sciencewoman | December 29, 2008This news is a bit old, but I'm still excited about, so I thought I'd share with others who may not have heard. Jane Lubchenco, an honest-to-goodness-working-mommy-scientist, is going to be the nominee for the next head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA is the uber-agency for the National Weather Service and National Marine Fisheries Service among other agencies. Long-time careful readers will know that Lubchenco is one of my favorite women scientists.
Lubchenco is the former president of AAAS, a professor at Oregon State University, and a marine ecologist,…
sciencewoman | December 28, 2008I have a dream that one day, academics--both men and women--will be able to take time to go the mountain top--or just the hill in the local park, or even a slope on campus--and cherish watching their toddlers roll down, confident that their careers aren't rolling downhill with them. I have a dream that academics will take the wisdom they gain from fostering their children's development back to their intellectual work, and feel confident that their community admires them for doing so. I have a dream that the stalled revolution will jump-start one day, that all women and men, whatever their…
sciencewoman | December 27, 2008There's quite the discussion going on over at Dr. Isis's house about different approaches to feminism and how the actions and choices of mothers and others do or do not conform to particular feminist philosophies. I made a comment early this morning that perhaps wasn't clear enough about where I thought the current US societal set-up fails us, so I tried again this afternoon:
I fervently hope that there could be a better way than having a woman work a "man's job" (in my case, science professor) and then come home and work a second "woman's job" (mother, cook, housekeeper). How many times have…
sciencewoman | December 26, 2008Three papers, an introductory chapter and some broad conclusions. Those are the ingredients of a Ph.D. dissertation in it's simplest form.
That recipe doesn't tell you anything about all the blood, sweat, tears, and sleepless nights that go into those papers. It doesn't mention how your personal and professional identity gets inextricably tied up with the subject for the time it takes to do the work and publish the papers. It doesn't hint that those papers help define you as a scientist, get you a real job, and make a name for yourself. It just says three papers.
My first PhD paper was…
skookumchick | December 23, 2008Last night on the News Hour, essayist Nancy Gibbs read another good essay about the confluence of the holiday season with the current economic collapse. Read it here; listen to it here.
sciencewoman | December 23, 2008It's December 23rd, grades are in, my daughter is in daycare, Christmas shopping still needs to be done, and I'm working on a review for a journal. What's wrong with me? Shouldn't I be enjoying the break between semesters? Why do I feel like the "break" is really code for "time to get caught up on all of the things that slipped between the cracks at the end of fall semester"? Am I the only one that feels this way? Are the rest of you reading this post by a crackling fire after making snowpeople with your families? Or are you reading this post in the lab while waiting for the centrifuge to do…
skookumchick | December 23, 2008I'm sitting at my desk at home, feeling the cold air blowing through the window, and watching the birds eat at the bird-feeder. I submitted the last of our grades yesterday, including one for a student who hasn't attended class since October and who I am worried about. I am now dreading the release of my course evaluations. I am working on the interim report for our ADVANCE project, officially due to NSF on New Year's Day but I'm desperately trying to get out the door before Christmas. I have just started the wheels in motion to hire another student on the ADVANCE project, and am waiting…
sciencewoman | December 21, 2008It's the end of the year, and I'm feeling a bit reflective. (I'm also avoiding a daunting between-semesters to-do list. When will I manage to take a break?) In a recent comment thread, Female Engineering Professor commented:
I often find myself wondering about various random threads on these blogs. Just the other day I was wondering if ScienceWoman ever got blinds or curtains in her office.
So instead of doing the year in review meme that's gone around, I'll now try to tidy up the nursery by sharing the rest of the story from a few past posts.
First to answer FEP, I did get blinds in my…
sciencewoman | December 20, 2008Don't tell my university administrators, but sharing my latest science results is only a tiny fraction of the reason to go to a conference like AGU. Even hearing the latest and greatest science is not the entire reason. This is a lesson that is taking me a long time to learn. I get giddy with the thought of all the cool science I want to take in at AGU. I plan my schedule full from 8 am to 6 pm with talk after talk and poster after poster. Since the work I do crosses several sub-disciplines, I am often forced to make difficult choices between competing timeslots. When I was a wee grad student…
skookumchick | December 20, 2008This semester, I co-taught a course on the history and philosophy of engineering education for graduate students. One of the students' final projects was to create an alternative vision of engineering education, in contrast with this video uploaded a short while ago about our department of engineering education:
I confess this video really really bothers me, and I didn't want this video to be the sole representation of engineering education on YouTube. So, emboldened by this video by Michael Wesch at Kansas State and his Digital Ethnography project, my co-instructors Robin Adams and Karl…
sciencewoman | December 16, 2008The last few weeks have been completely chaotic, over-crowded, and exhausting. On top of the end-of-term crunch, with its usual flurry of grading, review sessions, and exams, I was also trying to finish revisions on a paper, and get some research done in time to make the poster for AGU. The unintended, but entirely predictable consequences of all this was longer and longer hours working, more and more caffeine, and less and less time with Minnow.
I was getting so much done! I discovered that if I just drank more caffeine, I could reduce my nightly sleep to 6 (badly interrupted) hours. And in…
skookumchick | December 15, 2008Both ScienceWoman and I are attending ScienceOnline09 in January; ScienceWoman has already gotten your feedback about her session she's co-chairing with KH, so it is high time for me to ask your thoughts about the session I'm co-chairing with Abel Pharmboy and Zuska.
Our session is titled "Gender in science" but we're really interested in how blogging and online interactions can provide allies with a way to support women bloggers, bloggers who are people of colour, LGBT bloggers, and other underrepresented bloggers in STEM. So, as examples, in no particular order (but numbered in case you…
sciencewoman | December 12, 2008While many of you are thinking about issues related to blogging and interviewing, let's take this opportunity to have a more constructive conversation on benefits and pitfalls of blogging while on the job market. Warning: I want the discussion in this thread to be focused on a wide range of experiences, questions, and generalities, and if I see it disintegrating into more rehashing of the specific case a few posts below, I'm going to exercise my moderation super-powers.
Let's say you've got a blog. Maybe its focused on your science, maybe it's more a journal of your life as a scienitst (or…
skookumchick | December 12, 2008I am a total sucker for StoryCorps - I think it is a brilliant brilliant project, and wish I had brought my parents in to be interviewed when the recording trailer came to my hometown. I keep telling myself I'm going to record them - I'm planning another attempt when I go home for Christmas.
In the meantime, you should listen to the story of Ledo Lucietto and his daughter Anne, and how they've been mechanical engineers for generations, and how Ledo told people off when they dismissed his daughter's aspirations for becoming a mechanical engineer, too.
skookumchick | December 11, 2008One of my graduate students reminded my co-instructors and me of a fun internet tool called Wordle which takes text you give it, and makes a graphical representation of the text based on the number of times certain words appear. We used this idea to summarize the course we've just finished on the history and philosophy of engineering education, and then I wanted to keep playing so I made a wordle of my dissertation. The whole thing. Well, except for the references.
It's below the fold. If you want to play along, wordle your dissertation at http://www.wordle.net and share the link with us…
sciencewoman | December 10, 2008Remember the post on "Negotiating Beer with the Guys on a Job Interview"? from back in August. We had a lively discussion in the comment thread on the way a teetotaler interviewee could handle an interview schedule that included "throwing a few back" in a tailgate reception.
Today, a new comment popped up in the thread. And it's from the chair of the search committee.... For your ease, I've reprinted it below.
Hello all,
This message is coming to you from the chair of the search committee. That's right, somehow the internet, including blogs like this one, gets to institutions like mine. It…
skookumchick | December 9, 2008Bora has posted a list here of all the nominated posts to his Open Lab Anthology. While we don't yet know who will "make it" into the top 50, I was pleased to see some posts from Sciencewomen were nominated. Thanks to the nominator(s)! and go check out all the other great posts people put in the online pot.
skookumchick | December 9, 2008Linda Hirshman has a good op-ed in today's New York Times, arguing that the jobs Obama is proposing to make are in industries where men constitute the majority of workers. She writes:
The bulk of the stimulus program will provide jobs for men, because building projects generate jobs in construction, where women make up only 9 percent of the work force.
It turns out that green jobs are almost entirely male as well, especially in the alternative energy area. A broad study by the United States Conference of Mayors found that half the projected new jobs in any green area are in engineering, a…
sciencewoman | December 8, 2008One of the perks of blogging at ScienceBlogs is that our overlords send us free copies of Seed magazine. In fact, Seed loves me so much that they send me two free copies of every issue, even though I've asked them to stop. This is an especially interesting issue, with profiles of global science funding and education, a survey of 1000 scientists, and an interview with Craig Venter. So, what to do with the second copy? One for upstairs and one for down? Wait, I've got a better idea...I'll send it to a blog reader.
But who to send it to? I know, I'll do a scavenger hunt. Below the fold, I've…
skookumchick | December 8, 2008I'm fried. Tired, irritated, avoiding work. Note I have not posted on my dismal failure of InaDWriMo. I was so relieved to make it to Friday evening, I was just gasping.
Mark Bittman holds a secular sabbath for himself (a term he attributes to the blogosphere), where he turns off all his technological gadgets for a day. That may be a new year's resolution for me. In the meantime, instead of (a lot of) work this weekend, we did laundry, moved furniture, and decorated our house for Christmas instead. And we wrote almost all of our Christmas cards - 44 so far. :-)
Now it is Monday morning…