Tag Archives: life
Have you made any sacrifices in your academic career?
Academic speakers at the Naturejobs Career Expo, London, 2016, discuss the sacrifices they’ve made in their careers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGkZ-yt_Yi4
Have you ever had to compromise your personal life?
We ask speakers at the Naturejobs career expo, San Francisco, if they’ve had to compromise on their personal life to make it in academia.
https://youtu.be/3oRQWv30XN0
Babies or career: How to keep young researchers in science
Could shared post-docs improve work-life balance and make academia more attractive for early career scientists?
Naturejobs journalism competition winner Ulrike Träger.
If you look for advice on work-life balance in science online, the message seems clear: it’s possible to fit a 10-hour work day around quality time with your kids and family as long as you’re organized. Flexible hours of working in the lab help. Experiments don’t mind when you do them, and can be postponed until your kids are asleep. But still, long hours are expected in order to be successful, and finding childcare during midnight experiments is not always easy if you don’t live close by. So for many (including myself, a post-doc in my late twenties pondering the right time to start a family) the prospect of having to plan each and every minute of the day to be a good parent and scientist is daunting. This leaves promising young scientists everywhere feeling like they have to choose between family and career.
Can scientists really have work/life balance?
To be a top performer you need to be happy – something academics tend to forget.
Naturejobs journalism competition winner Elisa Lazzari
Scientists spend a lot of time trouble-shooting. Every day we work on our protocols, and if something doesn’t work, we try again and again, until we fix it. We keep track of all the factors and accurately measure all variables, to find the perfect combination of parameters that work. If there is one thing we can claim after getting a PhD, we’re definitely great at problem-solving. Can we also trouble-shoot our way out of the everlasting dilemma on how to find work/life balance?
Elisa Lazzari