Interview by Heidi Molga, CLB Undergraduate 
(under the supervision of Professor Amy Ralston)
September 18, 2013

Heidi: Can you start us off with a personal introduction? 

Carrie: I’ve been here at Santa Cruz as an assistant professor for just under three years. Along the way here in my career, I’ve also built a family. I got married during graduate school, and we decided to start our family then. I had my first son in the middle of grad school. Partway through [my postdoctoral fellowship], we had our second son, and then we came here. In this career, it is very important to have a supportive significant other or spouse. My husband is a graphic artist that works from home and does an extraordinary amount of work with our boys. Our two boys are now ages four and eight, so we spend our time just trying to keep up with them.

Heidi: Did you feel as though having your children at the graduate level and the postdoctoral level was the right decision to make?

Carrie: At the time, I was very nervous about having my first child in grad school, but I had a really supportive P.I. (principal investigator), so I felt like it was the right decision. Now, looking back, I know that it was the right decision. We always think we are in the middle of the most difficult part of our life, but I’ll tell you, it only gets more challenging as your responsibilities grow.

Heidi: Has having children changed your approach to work, to research, and to teaching?

Carrie: Absolutely. I was always a pretty organized person, but once I had my first son, it forced me to really plan out what I had to get done in a day, because I had a very firm limit when I would need to leave. I am a very competitive person, so I didn’t respond to my hectic schedule by decreasing my workload. I tried to keep the same level of productivity that I had before, so I learned to organize my time much more stringently. It made me a lab ninja, in the sense that I was constantly working to be productive in a short period of time. Now, raising children and dealing with temper tantrums, I actually find that parenting skills come in surprisingly well when dealing with students. Being able to recognize the beginnings of conflict, you have the skills to calm everyone down and see what the conflict is.  Basic parenting skills absolutely help diffuse tense situations.

Heidi: Now that you are a professor parent, what kind of support do you feel would be the most helpful?

Carrie: The most important thing would be to have quality childcare available on campus at an affordable price. That’s just generally true for everybody – we all need to feel like our kids are well cared for while we’re at work. We have lots of grad student and postdoc parents as well.  These people really need support to help them establish and maintain a career-life balance, because they need to learn that they can be dedicated academics and good parents. From my perspective, it’s also good to have recognition from your faculty peers that being a parent is an important part of your life.

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

Carrie: Part of it is an attitude change – that women themselves need to know that it is possible. Throughout my career, I didn’t have a lot of examples of successful women scientists with families. From the peer group that I’ve had through grad school and my postdoc, I would say that trying to maintain a career-life balance plays a greater role in the loss of women along this career track than in the loss of men. We need to find ways to help women deal with all the challenges of a having family while maintaining their excellence and competitiveness in a lab setting. The best way to do this is to provide support services such as access to affordable childcare and help women scientists-in-training find mentors to give them support and advice.

Heidi: What are the most important goals of graduate school, postdoc, and being an assistant professor?

Carrie: The goal of graduate school, in my mind, is to learn as much as you can about being a scientist: how to teach yourself, think deeply, evaluate data, and to learn how to give and receive criticism. I think that being a postdoc really builds on that by allowing you to work more independently. You get a free reign to go forward and be a scientist. If you pick the right postdoc mentor, which is really critical, it can be a wonderfully supportive experience, where you are treated as a peer and allowed to hone your skills. As an assistant professor, you bring together all these different skills: a deep knowledge in your field, the ability to train others, and to think about exciting new questions to ask in the lab.

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

Carrie: I would say that I was not aware of just how many different things we have to do in a day: working in the lab on research projects, managing grant funds, trying to write grants (for more money!), and teaching. I had no idea of the breadth of these challenges. You have to be a great scientist to get this job, but very few of us have received formal training on managing budgets or teaching. When you start a position like this, you are given quite a lot of money to start your lab – I would say that planning out that budget was one of the single hardest things for me.

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

Carrie: I think the hardest thing for me, and something that I love about the process, is that it never ends. If you get exciting data, the experiment isn’t over – it’s really just beginning!  I really have to work to balance the amount of time I put in to this job, because I love what I do and there’s no limit to the amount of effort that you can put in. So for me, the struggle is really just coming up with a balance that allows me to be competitive with my scientific peers around the world and maintain a healthy work-life balance.  I couldn’t do any of this without my husband, who is extremely supportive and a fantastic dad.

Heidi: What is your next big career goal?

Carrie: I would like to be at the top of my field for what I do. I would love for my students’ work to be recognized as some of the best in the world in our field. I think we can do it!

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

Carrie: During my postdoc I had a thriving indie craft business with my friend, Abby, an M.D./Ph.D. student who worked at the lab bench next to me. We travelled to indie craft shows all over (Seattle, Chicago), sold our jewelry and had a lot of fun. Abby, my husband and I helped form an artist’s collective with a group of other creative people in Dallas, and it was just such a great way for me to get out of the lab, out of science. To hang out with people who didn’t care that I was a scientist, at all, was great. I would say that the single biggest joy in all of this was having a bench-mate in the lab with whom I was really close.

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

Carrie: In my first year in grad school when I had just joined the lab, my P.I. stopped by my desk one morning and said, “You can do whatever you want. You can be a good scientist and you can have a family. Don’t let your desire for this career turn off anything you want in terms of a family.” This is really true. You can have a career in science on your own terms – provided that you are willing to work hard, anything is possible.

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

Carrie: I would say that I don’t actually get in mental ruts very often. I am a very energetic person and I always have a lot to do.  If I hit a wall on a particular project, I try to push through it or swap to something else for a while.  Our job is ideal for persistent people!  

Heidi: If you could do it all over again, is there anything that you would change?

Carrie: No, nothing. I picked a good life partner – my husband is my best friend and has been very supportive of my career. He knows that doing scientific research is one of my great passions. I love the way my career has played out and can’t wait to see how it goes here at UC Santa Cruz. As stressed as I am sometimes, I really am extraordinarily happy – I love where I am. I feel like I have won!

Heidi: What are your greatest weaknesses in terms of attaining an appropriate balance between work life and home life?

Carrie: I still struggle with work-life balance because I love coming into the lab to work.  I could work 7 days a week for long stretches at a time because I am so motivated by our discoveries in the lab.  That being said, I work with my husband to try and balance the needs of our family with that of starting a lab. It’s really a partnership between you and your significant other – learning how to deal with the ebbs and flows of work demands.  One strategy to help with balance is to create certain times of the day or certain days of the week that are protected from work no matter how busy you are. For example, you always make it home by 6 pm or don’t work on Saturdays.  I’ll note that I’m horrible at adhering to this – my goal for the coming year is to get better at setting family time aside.

Heidi: What advice do you have for students desiring an academic career as well as a family?

Carrie: Having an academic career is very rewarding and an immense amount of fun, but it takes lots of really hard work to succeed.  If you’re dedicated to what you do – if you have passion for your work – you’ll have no problem finding the energy to keep up with the demands of the job.  However, I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to have a supportive significant other or spouse.  We do not have regular 9-to-5 jobs, so having a partner that is willing to work with you and the demands of your job is essential.

Heidi: Would your advice differ if you were advising a male student vs. a female student?

Carrie: None really – I would give them both the advice above.  Nurture your passion for what you do and find a supportive partner that is willing to go on this crazy journey with you!  For both women and men, I would encourage them not to postpone having a family if that’s something they’re interested in. Provided that you have access to affordable childcare, you’ll find that you will learn how to manage your scientific training and have a family.

Heidi: How has your approach to career-life balance evolved over the years/ through each stage of the journey?

Carrie: Not much.  Having two kids throughout my scientific training (one in grad school, one as a postdoctoral fellow) allowed me integrate my career development and family as I went along. Early on in grad school, I was advised by many professors to wait until I was in a tenure-track assistant professor position to have children.  I think that waiting until I was in this challenging position to learn how to integrate work and my family responsibilities would have been very difficult for me.  Having kids makes you develop excellent time management skills!

Heidi: As you may know, tenured female professors are more than twice as likely as male professors to be single, with no family (source: Do Babies Matter, Mary Ann Mason et al., 2013). What do you think about this?

Carrie: This doesn’t surprise me at all.  I think a lot of women feel like they need to make a choice – either have a career as a competitive research scientist or have a family.  I think this feeling arises because as scientists, we’re judged by our productivity (i.e. the quality of work that we do and how many papers we publish).  As women, we may have the fear that taking time to go through pregnancy and raise with young children will put us at a disadvantage from those women and men that don’t take maternity leave or have to deal with sick kids.  This is somewhat true – you will need to work harder to keep up with everyone, but with a supportive partner, it’s possible. At the end of the day, if you love what you do in the lab, it’s all worth it.