Modelling parenthood in research careers
With Dr Jenny Clark
Jenny started to build her research independence early on when her PhD supervisor left the UK, and she had to construct a support network that would sustain her research studies. She established an important collaboration with a theoretician in the US who her initial supervisor had encouraged her to contact. Fascinatingly, this interaction was built through email well before we expected Zoom or Team online meetings to be the new norm. Her budding research independence took her to Italy, then back to Cambridge, before landing at the University of Sheffield, where she has worked since.
Jenny reminded me of a blog post she had come across and previously shared with me from Radhika Nagpal, who described her approach to navigating her career. In this article, this academic talks about stopping to take advice from others and freeing herself from the never-ending list of what you should do to be successful in academic careers from well-intentioned colleagues. Radhika says in this article: “If you ask them what is important to succeed as a junior faculty member, people will tell you everything they did that they think helped them succeed. Plus, everything they wish they had done. And all the things their friend did too. They deliver you this list without annotation, a list which no single person could ever accomplish.”
I think there is value in hearing how others have navigated their career, but we always need to take others’ stories as the narrative of their own journey and not what we should do ourselves. Sometimes, the stories of others can trigger us badly as often they mostly share their success, or we unconsciously only pay attention to their accomplishments instead of reminding ourselves that what they share with us is a tiny narrative of the whole story. The narrative of Jenny about her career is about attempting a control between work and family commitments.
I interviewed Jenny a few years back where she talked about the early starts of her research career, you can hear this here
More about Jenny
Prof. Jenny Clark is a Materials Physics research leader in the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at The University of Sheffield. Jenny has sailed the fellowship boat to build her research career while putting her family as one of her priorities. She is an example to showcase that whilst no one can ever “do it all”, researchers with parenting responsibilities can progress in science and protect their family time.
https://academicstories.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/profiles/jenny-clark
https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/mps/people/all-academic-staff/jenny-clark
Listening to our conversation will prompt your thinking:
What are the boundaries between work and other parts of your life that you want to reassess and work on?
What could be more in control/ feeling more balanced look like for you?
What are you prepared to push away/ say no to/ accept not to be involved in to reclaim a sense of control?
Some reflections to ponder based on my discussion with Jenny
I almost quit
While building her research team, Jenny was also building a family with three kids. Before she had kids, she felt that what mattered during her career was to do her best. After becoming a mum, what it meant to do her best on both fronts of family and work took a beating. The reality of what a work week can look like for a scientist with the desire to be actively present and engaged in family life meant building some serious boundaries. Jenny poignantly admits, “I wanted to have it all, and I could not”. On the verge of choosing to leave, her dad motivated her to stay in her research career by reminding her that she could be a role model for her children.
Being able to run her lab not at the expense of her family has been a collective effort between her and her partner, but also the help of her parents. We cannot do it all on our own, and most importantly, we cannot do it all; boundaries and hard choices had to be made.
Jenny has continued to work part-time and has created a clear routine. She does not work at home but works late two days each week when her parents can pick up her kids. She has had to say no to some opportunities and has accepted that this choice created the risk of limiting her progression (it is great to see that she was recently promoted to a Professorship- the boundaries she created did not inhibit her progression).
Jenny has built clarity about what she wants to achieve and what she would accept that she could not do, to preserve her boundaries as much as possible. She has also developed self-awareness and understands that switching between focus can be challenging and is best avoided. During a period when her lab was well funded, she was able to receive the support of her Postdocs to take up more of the students’ supervision; this allowed her to start getting involved in some teaching and have the headspace needed to take part in training and reflection related to her teaching portfolio.
Her experience of the challenge of being a parent and a research group leader has motivated her to be an active contributor to the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion agenda in the institution. For example, she ran an institutional survey to explore the attitude and experience of staff towards parental leave. This led to submitting a report with key recommendations about parental leave to EDI institutional committees. Jenny was also shocked by the experience of international postdoctoral researchers who were bearing the substantial cost of visa fees for their families or could not carry on work as researchers because of the cost of childcare. Making a difference for her has meant lobbying at university and funder levels to address these inequity issues.
o What conversations with partner and family members may you need to have to address that you can’t do it all?
o Can you reframe that by having the courage to ask for help (eg., asking a partner to contribute more equally to the parenting responsibilities, asking family members to help with childcare, asking a colleague to cover for you if something unexpected happen at home) is a likely contributor to your professional success?
o If you started to tell yourself that asking for help is a strength and not a weakness, what could this change for you?
The haphazard process of building your team
From early on, Jenny knew that building a team of a specific size was critical in creating an environment where team members would support each other with the experimental work. Sustaining a research team of a certain size is not easy as it depends on many variables, accessing funding, PhD students and getting potential recruits to apply.
Jenny shares that her way of thinking about recruitment is to wish for team members who are smarter than you as they bring their expertise and way of thinking and challenge your thinking as a Principal Investigator. What Jenny is looking for during recruitment are team members who are nice, kind and thoughtful. Her ethos is to create an atmosphere where everyone can flourish, be nurtured and enthused.
When she first set up her research team, she was unsure whether she could get any PhD studentship funding and ended up applying for anything she could to scramble some funding. Several of these applications were successful, meaning she had four students starting PhDs in addition to a Postdoc during the 1st year of building her lab. She admits that this was challenging and maybe detrimental to them.
o What would be the best scenario when it comes to building my team- could I reverse engineer the process?
o What do I need to avoid as I am building my team, to build a team I have the capacity to support well?
o If the scenario is less than ideal when I build the team, what alternatives paths can I find to make things work out?
The advice I give versus what I did
It was interesting to hear Jenny’s take on how she had approached writing her first fellowship. She had brought together different strands from both her PhD and her Postdoc; she had proposed a project she was excited about, and that felt unique in how she was weaving all of these strands of experiences and skills. She had done a lot of thinking and reading. It probably took her a year to build her application.
Interestingly, she admits she did not show her applications to others apart from another Postdoc. She would give very different advice to her Postdocs and encourage them to get lots of feedback. For her at the time, it felt hard to show these ideas or get help. She read her application obsessively over a long period.
This is a good illustration where the obvious advice is to show your application to many people. Still, some people who have not followed traditional advice may have successful outcomes. Like other aspiring research fellows, Jenny put all the chances on her side and applied for seven different fellowship funders. Her work paid off, and she was awarded two fellowships from which to choose.
o Whose advice is serving me well, and whose do I need to take lightly?
o If I was advising myself, what words of wisdom would I share?
o What are my fears or limitations to ask for help or advice?
“I wanted to have it all, and I couldn’t, and it drove me mad. I almost quit. And my father actually said, no, it’ll be good for your children if you stay in academia. It’ll be good for them to see that it’s possible. And so, I decided, okay I’ll do it, but I’ll do it on my own terms.””
