Choosing your Path, Seizing Opportunities

Posted on November 11, 2015 by Athene Donald

I gave a talk today with this title at the Institute of Physics’ Careers Day ‘Taking Control of Your Career as a Female Physicist’. What I said is relevant to anyone setting out regardless of gender and, I suspect, regardless of discipline. They are, I believe, home truths from which most of us can benefit. Although women (and other minorities) may face more substantial obstacles than men simply by virtue of being present in small numbers in physics, often feeling isolated and unsupported, the basic ‘rules’ for what you need to do to take control are pretty generic. In writing my talk I came up with a list of ten such rules. There are no doubt more and the whole issue could be tackled in many directions. But, for what it’s worth, here are my golden ten.

  1. Don’t be passive: Ask questions of yourself and others.

If you don’t know what you want to do next it’s important to try and work it out. Sitting around waiting for a bolt from the blue to reveal all is not a good strategy so it is wise to start by asking others the questions that are bubbling away inside. Ask anyone and everyone (and particularly those just a little bit ahead of you) about what they do and what skills they need to do it. Ask the careers service for advice. Ask your supervisors and those around you what your strengths and weaknesses are. All this will help you build up a picture of what might be the next step you want to take.

  1. Don’t be passive: Don’t sit and wait for things to happen.

There’s no point just waiting for that next step magically to happen, for someone to tap you on the shoulder. You have to keep an eye out for the opportunities. You do. Not your supervisor, your best friend or the head of department. Perhaps one of them will come up trumps and draw a good opportunity to your attention – if so you’re lucky. But it doesn’t always happen that way and the more proactive you are the more you can make things go the way you want. Even if the first thing you do isn’t your ultimate goal it may help you in the right direction and alert others to what it is you’re trying to do next.

  1. Seize opportunities.

And if someone does draw something to your attention you then have to be willing to give it a go. You may feel it’s risky but could help you on your way. If you turn it down you’ll never find out. (Of course sometimes it may be risky and irrelevant, in which case you’d be right to turn it down). But doing something that isn’t quite what you want but could take you nearer your goal has to be wise. If you feel it will stretch you – that’s healthy. If you only do things that are obvious and easy you are not going to progress very far.

  1. Don’t assume you’re stupid just because things are tough.

On the other hand, if you do things that stretch you it will feel difficult. You may know, indeed are likely to know, less than those around you when you first start a new role. This is natural. It does not mean you’re stupid. Stretching is all about learning new skills (and knowledge) and it is inevitable that it will take you a while to master these. It is far too easy to fall into the trap of thinking because you aren’t as good at something as others around you, that somehow you’re a fool. Wait a while and you’ll find you improve. Maybe soon it will be you helping the next newcomer and trying to support them.

  1. Don’t assume other people are ‘better’ than you because they act confident.

Some people’s way of coping with difficulties and novelty is bluster. They cannot lose face by admitting they haven’t a clue what’s going on and so they look ultra-confident. If you yourself are shaking in your shoes, this can be very dispiriting. However, a loud voice does not mean the content is right; answering a reasonable question by raising eyebrows and looking shocked that you don’t know the answer already is almost always a sign of someone who doesn’t know the answer either but isn’t prepared to let on.

  1. Networking is not a dirty word.

Somehow people seem to associate networking with sucking up to people. Maybe some people use it like this, but I see it as little more than taking an interest in the people you meet. If sometime later you can be useful to them or they vice versa, so much the better. Talking to your peers may be illuminating in the present and provide you with names of people to invite to conferences/give seminars etc in the future. So, when faced with a roomful of people you don’t know (as at a conference) take your courage in your hands, introduce yourself and see where it takes you. The worst that can happen is that the conversation goes nowhere.

  1. Failure in one situation does not mean YOU are a failure

As with rule 4, if you are pushing yourself to try out new things it is likely that sometimes you will fail. Failure is not unusual nor is it a sign that you will always fail. The author Samuel Beckett said ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ In science failure is a necessary staging post in the development of new ideas. The important thing is to learn from failure and do something that gets nearer the truth. In the wider world, this is equally true. Do not give up at the first setback, but learn from it and try to get nearer the right answer next time.

  1. What matters is not failure itself, but how you cope with it.

And that leads directly into my next rule. If you give up at the first hurdle you will never get to where you want to be. Failing is always unpleasant, but so is not getting to where you’re aiming. So, it is worth picking yourself up and either trying again or finding an alternative route to your goal. Despairing, assuming you’re rubbish is simply self-destructive. It takes courage to keep going, of course it does, but you have to convince yourself the goal is worth the effort of dusting yourself down and trying again.

  1. Always be true to yourself.

People, blogs (like this one) are liable to give advice. You’re entitled to pick and choose what bits to follow and to reject things that don’t fit who you are. In particular, if someone tries really hard to convince you to do something your inner self says is not right, ignore them. Ultimately you have to be the judge of what would work for you. If you feel you’re forcing your round self into a square hole you are likely to be right. Seek further advice, keep working on what you’re told until you feel comfortable. This is as true if someone says be loud and extrovert when you know you’re an introvert, as when they try to convince you that you really do want to take up that position in Alaska.

  1. Rule 10 Don’t kid yourself luck doesn’t have a role to play.

It’s always easy to assume everyone else got where they did solely on merit and it’s only you who has succeeded because of a bit of luck. That’s rubbish. Most people will have been affected by luck at some critical juncture (just as they will also have been set back by bad timing, ill health or some other kind of misfortune). You may ‘make your own luck’ as they say – and I would agree, particularly if you start networking, seizing opportunities and being willing to be proactive about looking for opportunities – but for just about everyone at some point chance will have contributed to their progression. Just because luck has played a part doesn’t mean that merit hasn’t too.

I hope the early career physicists who heard me illustrate these rules by my own examples this week felt reassured. Life is uncertain and frequently does not go according to plan. But you have to live with the hand you’re dealt with and get on with it. Good luck!

 

 

Posted in Careers, Science Culture | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Eradicating Gender Stereotyping: How can Athena Swan Awards Help?

Posted on November 6, 2015 by Athene Donald

There is nothing like seeing gender stereotyping through reverse eyes to highlight its stupidity. Women are used to intrusive, inappropriate questions about their looks and dress, even in professional situations (see this recent story about Russian astronauts for an example); they are used to being judged by criteria quite different from men, be it about being aggressive rather than assertive or being expected to be the one to sort out the childcare and the laundry. But, turn these statements around – as Twitter user @manwhohasitall does – and it really brings it home. Look at these recent examples of his (I presume given the twitterhandle) wit:

  • TODAY’S QUESTION: Is it time we focused on male politicians’ POLITICS instead of their hair, clothes and parental status?
  • To all intelligent men. Don’t be AFRAID of your intelligence! It’s OK to be a man and be intelligent. Some women actually find it attractive.
  • I have absolutely nothing against male chief executives, as long as they are able to make tough decisions.
  • Dad with a career? Pay attention to your eyes. Dark circles from lack of sleep can make any man feel insecure & come across as incapable.

And, most relevant to this blogpost:

  • “I don’t like being called a ‘male scientist’. I’m just a scientist,” says Ben. Aren’t some people funny? He IS a male scientist!

The trouble is, it’s still too easy to see these comments as ‘normal’ when referring to women – in the media or in person. Should I, for instance, in participating in a recent ‘photo opportunity’ highlighting three successful young researchers who all happened to be female, have made a fuss when the photographer referred to them not as ‘intellectual’ but as ‘attractive’? It feels churlish in a way; the male photographer meant no harm (I know that’s no defence), probably thought he was being complimentary, and yet it is totally demeaning in a professional context.

For university departments these fundamental issues need to be addressed. Producing lists of committee members where the women are marked with an {f} (as happened in my own university until rather recently) or asterisked (as I saw in a separate external list just this week) immediately implies everyone else is male by default (and yes I know we’re not necessarily binary either, but I think we have to start there). Whereas it is as well to know what the gender make-up of a committee is, marking the men with an {m} and the women with an {f} removes the presumption that if you’re not male you’re odd.

We should be sure that people are judged solely on merit, not filtered through the eyes of what is deemed appropriate, whether they talk in a low- or high-pitched voice or happen to have an elderly parent or a toddler to worry about. We should be aware that student surveys tend to view male lecturers as more knowledgeable and professional (see here and here) so that such ratings should be used with extreme caution in internal reviews; that women who attempt to negotiate a higher salary are penalised and hence a gender pay gap is likely to persist for the foreseeable future without compensating action being taken by the management; that women are often assumed to be unambitious and, particularly if they are mothers, less competent than men of similar standing but this is, indeed, an assumption not based on evidence; and that someone who talks loudly and at length doesn’t necessarily know what they’re talking about more than someone who is less domineering (indeed, it’s often the opposite) and should be treated accordingly.

University leaders at every level need to bear these and many similar issues in mind when it comes to appointments, promotions and career opportunities. Bigger – be it grant income, h index or group size – does not necessarily mean better. Those who are the arbiters of people’s fates need to be much more conscious of the subtleties of what merit and success look like, not fall back on measures that are increasingly shown to be unhelpful and systematically disadvantaging certain sections – notably including women – in academe.

Athena Swan committees and diversity leads/equality champions (according to the language an institution uses and the structures they put in place) should act as the conscience for these leaders. They are able to raise examples of both good and bad practice that they come across; to share action plans across departments and to make suggestions for improving the working environment for everyone. But more particularly, they can be the conduits for passing on information to the leadership about local issues that are specific rather than systemic. These may relate to poor behaviour in a pocket of a department – inappropriate posters, comments or actions that don’t amount to harassment but do amount to a difficult atmosphere. They may be down to a particular research group having seminars at 1730 and then heading off to the pub, thereby excluding parents or those who don’t believe the pub is a comfortable place to hold research discussions. Or they may arise because certain parts of a large department are failing to apply recommended practice about matters such as (KIT) Keeping in Touch Days and requests for part-time or non-standard hours of work leading to uneven responses to such requests.

The Athena Swan awards have proved to be a significant factor in encouraging conversations about diversity issues and disseminating examples of good practice. As long as they continue to be about facilitating such conversations and internal reflections their importance will remain. If any institution starts to use them, not as the motivator for debate and action but as simply a tick-box exercise which has to be gone through for the colour of the logo on their headed notepaper their worth will instantly be diminished. Departments need to keep their eyes on the primary goal of creating a more equal and creative workplace and not being fooled into believing that an award confers some sort of prestige and that no further work is needed.

Athena Swan has to be about a work in progress. Every submission’s action plan is only a staging post on the road to eradicating inequality. It is unlikely that, in my lifetime at least, there won’t be more that a department can do to improve gender equality (and that’s before we start on race or disability issues). Think of the action plan as just the beginning of the work, not the end itself.

 

Help us do science! I’ve teamed up with researcher Paige Brown Jarreau to create a survey of Athene Donald’s Blog readers (as well as 49 other blogs) during October and now running till Nov 20th. By participating, you’ll be helping me improve my own blog and contributing to SCIENCE on blog readership. For completing the survey, readers will be entered into a draw for a $50.00 Amazon gift card (100 available, or guaranteed 2 per specific blog included in this survey), plus FREE science art from Paige’s Photography for participating, as well as a chance to win a t-shirt and other perks! It should only take 10-15 minutes to complete. You can find the survey here: http://bit.ly/mysciblogreaders.

 

This post was originally written for QMUL’s Institute of Dentistry E+D pages.

 

Posted in Science Culture, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Lisa Jardine, Health and Sickness

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Athene Donald

Like so many others, I was deeply saddened to hear of the death of Lisa Jardine last week. She seems to have been able to cross many disciplinary boundaries and make an impact on so many individuals and spheres, her loss will leave a huge hole in the cultural and intellectual landscape of the UK. I only met her a handful of times but felt as if we had instantly connected and that she had something very special to offer the world as well as her friends. If you want to know more about her, try listening to her Desert Island Discs (recorded this summer).

She and I met for the first time, appropriately enough, at the Royal Society in 2013 at one of the Summer Exhibition Soirees. By then I had read some of her books – notably Hooke’s biography (The Curious Life of Robert Hooke) – and knew she had worked with the Royal Society over the acquisition of some of Hooke’s papers (as Sir Martin Rees mentions in his own remembrances). At the dinner for the soiree I sat down randomly at an empty place and introduced myself to the woman next to me. ‘You’re one of my heroes’ she said, to my embarrassment, but I certainly wanted to return the compliment as soon as I found out who my dinner companion was. Within minutes I found myself signed up for a small contribution to her BBC Radio 4 series ‘The Seven Ages of Science’ being put together at the time. This series is a wonderful listen, and still available to download from the BBC. During that conversation I felt as if I had found a new friend, and we kept in touch loosely thereafter, including via Twitter.

I last saw her when she came as a College Guest to our Scholars’ Feast last autumn and last was in touch with her to congratulate her on her election to the Royal Society this summer as an Honorary Fellow. It was clear how much this honour meant to her. Her death is a massive loss. Perhaps what convinces me personally more than anything of her impact was how much she meant to my elderly mother (and always had). Neither a scientist nor a historian, there was no obvious reason for my mother to hold Lisa in such high esteem, but from hearing her repeatedly on the radio it was clear that Lisa was an intellectual voice who struck a chord with my mother and who therefore meant a lot to her in a non-specialist way.

This week health and sickness has anyhow been much in my mind following an accident befalling my husband leading to his patellar tendon being ruptured. This, it turns out, is a big deal. Basically the loss of the tendon means the total decoupling of the kneecap and hence the total inability to do anything with the relevant leg. Nevertheless, if you have to have an accident like this, having it in a Cambridge College is an excellent place to choose: from the porter who sat with my husband during the time it took for an ambulance to arrive for a non-emergency case (a couple of hours I believe: I was in London on BSA Presidential business and so not fulfilling an appropriate wifely role of picking up the pieces), to the staff who had transformed the Master’s Lodge with a downstairs hospital bed by the time Matthew came home from the hospital, to the cleaning staff who work around the chaos an invalid causes in a home, to the academics who have borne with my distraction and absences (both physical and medical) – my profound thanks! Matthew was home within 24 hours of the surgery to repair the tendon but is now lumbered with a rigid brace for the next period (currently of indeterminate length) until he is allowed to start bending his knee through small angles. If you think about how you live and move you will realise such limb rigidity is more than a little constraining.

My remarks above about my wifely role are said with feeling. There are times when being Master and/or a professor of physics is all-consuming. But, as my husband pointed out (and as I relayed as I returned to a formal dinner for one of our donors after a quick exit to pick up the painkillers my husband had dropped), there are times when family comes first by a very long way. To the Chinese guests attending that particular dinner – held only a tiny distance from the Master’s Lodge, albeit in the main College building – this clearly made a lot of sense. It is important to retain a sense of proportion. For the time being I am more wife than anything else: academic life in all its shifting shapes can wait a little (blogging may be more erratic too) and I’m not (I hope) going to feel guilty about that.

Of course, in the weeks ahead, finding the balance between my different roles is going to be a major challenge. In the critical period, when a patient cannot be left to fend for themselves, what one has to do is obvious: be there to soothe, to tuck up, to be leant on and to provide plenteous fluids. As the healing progresses (and goodness, it is also worth thinking about the wondrous world of materials science that has given us appropriate sutures, strong and light enough crutches, a curious and ingenious device called a leg lift and plastics for the sharps’ bin) the decisions about how long my husband can be left to fend for himself as I attempt to fulfil my different duties is less clear-cut.

Anyone whose emails have been left unread – apologies; to those whose appointments have been deferred at short notice, I will reschedule; to guests at various functions at which I have been distracted or completely absent, bear with me. To those who worked so hard to make my husband as comfortable as possible in the hospital and who mucked in within the College to keep us afloat – my gratitude. I hope, for both my husband and my own sakes, this period of discombobulation will be brief.

 

Help us do science! I’ve teamed up with researcher Paige Brown Jarreau to create a survey of Athene Donald’s Blog readers (as well as 49 other blogs) during October and now running till Nov 20th. By participating, you’ll be helping me improve my own blog and contributing to SCIENCE on blog readership. For completing the survey, readers will be entered into a draw for a $50.00 Amazon gift card (100 available, or guaranteed 2 per specific blog included in this survey), plus FREE science art from Paige’s Photography for participating, as well as a chance to win a t-shirt and other perks! It should only take 10-15 minutes to complete. You can find the survey here: http://bit.ly/mysciblogreaders.

 

 

Posted in People | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Asking the Right Questions

Posted on October 25, 2015 by Athene Donald

The quote from CP Scott, long-time editor of the (Manchester) Guardian, elegantly says ‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred.’ As a scientist I like gathering evidence, getting at the facts and so, when Paige Brown Jarreau asked me to participate in her survey of science blogs it seemed like a good idea. If you haven’t already completed her survey then perhaps now (until October 30th; now extended to November 20th) is a good time to do so. Her inducement to me, and other participants, was that from the analysis I would learn useful things such as why readers are motivated to read my blog, what they perceive I’m doing effectively in terms of content (and presumably what I’m failing at) and something about the demographics of the readership, all information suitably anonymised.

That opening quote of course implies that the facts are black and white. That may or may not be true even in such a simple task as someone ticking a box on a questionnaire. Unfortunately, when it comes to memory this most definitely isn’t always so: there are many shades of grey when trying to remember something from the past, even if only yesterday. There are also those sorts of questions that people ask that instantly make you feel guilty, forgetful or as if you’ve got the answer wrong. It can be entirely innocuous – the dentist asking me whether I’m on any medication, for instance – yet still I can end up thinking ‘was that right, did I forget something?’

Currently I seem to be being exposed to far too many interviews and, in that context I’m rarely certain I got it ‘right’ or that, even with the best of intentions, that I’m speaking the truth. Because, in some sense which no doubt the more philosophically-minded could label with some appropriate -ism one cannot speak the truth like this. Reinventing oneself 20, 30 or more years after the event, telling the questioner about things that happened in the school playground or why physics was obviously what I wanted to do when I first encountered it at 13, how much accuracy is there likely to be in that? And the more I get asked the questions the more I find ‘suitable’ answers that are liable to get stylised because they ‘work’ and yet they become a remembered reality rather than the truth.

I don’t want to be difficult. I understand that someone carrying out research for their dissertation into what makes someone successful in academic science is bound to go back to how one started out. I am quite sure that it is relevant what sort of career advice I got at school (essentially none), whether my physics teacher was qualified in physics (she was) or had I been surrounded by family members who worked in STEM (I wasn’t). Yet nevertheless it is all too easy to see how truth gets distorted. If asked whether my parents went to university the answer is no, neither of them did. Yet that masks the fact that other family members did and there was undoubtedly a view in the family that if I wanted to go to university, go I should. Saying that neither of my parents did so can give the impression I was the first in the family to participate in higher education and that was simply not so. So facts may be deeply misleading even when true.

That answer is at least is a hard fact to which I know the answer. Another recent question, in another context and another interview, was to name and describe an object which had meant a lot to me as I was progressing in my academic life. Not something associated with my research, not a person – both of which are questions I’ve had to answer before and which are comparatively easy – but an object. This question, like ‘why did you choose physics?’ doesn’t really have an answer for me. However, ‘don’t know’ I fear is not acceptable (not least because the interviewers want to illustrate it in this case, and an illustration of ‘don’t know’ might be problematic).

The example given was a fountain pen, in order to get my brain in gear, but this didn’t really kickstart any fruitful line of thought. I am still struggling to come up with something that could possibly fit the bill. I tried to reconstruct my desk at different periods of my life, to see if there was some common thread, but I’m not particularly into paperweights, gonks and mascots or pictures hanging above my workspace so that didn’t get me far. I’ve a germ of an idea which, by some stretch of the imagination might work for the purpose, but it’s not satisfactory to have to do this.

So, seeking evidence is all very well but what if the question posed is the wrong question, as I feel of the search for an object? That of course is so often what one’s research reveals. The answer does not lie in the question asked and one has to stop, think again, dream up another hypothesis and another set of experiments. It’s a challenge. It’s exciting when finally the right question is identified. But that is not how the interviewer trying to turn my life into….whatever it is they’re trying to turn it into operates.

The myth of the myth of the great (wo)man in science may lurk behind too many of the questions, implicitly assuming that dig out my bio and all will be revealed about why I made it to professor and the young woman at the lab bench next to me did not. I am not sympathetic to the idea of the ‘lone genius’ anyhow, but I also think 1000 words trying to describe me from childhood to professor is unlikely to reveal with much certainty what actually helped along the way. If I don’t know the answers, how can I respond to the questions? If they’re the wrong questions anyhow, only some dubious construction of a faint verisimilitude of me might emerge. The evidence may not help and the apparent facts be less than sacred.

 

Help us do science! I’ve teamed up with researcher Paige Brown Jarreau to create a survey of Athene Donald’s Blog readers (as well as 49 other blogs) during October – now running till Nov 20th. By participating, you’ll be helping me improve my own blog and contributing to SCIENCE on blog readership. For completing the survey, readers will be entered into a draw for a $50.00 Amazon gift card (100 available, or guaranteed 2 per specific blog included in this survey), plus FREE science art from Paige’s Photography for participating, as well as a chance to win a t-shirt and other perks! It should only take 10-15 minutes to complete. You can find the survey here: http://bit.ly/mysciblogreaders.

Updated Oct 30 to reflect extension of survey date

 

 

Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Career Trajectories: Not Always Straight and Easy

Posted on October 18, 2015 by Athene Donald

It is all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking anyone who has reached the top of their particular tree has travelled in a straight line from their teenage years on and have had the cards always stacked in their favour. This week I have come across some remarkable examples of those whose lives have not been like that at all. For those who are just starting out, as well as those further on in life, I hope you will find these vignettes as striking and impressive as I have.

At the start of last week I led a public ‘conversation’ in my College with a former student and then Fellow (and now Honorary Fellow since she left and went to Oxford): Professor Dame Carol Robinson. Carol’s career has been truly remarkable in its lack of following the standard ‘rules’. If you want to hear the full dialogue, it is available as a podcast, but I’ll just pull out a couple of surprising facts. First of all, Carol left school at 16 and went to work as a technician at Pfizer in Sandwich (as it then was).

There she was responsible for a mass spectrometer, and this technique has sat at the heart of her research ever since. But, leaving school at 16 and ending up (after gaining qualifications as a day-release student and then taking a PhD here at Churchill) as the first woman to be a professor of chemistry in Cambridge – and then repeating that achievement at Oxford is remarkable enough in itself. Add in the fact that she took 8 years out after her PhD to bring up 3 children before returning to the workforce as a postdoc at 38 and you can see quite what an extraordinary career path hers has been. It should inspire others. You don’t have to travel in a straight line; you can step back or start late and yet still achieve a fantastic amount.

Just to reinforce this message, starting late was also a key feature in the life of one of the women in the audience for this conversation: Jane Clarke. Also a professor of chemistry here in Cambridge, she was a teacher till her 40’s when she started her PhD. This year she was elected to the Royal Society: another remarkable trajectory.

Later in the week I went to Manchester where I was honoured along with four other individuals with an Honorary Degree . The evening’s ceremony gave me much more food for thought about our life paths. First up on the platform was poet Lemn Sissay. He was being doubly honoured, not only as an Hon DLitt but also as the incoming Chancellor of the University of Manchester. Much was said in his praise by the well-known writer Jeannette Winterson. She spoke in warm terms of all Lemn has done and written, drawing parallels between her own life as an adopted child and his as a child of Ethiopian origin brought up in care. These were neither of them children who started with anything approaching a silver spoon in their mouths and yet look at what they have both achieved through their words and lives.

Then onto the platform came Joan Bakewell. From a grammar school in Stockport, to Cambridge she went on to become a pioneering woman at the BBC. To do this she had to overcome stereotyping and negativity as she fought to make her mark as a presenter and thought leader. Having to contend with remarks such as ‘the thinking man’s crumpet’  (thanks Frank Muir) she has nevertheless emerged seemingly unscathed as Baroness Bakewell of Stockport and President of Birkbeck College.

By comparison the lives of myself and Nicholas Hytner probably seemed quite humdrum in trajectory, but this was most certainly not the case of the final honorary graduand Dame Janet Smith. Probably best known for her unenviable task of leading the Harold Shipman and Jimmy Saville Enquiries and as an Appeal Court Judge, she also had a curious start in her career. Having won a place at Cambridge to read Natural Sciences (Chemistry) she chose instead to get married and never took a degree at all. Instead she went via a route into law that I think no longer exists simply taking exams from the Bar – and hence rose and rose ending up on the bench. But, as she admitted when she made a few remarks on behalf of all of us, the lack of a degree always made her feel different, not quite belonging. Indeed, an impostor although she never used that word. That was indeed the word that Carol Robinson used about herself for exactly the same reason: no (first) degree.

Now, clearly both Carol and Janet set out a long time ago and times are indubitably different. But they are living proof that not doing things in the sausage machine way, not simply getting on one end of a conveyor belt so that you can step off at the other, does not preclude success. Nor, as the choice of Manchester graduands demonstrates, does gender, sexual orientation or skin colour: Manchester had certainly done well when it came to diversity. No doubt that was not the primary consideration when the group of us were chosen, but nevertheless a fact remarked upon by many that evening.

I write these remarks to remind people that success comes in many shapes and forms. It does not require following a set of rules slavishly; many people who do just that fail miserably for all kinds of reasons. You do have to aspire, even if inwardly you quake, you do have to want to do just the next thing and the next. But don’t let assumptions of what is ‘right’ or ‘normal’ deter you from trying.

 

Help us do science! I’ve teamed up with researcher Paige Brown Jarreau to create a survey of Athene Donald’s Blog readers (as well as 49 other blogs) during October 19-30th. By participating, you’ll be helping me improve my own blog and contributing to SCIENCE on blog readership. For completing the survey, readers will be entered into a draw for a $50.00 Amazon gift card (100 available, or guaranteed 2 per specific blog included in this survey), plus FREE science art from Paige’s Photography for participating, as well as a chance to win a t-shirt and other perks! It should only take 10-15 minutes to complete. You can find the survey here: http://bit.ly/mysciblogreaders.

 

 

 

Posted in Education | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments