Nicely does it...

Since I've known (although hardly anyone else does) that I'll be taking over the management of academic staff here next year, I've found myself smiling more and saying hi to people on the stairs and in corridors that previously I might have just nodded at. This isn't just the people I'll be managing directly, it pervades to everyone from technicians, students, secretarial support and postdocs. Maybe it's because we had a previous head of department several years ago who never said hi to anyone (in fact there were various competitions running to see what we had to do to get him to acknowledge us on the stairs), but that didn't occur to me until I thought about it just now. I guess I also feel like people will officially be looking to me as a leader so I should foster the attitudes I would like others to have...

Of course I could be coming across as a suspicious grinning maniac.

I don't count!

I am staggered by something I have just read over lunch. In the UKRC Women mean Business brochure published in 2010, there is a reported statistic that in 2008 around 9% of full time professors in SET subjects were women.

Now, I have seen this statistic before, but never really noticed the "full-time" in it. So, since I work 0.8FTE, does this mean that far from furthering the leadership by women in SET subjects, I am not going to count in these kinds of statistics? How many part-time professors are there out there? Are we not good enough?

I can understand that there is merit in using the proportion of full-time professors, but shouldn't an organisation that tells us to improve our family-friendly policies (including flexible working) in order to encourage more women to stay in SET subjects to high levels at least recognise the part-time female professors who are also valuable role models?

It's enough to make me choke on my tea...

Token women?

Our School has just introduced two new policies regarding the gender balance of seminar series. Firstly for our two main seminar series (one given by externally invited speakers, one by internal speakers) over any year, the list of speakers is to include at least 30% female, 30% male (our gender balance in the department is about 30% at postdoc level, less than this at faculty level and more at PhD). Secondly, any scientific meetings hosted by the SChool should have both male and female speakers (unless this is a very small field and people just aren't there).

A female colleague mentioned that she was thought this was a strange thing to do, as she didn't see how the organisers of such series or meetings had the power to ensure the gender balance is met.

I disagree - it may mean looking a bit harder for female speakers, but in principle certainly for seminar series in our field it is relatively easy to do.

The more complex argument is whether this is the start of quotas for women at various things. We already have some of these imposed by the university - e.g. on interview panels. The school is aiming to have female representation (in the spirit of enhancing diversity) on the main strategic committees and promotions committees. Hence I find myself on two new committees this term. Some would say I was there as the token woman. I have indeed felt resentful of this in the past. But I have a new motto:

"Just because you start as the token woman doesn't mean you have to stay one"

I figure that without women in senior leadership positions, the battle for increased diversity (which has a strong business case) will never be won. So my goal is to learn from and contribute to these committees where I can, and if I really feel that there is no sense for me being on one other than being female, I will say so and resign. Perhaps this is overly naive and aspirational since I haven't yet attended any of the meetings, but it can't hurt to start like this.

Apparently it's an OYCN (offer you can negotiate)

Well, in a previous post I described a dilemna about accepting a senior management position within a year of being promoted to full professor. My main issue was that since I work 0.8FTE, if I took the role (roughly 0.5FTE), this would make my workload unfairly biased towards admin compared to a 1.0FTE person taking the same role. After lots of negotiations and meetings, it appears that we have split off some aspects of the work to another person and so can now demonstrate that 20% of the load has gone. So it looks like I'll be a senior staff manager from Easter. Scary.

They're here...

Of course I don't mean the alien invasion, just that the students are back, oh hang on.. :-)

Actually aside from campus looking like a trash can at the moment, it's nice to see the place restored to (one of) it's primary functions. There was a danger for a week or so that I was about to actually acheive one of my summer research goals but now there's no chance. However, there is definitely a different buzz around the place.

Our new PhD students start today, and as admission tutor I feel excited that I have been involved in giving 15 students opportunities to follow our graduate programme.. but slightly nervous in case any of them turn out not to live up to expectations. For the coming year I wanted to try to get a better comparative measure than their paper applications, but I would have at most 10 mins with each student in which to do it. I wonder about
a) asking some very standard questions to each student (should these be technical or more open-ended e.g. what excites you about the subject X)
b) sending out something to be prepared in advance (e.g. get them to summarise a short paper in subject X)

Either of these would be more objective than a look at their paper application, a general chat, and a "gut instinct". But would they be more reliable?

Fieldcourses: expensive or priceless?

I've just returned from a week teaching 24 undergraduates on a fieldwork course (under the path of ex-hurricane Katia) and have yet again been reminded how rewarding teaching can be under the right circumstances. This course involves staff and students from two different universities and is residential in a remote place which has conditions very different to anything the students are used to. Days are long and intense - usually 7.30am to 9.30pm for students and longer for staff. Students complete several different exercises both outdoors (including a long hike) and indoors and hand in work for assessment before leaving to return home. The work to some extent depends on weather conditions and so there is always an element of "surprise" and crisis management. However, overwhelmingly the students and staff get a lot out of it, and I feel reconnected to teaching and to our undergraduates.

It is obvious that the staff/student ratio here is far better than you would ever get in ordinary teaching - approximately 1 to 6. Plus we use postgrad demonstrators and IT and technical support staff. We have to pay for board and lodging, transport and computers and field equipment. The students make a contribution but it is heavily subsidised by the department. I am increasingly conscious that it looks like a large amount for one module - and the less fieldwork based staff have sometimes questioned the use of resources. However, I will continue to defend field courses like this one because to staff they are refreshing and to students the requirement to combine knowledge across their other modules and the resulting revision ahead of the final year is a unique experience that cannot have a value placed upon it.

3 days

Well, I've just received an "invitation" to participate in a workshop to shape the admissions procedures and processes of the University (we have just re-organised to one central admissions office rather than separate undergrad and postgrad offices). Whilst I admire the ambition to include the views and creativity of people from all parts of the university and all steps in the change from application to acceptance - the workshop is for 3 consecutive full days 9-5 in week 4 of term. On what planet do people think that a part-time research active professor with full teaching and admin "service" loads can spend 3 full days navel gazing with administrators? I would have been happy to be involved for one or maybe even 2 days, but 3 is ridiculous.

Rant over.

OYCR or OYCN

"Offer you can't refuse" or "Offer you can negotiate"?

Is it ever acceptable to say "no thanks" to a suggestion from "management" that you "consider" taking over one of the 3 leadership roles in the Dept in 9 months time, which will be 9 months after your promotion to full professor. This role would put me in charge of all the teaching management, and the management of all Faculty academic staff, as well as strategic decisions regarding the direction of the department. It currently takes up around 0.6 of someone's full time post. I only work 0.8 FTE (full time equivalent) so unless I negotiate it down, I will be spending a disporportionate part of the next 3 years being an administrator. I accept that at some point I will need to do this or a similar role, but I wasn't expecting it to be yet. I am also conscious that there has never been a female HoD in this department (nor a part-time one either). Do I:

a) say "no, I can't do it now" - with justification that I am too inexperienced to do the academic staff management, and it would have a disproportionate reduction on the amount of time I have for research?

b) say yes ok, I'll take part of the role, but 20% of it needs to be split out to other people (I would rather this were the academic staff management role as I will feel very underqualified to be doing reviews of senior professors in the department)

If b, what else would you negotiate? More money? Sabbatical at the end of 3 years? A female mentor (mentorship for leadership positions is dire in this university).

Here we go - the September rollercoaster

Finally, the month of chaos is here. September sees me with a total of 8 days teaching on a fieldcourse (incidentally this absence quadruples the maximum time I have been away from home in one block since I had my first child), 5 days away at other conferences/meetings, 3 full day meetings in the office and approx 33 hours on long distance trains. This leaves 6 days unaccounted for in the office, but these will be taken up with preparation for all the meetings, and indeed for the new University term which starts in early October here. My youngest child moves rooms at nursery while I am away.

Now ordinarily I like roller-coasters, but only when I can freely wave my hands in the air and scream loudly - possibly not acceptable in a working environment.

Roll on October, when ironically, although the students are back, things will be a bit quieter.

"extreme professionalism"

As a favour to a long-standing collaborator of mine, I recently (over the course of the past 18 months or so) acted as Associate Editor for a special issue of a peer reviewed journal which focussed on one of his projects with which I was not involved. This issue contained only 8 papers, but they involved virtually all active research groups across Europe on one particular research area. It was therefore extremely hard to find reviewers. For one paper, I ended up doing the review myself. The issue has now appeared, and in the editorial/acknowledgements I see the phrase "We would like
to thank Prof. X (me) who acted with extreme professionalism as associate editor for this Special Section".

A colleague mentioned that he was trying to work out whether this was a compliment or not and I confess I am not sure myself what is meant. I was thorough in tracking down reviewers and reading all their comments and making decisions appropriately and justifying these fully (even though this meant that the special issue took longer to appear than it might otherwise have done). I was also thorough in making sure the reviewers had no conflicts of interest. However, I'm not sure how much more professional I was than any others would have been. IN fact, since I am currently a co-editor of a different journal, and going through a heavy phase of reviewing articles, it made me feel slightly odd!

Recently I have seen two excellent guides to writing a peer-review, which made me feel guilty about the quality of peer reviews I have sometimes provided, and frequently seen. One is published by Elsevier.com and available at www.elseview.com/reviewers. Another is an article in the membership newsletter of the American Geophysical Union. The latter suggests 3 readings of the manuscript in total, but that a review can be written after then first one if the material is not publishable or has a major flaw which could be addressed. I wish I had time to read things that many times (although I often skim a manuscript before doing a detailed review). On occasion I have resorted to filling the review with structural and grammatical comments rather than deeply considering the science.

I resolve to treat others manuscripts as I would have someone treat my own in the future. If this means accepting less requests to review in order to do them more thoroughly, this will be ethical.

Conference confidence

In the last post I talked about my difficulties in selecting material for a 15 minute overview talk. Well, I'm back from the conference and can report that I managed to raise enough interesting points for people to ask good questions, and to come and seek me out after my talk for further conversation. And I only over-ran by 1 minute (whilst I realise this is bad manners, in the context of everyone else in the session I was a full 5 minutes relatively well behaved!!!). The interesting thing is that this is the first time I can remember people being so enthusiastic about coming and talking to me. Perhaps it's because I haven't been to an international conference for around 4 years (child-raising issues), or perhaps it's a different group of people at this particular conference now. I didn't advertise my new Professorial title at all in the talk so it's not that directly. I've also had a follow up email from someone I talked with requesting details of any publications we produce on a certain topic, and a request from another (admittedly someone I have collaborated with in the past) for a letter of support for a grant proposal. So why the difference?

I put it down to two things. I do think that I have a certain amount of additional confidence that derives from my recent promotion in the sense that I feel like "I'm a professor so I don't need to prove anything to you" Or, hopefully it could be that I am finally either talking on the right subject, or, since I have been talking about the same theme for several years, people have finally caught on to it.

However, outside of the formal session, I started to fall back into my old ways of self-doubt. I didn't know many people at this conference, and although not shy as such, I am not very good at networking, and have tended to be less than pro-active in the past. This time, I was only there for one evening and had no dinner plans. At the end of the session I was talking to someone I do know, when a colleague of his came up with dinner plans. Originally they didn't involve me, but the invitation was extended to me as I was standing there. I felt a bit like they felt they had to invite me. I contemplated staying in my hotel for room service, but in the end I went to meet them at a bar/restaurant. Of the 5 men there, I knew one reasonably well, one slightly, and didn't know the others at all. We had a good evening, topics covering work, but also funding in our 4 different country bases, politics in all 4 countries, and many other things. I came away glad that I went but concious that I had yet again contributed very little to the work discussions and this only fed my paranoia. Now I just have to figure out how to translate the confidence from the formal session to confidence in less formal, but still professionally focussed interactions.

What can you say in 15 mins

I have just sat down to write the presentation for a talk I have been invited to give at an international conference next week. I am an invited speaker, and was asked to give an overview of my subject area. The conference is a wide-ranging one, although it is likely that most of the people in the session itself will be more familiar with the topic I am discussing. Today I double-checked the programme and found that my talk is scheduled for 15 minutes! 15 minutes! How can I give an overview in 15 minutes (or 12 mins and 3 mins discussion!!!)???

Moral of the story: Ask more questions before agreeing to give an invited talk....

De-valuing the Professor

I mentioned to my partner (not an academic) that we had a lot of young professors in our department. His immediate comment was " do you worry that having a lot of young professors somehow devalues the title?" In recent years, we have seen the public derision of the two main school exams in the UK - additional grades have been added to the top end of both GCSE (16) and A-level (18) to discriminate, and there is anecdotal evidence that students gaining a C in maths a-level in recent years would have failed the maths a-level 20 years ago. It is certainly true that at university we have to spend longer teaching basic maths concepts that I studied at A-level. So, does having more people at any given level (including being named Professor) automatically devalue that level of attainment?

Our discussion also included whether potential business partners would prefer to collaborate with older professors on the grounds that they fit the stereotype better. At the moment, the UK has a "celebrity physicist" in Prof Brian Cox who "looks like an ex-boyband member and way too young to be a real professor" (quote from various members of my family). Does being a young and female professor reduce my chances of being taken seriously? If anyone has experienced this, how did they respond?

Mirror mirror

I am in reflective mood. The combination of my recent promotion, my annual staff development review and the relative quiet of the university summer vacation have conspired to promote thoughts about questions such as "What kind of professor am I?","What legacy will I leave?", "What do I aim for now?" .

I would say that I am generally on the more reflective side of the population anyway, but some specific circumstances make significant personal development necessary now.
My department has a somewhat unusual demographic. As well as several what you might call "old school" professorial staff, we have a rapidly growing number of professors (myself included) who have been promoted in the past few years and were under the age of 40 at the time of promotion. This means that instead of the traditional view of promotion to Professor being something obtained at the end of a long and distinguished career, we have 25+ years of "Professor-hood" to maintain and manage. In addition to this, the role of Head of Department rotates through eligible staff every few years, so it is more than likely that we will each take at least one or more turns before we retire. In addition, much of the activity I have undertaken until recently has been targetted at not only advancing scientific understanding in my field, but also at building my CV to get to this point. Whilst there are "zones" for professors with different skills and experiences, and therefore some career progression goals laid out, these are opaque and in some circumstances virtually impossible to plan for (e.g. making it to zone 3 is only possible if you are made a Fellow of the Royal Society).

To assist with answering these questions I am embarking on "project me", which will define (or rather re-examine) my core values and activities in my new role. My line manager (who thankfully is on the same wavelength) suggested reading biographies of a wide range of scientists and academics and identifying desirable traits and potential role models from amongst their ranks, as well as looking at my peers with "role model" glasses on. I am still slightly uncomfortable with looking at "real live" people in this way so intend to start with the biographies. I am re-reading Georgina Ferry's biography of Dorothy Hodgkin which I first read many years ago. This will be followed by Brenda Maddox's biography of Rosalind Franklin, and biographies of Ada Lovelace and Rosalyn Yallow. I am also interested in the new biography of Mary Somerville. However, I fear this concentration on female scientists is too exclusive - there is absolutely no reason why the traits that I might discover that I value should only be found in women. So this is an appeal for suggestions of biographies of male scientists - preferably those more interested in collaborative work than sole endeavour. I'd love to hear of any that you have found useful.

Happy Holidays...

Well, that's it. One week off and no more leave in the diary until the University closes for a few days at Christmas. That's depressing.

My fellow blogger FSP writes that her summer season is frantic with travels and work. Mine is more stay-at-usual-desk-and-work. Admittedly campus is a very different place during the summer, but I can't quite work out whether I like it or not. Our term finished 2 weeks ago, and I was on a "British = cool (temperature)" beach last week, so this is the first real week of "quiet". Campus seems to have exhaled and collapsed as the students left. Some departments are empty - although mine is just quieter than normal. We still have MSc students and grad students to supervise. I still have some teaching admin to do since we have a fieldcourse running in September that needs organising. However it is undoubtedly true that there are less interruptions to the working day, and there is a chance that I can tick some long term goals off the to-do list. However, this opportunity merely reveals that I excel in procrastination and somehow manage not to acheive my "personal scholarship" list even in the summer. There is also the nagging feeling that a university without the vast majority of its students is somehow less of a university. Perhaps all those years of explaining the lack of a summer break when people assume we are like school teachers (OK, I know many of them work in the holidays too but...) are finally getting to me.

Q2. When is a PhD student like a 3 year old?

My 3 year old is going through a phase where he will argue about everything - insisting that he is right about everything, even when demonstrably wrong (e.g. your brother is smaller than you.. "no, I'm smaller than him", or "it's tuesday today" -"no, it's thursday", or "I won that game" when mummy clearly has all the pieces on the board and he has none". Whilst friends reassure me he's only "being 3", it struck me that I have come across this before in one of my grad students.

This student hangs on to a theory or hypothesis that they have proved to be wrong via experiment and observation, just because they can't conceive of being wrong. How long do I go on helping the student devise ways of proving himself right, knowing that they, and acres of past literature will prove him wrong and that he won't accept the answer?

And who will grow out of the exasperating phase first????

Q. When is a grant proposal like a toddler?

A. When you think you've put it safely to bed and then something (a co-investigator who has previously been silent or an administrator) wakes it up and it stands up in the cot and starts screaming at you...

Unfortunately, in both cases I have real trouble taking the "check it's ok and not in serious trouble and then leave it for a while and it will go quiet and then not trouble you again" approach - hence I am getting absolutely nothing else done at work, and very little done in the evenings at home.

Aargh...

Marking schemes

Having spent much of the past week marking exam papers, my colleagues and I have developed a new marking scheme that both extends the range of marks and feedback available, and is couched in a user-friendly language and is largely relative to the individual students potential, thus doing away with set boundaries. The new scheme is as follows:

"Awesome" Spectacularly good - so good you suspect they have seen the paper in advance
"Sweet" anything similar or greater than the mark that particular student expected or was expected to get
"OK" roughly what they expected or you expected or a little lower
"WTF?" answer incomprehensible or student directly contradicts themselves in the same sentence.
"Epic" as in epic failure i.e. didn't turn up to anything or turned up to everything and still managed to score less than 10%

We decided that "OMG" was too ambiguous to use.

I am looking forward to explaining this at our next examiners meeting.

Marking depression

Sometimes I wonder whether there is any point in me teaching at all...

It's exam script marking time. This year I have taught two different modules: a final year undergraduate optional module in a specialised topic of our general field (but one which receives a lot of attention in the media and scientific press) and a first year compulsory (for students taking a degree in our subject) introductory module covering a very very broad range of subjects. Let's take the first year module first. All our students are required to have good grades in maths and physics at A-level. The module uses some maths and a fair bit of physics, but is a mix of coursework done in class (calculations and analysis), on-line quizzes that also revise the material covered in lectures, and a longer assignment (students could choose from 3 options). The coursework counts for 50% and the rest comes from an exam that they sat on Thursday last week. Most students have passed on the coursework. However, I got to the point in marking the exam when I couldn't work out whether I was glad they hadn't written anything because I didn't have to plow through pages of brain-dump gibberish that directly contradicted itself trying to award marks for at least recognising which part of the course was being addressed, or depressed because they clearly had learnt/understood very little. I guess I will have to mark the resits so it's just delaying the inevitable. I hate to think how they will do in year 2 if they have just scraped through, but at least those who have failed will have to retake and pass it before they can progress...

The final year course was a little better - the usual bi-modal distribution of those who "got it" and those who didn't. However, here there is a different problem - these students will in all likelihood graduate from our programme despite doing very badly in a module that is more relevant to everyday life than most and on a topic which we would hope they could lead on in the outside world. And yet a significant number of them cannot reproduce the basic mechanisms in an exam. Now, whether it is merely the exam process that is an issue, and they do really know the answer I can only hope. Should I be asking our institution to change the graduation rules so that they HAVE to pass every module (rather than a certain % of credits)? Of course every student can have a bad day, and if a module (unlike mine) is based 100% on exam this could be a problem. But surely we shouldn't be allowing students to graduate who have failed one or more of their final year modules???

Science Festivals..

Yesterday was more fun that most work days!. I spent yesterday at a large science festival with our Dept exhibit which aims to get people interested in our field, and to explain that to study our field you need to study science and maths to high level - at least to A-level in the UK (without revealing too much we often get people who have been poorly advised and think that geography is sufficient). We had some hands-on competitions and some demonstrations from our laboratory analogues of natural systems. Also in the "Discover Zone" were demonstrations about x-raying archaological finds, heat exchange, "dry water", nuclear technology, code breaking, microbiology yeast balloons and a whole host of big theater events. There was a lively bunch of (generally young) scientist presenters and lots of freebies. The attendees were mainly school groups aged 8-14, and some individual children with their parents. I spent my entire day on my feet just talking about our subject and interacting with a group of people I don't normally get to talk to. I returned home pumped full of adrenalin, enthused for our subject and convinced I should now go and work in a science engagement role rather than my current position... I should probably sleep on that decision.

I would say, if you get the chance to do something similar for a day, go do it - even if you feel nervous. Be prepared to be mentally challenged by the unpredictable nature of the interactions and physically exhausted, but to regain the motivation that led you to the subject in the first place. Oh, and it might even look good on your CV too :-)

staff meetings

I have just returned from our weekly "informal" staff meeting where there were two topics of discussion:
1) Whether to make the whole building WiFi (currently only some of the public shared rooms have a secure WiFi) so that visitors and meetings could access the internet more easily.
2) Whether to replace our Dept coffee machine (grinds coffee, makes espresso) which broke some time ago.

It took 40 mins and a lot of prompting to get any kind of decision on topic 1 - a vote was taken. Topic 2 was agreed in 3 mins with no vote. Enough said.

A blogging first

Thank you thank you thank you to GMP for finding my blog and leaving a comment. Yey!!!

why "Science Professor Mum"?

I spent quite a while thinking about the name for this blog. As I intend to use it to talk about issues relating to academia, science, women in academia and women in science, and mixing parenting with academia I wanted something that reflected all those things. So, Mum covers the parenting and female part. Professor is what I am, and it makes sense to use science to better define this so it might be more relevant to people. The combination is inspired by the brilliant "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" book by Lynne Truss which is recommended reading for all my PhD students when they start writing. My blog title could read "Science, Professor, Mum", "Science Professor, Mum" or less legitimately since I can make no claim to expertise, only to experience, "Science, Professor Mum"!

To pour or not to pour?

Last night a group of 7 female lecturers and senior postdocs went out for some celebrations following my promotion to professor. The group included both UK and international scientists, 2 lecturers (with varying experience), 1 reader and 1 professor (elect) and 3 senior research scientists who don't have a teaching role. There were many interesting discussions, both work related and otherwise. However, one that came up was the issue of interacting with our male colleagues in the semi-formal environment of conferences and meetings. Experiences included being the only person not introduced to the group by the senior male colleague, some people uncomfortable with the idea of shaking hands with women (we *hope* this is soon to be a thing of the past in the UK as it seems to be a generational thing - in other cultures this may not be the case), and being mistaken for a secretary rather than a research scientist. Several in the group also reported the difficulty of looking "youthful and girly" although being senior scientist in the group, and the issues with being taken seriously. Colleagues with substantial fraction of grey hair, or large physical presence were felt to be taken more seriously even if their experience and skills were the same as, or lesser than, our own. An excellent related post and discussion can be found at the FemaleScienceProfessor blog.

One colleague made the point that she never, ever pours the tea or coffee at a meeting where male colleagues are dominant, on principle. Talking to my other half this morning, he felt this was an over-reaction (he has in the past worked in an environment with 2 men in a department of 17 women and had to put up with inappropriate labels concerning his sexuality as a result). I am not sure - but I suspect I end up pouring tea and coffee and sorting out immediate domestic issues at meetings more often than some of my male colleagues... so.. would you pour or not????

7 un-interrupted hours of...

...reading! Yesterday I had a total of 7 hours on cross-country trains going to and returning from giving a seminar up in the north west of the UK. This is what I acheived:

• reviewed a paper for a journal
• read and critiqued a 6 monthly progress report from 1st year PhD student
• read and critiqued a draft paper from a postdoc
• read "good practice guides" on PhD supervision and examining issued by our new university Grad School
• read the documentation for the "Research Development Framework" which is a national scheme to encourage career and professional development of research staff
• read the guidelines for applicants to an EU funding scheme so as to understand what a Spanish postdoc who wants to come work with me will need from me as the host supervisor

At my destination I gave a 1 hour research seminar, and spent 3 hours with a collaborator thrashing out the structure of and roles in preparing a consortium proposal due 1 July.

If only every day were so productive. I think most faculty in my department appreciate the pleasures of long distance (relatively) comfortable travel as an opportunity to catch up on things without interruptions. Of course the downside is usually a morning fire-fighting to clear the "emergencies" that happened while you were away, but I got home last night with a curious amount of adrenalin in my system given the length of the day in total.

Actually there was one interruption on the trip up north. A gentleman decided that it would be a good idea to put an open bottle of red wine horizontally in the overhead luggage rack. By the time he realised it had leaked, it had soaked through my rucksack. The contents were ok, but the bag itself smelt like the aftermath of a particularly good party and was dripping red wine. In an unusually assertive moment I extracted compensation from the gentleman concerned (he turned out to be a rather elderly Australian academic which made me feel a bit guilty - should it have?) and purchased the largest "bag" I could find that didn't look like a beach bag at the station forecourt branch of an "accessories" shop. I guess some of my colleagues would just have decanted everything into a carrier bag but I am searching for that elusive "stylish female academic who is still taken seriously" image at the moment. If anyone out there has found it, please let me know!!

Congratulations?

Well, the news about my promotion has been public for a week now and I have been very interested in the response I have got. The few people who were closely involved in my application were told first and they were very pleased and congratulatory. I then told current and past members of my research group via email (and promised them a meal out to celebrate) and got some nice emails and some shy personal congratulations from the more junior ones. Then when our Head of School made the news properly public by email a few people in our large department sent me short congratulatory emails - these were mostly people I don't know very well but exchange "hellos" with in the coffee room every once in a while. It staggers me that a few people who I work with more routinely, including vast numbers of our lecturing staff have not emailed me or said anything in person, despite having the opportunity. I have always congratulated people in a similar situation.

One potential reason is that our Department is quite large, and more importantly has grown very rapidly over the past 10 years. In fact we have been having discussions recently about whether we need to create subdivisions to stop increasing fragmentation and restore the friendly collegiate nature which our students and postgraduates value. However, opinion is divided as to whether this would indeed help, or just make matters worse. I'd be interested in the experiences of people who work in large research intensive departments where different structures are in place. Do you find your department to be collaborative or a collection of individual researchers? Does creating subdivisions help or hinder?

Professor (elect) at last...

So, after 10 years of lecturing, last week I got my promotion to Professor (from the coming October) confirmed. I work in a physical science based department in a research intensive University in the UK and am one of 3 female professors on a faculty staff of 25 or so. I've worked hard to get where I am, and had two maternity breaks in the last 4 years (now have 2 pre-school age children). I thought it was time to embrace some new things, and to find a space to talk about academia, women and family. I am hoping there will be some interesting discussions, and to meet some new colleagues from across the world. Female Physical Science Professors are still a relatively rare species so there's a chance something I blog about might be useful to those still climbing the ladder - I hope so! I don't promise to be blogging every day, but I'll be here pretty often.

For now though, I've got a Board of Studies to go to....