Hello

I have been invited by YHN DrugMonkey to participate as a guest blogger here, so I thought I’d introduce myself a little bit. I am a tenure-track assistant professor in a medical school at an Ivy League university. I do not see the non-scientific aspects of running a biomedical research lab–grant writing, lab management, mentoring, departmental administration, etc.–solely as necessary evils. I enjoy thinking about them, doing them, and sharing my thoughts about them with others. And that is why I’m here.

Ageism: A 36 year old dean?

The Chronicle has a piece which boils down to “I’m a 36 yr old academic, I want to be a dean and the institutions all want someone “with more experience”, read, “older”“. The new job search strategy?

I’ve rewritten my CV yet again. This time I’ve eliminated all those pesky dates that might allow people to guess my age. I went back and forth for a long time on that one, and I’m still not entirely comfortable with my choice. Besides feeling slightly deceptive, I realize that the strategy could backfire and that search committees will probably assume that I am much older than I am.

Can’t wait to see how that turns out…

New Kid on the Hallway wants to know “Would you, personally, support the candidacy of a dean who was 36?”

Dean Dad screams “ageism!“. Ok, that was snarky, what he really said was:

what if, just for the sake of argument, we looked at performance and talent, rather than age? What if, and I know this is reaching but bear with me, we accepted the possibility that you don’t need gray hair and an AARP card to know something about management? What if we stopped hiring the same faces over and over again, expecting different results?

What if, indeed.

Blogrolling: On being a scientist and a woman

I want to note that the Borg (ScienceBlogs™) has picked up ScienceWoman’s blog “On being a scientist and a woman“, previously here.  Not that she needs any more advertising from me!

However, it is worth pointing out that she will apparently be talking topics near and dear to YHN including lessons learned and other careerism in science issues, grant/career strategies, etc. And that was all in the first week!

Go read.