Here I share my journey of going back to science. If you have missed Part 1, do read how I made my initial moves onto the academic ladder after a prolonged career break. Once I had spoken to my mentor, and after being in touch with a recipient of one of those awards, my drive to come back to science was reignited. You will find that contacting awards recipients is actually encouraged and recommended - most funders' websites also have previous recipients pages and frequently asked questions. If you have a question for which you cannot find the answer, the administrators on the grants/awards are usually really helpful and very knowledgeable, so I'd recommend writing to them directly. Once I had identified a potential organisation (in my case the Daphne Jackson Trust), I made contact and was asked to submit a proposal. Well, that took quite a lot of thinking and time. Since my PhD, I had moved city (and country, but that is another story) and had no direct links to my previous supervisor anymore. So I looked at my local university and was lucky enough to find that one of the academics there worked on a topic I had worked on during my PhD - albeit on a completely different study system! I got in touch with him, sent him my CV, we Skyped a few times and talked about possible ideas. These few lines here took a few months in reality! However, by the time we had been writing a proposal, an opportunity came up at my local university - and that is where luck was on my side. This was an entirely new scheme designed for researchers who had undertaken a prolonged career break. I applied and was awarded the first Back to Science Fellowship, together with another fantastic scientist (needless to say, we have shared the journey and are still in touch). From my initial meeting with my mentor, it took nearly 22 months to make it back into science, and I still think that luck played a big part. But isn't that how academia works?! I really hope that sharing the ups and downs of my journey will be useful to others who embark on a similar path. It's doable, you just need support along the way. More and more organisations and learned societies are recognising the challenges that different people encounter in academia. To share my experience, I joined the first peer-mentoring scheme run by the British Ecological Society. I hope that initiatives like this will be something that all learned societies will offer in future.
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When I first made the decision to come back to academia after my prolonged career break (five years), I almost immediately felt the need to write a blog about my experience. At the time though, my youngest was only about one year old and with two more children under the age of five, it just seemed too much of a commitment. The more I look back on my journey, the more I think it is useful to share the many ups and downs along the way. So here it is, I hope that my reflections will be useful to my mentees as to the wider academic world. At the beginning the task to get back onto the academic ladder felt like an impossible climbing feat. Everyone and everything else had moved forward in the intervening years whilst I had been away, not just in terms of career (research, teaching, funding and publications) but also spatially. My colleagues, my support network, had now moved to new institutions, almost invariably abroad. Where could I start to go back? I have been unbelievably lucky to have my mentor alongside me along the way. I have also been lucky to have a very supportive husband who also works in academia. So I think a key prerequisite is support around you and a good dose of luck to go with it. The first step was to talk aloud to other people about this possibility. After some initials conversations with my husband, I decided to fix a meeting with my mentor. Remember: meetings do not need necessarily to be in person, in fact, in my case, they are usually via Skype/phone or some other wonderful technology (Zoom and similar). At the meeting my mentor was extremely positive about my idea - that positivity really boosted my confidence. Believing in oneself and talking to others are other important steps on the journey back to academia. Once I made the decision to go back, the next hurdle was understanding how to go about it. Here my mentor had several ideas. The first was to identify funding and organisations supporting those returning to science after a career break, be it for caring responsibilities or other reasons. Second, she introduced me to a recipient of one of these awards who successfully returned to science (in her case via Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship and a stint as Daphne Jackson Fellow too). I was able to talk to her on the phone - that further ignited my confidence! On my next post I will talk about the following step on my journey. In December I went along to the British Ecological Society Annual Meeting which took place in Birmingham. This was the second time that I was fortunate enough to attend as an associate editor (for Methods in Ecology and Evolution, MEE). MEE feels a bit 'like home' to me, as I used to work as the journal coordinator when the journal was founded. Conferences and meeting are always places where I go to catch up on the latest science, but the BES Annual Meeting is doubly special because the society's scope is broad enough to encompass a huge variety of topics, from urban and population ecology to quantitative ecology and policy. This also means that the Annual Meeting is an opportunity to meet colleagues, friends and in general to network. This year, as I usually do, I went along to the Women Networking event. As I sat with other women, some of whom had already taken part in the society's Women in Science mentoring scheme, I felt a mixture of excited and daunted as I take on my new role as senior mentor for returners to science. Women like me, who have taken a carrier break and are hoping to come back to academia, have joined the newly-established peer-group mentoring opportunity to share their experiences and talk about the common challenges that come with balancing caring responsibilities and a professional life. Of course there is no magic wand to strike the perfect balance, but I really believe that having a peer network and talking to other people who have made that transition, may help others find new perspectives or just get useful tips on how to cope. I remember reading just that in Every Other Thursday (by Ellen Daniell), a book describing how a group of women scientist met regularly to be a sounding board, to share experiences, to wind down and feel at ease with others who shared the same challenges. I do hope that the returners to science peer-mentoring group will be that sounding board for those trying to come back to academia after a break. I am really pleased to have just joined the British Ecological Society Returners to Science mentoring scheme - as a senior mentor. This is going to be a fantastic opportunity to share my experience of being out of academia (in my case for an extended period) and - being lucky enough - to come back to it.
Mentoring has a crucial role to play in this - and you'll see featured heavily on this website. We lack a range of role models which encourage people from different ethnicities, cultural backgrounds and with a wider range of experiences to take up, or continue a career in academia, and more generally, in science. There are a lot of people writing on this topic at present, Athene Donald's co-hosted blog - Occam's Typewriter, gives great insight into the challenges that women face in academia. I also wrote a post on the topic for Rapid Ecology. If you have suggestions or tips for returners to science, please contact me. |
AuthorGraziella Iossa Archives
August 2023
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