Family, Academia, and Rock Stars

The academia and family life discussion continues on ScienceBlogs and elsewhere, and continues to be fascinating (at least if you're fascinated by this stuff...). The Female Science Professor has two more posts on the topic since I last linked her, one on awkward interview questions (though nothing to compare to this anecdote), and another on kids and tenure. Between those, there's a post on changing jobs in academia that's also worth a look.

Elsewhere, Mary at View From the Corner (who has an RSS feed now, yay) talks about the evolution of her view of the professoriate:

I don't think professorial jobs are the ones I will be applying for when I finish grad school. I'll try to summarize the reasons why not. What's a blog for if not working through your angst? And maybe there are some insights to be had from my experience, who knows?

I didn't start my college career dreaming of being a professor. That was an ambition I picked up as an undergraduate, which is probably when most people who become professors decide that's what they want to be... As an undergrad, you're being exposed to all of these new ideas. It's a thrill. If you're lucky enough to go to a small teaching institution like I did (The University of Puget Sound), you're talking about all of these ideas with your professors. You want to keep talking about exciting, important ideas, to keep making discoveries, to contribute something to humanity. And the way to do that seems to be, become a professor. Because they're right there with you, having these conversations, only getting paid for it. Only it's even better for them, because they're experts, with the respect and attention of everyone else in the conversation...

Like some commenters here, she's got a darker view than I do of a post-doc-- I was perfectly happy with my post-doc salary and working conditions. It's worth reading the whole thing, though. (And a hat tip to Colst for reminding me to look at Mary's blog, which was languishing in RSS-less obscurity for a while, there...)

Finally, if you can't get enough rockin' scientists, Dan at Migrations has a rock star round-up, collecting posts from ScienceBlogs and elsewhere about where the scientific rock stars have gone.