Anti-role models

When Isis wrote her post using the Despair.com de-inspirational posters, I was totally excited. Back in my more dark-humor post-doc days, when the randomness of the job market obsessed me, I adored the Despair.com posters. So, I followed her link and perused my favorites once again.

Figure 1. Example from the River Tam list of favorites: "Mediocrity: It takes a lot less time and most people won't notice the difference until it is too late."

However, one of the Despair.com posters has always had an important ring of truth to me:

Figure 2: "It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others"

I don't know about the rest of you, but I have some of these people who serve as reminders that "here be monsters" that will sink my own ship if I am not careful. People who do not understand how they got where they are and are not happy about it. There was the woman who published plenty of papers but not really any first authored papers who makes everyone flinchy about her ability to take a scientific lead on projects. There were the various graduate students who focused on lots of easy, first-authored publications in undistinguished journals of ill-repute and now don't understand why major research universities are not interested in giving them a job. There is my friend who chased the easy money and not the ideas and is realizing that they have ended up doing research that bores both them and their colleagues. I used to dismiss these people as the inevitable end of someone who was not cut out for the career path I wanted. In some cases, this is true. I've known a few analogs of the drunken captain of the Exxon Valdez who not only ran their ship ashore but did a lot of damage along the way. But many of these were talented friends who only years later did I understand the lesson they had taught me as I found myself in similar waters.  They remind me how easy it is to take one's eye off the direction you really want to go and make expedient or expected choices that actually take you away from your preferred path.

In some ways these anti-role models have been as important to me as my role models.  Right now they seem more so, as I try to figure out what to do about my confused university and if I am at my own critical juncture and about to become my own warning to others. While role models provide me with guiding examples of who I want to be and how I want to live my life, anti-role models serve a more basic function of warning me of specific things to make sure I don't do along the way.

I haven't been as funny lately as I have wished to be, so I'll leave you with one last poster from Despair.com

Figure 3. "None of us is as dumb as all of us." River Tam's opinion of committees and faculty meetings.

Update: General Disarray distracted me and I posted without the relevant links to the Isis post and Despair.com (Sorry, Isis! I beg of  you, no smiting!)

Role Models

A few days ago Isis mentioned that like many young, female academics, she worshiped at the alter of FemaleScienceProfessor. Something about her statement brought to mind a phenomenon I often experience when at scientific meetings, which General Disarray swears happens at every time. One minute he will see me walking across a room towards him and the next I'll have disappeared behind a wall of women who have taken the opportunity of finding me alone to come ask a bewildering array of questions regarding being a woman in science. General Disarray says this is a sign that I am doing something right as they wouldn't be coming to ask a complete loser for advice, but I have always felt a little sadness about it because surely these women can find a better source of information - someone further in their career who has actually figured somethings out and isn't blundering around in the dark just like them.

Until Isis's comment, that is as far as my thought process had gone on this topic. Something about her statement made me realize that with respect to FemaleScienceProfessor, I was like the women at those meetings...except instead of rushing towards her at a meeting, I rush to my google reader every morning. And then I realized that she was filling a role model void that I have had for a long time - the happy, female, scientist, tenured professor, with children. This realization made me think a little more about the importance of role models.

I do not have a role model, I have lots of role models....kinda like the Catholics have patron saints for all sorts of different things, I have role models for different occasions. For example, I have Saint Professor Mentor who is my role model for being a scientist. I have Saint Female-Scientist-with-Kids-but-no-permanent-position, who I go to when I want to know more on balancing kids and science career demands like frequent traveling. However, in my pantheon of saints, I have been missing a Saint Happy-Full-Professor-Female Scientist...someone who walked the path I am walking, dealt with the issues I am dealing with, and still loves what they do. Too many of the senior female professors in my field seem to have lost that joy somewhere along the way...or they have become tough in a way that is simply not me. I feel like FemaleScienceProfessor fills that niche for me and my guess is I'm not alone in that.

While some may prefer to take a more monotheistic approach to their role models, I have always felt like what are odds that one person will incapsulate everything I want to be? (And even if they did, would that be a little creepy?) And this, to me, is an important reason why we need diversity in science. Afterall, we all need role models, people we look up to that help us calibrate our internal compasses when times get hard and confusing. Finding the right role models for you becomes a lot easier if there's a diversity of people to choose from. Which is what's so great about the blogosphere. I've been exposed to a diversity of people that I have not found in my own world...who knew some of my role models would end up being a female scientist in the physical sciences (St. FSP), an NIH-funded biomedical research scientist (St. DrugMonkey), and a slightly profane basic science faculty member at a private medical school (uh...St PhysioProf?) ? How cool.