Permission to be here

One thing that surprised me about the change from grad student to professor is how shy I felt about doing "faculty" things. Checking my department mailbox. Using the copier. Going to meetings.

When I was in high school, I once knocked on the door of the faculty break room during lunch hour, in search of a teacher. Nobody shooed me away, but there was still the feeling that students were verboten from the break room. (And why not? Some of those teachers seriously needed a break from students, if only for a few minutes.)

The first time I went into the Briggs break room I had the same feeling. Like I'd trespassed in Grown-up Land. Except I'm a grown-up too. And I'm a professor too. And I'm totally allowed—even expected—to be there.

I consider how I would feel if there were no other women, or if I were some other minority in the department, or if my college and colleagues were not so supportive. This is how many people do feel, and it's not just in their heads—many workplaces are not welcoming and inviting, people are made to feel uncomfortable and othered. I am lucky that most of what I face is internal. Nobody's actively pushing me out. In fact, they keep welcoming me and encouraging me. They want me to succeed.

I realized I was asking everyone around me for permission to be there, and that was undermining my confidence. I don't need anyone's permission to do my job. I'm the real deal, not an impostor.

Like the spy movie cliché, people tend to assume you belong and you know where you're going. You just have to act like it. Do it long enough, and you might just fool yourself.

So when I feel uncertain now, I just act. I pretend confidence, and the confidence becomes real.

Hire me

I love working at Lyman Briggs, but the job I have is a temporary one. I’m only here for a year. The academic job market has a particular annual cycle, and right now it’s application time for tenure-track positions. This means that though I will be happily teaching chemistry at Briggs from now until May (and possibly into the summer), I have to look for next fall’s job now.

I don’t like applying for stuff. I don’t like selling myself. I worry that nobody will want me, that nobody likes what I do, that I’m not good enough, experienced enough, polished enough to get the job I want. I worry that I’ll be passed over because of my gender, my opinions, my beliefs, my appearance or my personality. I worry that the search for the next job will be a hindrance to the job I am currently doing.

But.

When I can drive the poison of Impostor Syndrome from my addled brain, I remember that I’m actually a competent, qualified instructor with a passion for teaching. I’m an expert in my field, with the publications and fancy diploma to prove it. I am capable and talented and enthusiastic. I have a deep desire to ask and answer scientific questions. I have the potential not just to succeed, but to thrive.

So if you’re at a liberal arts college or regional university and you have an open position in chemistry to fill for next fall, I hope you’ll consider me when my application crosses your desk.

Excited state

My job has overwhelmed me more times than I can count. I have found it very hard. But I love it. So much. I must be nuts to love this much hard.

So far I’ve had students crying at me in the hallway and at office hours,¹ one call to the paramedics, one student at office hours who proceeded to break one of my pens despite several requests to leave it alone, some angry demands for exam points back, some shy requests for office hour help, and many very funny emails.² I’ve been called Professor a lot, Dr. Haas most of the time, and occasionally mistaken for a student. I’ve been consulted on a medical issue³ and I’ve been thanked for the tiniest things as if I’d bestowed some royal favor.

I’m primarily responsible for a lecture section, but I have to admit that my favorite time is spent in office hours and lab. I love lab. I get to wander through the room, nudging students into understanding. Why did that happen? Did you expect that? What does that mean? Last week’s lab was on light absorption and emission. I stationed myself at the absorption experiment (look at salt solutions with a spectroscope) and peppered the students with questions. Is this absorption, emission, or something else? How do you know?

Last Wednesday, I was going through this with one group, and a young woman got just to the edge of an epiphany—and she started to move. She was practically dancing, moving in place and gesturing as she talked. I could see her eyes light up, and her voice rose as she worked through the questions I hoped would lead to her understanding.

In emission, the electrons are in an excited state and fall to a lower energy state, releasing a photon.

This young woman, shaking with energy, was a student in the excited state. On the verge of enlightenment. It was beautiful.

My Wednesdays are long days. I left home that day around 7 am and got home after 9 pm. And I was finishing an exam, and planning out the next week, and calming test anxieties. Long, long days. It’s hard.

But that dancing student, eyes alight, she made the day sparkle. This is why I love this job.

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1: I swear they weren’t crying because of me! I don’t want to be the scary professor.

2: Sorry students, but you guys totally crack me up when you’re so very serious.

3: “What should I do about this weird growth?” “Um, take it to a medical doctor? I’m a chemist.”

Blogging silence

I said blogging would resume, but I haven't posted in weeks. It's not because I haven't been writing. It's just that so many of the words I've written have been sad and angry. And overall I have not been sad and angry. I am delighted with my new job, my wonderful students and my friendly, supportive colleagues. I still have yet to find my balance-point—the last few weeks have not been easy—but I am doing well.

No, the things that have filled the news I read are what creep into my writing: Ferguson, Ebola, war and conflict all over the globe, misogyny nearer to home. So I have written out thoughts and decided not to share them, not to add to the anger and sadness and frustration. I don't want to be yet another angry blogger. I want to contribute in a positive way.

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One hard thing about my new job is the time my workday starts. I am not a morning person. At all. I don't get up early easily or happily. I am very good at staying up too late for a good night's sleep, and not so good about dragging myself out of bed the next morning.

My lecture is at 9 am. That would not be much of a struggle, were campus closer, but I drive 65 miles to work. To arrive on time and ready to teach, I get up by 6, which is even earlier than I got up back in high school. It's an incredibly simple thing, getting up early, but so hard for me. To cheer myself—and my students, who may be as grumpy early-risers as I—I start every lecture with a chipper "Good morning" and picture of a sleepy animal. It's silly, but it makes us smile.

We don't start with the serious stuff, the exam worries, the homework frustrations, the mistakes we have made. We start with a smile. A smile's a pretty good way to start the day, I think.

Back from Vacation

An afternoon in Tuscany

Last month I went to the Single Molecule Approaches to Biology GRC in Italy and had a wonderful time meeting delightful people and learning about cool developments in the field. It was a pretty great week. GRCs don't allow recording of the scientific sessions, but I was allowed to snap a few photos of the gorgeous view from the hotel.

After the conference, my husband and I spent a couple weeks vacationing in Italy and Germany, seeing sights, eating delicious food (we had the best gnocchi in Florence), and visiting old friends of mine. We came home happily tired from all the travel.

After that, I took a sort of technology vacation. It was unintentional to begin with: I had almost gotten used to being Internet-less. But after a few more days, it was really nice not to feel the pressure of email and Facebook and the endless stream of Twitter. That was as relaxing as anything else after we came home.

But I have a new job, and even if it doesn't start until next week, there is preparation to do already. So this week I reconnected myself to the buzzing web. Blogging will resume shortly.

What's next

I defended my thesis in April, and turned in my dissertation at the end of May, but I haven't left my grad lab yet. Here's what I've been up to, and what's coming up next.

Wrapping up

First I'm wrapping up some things. I've been revising and polishing two papers (one is done and submitted, the other will follow shortly), doing a few experiments for my last project, and getting things ready to hand off to the next person.

Most of my dissertation work was about watching the motions of one protein, TcpP, that is involved in the pathway for producing cholera toxin in Vibrio cholerae. Cholera toxin is the compound (a protein complex) that makes you so very sick if you contract cholera. TcpP (along with another protein, ToxR) activates the transcription¹ of the toxT gene. The ToxT protein activates transcription of the cholera toxin genes.

Aside from its role in cholera toxin production, TcpP is interesting because it (and ToxR, too) is bound to the inner membrane of the bacterium. In order to activate transcription, TcpP and ToxR must bind to the DNA, but somehow they manage to do this without leaving the membrane. Since DNA tends to be compacted into the center of the cell², it's pretty remarkable that two proteins on the membrane can find a specific region of DNA and bind to it. There aren't many proteins that bind DNA while bound to a cellular membrane, but there are a few besides these two.

To learn more about TcpP and how it pulls off this trick, we labeled it with a fluorescent protein and watched it move around the cell. My part of this project is done. Another grad student will watch ToxR move around to learn more about how these two proteins interact. So I'm updating my index of data files, checking that any protocols I've revised are up to date, and commenting the Matlab code I've written that he might use for analysis.

My other dissertation project was a collaboration with my labmate Jess, who has been studying fluorescence enhancement by plasmonic surfaces. I've been learning about plasmon-enhanced fluorescence for years, and it still seems a little bit sci-fi to me: by shining light on metal nanoparticles, you can create an enhanced electric field that makes fluorescent molecules shine brighter and longer.³ Jess has been enhancing fluorescent proteins using nano-structured gold surfaces. A while back we began pairing my fluorescently labeled bacteria with her plasmonic surfaces, to see if we can get enhancement inside live cells. We had some success [$] with our initial experiments, and the project has grown from there. Just because my dissertation is done doesn't mean this project is, though. I've been busy with experiments and trouble-shooting throughout June, and Jess will carry it on after I leave.

Shipping out

My last week as a Biteen lab member will not be spent in lab, but at the Single-Molecule Approaches to Biology Gordon Research Conference in Italy. I like the GRC conference style, and I can't wait to hear all the latest and greatest research in the field. It doesn't hurt that the conference is at a resort in Tuscany, either.

After the conference, it's time for vacation. My husband will meet me in Italy, and we'll tour parts of Italy and Germany and visit some friends of mine from my time as an exchange student. Then it's back to the States so my husband can get back to work and I can enjoy a couple of weeks of unemployment (and prepare for the next job).

Moving on

Mid-August I start my new job. For the next year, I will be a visiting instructor at Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State. (Yes, I'm going to be an adjunct.) I'm excited to move to Briggs: the program is interesting, the faculty I've met have all been delightful people, and this job feels like the right thing for me right now.⁴ Briggs students take science classes that emphasize active learning, and "HPS" courses (history, philosophy and sociology of science) that give them context for science in their lives. As I said to several people while interviewing, Briggs is the kind of place I'd have loved to attend as an undergrad. I'm delighted to teach there. It's gonna be great.

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1: transcription: just like you can talk about transcribing text, i.e. copying words from one place to another, we talk about transcribing genes: copying nucleic acid "words." The nucleic acids are slightly different—DNA is copied into RNA—but both kinds of nucleic acid "words" are the instructions for building proteins.

The process of decoding RNA to protein parts is called "translation." Again, it's just like text, translating from one language (e.g. French, or, in the case of genes, nucleic acids) to another (e.g. English or, for proteins, amino acids). Stitch those translated words together, and you get functional sentences (or proteins!).

2: In eukaryotic cells, such as your own human cells, DNA is stored in the cell nucleus. Bacteria don't have nuclei, but they still keep their DNA kind of bundled up in the middle.

3: It's more complicated than that, but that's the general idea.

4: It's a one-year position, and that suits me fine. My long-term goal is still to get a tenure-track position or a permanent position off the tenure path—I want more certainty in my employment than adjuncting is likely to supply. For the next year, though, I'm very happy to teach at Briggs.

A one-year appointment also means I will go through the whole job application process again this fall. Yay

The best scientist I know

Joe Palca asked me on Twitter this morning,¹

Who is the best scientist you know, and what qualities make her/him the best?

I had to think a moment about this. I'm sure many people who love science have a favorite historical scientist. My shortlist is mostly crystallographers: Kathleen Lonsdale, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, the Braggs (Sr. and Jr.), Linus Pauling,² and I am amused by the story of Alessandro Volta, who was such a great practitioner of the scientific method, that he felt the need to zap himself with his electro-motive apparatus over and over again on various parts of the body "where the skin is very delicate" to make sure it really worked.³

Who is the best scientist you know? It's a simple enough question, but it can be interpreted in several ways. For one, what sense of "know" are we considering?

• Who is the best scientist you know of?
• Who is the best scientist you have seen (at a conference, seminar, etc.)?
• Who is the best scientist you have met?
• Who is the best scientist who knows your name in return?
• Who is the best scientist you know personally?

Then we should consider what we mean by "best scientist"? The follow-up question (what qualities…?) allows us to define our own criteria for best, but who gets to be a scientist? Must we consider only professional scientists?

Because this question has so many variations, I have several answers. Here are two scientists I aspire to be more like.

W.E. Moerner is one of the best scientists I know. I have heard him speak on a few occasions, and I have read a fair number of his papers. My advisor was a postdoctoral fellow in his laboratory, and from comments she has made over the course of my PhD, I believe that experience has significantly influenced her approach to science and advising.

Dr. Moerner gave a seminar at UM once, and I was among the students and post-docs who ate lunch with him. We had sandwiches and chips in the Biophysics conference room, and he chatted with each and all of us about a variety of topics. Someone asked him about his work with Kador on single-molecule spectroscopy, and he jumped up to the white board and started sketching out diagrams and explaining the story. He did so clearly and carefully, and seemed to have all the patience in the world when someone didn't understand. He has a reputation for being brilliant, and that made me a bit intimidated at first, but that feeling wore off quickly. He was approachable and just plain excited to tell us about the neat things he'd learned. And he didn't just talk to us, he conversed with us.

Krishanthi Karunatilaka is one of the best scientists I know personally. She was a post-doc in our lab until last fall. She is absolutely meticulous; I have some real notebook-envy for her tidy, organized notes in clear and even handwriting. She is driven and dedicated without any of the pushiness that I have come to associate with those terms. She has worked some long, hard days because she wants to know the answers to the questions she has. She also finds balance. I know that her Saturday mornings in Ann Arbor were set aside for a peaceful cup of coffee on her apartment balcony. She doesn't get knocked down by failures. If an experiment doesn't work (or gives unexpected answers), she has another idea, she keeps rolling on. When someone else is struggling, she's the first person to say "Don't worry, you can try something else. Keep going." She has a talent for presenting even brand-new data in a way that makes it sound like she's considered their implications for weeks.

Other names come to mind as well,⁴ but you'd find they follow the same pattern: the best scientists I know do good, thoughtful, careful scientific work, and are also excellent teachers, communicators, and just generally nice people.

So those are my "best scientists." Who are the best scientists you know? What makes them the best?

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1: I admit, I had a complete fan-girl moment.

2: I admire Marie Curie, too, but she is used so often as The Token Female Scientist, that I think of the words of Mr. Bennet: “That will do extremely well… You have delighted us long enough. Let the other young ladies have time to exhibit.”

3: From Volta's letter to the Royal Society:

If, by means of an ample contact of the hand (well moistened) I establish on one side a good communication with one of the extremities of my electro-motive apparatus … and on the other I apply the forehead, eye-lid, tip of the nose, also well moistened, or any other part of the body where the skin is very delicate: if I apply, I say, with a little pressure, any one of these delicate parts, well moistened, to the point of a metallic wire, communicating properly with the other extremity of the said apparatus, I experience, at the moment that the conducting circle is completed, at the place of the skin touched, and a little beyond it, a blow and a prick, which suddenly passes, and is repeated as many times as the circle is interrupted and restored.

4: For example, my introduction to Jenny Glusker was similar in many respects to my lunch with Dr. Moerner.

Victor DiRita, a collaborator and dissertation committee member of mine, is another one of the best scientists I know. He teaches me something every time time we meet, even if only for a few minutes.

The best amateur scientist I know is probably my uncle Tom, for lots of the same reasons. He is also the only person I know who gets really excited about moss.

Many kinds of good scientist

I saw this article by Adam Ruben make the rounds on Twitter a few days ago. Then I saw the article spreading on Facebook, with friends from grad school saying things like "So true!" and "That's totally me!" so I took a look.

He had me until the grants ("I dread writing grants…") but then I realized I wasn't even a third of the way through his list. It just went on and on, with an increasing tone of whininess. The post spirals out into a humble brag. By the time I got to the mice he's killed, I just grumbled, "Okay, dude, we get it. Poor you."

If you can sift through it, though, he makes some points about the culture of academic science that are worth expanding on.

I am not a priestess of Science

• I don’t sit at home reading journals on the weekend.
• I have skipped talks at scientific conferences for social purposes.
• Sometimes I see sunshine on the lawn outside the lab window and realize that I’d rather be outside in the sun.
• I have gone home at 5 p.m.

I love being a scientist, but I have a mighty big problem with the idea that as a scientist (or more broadly, as an academic) I'm supposed to "devote my life" to my work. That's not called Science, that's called Workaholism. If that’s what you enjoy, then by all means do it, but don’t expect me to have the same desires.

Here's my own confession: I worked roughly 8:30-5:30 five days a week through grad school. Sometimes I would keep working when I got home, but that didn't happen every week, much less every day. I came in to work or worked at home a few weekends, but I never made it a routine thing.

It's not that I wasn't dedicated to science or my research project. It's not that I didn't care, or that I was lazy. It's that I needed balance. For the most part, I leave work at work, and I am home at home. Balance for me means lunchtime chatter with friends, Friday date nights with my husband, and brunch with the in-laws. It means taking holidays and coming to work focused. We talk and talk about "work–life balance," but the cultural incentives are heavily on the side of more work and not at all balanced.

The summer after my freshman year, I spent about three months as an REU-type student at Duquesne University. It was awesome, and I learned so very much. An important part of what I learned, though, was that I needed to Stop. I lived in a dorm, worked in the lab, and knew almost no one besides the people I worked with. I ate breakfast in the dorm room, lunch in the lab break room, and dinner back in the dorm room. I had a crappy-to-okay Internet connection, I didn't know my way around Pittsburgh (and was honestly a little frightened of wandering the city alone), and I was too shy to get to know the other girls on my floor, so I stayed in and read research papers. I read a lot of articles that summer. I still have them all, in a cardboard box tucked at the back of a closet. I didn't understand half of what they said on the first read-through, so I read them over and over, looked up terms online, asked questions in the lab, and just tried to work it all out through context. At the end of the summer, I was praised for my efforts, but I was also teetering towards burn-out. I hadn’t spent enough time away from science.

I have been very careful since then to take breaks and disconnect from work. I have sought balance. And I have advised newer students to be mindful of their own balance. I love my science very much, but I refuse to pass on the idea that the only way to succeed in science is as part of a monastic order.

I am not a priestess of Science. I got a PhD all the same.

A PhD is not proof of knowing everything

• I remember about 1% of the organic chemistry I learned in college. Multivariable calculus? Even less.
• I have felt certain that the 22-year-old intern knows more about certain subjects than I do.
• I have pretended to know what I’m talking about.
• I find science difficult.
• I have worked as a teaching assistant for classes in which I did not understand the material.
• I have taught facts and techniques to students that I only myself learned the day before.
• I have feigned familiarity with scientific publications I haven’t read. ¹

A PhD is not proof of knowing anything. It's rewarded for "Persistence to a high Degree" as much as anything. It's not about facts you've memorized, or stuff you can recall on demand–no matter what certain committee members may say. It's about learning something new. And that new stuff wasn't in the classes you took. (As I've discussed with some friends and labmates before: course material covers stuff someone already knows; research is stuff we don't know yet.)

The work you do in a PhD is, as a rule, highly specialized and focused. I spent most of 5 years watching one protein in one pathway in one kind of bacteria. I am the world's expert on the motion of that protein. Yippee. I don't have equal expertise for other bacteria, or even other proteins in the same bacteria, much less other aspects of microbiology, microscopy and the rest. But I do have some expertise, and I have much more in these particular fields than a friend who has studied the thermodynamics of two dimensional structures, or another friend who has studied the surface chemistry of semiconductors. The three of us have each spent 5 years studying chemistry, and we have each earned a PhD for doing so, but we would not be able to pick up each other's projects on a whim. It would take more time and more learning. The need to learn something new doesn't make us bad scientists.

We have got to get over the idea that we must know everything, that everyone around us knows everything and expects the same of us. It's just not true, and it sets unrealistic expectations.

Academics posture too much

• I have asked questions at seminars not because I wanted to know the answers but because I wanted to demonstrate that I was paying attention.
• I have worried more about accolades than about content.

I don't understand why seminars start with the speaker's professional biography. It's not like it'll convince me to come see the talk: I'm already there, sitting in a seat. And if you were to tell me the speaker is from Nowhere State and has done absolutely nothing of note, I'm still not about to get up and leave. Will the talk be better because I now know that Dr. I-Never-Heard-Of worked with Dr. Famous? Fame, publication record and grant money are no guarantees for talk quality, yet those are the things chosen for introductions.²

With fame so highly valued, I suppose it's no surprise that people (in my experience, mostly men) feel the need to show off. Asking a question brings you to the attention of the seminar speaker and the audience. If you don't care about the answer, please don't ask the question; you're just wasting everyone else's time with your ego-stroking. Let someone else ask the question they care about. This counts double for "questions" that don't ask anything. Those are called statements. Keep them to yourself during the open Q&A.

Most scientists don't communicate well

• I can’t read most scientific papers unless I devote my full attention, usually with a browser window open to look up terms on Wikipedia.
• When a visiting scientist gives a colloquium, more often than not I don’t understand what he or she is saying. This even happens sometimes with research I really should be familiar with.
• When I ask scientists to tell me about their research, I nod and tell them it’s interesting even if I don’t understand it at all.
• I have used big science words to sound important to colleagues.

I like words. I like big, fancy words and unusual words and old words hardly anyone uses, but if you study too long for words of four syllables,³ I lose patience. Tell me how you rowed the boat gently down the stream, but not how you 'propelled the craft placidly through the liquid solution.’⁴ I'll know you're smart by the clarity of your point, not the frills in your sentences or the jargon you use. You don't have to emulate Newton and hide your knowledge in nonsense sentences.

Scientists are people

• Sometimes science feels like it’s made of the same politics, pettiness, and ridiculousness that underlie any other job.

Sorry to break it to you, fella, but science is like any other job. There are politics and pettiness, rudeness and ridiculousness. There are easily bruised egos. There are liars and cheats. There are people doing this job, flaws, fears and all. We scientists aren't a special case.

This is what a scientist looks like

As a counter to Ruben's concept of a scientist, here is my own list:

• Science is my job, not my life.
• I do not know everything.
• I do not need to know everything.
• I do not learn by pretending to know.
• My knowledge is not spoiled by sharing it with others.
• I am not perfect.
• I am a scientist anyway.

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1: Another article I read this week was on feigning cultural literacy. It's worth a read. There's a lot of overlap here.

2: Possibly the worst scientific talk I have ever sat through was given by a Nobel laureate; it was absolutely dreadful.

3: “…he does not write with ease. He studies too much for words of four syllables. Do not you, Darcy?” – Mr. Bingley, Pride & Prejudice

4: In case you're not familiar with the “sophisticated version" of "Row Your Boat"

Propel, propel, propel your craft
Placidly down the liquid solution.
Ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically,
Existence is but an illusion.

Attention

More thoughts from my trip to San Francisco. This really happened, and though you may think it's "not so bad," it still shook me.

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We waited for the light to change. A fire truck rolled past, and one of the firefighters caught my eye and waved to me. I smiled. It seemed friendly. Yes, potentially flirtatious, but certainly benign.

I left the group as they entered the dance club. Tired feet took me downhill to the hotel. Four men hiked the hill in the other direction. As they approached, one called "Hey." It wasn't a greeting; it was an invitation to a conversation. I pretended not to hear and kept walking.

Another intersection. Another crosswalk. Another light slow to change. A man carrying a shopping bag neared the same stop. He skipped right to "What are you doing out tonight? You're a sweet little thing. You want to get something to eat?"

My training in politeness kicked in, even though he stepped closer, approaching my shoulder, step by step. "No thank you. Have a good night," I said, glad the light had finally turned.

I realized then that those four men walking uphill had triggered something in me. I had weighed them as a possible threat and found them unlikely to be trouble. It was unconsciously done. But the lone man on the corner tripped my alarms and reminded me that those alarms even exist, that out on the street I am always judging men–and occasionally women– for their potential to cause me harm. And that fact scared me.

Someone looking at me would see I was wearing a black pea coat, jeans, and sneakers. Not exactly dressed for attention. It was 1 am. But it doesn't matter what I was wearing, and it doesn't matter what time of day it was. I shouldn't have to spend my energy shielding myself from unwanted attention.

A few things I am thankful for

• my husband, who laughs at me when I deserve it
• walks with friends, no matter the weather
• friends who know when to invite themselves over
• role models of a variety of shapes and sizes
• my Facebook cheerleaders
• singing with my fellow GradTONES
• control experiments that work out the way I hoped they would
• warm mugs of tea on frosty mornings
• a welcoming network I can lend to others
• comfort food
• inside jokes about Mr. Collins
• some high school teachers of mine who have been on my mind lately: chemistry, physics, science research and English; you know who you are