I think that Time magazine got it right when they named you the person of the year for the way that people are bringing all their perspectives online via social networks, blogs, podcasts, and videos. I especially appreciate and applaud the blogs written by a number of anonymous female scientists and engineers who give the dirt about what it’s like to be in their position. (Three examples are FemaleScienceProfessor, ScienceWoman, and the still-new Am I a Woman Scientist?, but each has links to plenty more such blogs kept by women in many different disciplines and at all levels of science from grad student to tenured professor.)

I wrote my essay for She’s Such a Geek because I wanted girls who were considering science as a career to learn from my mistakes. I believe my main mistake was that I didn’t talk to enough people to learn what a physics career really entailed before I committed to that path. Partly it was because I didn’t really give enough thought to issues pertaining to balancing work and personal life as an undergraduate—academic achievement had been priority #1 for me up until then, and I didn’t see anything changing any time soon—and also it was partly because I didn’t feel like there was any faculty member I could have opened up to and ask these things if I’d even known to ask them. Talking to a professor (and they were all male in the engineering and physics departments where I was) felt so intimidating compared to talking to the secretaries and admins there, who despite being warm, fabulous people, couldn’t give me the mentoring that I didn’t know I needed.

So my advice is, find female scientist mentors any way you can—and until you do, read these female scientist blogs. If you’re in a department where there’s only one or two female faculty members, you still can’t expect them to be able to mentor you. Those women have their research to do, just like every male professor in the department, and they probably have to work even harder to make sure that their work is perceived as equally competent to their peers’. Until you find the professor or postdoc or senior graduate students who you feel some chemistry with and who can give you practical, caring advice, you could do a lot worse than read these blogs telling the good, the bad, and the ugly about the lives of female scientists in academia today.

(Also note that this Dec. 19 NY Times article about some of the issues that female scientists are discussing today. It’s definitely progress that people are discussing issues such as unconscious bias, which weren’t even acknowledged when I was an undergrad and graduate student. I’d love to discuss this in a future post, because if I’m honest I internalized some of these biases myself—it would have been hard not to, being raised Catholic.)

This entry was posted on Monday, December 18th, 2006 at 11:56 pm and is filed under Career advice, Inspiring women, Progress and politics, True confessions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.