{"id":273,"date":"2010-10-10T08:12:43","date_gmt":"2010-10-10T08:12:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/athenedonald.wordpress.com\/?p=273"},"modified":"2012-10-13T12:33:40","modified_gmt":"2012-10-13T12:33:40","slug":"is-travel-good-for-your-career%e2%80%99s-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2010\/10\/10\/is-travel-good-for-your-career%e2%80%99s-health\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Travel Good for your (Career\u2019s) Health?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In order to move up the rungs on the academic career ladder it is inevitable that one needs to fill in an answer to the question of \u2018talks given\u2019. At the lower levels, departmental seminars and small national meetings will suffice to satisfy, but moving upwards the demands get greater: invited lectures, international talks and plenary talks at international conferences become de rigeur<\/em>.\u00a0 This immediately poses a problem if, for whatever reason, you don\u2019t want to travel. Perhaps you have a fear of flying but, for parents of small children, there is another obstacle. Quite simply, you don\u2019t want to leave them. This is particularly acute for women and may hit them just at the time they are applying for a permanent post, senior fellowship or promotion. How serious a problem is this?\u00a0 I would like to propose that there are in fact significant advantages in restricting travel \u2013 and if more parents believed this, it could reduce career-angst a little.<\/p>\n

I was a lecturer when my children were born and for a number of years I restricted my travel to only about 3 days a year \u2013 or more accurately, 3 nights away from home a year. Really. These days I am frequently away 3 nights a week but back then I absolutely tried not to travel, not to be away from my children, however much I knew my husband was there to look after them and was more than capable of doing so.\u00a0 Whatever biological differences there may or may not be between the sexes, I do think the maternal bond is very strong!\u00a0 So, did that disadvantage my career?<\/p>\n

In some ways I am sure it did \u2013 my international visibility was not great and if you turn down invitations, it soon becomes well known and the invitations dry up. However, and why I think the answer is less clear-cut than might first be thought, there are some definite plusses. Just think of all that time you don\u2019t waste in airports \u2013 though a long layover in Newark once enabled me to read an entire thesis cover to cover, which I suppose was a positive – or the overheated hotels with lousy food you can give a miss, the many identikit convention centres you can avoid.\u00a0 All things which one\u2019s soul is better off without. Furthermore, while my colleagues were out on the road, I was back home talking to students and hopefully inspiring them to better things whilst keeping them on the straight and narrow.\u00a0 I kept in very close touch with them and had time to read and comment on their thesis chapters, write the papers and produce grant applications (as well as being able to keep my carbon footprint down) – naturally at the expense of less time to network, raise my profile and make useful contacts.<\/p>\n

I believe that this is an acceptable trade-off for a few years. When my children were small I basically didn\u2019t travel; that was fine, I had my lectureship and I wasn\u2019t trying to get promoted. When they were a bit bigger, say 5 and 7, I started travelling rather more, got some US talks on my CV so that I looked convincing when it came to promotion to Reader. Then I (and they) found their adolescent years sufficiently troubling that I cut back on travelling again \u2013 but amazingly\/luckily I had already managed to get my Chair by then, so this mattered less. The timing maybe worked fortuitously well for me, but I think it is worth saying loud and clear that travel has a significant opportunity cost \u2013 in terms of useful working hours lost \u2013 as well as an obvious opportunity gain. But for parents, and most particularly for women for whom this is undoubtedly a particularly acute problem, trying to balance home life and the apparent necessity of jet-setting, I would say step back and think carefully. Some<\/span> travel is vital, much<\/span> may be as much about ego-stroking and having interesting experiences in exotic parts of the world as actually being productive for your career. Don’t assume more is necessarily better.<\/p>\n

Finally, I would like to invite those drawing up promotion criteria to think carefully about this issue.\u00a0 Is a long list of talks given an unnecessary hurdle for young parents? How many talks are needed on a CV to be an indicator of quality? Aa an alternative would it be reasonable to ask applicants to list invitations received, as opposed to talks physically given? The invitation is the true measure of esteem, the fact that the talk was delivered is less material, unless judgement is actually going to be made about the inherent quality of the talk – and no one does that on a promotion panel!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In order to move up the rungs on the academic career ladder it is inevitable that one needs to fill in an answer to the question of \u2018talks given\u2019. At the lower levels, departmental seminars and small national meetings will … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,27,41],"tags":[67,72,110,964,141,150],"class_list":["post-273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-culture","category-women-in-science","category-womens-issues","tag-children","tag-cv","tag-networking","tag-promotion","tag-travel","tag-work-life-balance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}