What, exactly, is meant by 'a life'?

A couple of older ones from CV:

http://cosmicvariance.com/2005/12/28/relax-young-physicists-relax/
http://cosmicvariance.com/2005/11/10/should-she-or-shouldnt-she/

Your series is great -- can't wait to see how it turns out!

Well, since I mostly disagree with you, perhaps my own post on the subject doesn't count as thoughtful and interesting. :) Academia and Family.

But to expand on your last point: You're right, more hours on the job does not always mean better hours on the job. That said, someone who works 60 hours per week (and is productive) is going to get a _lot_ more work done than someone who only puts in 40. Also, no matter what you're doing - I think 6 or 7 experimental runs per week is almost always going to get your work done faster than 4, or at least get you higher quality data.

Agreeing with me is always optional!

My experience has been that there's a point of diminishing returns on hours logged in the lab, and it's often much lower than people think it will be. (Maybe the people I knew who were in the lab fewer hours were doing more strategic thinking about how to use those hours effectively than the folks who were in the lab all the time. Maybe they were more effective because they were less sleep-deprived.)

As well, sometime there are practical issues. In my experimental work, I used an instrument that did not function reliably at all if it wasn't given at least 8 continuous hours of being turned off in every 24 hour day. Indeed, there were periods where I had to share this instrument with others in my research group (who, obviously, were using it for their own experiments). This rendered it impossible for me to get more than 4 experimental runs in a week (even coming in on weekends) unless I was going to be a jerk and either hog the instrument or try to sneak in a run while the instrument was supposed to be turned off so it would work for someone else's run.

In other words, during the stretch of my scientific career when it was common for me to work 5 am to 9 pm, it was not actuallyu possible to get all the experimental runs that might theoretically have fit into that time and still have anything like reliable data. So, in the end, I'm stilll going to say hours logged in an unreliable proxy for the quantity or quality of data collected.

Thanks for including my post. It's more of a question than "thoughtful" (at least right now). Maybe your readers could chime in.

For me, though, as an aspiring academic in the humanities, it's been interesting to watch my partner go through fellowship interviews in medicine--a scientific field, though not straight research.

The departments seem to want to know you as a person--or at least how you "fit" with them. Trying to figure out whether a program wants you for slave labor or to teach you is also difficult. And then there's the question of what *you* want to do yourself--how focused do you want to be on research, how much on patient care, etc.

To me, what's strange is how unofficial the whole process is--no online application forms or GRE scores. Just your CV and some letters of rec, and a trip to impress your potential colleagues. And offers that come in before you've interviewed elsewhere (or your partner has even begun her PhD applications!)

I'm saying all of this as an outsider--one who isn't a scientist, but who is trying to understand the politics because it is going to impact my life for a while. And then, of course, toss in the question of how "out" to be in a field like medicine (you don't want to have that prevent you from getting a job but you also want to know if there's homophobia up front).

Sheesh. Sometimes I think my day job (technology) is worth sticking with, just for the relative stability!

Actually, it is my understanding that a man having a child INCREASES his chances of tenure, while a woman having a child DECREASES her chances of tenure. This is something I was told by a friend who has read the work of Marianne McSomething (McPherson? McManus? crapola, I'll look it up) from Stanford. I'll look it up and recomment.

Ok, it's Mary Anne Mason from Berkeley, not Stanford, and she has a series of articles on "Do Babies Matter?" You can find out more here: http://www.grad.berkeley.edu/deans/mason/

All these posts on balancing non-academic interests with the demands [not all of which are supported by evidence and logic as much as by convention] getting an advanced degree or cultivating a respectable academic career put a question in my mind.

Much of what I am reading here is life-lessons told as if each of us had to re-invent this balancing act of the academic career. But there really might be two broad categories of struggling postdocs and professors on probation toward tenure:
1 Academics who were the children of one-PhD or, sometimes two-PhD parents
2 Academics who are the first in the family to have gone on to higher degrees and into teaching and research.

For the former, they are not reinventing but making their personal variation on a theme they have already experienced from inside the family boundaries. [or maybe being the children of professors totally sours one to the academic's life and there are no instances of the former case to report???]

Greensmile, interesting. My parents: 1 PhD (engineering), 1 high school education. Her parents: 1 MD, 1 PhD (epidemiology, so also the medical field).

Of course, for me, my dad had the PhD and my mom was the caregiver--she worked out of the home or at church, so we didn't have a "two-career" family. Her parents did have to make some adjustments because of having two careers, but the fields were related, which I think helped.

I'm not soured, nor is she--but we are realistic about job prospects and the difficult decisions ahead.

In my case, my mom went back for the PhD when I was nine. She did have a balancing act to do, but my dad was supportive of the whole child-rearing effort. My sister and I were old enough that it was only a year or two in day care before we became "latch-key" kids. I do remember coming home from school on Friday and stopping off at my mom's lab, where another grad student would pay me something like a dollar to sweep a million mites off of leaves onto various petri dishes.

My own thoughts on the "have a life and a career" thing closely echo Janet's-- to the point that this post on my blog is about half quotes from hers (which may be a whole NUTHER ethical thing that Janet has written about):

http://brahms.phy.vanderbilt.edu/~rknop/blog/?p=81

Yet another thought :

When I was in grad school (Caltech, Physics), there was indeed a sort of "busier than thou" ethic among the post-docs and grad students. You were supposed to be in the office all the time, evenings and weekends.

My observation there and elsewhere, however, is that the people in the office a lot are not on task a lot. They spend a lot of time hanging around, chatting, goofing off, etc. As such, counting all the time they are in the office as time when they are working is not really valid.

I've told my current grad student that I'm not really interested in how much time she is present at work. What I'm interested in is how much she gets home. She's said that she works more efficiently at home frequently-- and I sympathize, as I've had things that way in the past. Now that I've got my own office, I do work more efficiently at work. The grad students all share offices with multiple other people, and with many other people around, the net cross-section that somebody is ready to distract you is high.

I did tell her a cautionary tale about a past grad student, who really wasn't getting things done at the rate he needed to-- and that, because of that, I started noticing how much (or how little) he was around. Time does need to be put in, but as long as you're getting a reasonable amount of stuff done, I won't demand unreasonable hours from my current grad student, nor will I demand her constantly visible presence.

-Rob

Just a thought (and not to disagree with anything that's been said so far), but has anyone put forth the argument that an academic career has advantages for raising kids, too? I agree that starting a family while trying to get the ball rolling on an academic career (esp a preestigious one) is brutal. And yet, once one has the job...professors get to manage their own time to a much greater extent than most people with office jobs. They get to do a lot of their work at home if they want (though I imagine that's less true in the scienes). They get summers to be more or less home with the kids.

I was raised by a community-college professor (admittedly, not the most high-pressure of academic appointments), and I feel that the amount of time she was able to free up for her family was an absolute luxury. It makes me sad to think that I might not have as much flexibility to be there for the kids I might have some day as she had for me and my sister.

Judging someone's commitment or contribution to the organization simply by counting the hours he or she is there looking busy is intellectually lazy.

This problem is not just endemic to science/academia, it's also a problem in business. We live in a nine-to-five world where the time spent on a problem means more than the actual rate of progress. This is why solitaire exists on most computer systems. This is why some contractors love billable hours. We work to a clock and not until we're done for the day. Sometimes done means twelve hours of work and sometimes it means four.

But how do we measure that? Even in salaried positions, companies, schools, labs, etc. like to think they're getting their money's worth, so they institute the more measureable, and frankly easier to track quantitative standards of time spent (that old adage of time equals money is really the death knell of productivity) rather than progress made. I understand why. Time is a standard that does not really change, unless we start looking at it in relativistic rather than Newtonian terms, whereas measuring by progress means creating new standards, new milestones, and new deadlines.

And yes, there are positions where time is the perfect measurement, such as manning a desk at a philosophy department office.

But it's not necessarily intellectual laziness that leads to the time/progress dichotomy. It's more a willful unwillingness to trust in the qualitative. Qualitative seems less objective in the mind's eye than quantitative, because it means creating standards rather than relying on the old and the (supposedly) reliable.

It's a vast conservativism that keeps us from measuring work properly. Perhaps we can get academia and science to measure correctly. I know some labs do. A friend of mine who is working on his Ph.D. in Microbiology started off in a nine-to-five lab and suffocated under the weight of unprogress. Then he moved to a work as you need lab in the medical school of his university, and suddenly had direction, and publication.

Success will probably lead the way in this battle.

---Peter

I generally agree with all of this, with one big caveat:

Reproduction and all needs associated with it (i.e., family life) are fundamentally more important than rockclimbing, or even blogging. ;-) They represent an individual's evolutionary stake in the future -- what's more exploitative than cutting into that? Furthermore, among any reasonable cross-section of the population, it can be expected that most of the people in the relevant age ranges will, over the course of a decade or two, want something of the sort. The freedom of individuals to choose otherwise does not change the fact that en masse, this is part of the basic cycle of human continuance, and it's something that any employer with human integrity should be working within, not against.

Thanks, Janet, for mentioning my teeny contribution to the discussion.

I keep having mixed feelings about writing more on this topic, but reading this comment from Katherine Sharpe:

"Just a thought (and not to disagree with anything that's been said so far), but has anyone put forth the argument that an academic career has advantages for raising kids, too?"

... and the rest of what she wrote, I have to add my 2 cents.

For all it was incredibly stressful in certain ways (that I am not going to describe) to be going through graduate school when my son was born, in other ways it was the best possible timing. The only times I actually was obliged to be physically away from him were when my courses were being held, i.e. only about 8 hours a week. So the only times I needed to hire child care for his first year or so were the times when his father and I happened to be in class at the same time. I can't imagine another situation that would have let us schedule our time so flexibly. Of course, what it also meant was very little sleep as baby's sleep time was homework time!

This is not to say that I recommend this to anyone, and it would have been a lot better to have had good affordable infant care (or a willing, retired relative) available; I'm just agreeing that academia is in some ways more congenial to having a family life than, say, being an associate in a law firm is.

Hey, A Little Night Musing, thanks for the two cents. It's interesting!

I also find myself moved to comment by something that Patrick O'Sullivan said, about how we're more inclined to measure 'working enough' in America by counting hours spent looking as though one is working, rather than how much that person gets done (quantitatve not qualitative measurement). I think that's right on, and that it is a BIG PROBLEM for social life in America: both the amount of time that people are expected to work, but much more than that, the total temporal and spatial separation that's expected between "work" and "leisure."

Is there anything that we as a society (or we as individuals living in this society as it now is) can do about this?

(Patrick's comment also makes me think, somewhat cynically perhaps, about blogging. But really, what is up with the proliferation of interesting stuff on the internet? I honestly believe that there would be vastly less of this stuff, and vastly fewer blog-readers, were there not millions of people obligated to be at desks all day, looking as though they are working, but not necessarily able or interested in working at full capacity for eight or nine hours at a stretch.)

Katherine Sharpe: Consider that besides those reproductive urges, humans in general also have social and creative interests. Being fundamental to humanity as such, these likewise tend to foil any attempts at suppression.