33 Back in the early days of chemistry (20 years ago or so) well adjusted grad students were strapping bachelors or closeted homosexuals or chronic masturbaters (or all three or a combination); they were NOT married, child bearing, family having, nine to fivers. For one, back in the olden days, there was no way to do work at home since you couldn’t take the library home with you. There was no chemistry you could do remotely from a terminal in your bedroom. Today, it’s not only easy – it’s pathetically easy. With the sole, sad exception of one slightly important journal, every journal in print we have online.
For those of you that may have an interest, I do not have kids and won’t be having them until after my post doc, (the goodly and patient Mrs. Finchsigmate is not in collegiate academics but, rather, is a secondary school teacher and pregos benefits for them are awesome, I’m thus in no need to hurry a few out. But my situation appears to be relatively unique amongst my married and/or partnered friends. Everyone is associated with another chemist and for them, I postulate that having kids in grad school is great because :
- There are way too many ladies and gents to not get mixed up with that sexy time thing
- It’s never a good time for ladies to get pregos, so why not in grad school? That’s certainly better than year 2 of Associate Profdom, is it not? It also becomes more and more dangerous after 40. Women are in a really shitty situation when it comes to having a family. Methinks it best to do it in grad school.
- So what? If you have to work 4am-11pm who cares? The more empty rotovaps for you the better. And don’t give me no jive about “safety” working in a lab. You know as well as I do that there isn’t a PI on this earth that’s going to say “YOU SHOULDN’T WORK IN THE LAB SO LATE! WHAT IF SOMETHING HAPPENS TO YOU?” Pfft. If I could, I would wake up and work those hours.
- The Supreme Court of the USA, the Wisest Court In All The Land® has decreed that it’s within the Framers’ intention that pregnant women (and dudes seeking to pregotize a woman) can work in hazardous jobs where toxic materials can make for some very interesting looking children.
- If you’re a foreigner, your child will become a natural citizen of that country! Think of all the fun and mischief you can have with that.
- Why not? The antediluvian theory that the PI is the father of his group and the ’students’ became students to slave away for hours and hours to appease him is… well… antediluvian. Academic independence for students is the new chocolate covered iPhone. Vying for the affection of the father in a group is gross and demeaning. You should suck up because s/he’s your boss and that’s what peons do, regardless of the job – not because your dad hit you and you found a new one in your boss. It’s easier to drop a 3 year old off at the day care, but what do you do with an infant? I dunno. You sure as shit can’t sell them on eBay. Or leave them in the car with the window cracked no matter how full their water dish is.
- It’s your body/jizz and it’s your right.
So, I guess my point is, though it’s not for me – I think if you want to have a kid while in graduate school, you should1. It’s your goddamn right and the best way to protest this horrible idea is simply by doing what is natural. In any regard, it’s the best time to work out those ‘infant years’ where the only people that will want to be around them are their grandparents and you. (I hate babies.) Committing to the ‘grad student life’ is stupid. If you want to work 12 hours a day in lab, you should do it because you’re a suck up and conspicuously ambitious – not because it’s expected out of you. Work like a Frenchman and party like soccer hooligan, I say; it’s not like they’re paying by the hour. Besides, in most of Europe, they don’t work 12 hour days in grad school. In most of Biology in the US they don’t work 12 hour weeks. I don’t even think physics grad students actually work. Why do chemists get screwed? I dunno. But if we’re going to get screwed, we might as well get pregnant.
Now… the boss could get cranky and write some nasties in your letter of recommendation. This is possible and you can’t legislate opinions out of existence, no matter how much you threaten them or the blogger that posts them. You can however, work for one of the new-fangled profs that don’t mind such baby having mischief. One of the most successful (in terms of papers) grad students I know is graduating after having 1 child and has been walking around with another. She may be exceptional, perhaps, but her boss was very understanding of the whole thing. They exist and they’re becoming more common. If I were a prof, I’d certainly not give a fuck. So long as post-pregos results are still top notch, why stress? You came to grad school to become a better chemist, not to give up on being a goddamn human being for 5 years.
1 I don’t intend to suggest that I would invite anyone to have kids in lab. This amplifies the workload unbelievably just to obtain the same results, but nevertheless, it’s so possible, I’ve seen it done with multiple people to results comparable to non-child having people. It required significant dedication and an understanding boss, but having a child in grad school requires substantiative thought. I only mean to imply that it’s not only possible, but greater accommodations should be made for it from where they are now (which is roughly zero).
2 I certainly hope everyone got the sexist undertone I sprinkled through this whole article. I mean… I wouldn’t want to try to tackle a legitimate issue regarding women (and men) in science without putting something in there, however minuscule, that might offend someone so the argument could rapidly move away from the real issue and focus on me. Which is how these sorts of things actually get resolved. You know. By bitching like a little fucking turd. It sooo helps, I think. See, by using masculine noun forms, of which English supposedly has none, but if you carefully translate into German/French/Latin, you’ll find that not only are the feminine nouns used in supportive clauses exclusively, but they’re also used in highly derogatory contexts.
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I typically only work 8-10 hours a day 5.5 days a week. Which is why I’m not one of those that need anti-anxiety or anti-depressants; I just go about my business.
Mitch
Don’t pat yourself on the back too hard there Mitch, you might put something out. Then you won’t be able to pick things up without agonizing pain, you will have to be put on disability and medication that will leave you constipated and stoned; you will no longer be able to type so you are basically a vegetable in the lab and at your desk, so you will be eased out the door with only your pride and maybe a letter that says you were okay (just… okay) until this happened. Of course, your pride will start to wither when you have trouble finding a job that allows you to make ends meet, putting you into debt and once the late notices start piling up and the creditors start calling, the dilemma becomes panic as it forces you into bankruptcy and in an endless spiral of doubt and crises of self-worth, requiring you to seek professional help that will suggest putting you on anti-depressants which, on some idle, lonely Tuesday night, you’ll reflect with a crooked smile how it all started with a teeny pat on the back that went out of control after you let everyone know how awesomely normal your life is.
There’s balance in Nature. That’s why we study it. Right?
Hopefully, that won’t happen though.
mother nature – not all scientists are screwed up workaholics who can’t function without therapists, drugs and other emotional crutches. And those that are usually complain about it more than those who just quietly go about their business (and have little to complain about).
just shut up
I think I just have a new runner up that does justice to the ‘brain-dead Hazmat guy carrying away contaminated jizz’ as the “BEST COMMENT EVAH”.
Now excuse me as I clean the coffee from my shirt that I spilled while laughing. Is it me, or is The Chem Blog becoming weirder?
weirder, I don’t think so. Filled with more douches like mother nature, yes. There is an inverse relation to the niceness of the commenters and the popularity of a blog- take a look at perez hilton’s commenters if you don’t believe me.
Weirder? Really? I’ve got two posts in the tubes that I think are pretty good. One is certainly very bizarre but the other is just a run-of-the mill lit post from Craig Hawker’s group.
Craig Hawker swears in conference presentations…it is awesome.
He also gives presentations at ACS meetings describing reactions performed in a solvent of Jack Daniels.
20 years ago when I was a graduate student with a toddler I would do literature work on the weekends. I would take my son in with me to give my wife a break. The building was locked and all the rooms were closed so I just let the little guy loose in the hallway and keep an ear out for him. Every now and then we would have a cookie break and we would play with whatever was kicking around my office. Once we were playing with models of my compounds and I later heard him telling a professor in the hallway that he was “an adamantyl derivative”. The professor dropped by my office and suggested I was “in too deep and needed to take a break”. The horror of course was that my son was holding a model of norbornane at the time. Kids … 50 % wonderful and 50% “why didn’t we get a dog instead?”
The fantastic Mrs. Milo is not a chemists. Heck, she quite dislikes science altogether. I was one of the very few who was not part of a chemist power-couple in grad school… and I would not change it.
Word.
“It’s never a good time for ladies to get pregos, so why not in grad school? That’s certainly better than year 2 of Associate Profdom, is it not?”
Finally the best reason to have children in grad school is because it’s better to have children young. Your body can take it (both the pregnancy and the sleepless nights that follow). People who start having children well into their 30s STRUGGLE.
“Work like a Frenchman and party like soccer hooligan”
Visted the X who is a mathgrad at high-profile-liberal-institution-up-the-coast. It seems like math grad students don’t do ANY work. I cannot condone this; as it is quite evident that her career may suffer as a result of this attitude. Inasmuch as she is a brilliant mathematician, she’s also getting NOTHING done.
I knew a math grad student who was a roommate of one of my exes back in the old country. I’m not sure about work, but I know he did a lot of drugs. He kept pestering me for solvents and strong bases from the lab so that he could torture some poor little plant or mushroom from Mexico that he bought down at the ‘usual’ metro station. Apparently there are a lot of weird plants and mushrooms that produce narcotics and if you’re a math grad student, it could become a time consuming hobby.
He finally quit grad school, despite the department begging him to stay and offering a raise. The next time I saw him was 3 years later in a place 1500 miles away dressed as a zombie during Halloween. In the 3 short minutes that I talked to him, he told me that he didn’t have a job.
Math is a difficult thing man. It does things to your brain. I was good at it in high school, but I saw the darkness and got out.
Nonsense, math does not corrupt. It is beautiful and pure. What corrupts is God’s cruel hand in creating semi-autistic, autodidactic geniuses who are solving differential calculus, elliptic fields, AND topics in diffeomorphic graph theory at age 18.
Competing against these idiot savants drives one to shrooms. Much like how watching Phil Baran makes me want to smoke pot.
Watching Phil Baran makes me want to do something relevant, like make a conducting polymer or clean my cat’s litterbox.
Has he begun to do relevant chemistry? Jesus, I’d hate to think he’s turning a new leaf or something.
Or make a conducting polymer that cleans your cat’s litter box for you! On second thought, maybe not a conducting polymer. The smell of burning cat hair would be horrible.
Differential, integral, and some multi-variable calculus, along with group theory, were all topics taught in my higher level IB class in high school. My teacher did have a doctorate in math though. And he gave us an optional class that wasn’t on the curriculum three times a week at 7a.m. So I was 17 and not that far removed from doing that. As far as I know, no one in that small class was autistic. It takes a lot of hard work and excitement for the subject to be good at it at that level when you’re young. When I stopped liking math later, I stopped being good at it.
It is probably a fallacy to assume that you have to be unconventional socially to be good in math. If people really think that, then math may have a lot more problems with granting opportunities to women than physics and engineering.
If you’re autistic you usually fail, like my very good friend who failed out of university because he would do anything at all other than homework. It’s not a ticket to greatness, it’s a handicap. Many succeed in spite of it, not because of it.
1) In mathematics they don’t care if you fail, or even do homework. Even a degree really isn’t all that necessary. All you have to do is prove theorems. Case in point: Pal Erdos.
2) Even amongst the “normals” exceptionality in mathematics is possible. I went on a date with a kindergarten teacher once who had a student in her class who was reading chapter books and solving for x. He was otherwise socially normal — just educationally precocious.
3) It is also possible to be mathematically “behind” and catch up, especially in grad school. I had a friend in college, Amanda G—-, who was in my analysis class, as a sophomore, and didn’t take advanced algebra. In grad school, she started really kicking ass, really fast, and is reputed to be one of the “up and comings” in the field of differential topology.
The point was that seeing young geniuses can be utterly demoralizing, especially when things come so easy and fluidly to them. As chemists we are to some extent insulated from this because nobody these days wants a 5 year old at the bench doing recrystallizations from benzene/methanol on the way to suxmycoxin A. It drove another mathgrad friend of mine to pursue his other dream. He’s now in flight school learning how not to crash an $18M F/A-18.
Huh, how is chemistry insulated? As I told my students, if you were the best in high school, expect someone else to be better than you in Organic class and Quantum. Even Einstein did his homework.
In high school, it’s pathetic teenage male dick-swinging that makes kids try to get an A+++++ without doing homework. It’s apparently cool to be a genius, but not if you have to work for it. A well written math textbook (like Stewart’s calculus) is a joy to read and you can do it in your free time and become good at math on the side. But god help you should anyone catch you reading it or doing problems from it. Then they’ll know you’re not ‘keeping it real’; you always gotta watch your back and know how the others are doing. I though that kind of juvenile behavior wore off by the time you were 20 and/or in grad school. But apparently…
Where does the dick-swinging come into it? I can name only three classes I actually did all the homework for.
It comes in because it’s male high-school culture. Even among nerds. That’s why boys do much worse than girls in high school today. There are exceptions, but not many.
If they got As and didn’t do homework in high school, they’ll continue not doing homework in college and will fail out. Hence, more women now get degrees.
If you can name three classes you did all homework for in high school, then you are very, very far removed from that stupidity. Remember, the trick is not to do homework for any class and still be a genius. (Or to do drugs and drink and still get an A if it’s like my high school…)
There were about ten people like that in the full IB program when it started and all of them later dropped the full program because they started sucking. This was a big public school where parents didn’t care too much about it all and let their kids do whatever they wanted, so I don’t know if the theory applies across the board.
Oh, no, I meant in college too.
Because being a good textbook chemist does not necessarily translate into being a good bench chemist. Your hands are crucial, and “hand” training doesn’t begin until late high school, at the earliest (I get to judge students whose parents got them the hookup in the lab on wednesday, yay!). Being a good textbook mathematics is still off, but not by much.
Anyways, I don’t even know why I’m arguing with you. I usually don’t care about crap like this and I should definitely not write unrelated crap on a chemistry blog. Looks like my first ‘argumentative comment’ dates back to Friday, so that might explain it. Although, I wasn’t drunk when I made that post…. but maybe I was looking forward to it.
That’s it. I’m outta here.
I have to apologize for making the non sequitur Phil Baran comment. I just thought it would be funny to say something about pot. I actually happen to have a respect for Phil’s work, but at the same time, I don’t think it’s the best thing since sliced cheese. That slot is reserved for “Uncrustables” — but if they were any more expensive at the cafeteria, I would withdraw that statement.
We cannot condone the rolling of graduate students under any circumstances, especially in laboratories.
That’s funny, every time I get my check I feel like I’ve been rolled by the HR dept.
Of course I wanna have kids. Before “doing” it… must figure out how/where to raise them. Out of the apartment by 6am, only be back around 10pm. Commuting is a nightmare… Where am I going to put my babies? Can’t expect my folks to take care of them. They live 300miles away from me. I will miss out on a lot of things. First steps… first smile… Might as well don’t have children. What’s the point? To reproduce just for the sake of reproducing? Sometime it got real scary… the clock ticks louder everyday. Who knows… my time might have just ran out.
Well, my parents missed out on a lot of ‘firsts’ since the grandparents raised me for the first six years pretty much, and they are still pretty happy that they were parents. Grandparents are really happy to take care of children during the hardest times (1-6 years) for some strange reason…
If you feel you shouldn’t have children, then you should sacrifice that for Al Gore and co. Every child is a global warming nightmare anyways. I wish you luck and I thank you for offsetting my selfish global warming plans.
But, in the german newspaper that I’m reading right now, they have a special about career couples and a woman who had her first kid at 40 said that she used to work 8am to 10pm everyday as well. It wasn’t about her job or the hours. She was lacking the right man. Apparently, right men are hard to come by in Germany. Especially if you are looking for someone with an SPD affiliation. Anyways, that SPD secretary finally found some sort of manly man that passed muster at 38 and got pregnant at 40.
The article makes it really sound really easy to have a kid with that sort of schedule. She had to start coming back home at 6 or 5 p.m. though. Half the time. The other half the time it was her washed-up ‘no job as of now because I lost the last election’ SPD party functionary husband who had to take care of the kid.
Having kids and working in a lab is fine…the worst that will happen is that the chemicals will give them superpowers so that they can fight evil in their spare time.