Location, Location, Location

Yesterday was the due date for applications to a prestigious postdoctoral program in my field. I spent two solid weeks working on that application, so it was an inexpressible relief to finally turn it in.

Understandably, I'm a bit burned out on the job search right now. I'd love to forget about postdoc applications and go back to research, or in my current mood, just watch TV for three days straight.

About a month ago, my advisor and I worked out a list of 15 positions I'm going to apply for. Yes, fifteen. It has always seemed like too many to me, but my advisor insists it's a great opportunity to force people to read my work and build citations. Initially I agreed with him, and faithfully promised to turn them all in. But now I'm totally exhausted, and I desperately want to cut down my to-do list of job applications.

There are some jobs on my list that I really just don't want. One, in particular, is in a city--I'll call it Plainville--where I had the misfortune to live for a summer, and I do not care to repeat the experience. The weather in Plainville is completely objectionable; I had asthma almost the entire time I was there; and it's so sprawling that one can't get anywhere except by car. (Of course, given the rotten weather, it's no surprise that the inhabitants prefer to drive.)

I don't think the job in Plainville is critical to my career. There are other options, in places with equally good or even better research groups in my field. If my job prospects are bad enough that I get turned down for all my other 14 potential jobs, it's not very likely that Plainville will want to have me either.

So I asked my advisor about cutting this Plainville job from my application list. I don't want to work there, so why waste my time and my letter writers' time? But my advisor was adamant, again, that I go through with it. He sees job applications as a strategic move to build my career, not as just a way to get a job.

I trust my advisor's judgment on most things, and I'm sure he's right that I need to take every opportunity to publicize my work. But right now, I feel like I've come slap-up against reality: I don't have an infinite amount of time, I need to finish my thesis project, and application due dates for jobs I actually want are fast approaching.

The application I handed in yesterday was the first that required a detailed research proposal (some fellowships want only a one-page summary of your interests). Now that I've written the proposal, I can reuse it, so I'm not likely to need so much time for the rest of my applications. But still. I'll need to at least tweak the proposal to address each department's specific recruiting goals. It's a time-consuming process, there's no way around that.

What to do? Either the nuclear option (flatly refuse to hand in the application) or the weasel option: don't mention the Plainville job until after the application due date, then express dismay that I'm too late to apply. I'm pretty sure my advisor isn't keeping track of due dates. The weasel option isn't the most honest, integrity-filled way to solve my problem, but I'm running out of ideas.

Catch-22

Today, it's just me alone in my office. My office-mate is not in this afternoon. I have no meeting with my advisor scheduled. Even if my advisor and I had planned a meeting, he might just blow it off, which is what said advisor did with both of our meetings last week. No message, no note, nothing--just a no-show, leaving me hanging with an unfinished paper draft and lots of questions.

Sometimes this alone-ness can be a real drag. All the energy and enthusiasm I had this morning has drained for want of stimulation. I was pathetically grateful to nice Professor P. for exchanging a few words with me in the mailroom, when we were trying to un-jam the petulant printer.

But as numbing is it is to hear only the sound of one's keyboard, often interactions with one's colleagues are a real bummer. So it was last week at morning coffee, when I had a magazine about women and science tucked under my arm. I didn't intend this magazine for a discussion piece; I just happened to go straight to coffee after checking my mail. One harmless male, trying to make conversation, asked what was in the magazine, so I gave the highlight--a report of consistent bias against women at a prestigious university that's an important employer in our field.

Of course, this prompted a knobbish, irksome male student to expostulate that all discrimination against women was in the past, and now we're just waiting for women to move up the pipeline and fill senior positions. So I tried to explain how the pipeline leaks, and proportionally more men than women advance at each career milestone. The discussion went downhill from there.

I don't know what possessed me to engage with Knob Boy at all. It was entirely predictable that I would just expend energy and get frustrated, while his mind would remain firmly unchanged. This whole story, though, is just to illustrate the catch-22 that exists in my little slice of academia. Working completely alone is, well, lonely, but being around one's colleagues is sometimes worse.

What to do? Go to Graduate Women's Group every week, look forward to my next visit to nice collaborators in SoCal, and finish my degree so I can get out of here.

The Blog Begins

I, srastro, am a woman working in the physical sciences. I'm headed into my final year of grad school, so in 365 days, I'll be Dr. Srastro. I have amassed enough work to get a decent postdoc, so my first-job prospects are good. Plus, I chose my own thesis project and am very interested in the results, whenever they may come. On paper, my career and life seem fine. So why do I not feel fine?

Here's an excerpt from my handwritten journal that illuminates why I'm burning out in the home stretch of my Ph.D., and how I hope writing this blog may help me get through:

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Maybe I'll start a blog. I have been reading I Blame The Patriarchy a lot, and I find it really inspiring. Could blogging, and getting comments, help me process some of my frustrations with the intense manifestation of patriarchy that is academia, especially science? I have come to realize how truly, truly thankful I am for the safe spaces that exist for expressing feminist ideas. Thanks to Twisty Faster for being absolutely unbending in her criticism of patriarchy.

In fact, I have spent a lot of my work time on IBTP this week. Why? I searched and searched for the answer, and today I decided the obvious conclusion was the correct one. I spend my work time on IBTP because I'm TIRED. Tired of work, of having it pointed out that I'm a woman every other day, physically tired by an academic calendar that has, after months of languor, jumped by orders of magnitude. Easier on the tired old brain, and more fun, to read feminist persiflage than write supercomputer code.
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So here is the blog. I don't expect it to solve all my problems, nor do I expect it to set the scientific and feminist communities on fire. But at least, when I take the foment of my thoughts out of my head and cast it into the internet void, I may find the relative peace that comes from identifying and articulating one's thoughts and feelings.