Interview by Heidi Molga, CLB Undergraduate 
(under the supervision of Professor Amy Ralston)
November 21, 2013

Heidi: Let’s get started with a personal introduction.

Amy: I am an assistant professor of Molecular, Cell, and Developmental biology, and I started this position in 2009. That is when I moved to Santa Cruz, from Canada, and I have two small children.

Heidi: When did you start having children, and did you feel as though that was the best time?

Amy: I started having children at the end of my post-doc, and I think, professionally, that was the best time, because, when I moved here, I was able to hire people to do bench-work for me. That was what I found to be the most difficult combination, was bench work and children. The kind of research I do requires some bench-work outside of daycare hours, so it would have been very difficult for me to have children when I was a post-doc. Working with stem cells, you have to come in on the weekends to feed them, so I already felt like I had 300 screaming children in the incubator, and each one wanting something different for lunch. I don’t think I would have been able to have real children during that time. I sometimes wish I would have started having children when I was younger, and more energetic, but this would have meant choosing a different line of research, and that is not a sacrifice I would have been willing to make when I was younger.

Heidi: When did you and your husband meet?

Amy: We met in graduate school, a while ago. We were together for 12 years before we got married. After graduate school, we decided that we might have to face a long distance relationship for our post-doc, and we would come together when we were ready to settle down, so that was how we approached our job search, at the time. We did end up in different places. We maintained different houses for three or four years, and, we had a dog in common, so we had to ship it back and forth with us when we saw each other. He was like our child for a while. We would see each other every other weekend, and it sucked, it was really difficult. It was only temporary. Most academic couples end up doing some long distance stuff for a while. It could have been worse, I have seen worse. He was also in Canada, but he lived two hours away. It kind of made our lives really bipolar. We would work insanely hard during the week, and have no fun, and then, we would get together, and just have way too much fun.

Heidi: How has being a parent changed your approach to work, and to teaching?

Amy: I am definitely more conscientious of not wasting time at work, because I am paying for childfree hours, both in terms of daycare costs, and in time away from my kids. I start to feel guilty if I am just having a conversation in the hallway, because it is time I could be spending with my kids. That being said, there are a lot of very important conversations in the hallway, but I have to prioritize. It helps me stay motivated at work, and focused, but also, having kids has enabled me to remember what it is like to be young, and I think sometimes that helps me interact better with the young people that I interact with while I am at work.

Heidi: Do you often find yourself taking work home with you, or do you maintain a separation?

Amy: I definitely work all the time. I usually end up working if I wake up in the middle of the night, or if I wake up early and cannot fall back asleep, or if one of my kids wakes me up, then I will do some work. I will work on the weekends when they take a nap, or my husband will take them so I can get some more work done.

Heidi: So you have the mental capacity to function at three in the morning?

Amy: I have always kind of had insomnia, but that is why I have insomnia, because I am awake and thinking about science. Sometimes, I will dream about science, and then it wakes me up and I have to do some work.

Heidi: What kind of support do you feel would be the most helpful to professor parents?

Amy: Childcare, but that can mean many things. My children are in full time daycare, but it would be nice if it was on campus, because I could visit them if I needed to. For example, sometimes I have to drive all the way down to my kid’s daycare to take a splinter out of my kid’s finger, because they aren’t allowed to do it. It would be nice if it was closer, so it wasn’t a forty-five minute trip over something so trivial. There are also days where my kids can’t go to daycare, because of illness or holidays, and I end up paying extra for childcare, if I can find a sitter that works during the work hours. It can be hard. A lot of universities have actually contracted emergency daycare services, so that their staff have on call sitters to fill in so that faculty can still attend meetings if their child gets sick. I think that would be the most helpful support.  As would having other family member, like grandparents, in the vicinity.

Heidi: What is the best way to increase the number of women in STEM tenured positions without compromising excellence?

Amy: I think that if we can provide ways for women to have support for families, then we would retain a lot of really bright women that we are losing, because they think they wouldn’t be able to have the right support to have a family and be a tenure track professor. I think having the support, having the childcare, and also, having the mentoring, and the attitude that goes along with being supportive of working moms, is important.

Heidi: What are the most important goals of graduate school, post-doc, and assistant professorship?

Amy: In graduate school, I think the goal is to learn how to be independent, so that you can succeed as a post-doc. Being independent means not only knowing how to do the lab work, and knowing how to interpret your own results, or troubleshoot an experiment, but it also means knowing what experiment you are going to do next. You have a story that you are trying to tell with your data, and you are trying to go through and systematically harvest those fruits. As a post-doc, your goal is going to be to use that experience, and generate all of the data you will need to write your first grant as a P.I. Then the goal as an assistant professor is to get that first grant, and to demonstrate that you can be an effective teacher and mentor. At all of those stages, the way that we measure productivity and success is papers and funding, so that is how we measure success.

Heidi: What is one thing most people do not know about life as a tenure track professor?

Amy: I think when people ask me what I do, and I say, “I’m a professor,” they ask me what I teach. I do not think people realize that, in the sciences, teaching is a relatively small part of how I spend my time. That is not the case for all disciplines. What I do not think they realize is that, in the STEM fields, you are like a CEO of a tiny business that you run, and you keep that funded through grant-writing. I wish that they would ask me what I research when they ask me what I do. I have started thinking that when people ask me what I do, that I should answer, “I’m a scientist.” Then, they will ask me what I research, but then I have to add in, “but I also teach!” I guess it is important in terms of this conversation, because if people understand that being a professor means being the boss of a small group, then they might understand that the boss has certain benefits and certain responsibilities, and one of those benefits is being able to set your own hours, and that is advantageous for parenthood. Responsibilities are various stressful things that you have to manage, but that is why we work at three in the morning.

Heidi: What is the hardest thing about being a scientist?

Amy: The hardest thing is balancing your own research interests, which are born out of pure, unadulterated intellectual curiosity, against the practical constraints of what funding agencies are willing to pay for. So, knowing how to bring those two into check, that is the hardest thing. Sometimes that means having to make hard decisions like, you do not necessarily get to do something just because it is interesting to you. You try to strike a balance between that attitude, to being completely pragmatic to the point that you are no longer your own boss, funding agencies are your boss. There is a range of attitudes towards this, but I think that most academics probably feel as though one of the perks of the Ivory Tower is intellectual freedom. You start to feel that freedom is threatened when you cannot support your research without making a sacrifice.

Heidi: What is your next big career goal?

Amy: Definitely, the next big milestone is tenure, but I have many mini goals to get me there, like publishing several papers. I would love to get another grant. I need to do more traveling to establish that I have a certain expertise that is unique, and network. I also have some teaching goals, like I would like to change how I teach developmental biology. I am still refining that class.

Heidi: Tell us something about yourself that would surprise others:

Amy: I used to have a lot of hobbies, like crafty things, but those activities were supplanted by our jobs and families. If I was not a scientist, I would be an event planner. I, in fact, used to organize a lot of events, when I was in graduate school, because I think I was trying to fill this need to organize projects, which is now taken care of in my actual job, and that is very fulfilling. If it were not fulfilled with my job, then I could see myself planning weddings, and bar mitzvahs, and theme parties. I had so many theme parties in graduate school. We had this speakeasy party, where we made people come in through the back door, and we made them say a password to get in. We had a vaudeville show on a stage that I built, and everyone had spats, and all the girls wore their hair just so. I had three costumes for that party. We all sang and performed. That was the most epic, but we had a number of really cool ones.

Heidi: How were you able to balance your time so that you were able to plan for events like this?

Amy: Well, I’m not saying it was the best decision, but it was something that I needed to do. I needed the outlet. In graduate school, whenever I was doing bench-work, I needed to have something on the side that would show me a product, something that I could control. Bench-work, when you are doing it, can be very hard to control, and science, no matter what level you are doing it at, is extremely hard to control, because you might just be wrong, and then where are you? For a creative person, that is extremely frustrating, so I had to have this other creative outlet to keep me inspired.

Heidi: What is the best advice you were ever given?

Amy: I think one really helpful piece of advice that I received really recently from a role model of mine, was that you have to listen to your gut when you are making decisions. Your gut may not necessarily be right, but if you do not listen to it, you can only be disappointed, because you will always look back and think, “Why didn’t I listen to myself?” This has been a really helpful way to rationally justify having some self-confidence. It is kind of like what-if: if I don’t have confidence in this decision, I might just be mad at myself.

Heidi: And if you do, then you made the decision that you felt was best at that time, and that is the best decision you can make.

Amy: Yeah, and sometimes, you may be regretful, but I think that it is a worse kind of regret if you do not listen to yourself.

Heidi: When you are in a rut, how do you inspire yourself?

Amy: Honestly, movies are really helpful to me, because they help give me perspective on my problems. I like all kinds of movies, as long as it is a good movie, and solid character development, and that the character is real so you can relate to them and learn something from their problems. Whether they behave the right way or the wrong way, you can learn something. That is just one way. It depends on the nature of the rut. Sometimes, starting a new project really helps me. Reading papers in a new field, writing a new grant on a different topic, helps get me juiced up on something new. If it is something where I am having a bad day, or a paper was rejected, sometimes I will just leave and get one of my kids from daycare and spend some quality time with them. That helps me gain some perspective, and helps me feel like I am being a good parent. At least if I am not doing anything else right, I can help give that one person some quality time.

Heidi: If you could do it again, what would you change, if anything?

Amy: The short answer is that I do wish I would have had children at a younger age so that I would be younger when they were older. I don’t like having a substantial age gap. How much of my life am I going to be around for, you know? I probably would have done that. That would have probably meant making different choices as to what kind of experiments I could do within the confines of the 45 hours of day care that you get access to per week. Or it might have meant making different decisions about geographic location, so I could have been close to family who could help take care of children. There are ways to have children earlier, but it wasn’t on my radar, so I made all of my career decisions without reference to any of that. I would be in a different field, and maybe a different university.

Heidi: What were some of the lessons that you would have liked to learn earlier?

Amy: If I had more clearly understood the goals of each stage better, especially the transition from undergrad to graduate school, could have been smoother. I didn’t quite get the point of graduate school until I had been there for about four years. It finally clicked, I finally understood what it meant to do science independently, like we discussed before, but it took me a long time to get there. I could have probably abbreviated that if I had been more focused or more mature upon entering graduate school. Maybe one thing I would have changed would have been to take more time off between undergrad and graduate school. At the time I didn’t understand that it is okay to take time off, I thought that would be frowned upon. I think that in biology it is not considered a gap, but rather beneficial training to spend time as a research technician. You arrive in graduate school a lot more focused. I think it can be very beneficial.

Heidi: I am out of questions. Do you have anything else you would like to add?

Amy: It is now documented that the number of women in tenured positions in STEM fields is lower than it should be, given the number of women who are receiving a STEM Ph.D. Something that recently occurred to me, just thinking about this career-life balance topic is that part of the reason for that is that, in the past, it was probably a lot harder for women to do their jobs and be a new mother at the same time, because we didn’t have technology to help out. That led to not having enough role models to women entering the field, which is further hurting the field, and preventing women from trying to do both. The Internet was invented when I finished college. I am therefore part of the first generation to come through, from undergraduate, to graduate, to post-doc, to professor, with access to the Internet for our entire scientific training. This access to the Internet has enabled me to work wherever I need to, even if it is three in the morning, or if I am breastfeeding at the time, I can read papers on this tiny little thing called my phone. Whereas, women in the past would have actually had to come to campus, go to the library, pull the hardcopy of the journals they need, photocopy if they could, or just sit there and read it. That is not particularly compatible with the demands of a new mother. Given that these technological developments will enable people to be scientists and have children at the same time, the effects are only just going to start to be felt. This is the first generation where we can make use of this technology so we can do both, and address the problem that there are not sufficient role models, and work to correct that balance.