Female Science Professor - Details

Listing ID: 2092

Title: Female Science Professor

Description: Blog of a full professor in a physical sciences field at a large research university.

Category: Education & Training : Colleges & Universities

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listed on: October 15, 2008 05:08:37 PM

Number Hits: 7 times

Recent Posts:

Hyper Mellow Break Time - 2010-07-23 00:04:00

Not long ago I had dinner with some friends who have known me for ~30 years. At one point, late in the evening, after we'd been talking for a long time, one of my friends said to me "You're so mellow. You've always been a really mellow person." Another friend literally spit out her wine and screamed "Omigod, she is the least mellow person on this planet!" I'm not sure what that means. I am moody? At least one of my friends was drunk? Or that people, even friends -- even very good friends -- will perceive each other in very different ways. This is not surprising, but it may mean there is no hope of us ever being understood by our colleagues and students and others who know us less well and who interact with us in more stressful circumstances. It may also mean that I am simultaneously a nice, mellow personanda hyper-aggressive, competitive jerk. In an effort to find a good mellow-hyper balance and to recharge and to focus intensely on Science while my daughter is away at a summer camp, I am taking next week off from blogging. Thanks for reading, no matter what you think of me, my life, my choice of topics, and how I present my views.

Telling It Like It Is? - 2010-07-22 00:05:00

If you are an adviser of graduate students. and if prospective students contact you to ask you about your research and research program: 1. Do you encourage prospective students to contact your current or recent graduate students for a student-eye-view of you as an adviser, for information about the department climate etc.? (why/why not?) If you encourage this type of contact: 2. For how long do you suggest recent graduate students as sources of useful information? Within a year or two of when they graduated, for longer than that, or for much longer (especially if they say nice things)? That is, what is the shelf life of graduated students as resources for new students? 3. Do you 'cherry pick' the current/former students whom you list as good sources of information, or do you tell prospective students to contact any of your students? 4. If you are selective in your recommendations, is it because you think it most useful to mention those students with interests that seem most similar to those of the prospective student, or do you specifically avoid your crankiest students? My answers are: 1. I encourage contact, as long as it's OK with the student being contacted and asked for their time/opinions. 2. This was actually the question that started me thinking about this topic. I lose track of time so easily these days, I'm not sure of the answer. Maybe a few years? At least 2 but less than 5ish? 3-4. I encourage contact with anyone, but may point out a few particular ones with similar interests. Some of my colleagues use different schemes, so I suspect there will be no consensus, but I'm curious as to whether there is a dominant philosophy with respect to these issues.

Assorted Infants - 2010-07-21 00:02:00

Not long ago, a colleague at another university asked me for advice about being the parent of an infant. He is about to become the parent of an infant. I am the parent of a teenager who was an infant about a thousand years ago. My first reaction was "I havenoidea. You are asking the wrong person for advice." Then I realized that my reaction was kind of strange given that I often write about "academic infants" and children. When my daughter was a baby, I was an assistant professor, so why, if both stages of my life were equally distant in the past, was I be more reluctant to give advice about babies than about assistant professors? Perhaps I shouldn't even attempt to give advice about either. Or perhaps I should start dispensing baby advice. Or perhaps the fact that I spend my days surrounding by assistant professors and even more youthful academics, whereas I don't spend much time with babies anymore, makes one more of a remote experience than the other. When my daughter was little, big kids, especially teenagers, were rather terrifying. Now that we are in the teen zone, it's the teenagers who are rather fascinating and the little kids, especially babies, who are strange and terrifying. Middleschoolersare very complicated creatures, but they definitely have their charms -- kind of like associate professors.