10 Tips for Women Students
August 14, 2010
by The New Agenda
|These pearls of wisdom where compiled by blogger Sara Seager, professor of planetary science and of physics at MIT. Although the tips are meant for young women entering the so-called “STEM” fields (science, technology, engineering, or math), we think the tips are helpful for all young women:
1. Join a support group of peers. It will be reassuring to have a specific group of peers to meet with. Such “women in physics” or “women in engineering” groups not only provide a group of people in a very similar situation to you but also have organized practical connections such as resources and advice. And consider attending one of the growing number of conferences for undergraduate women in different STEM disciplines.
2. Find a mentor. A mentor is someone who can provide you with guidance and advice. Many colleges have formal mentoring programs to connect mentors and mentees, but if not, seek one out on your own. You should seek out additional mentors if your formal mentors aren’t meeting your needs. The mentor need not be a faculty member. A graduate student, a senior undergraduate student, or even a peer with good insight are all suitable possibilities.
3. Get involved in a research project. Listening in classes and completing homework is so different from any kind of work done in an actual scientific or engineering career. To learn whether or not a science, technology, or engineering career is really for you, it is important to try the research environment. Seek an opportunity during term or in the summer, at colleges with professors, or summer internships in industry.
4. Organize your time. College can be overwhelming with the rate of new material you are expected to learn, as well as all of the possibilities for extracurricular activities. Time management is a must, but it is a topic never taught. Get a calendar and use it. Plan ahead for big due dates such as term papers or exams. Clear blocks of time each day for homework and studying. With so many new opportunities in college, it’s tempting to overcommit, but it’s better to do a few things very well than to struggle with an unrealistic schedule. Find a way to learn more about time management on your own.
5. Don’t be afraid to be assertive. Ask questions in class. If you’re not understanding material from class or homework assignments, visit your professor or teaching assistant during office hours. It’s their job to help you so take advantage of it. Many departments also have tutoring programs, peer or otherwise, that no one should feel embarrassed about utilizing. Beyond classes, ask specific professors or other individuals about internship, mentorship, or other career-related opportunities even if they do not already formally exist.
6. Have confidence. A common stumbling block for women college students is lack of confidence. Remember that you were accepted to your college because of your qualifications and accomplishments, and you belong there. It may sometimes appear that some other students are excelling effortlessly. Whether or not this is the case, it should not interfere with you reaching your goals at college: to become educated and train for a career.
7. Look out for yourself. Another pitfall for women is the tendency to help others before helping themselves. In a science career, where individual accomplishments are used as the main basis for judgment, this is detrimental. Regardless of whether the research environment is collaborative or competitive, make sure your own interests are being met.
8. Avoid taking comments personally. Inevitably, rude or sexist remarks from others will occasionally happen, even though they are not supposed to. The worst ones attack women’s abilities in science, engineering, or math. These remarks are unfounded so don’t take them personally. Women students can often fall into the trap of taking even healthy criticism and scientific debate personally; don’t do this, as it will hinder your progress.
9. Strategize for the future. When approaching the senior years of college, always look a step ahead. Try to identify internship, graduate school, or other interesting options well in advance. Find out what it takes to be admitted to these programs and put in the effort needed. For example, your college’s alumni database could be useful for finding contacts who are willing to help you identify what it takes to be admitted or hired.
10. Enjoy yourself. The secret to a successful career in science, engineering or math is to find something you both like doing and are good at. Take your time in college to explore and find what suits you.
Amy thanks for posting these pearls of wisdom.
Finding mentors is so important and looking outside the existing possibilities. Ida B Wells the campaigner against lynching and journalist liked to participate in debates. When she lost a debate against a very accomplished female teacher, she enrolled that teacher as mentor to improve her orating skills. And an orator she became changing the national and international attitude against lynching.
Time management the topic in every successful somebody book. We multitasking women cannot learn enough about it.
then confidence and competition, that advice is just great. “it may appear that others achieve effortlessly”. when I had one of my interviews at an ivy league school I felt inadequate. I got the great advice, that the difference between there and somewhere else is that these people just work so much harder, and I knew I would fit in. no need to achieve effortlessly.
to the advice don’t take things personally I would add, even if they are meant personally, don’t take them peroanlly and you may have a chance to reflect them back. a long time ago some of the guys in surgery kept bragging how many female stuff they had relationships with and adding some jabs at you the female coworker being attractive, non-attractive,having boyfriends, having girlfriends or nobody. the talk reflects at them not you. an answer like ‘it is just another day the entire female stuff of the hospital has fallen for mr so and so” showed how many laughed with you.
These are nice “keep your chin up” style bits of advice, but they are not nuts and bolts enough and will not help.
The one piece of advice I wish had been given to me is the following:
Research something that does not require active collaboration.
Areas of research that typically feature papers with more than six co-authors are to be avoided. NO large-scale astronomy, NO high-energy physics. Avoid like the plague. Go into areas of research that are not pursued hotly, and research questions that do not require much active collaboration. Your fellow students will refuse to “take orders from a girl,” and your ideas will go nowhere until a man steals them and suddenly the guys around blink and call it genius.
Research relatively dormant areas — zodiacal light is a good area for astronomy, organismal biology is good, planetary physics is good. Steer clear of areas that require large numbers of collaborators because they will not do what you say and will sabotage you. Herding resentful males is a whole `nother part of doing research as a woman; don’t do any more of that sort of crap work than you have to.
If you look at the research areas that have garnered major kudos for women in the past, they are all areas where the women worked mostly alone or with very few collaborators. Curie worked with her husband, Lise Meitner worked alone on hers, Barbara McClintock worked alone because everyone thought she was nuts, those two women at UCSF who just recently won worked in their lab together as prof and student, building on previous research done by a man but working pretty much on their own.
Choose projects that you can research well on your own or with maybe ONE collaborator, and choose projects in relatively sparsely researched areas of endeavor. NO ONE does cell biology anymore, nowdays it’s all metagenomics and bioinformatics. So do cell biology. NO ONE cares about zodiacal light; it’s all networked radio astronomy. So look into zodiacal light.
Also, be prepared to defend yourself. If someone is taking credit for your work, speak up. Better yet, publicize that it was your work from the get-go so that you don’t have to defend yourself after you find out that the male students have been walking around assigning credit for your work to one another. Attach your name to your ideas as fast as possible and keep records. Never throw out a single e-mail.
These aren’t happy-perky pieces of advice, but they will be more useful, I think.
Janis, great that you expand on point 7. avoiding the male crowd is giving you breathing space. look out for yourself and don’t get trapped in helping others as the author said. too many women in all careers did not get any credit for their collaboration. Einstein had a female collaborator, Chopin had a forgotten female collaborator with the name Maria Agata Szymanowska. if you start paying attention it is easy to see the pattern. much more difficult to avoid the trap. Janis if you like we could continue this discussion as facebook friends. I am easy to find.
I agree that it is vitally important for people, especially those coming from diverse backgrounds, to get help when it comes to breaking into such competetive fields like science, technology, math and engineering. Finding a mentor who is a professional in your chosen field can be greatly advantageous in this situation.
If you are a person seeking a mentor, please check out MentorNet! We are a non profit service which connects college students with professional mentors. Take a look at our website and email leila@mentornet.net if you are interested, or follow us on twitter: http://twitter.com/MentorNetTweet
Another thing that I wish someone had made clear to me when I was in grad school was that you can get your degree and then leave.
It was always presented as if you got your degree, then went through a bunch of demeaning postdocs, then got a tenure-track position, then got tenure, then stayed where you were until you died. Like prison — get your degree and You’re One Of Us Forever. The idea of being surrounded by those awful creatures for the rest of my life was horrifying for me. Sure, I could get the degree … and then what? Be condemned to that purgatory for the next forty years?
Leaving was considered washing out, even if you left with your degree. Only the True Brotherhood would stay in the Hallowed Halls. It’s very monastic. The failures and washouts and disappointments and weak-willed ones would go into mere industry.
I’m not saying that corporate is some paradise for women; one of the most evil environments I’ve ever been in was in corporate. But I have also found some of the best, most intelligent, most forward-thinking environments in the world there. Corporate also has some wonderful advantages for women: laws governing workplace behavior, and chiefly an HR department who will crush anyone who hangs up porno posters on their office wall. *evil grin* Academia? None of the above. It’s a nonstop 24/7 locker room there.
But again, it’s never presented as if leaving for corporate is anything but a total failure and washout.
So that makes two things I wish had been made clear to me:
1) Research relative fallow fields that require as little collaboration as possible, and
2) YOU CAN GET OUT AFTER YOU HAVE YOUR DEGREE. You are not doomed to the mint-green cinderblock walls of Academe, surrounded by resentful, simmering, jerks who will rip you off for the rest of your life.
I don’t know whether I would have chosen differently had I realized the second, but I may have.
Janis that is just another interesting advice. I want to add, not only are people in academia so full of themselves, that it is utterly unpleasant to tolerate the arrogance. job security is poor, compensation is low and the lower the more respected the institution is. if you plan on combining family with work, academia is not well accommodating those wishes. and if you want to stay single independent with kids you simple can’t afford it. get a degree and get out would have been my parents advice, I would not have listened to.
Anna, I am a college student/undergrad who is near several people in academia every semester. With the exception of a few individuals, I would never call people in academia “full of themselves” or arrogant. Most have been very helpful.
Karen,
I have been in academia for many years on both sides of the aisle and I have met many individuals (men) who think that the world specifically revolves around them. If an idea didn’t come from their lips then the idea is bad.
I am happy that you haven’t seen the snarling beast of arrogance, but when you reach a point in your life when you are considered a threat to some in academia then you will.
–Optix
Karen, believe me, when I was an undergrad, everyone was very helpful and perky and welcoming, too. Stick around and go to grad school and then report back on the night-and-day change in atmosphere.
You know, I was lucky enough that my experience was like Karen’s in grad school too, for the most part. Discrimination as a conscious experience is only one side of the issue, because the discriminators have become very subtle and sometimes don’t even realize what they’re doing. If you can’t perform a double-blind test where you do the exact same things, only as a man, you’re not going to notice a lot of the discrimination, even though studies where they do things like send out identical CVs with male and female names show that it is obviously happening.
I’m in a STEM field, and I think that Janis’ advice in this thread is excellent, by the way.
I also want to mention that yes, it can be a hell of a lot of fun. Grad school is weird — it’s a bit like the snooze button on the alarm clock of life and can wreak havoc on your finances when you DON’T spend your 20s saving, but … it is so damn cool to get the chance to think about shit you love 24/7. I spent quite literally years of my life learning some of the most gorgeous mathematics I’ve ever encountered. Two of the most profound things I’ve ever learned were how spherical harmonics translate naturally into the periodic table — how crunchy, delicious math literally turns right into the real world before your eyes — and how the uncertainty principle just falls out of commutator relations between mathematical operators. That plus twin methods of notating quantum mechanics (still the most gorgeous discipline on Earth) was like going to heaven.
Okay, so that was all mumbo-jumbo reverse-the-polarity-of-the-neutron-flow-Geordie for just about anyone else, but getting paid (a pittance) to think about that crap all day long was fantastic. It’s like putting a brick on the accelerator in your head, for years. It can be an absolute blast.
And even if you get a wild hair about something else — music, some weird history thing, gardening, anything — you often have a GINORMOUS university library around that will give you insane grad-student quality lending rights for about a month for anything. Decide you find 14th century French poetry fascinating? Go check out seventeen books about it for six weeks and read them all.
So yes, it can be fun in many ways. Enjoy taking this part of your life to do nothing but think about cool shit all day. You will not get the chance again.
Janis — your advice about avoiding crowds and hot research topics is TERRIBLE. Your career will not go anywhere if you avoid “hot” research topics and collaboration. Hot topics and collaboration lead to a better publication record.
I collaborate with men all the time, and I’m often the lead on the project. It is not impossible. Establish your competence, be firm, and people listen to you.
I once had a negative collaboration experience with an arrogant male colleague, and the answer was simple: I didn’t work with him again. But that doesn’t mean I write off *all* men as collaborations. There’re a dozen other men that I work with on a daily basis with no problem.
Oh, please. You simply didn’t work with him again, eh? When — in graduate school?
What is your experience and in what discipline? How hard a hard science are we talking, and at what institution?
An engineering field at a large top university. Maybe things are harder at smaller schools, but I find that women at my university are treated well even though there are few of us. I have no gender-related collaboration issues. I know my shit, speak up, and people listen. I have a strong publication record thanks to my work with both men and other women. If I were working alone, I’d have maybe half as many papers.
Are people in academia arrogant and difficult? Sometimes — but people give my male colleagues a really hard time, too, if they say something stupid or are too meek. I don’t find it excessive.
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