appealing right now.

Not feeling like an idiot all the time would be charming.  Not feeling guilty for not working over 40 hours a week would be welcome to my newfound hypertension.  Money and stability would be things unimagined of.

But for now, it’s all about embracing the stress, trying to find ways to cope while I punch my way through this brick wall I’ve put in front of myself.  I will figure this out even if it takes me 10 times longer than it should.  Because if there’s one thing  I’ve always been, it’s a ridiculous obstinate hard worker.

Ok now, there’s only a couple of days left, so I want to beg any of you out there who read this to help out.

Head over to my page at Donors Choose.  What happens is you pick one of those projects (or another that you like) and make a donation.  As little as $5 can help a project get funded, so everyone can do this!  HP has been helping out during the Social Media Challenge (asking bloggers to get out and promote the site) by giving each individual donors choose site a $50 startup donation, and now they’re doing even more.  If you get in by the end of the month, not only will you be helping out some awesome school projects, HP will send you a Donors Choose card so you can give some extra money to a project of your choice.

So, if helping out some kids in struggling Detroit schools get their hands-on-science on, then clicky click click. It’s a great cause!