We have kindly been given permission to reproduce this from Tenure, She Wrote where you can find the original post.
I haven’t gotten a paycheck since my fellowship ran out in 2017. Funding is scarce for students in the end of their PhDs and scarcer still for international students with disabilities, so it’s not too surprising that I’ve been turned down for everything I’ve applied for.
Almost 5 years ago, I wrote with regard to applications for funding and otherwise:
"Use your story and the survival skills you’ve gained to succeed. I use my escape from rural poverty in personal statements to show that I have incredible drive, creativity, and independence."
But I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t make my life a funny, moving, educational story for someone else to judge.
I used to follow my own advice. I turned the ways in which I don’t fit neatly into the world into pat inspiration porn. I talked about disability, adverse childhood experiences, being queer in a culture of religious fundamentalism, childhood poverty, and sexism as obstacles for me to overcome in a story to inspire funders. And I received fellowships that helped me make it through several years of my PhD, a year and a half of unpaid medical leave and many uncovered medical expenses.
But now I’m too tired, too sad, too angry to twist my life into those kinds of narratives. Those things are structural problems reflecting deep prejudices, oppression, & exploitation. I can’t wrap up the things that hurt me the most in a cute package to make someone feel good about giving me money. Funders seem to want a story where cleverness and elbow grease make light work of disability and other “obstacles.” Ultimately, telling those stories was personally destructive because I kind of came to believe those stories over time. And they aren’t true.
A little smarts and hard work and luck can’t make my chronically ill body “productive.” Even if they did, it would only make it alright for me – and that’s not good or fair. Telling those stories for so long made dealing with the reality of living-with-chronic-illness-under-capitalism/being disabled and past traumas really difficult.
As soon as I decided the problem wasn’t me, but the response of people and systems to me, I stopped getting funding. As Dr. Sara Ahmed says, “when you expose a problem, you pose a problem.”
Chronic migraine isn’t an obstacle for me to overcome. It is an illness that I live with. It hurts, it’s unpredictable, and the symptoms are strange and varied. But most of my difficulties would not exist in a less ableist, racist, sexist, and capitalist society – the poor care, the financial anxiety, the relationship power dynamics.
Migraine would have proper research and maybe even treatment – it wouldn’t be ignored, dismissed, and underfunded in large part because it predominantly affects women (and especially poor women).
My disease wouldn’t be stigmatized and belittled in popular culture, despite severe migraine being categorized by the WHO in its most severe disability class along with such diseases and conditions as active psychosis, severe depression, quadriplegia, and terminal stage cancer.
My disease would be less common – I might not even have developed it – if we had the political will to eliminate poverty and abuse and other such negative “social determinants of health”.
Properly funded health care would ensure I received proper disease and pain management, saving me time, money, and suffering. I wouldn’t waste hours every week on insurance paperwork and scheduling with doctors, commuting and waiting at appointments, coordinating my medical care and researching treatments. I would have access to specialists for my disease. My medications would be covered along with physiotherapy and massage. I’d have funded access to therapy to deal with pain that cannot be treated.
My PhD wouldn’t have such a short time limit on medical leaves. I wouldn’t lose my income when I am too sick to work. The number of hours I’m able to work wouldn’t determine whether or not I’m allowed to participate in science and research.
My ability to financially support myself wouldn’t be tied to the number of hours I’m able to work or widgets I’m able to produce.
I wouldn’t be financially dependent on my partner because I could receive disability benefits while in a relationship with someone who had income. Or I would just get paid for working on my PhD.
Disability support would be enough to live on instead of less than the median rent and I’d be eligible for it regardless of my work history and immigration status.
I wouldn’t have to rely on friends and family when I’m too sick to care for myself, making it impossible or difficult for me to move or travel – I’d receive funding to employ people (or there would be government aid workers) to help me cook and clean and go about my daily activities.
When I stopped writing narratives that recapitulated ideas about “hard work” and gumption and began talking about structural challenges, about integrating dismantling those structures into my work (or at least getting support to deal with them), I stopped getting funding.
And it didn’t just hurt my funding – my relationship with colleagues has suffered as my attitude has shifted. They like to say things like “you’re so brave” or “it’s so great you always have such a positive attitude” – but when it gets inconvenient or slows me down, if I ask for help advocating for accommodations, or get frustrated with the endless structural barriers my university throws up, they disappear or make excuses or defend those barriers. If I let my good-disabled-person facade drop and express anything but unrelenting cheerfulness, they start pushing me towards the door. It’s not everyone of course, but it’s enough, and it’s people with power, so it matters.
Being “successful” in academia when I’ve faced discrimination and structural barriers has meant parroting oppressive beliefs and mythologies, and I can’t do it anymore.
About the Author
Sarcozona is a graduate student doing research somewhere between ecology and evolution. Their blog chronicles their experiences being sick and queer in academia with lots of asides about the plants, shoes, and books they love. you might also want to follow them on twitter or read their posts on Tenure, She Wrote.
Recent developments in communications technology and a greater recognition of the importance of a healthy work-life balance has led to a wider number of workers across the world voluntarily working from home. For those experiencing chronic illness and/or disability, however, such working arrangements are an unavoidable reality rather than a choice. For individuals in this position studying and working within a profession such as academia, where long periods of independent research and a lack of day to day working routine are already commonplace, there are a number of issues that can emerge through such experiences that it is important to discuss.
From my own perspective, the involuntarily imposition of home working arrangements is something that I have spent the past eighteen months coming to terms with, following the beginning of an on-going chronic back injury at the beginning of January 2017 (worst New Year’s gift EVER). This coincided with the beginning of the second year of my PhD following a six-month suspension for a research internship. I had spent the first year of my studies working 9-5 in the communal office space provided for doctoral researchers in my department, a routine I found easy to stick to after spending six years working 9-5 before returning to research for my Masters/PhD. My own particular injury essentially turned my back into what I liken to a cross between Goldilocks and an extremely moody teenager, with seating/standing/walking conditions etc. having to be “just right” in order for it not to tie itself into painful knots. This makes working from the rigid confines of a desk in an office extremely difficult, and has made developing a new working routine from home essential.
In a number of ways, the two key issues inherent in working from home are the same as those within any professional working environment: making sure routines and systems are in place so that you can work well and maintaining functioning professional relationships with colleagues to facilitate those routines and systems. The key difference for most home workers, however, is that the relationship aspect of work shifts from being comfortable with others to being comfortable with working alone and with yourself. This can be more difficult when home working has been imposed by an individual’s circumstances through a chronic illness or disability, rather than a specific choice deliberately made to better support family life and/or a work-life balance.
Given this, it is no surprise that a number of issues can manifest for someone finding themselves in this position. Feelings of loneliness and frustration about one’s circumstances are perhaps the most obvious, with the necessity of working from home making some depressed and anxious about missing out on working with academic colleagues. For some like myself it can also have a detrimental impact on work itself, with more distractions at hand and the lack of motivation produced by the lack of anyone around you doing the same thing.
Fortunately, there are a number of ways that working from home can be made more palatable in the twenty-first century. The same technological advances that have led to an increase in home working can be similarly utilised to provide home workers with more social and colleague-to-colleague interaction, for example through Skype “Shut up and Write” sessions and virtual coffee breaks. For those who can work for short periods outside of the home, meeting up with colleagues at a nearby café or pub to work together for a couple of hours can be a welcome break from the confines of your typical routine, and the few-office-hours nature of academia can mean that arranging for others to work with you from your home are easier to arrange than they would be in many other sectors.
Setting clear boundaries between “work life” and “home life” are even more essential when your place of work is also your home, too: for example, by designating official start and end times to the working day, giving yourself a decent break for lunch (preferably outside of the house), and if possible ensuring that you get out in the fresh air at regular intervals (even if it’s just on the front door step). If you’re lucky enough to have a home office, use this more than any other room so that you can mentally leave your work in that room once the day is over.
While these may seem like very small and obvious pieces of advice, I can speak from personal experience that they really do help: working from home when you have no choice but to do so can be rough going at times, but there are a large number of things you can do to make things easier (and to avoid becoming a hermit): if you’ve got any advice of your own for us home workers, do please post it below!
About the Author
Calum Carson is a third year PhD candidate at Leeds University Business School, whose research explores the business case for the Living Wage amidst the continued growth of precarious work in the UK today.
About a month ago, Head’s Together launched their #OktoSay campaign to destigmatize mental health in the UK. Around the same time, a study done in Belgium was published that showed that “one in two PhD students suffered from psychological distress, while one in three were at risk of a common psychiatric disorder.” As soon as it was published, I had three people send me the article. It seemed that, at least in my network, I had become the go-to whenever this type of news showed up. This isn’t surprising given that a year ago, I founded my blog and resource, Labmosphere.com, where one of our core pillars is addressing mental health issues in academia.
Dark and ironic then, that those messages went ignored because I was at the time dealing with crippling levels of anxiety and, for the first time in my life, depression.
When I started my blog, I had just finished taking a free positive psychology course called the Science of Happiness, and before that had been trained as a Peer Supporter at the University of Oxford to help students dealing with mental health issues. At the time, I was dealing with stress and anxiety from my personal life, but believed that when I solved the situation, so too, would my life get back on track. Lab was a haven from everything outside, because things here were objective, and the data flowing continuously.
I was the happy-go-lucky grad student who was known for yelling “Science!” and running into the lab excitedly whenever an interesting result surfaced. I danced through the empty halls of the institute on weekends, blasting music and singing at the top of my lungs. Life was good, science was good. I wanted everyone to experience that. I thought I was immune.
But my anxiety continued to return, especially after I hit the expected third-year slump in my PhD. Sometimes, there was no clear cause or trigger for it; I would spend whole days in front of the computer in lab, using all my energy and lessons in mindfulness to regain the sensation of breathing freely and the ability to focus on my work.
That’s when my aunt, a psychologist who works at a clinic in Mexico, suggested I might have Asperger’s Syndrome, or Autism Spectrum Disorder Level 1. Until then, I had thought I was just unique and quirky: someone who was overly enthusiastic, intense, and avoided weekend plans to spend days shut in his room reading and writing about the strangest of topics. The professional diagnosis came a month later, but the recognition clicked as soon as I obsessively read the resources my aunt recommended. There were others like me, others who understood the gifts and challenges I had been unsuccessfully trying to describe to friends, family, and partners (cue the Tarzan music).
As freeing and joyful as the news was, and as much as I wanted to try on this new identity I was receiving in exchange for the thousands of labels I had accumulated over my life, the diagnosis coincided with a break-up and another slump in the PhD that left me at my lowest self-image I had had in a long time:
Maybe there WAS something inherently wrong with me, rather than just different. Maybe I shouldn’t aspire to do certain things because my brain just wasn’t built for them.
This is when the depression began, and managing that, alongside my anxiety, became overwhelming. It’s something I would never wish on anyone.
Being on the autism spectrum puts me more at risk for mental health issues, but no one is truly immune. The experience did give me much needed perspective: where before there was only empathy for those struggling with mental health issues, there is now solidarity. I too, am walking this path.
I understand what it is like to have weeks fly by without data because your motivation and concentration to work go out the window, what it is like to miss meetings because you’re in bed unable to get up, or hiding in an empty corner of the tissue culture room because you just broke down in tears and how difficult it is to recognise and admit that you need help and to ask for it.
I understand from a deep place of gratitude that having a powerful support network in my supervisor, friends, and family, made all the difference during the recovery from depression, and while I still work on my anxiety. And I understand that, unfortunately, not everyone has such a strong support system available to them.
This is where environment plays a huge role in either mitigating or exacerbating the mental health struggles we can all experience. We cannot continue to ignore the countless anecdotes, now being backed by hard data, such as the Belgium study. These point to the sad truth we must all face: that the current academic culture and environment are doing more exacerbating than mitigating.
Behind each of these data points is a story, a life, some of which are tragically lost to mental health issues. We cannot continue to feel isolated and alone.
Those of us that can and are willing must join our stories and voices to advocate for ourselves and those who cannot. It’s #OktoSay. As someone who has been there, I urge you to reach out. It gets better, and you are never truly alone.
In healing solidarity, Juan Pablo Ruiz.
About the Author
Image of Juan wearing a labcoat
and taking notes in a laboratory with glassware in the background
Juan Pablo Ruiz is currently working towards a DPhil in Biomedical Sciences. His research interests are in tissue and stem cell engineering, as well as developmental biology. He also has a wide array of interests which include positive psychology, literature, and creative writing. He recently received an ASD level 1, or Asperger's diagnosis, and is now working to break the stigma surrounding mental health and neurodiversity in academia
Deciding to do a PhD is an enormous life decision. It's something that will take over your life for at least three or four years after you start. Overall, it's been an amazing experience for me, and now that I've come out on the other side, with my doctorate in hand, I've had some time to reflect about navigating the experience as a student with a disability. My PhD is in Arts and Humanities, so this post reflects my experiences in that faculty.
I have an invisible, physical disability. It's something that varies from day to day. My condition is genetic, which means that it will never go away, and it's something that I've had to learn to cope with. If I'm honest, I didn't really learn to manage my condition until the end of my masters degree. I realized that I couldn't keep working myself into the ground, and that it was much better to take a bit of time off and refresh, so that I could keep going.
In terms of choosing a place to do my doctorate, I was lucky enough to get a funding offer at the same place where I had completed my MA. I hadn't really thought about disability support when I was applying, as I knew it was such a game of chance anyway that I'd be lucky if I got anything. Once I got my position though, all the documents were in place so that I could continue receiving the same support I'd had before.
The system slightly changed in terms of finances - it was my funding body rather than the Disabled Students Allowance that supported me now. But, I found this process quite straightforward as I already had all the required documentation. To be honest, I don't really remember much about this application process, just that the staff at Disability Services were really helpful in getting me sorted.
For me, it was important that both of my supervisors knew about my disability and understood the impact it might have. I use a voice to text software called Dragon Naturally Speaking, which often makes interesting word choices, such as ‘surgical’ instead of 'liturgical’ and taking issue with my use of the past tense. Consequently, my supervisors were a little more lenient with mistakes in my work, in instances where it was clear that it was Dragon making the mistake and not me. Also, one of my supervisors had an office three flights of stairs up. That's not something I'm able to do, so we always met somewhere else. I think being open with my supervisors enabled them to better support me in my studies.
In terms of other students, my disability was not really something that came up much. I sometimes talked about my 'joint problems', but usually only when I was explaining why I couldn't carry things or needed to sit down. I slowly became much better at acknowledging when I needed to sit down during the drinks after evening seminars. Initially, I would just stand like everyone else, but now I’ll seek a seat if I’m struggling.
Another thing I had to learn was to take time off. Doing a PhD is a bit like a job, although it seems to be not so much 9-5, but rather 24/7. You'll see people tweeting about working at all hours, and there seems to be a really unhealthy culture of boasting about how much you're working. This really isn't helpful. One of the most important things for me to do to manage my condition is pacing - pacing myself not only through the day, but also throughout the week, to make sure that I don't burn out.
While I was doing my thesis, I didn't work for two whole days per week. Initially this was just two days throughout the week, one weekday and one day on the weekend, and then it changed to taking the entire weekend off. On these days, I didn't respond to emails or do any work. I might have done the odd bit of reading or teaching prep, but nothing too strenuous. If I hadn’t taken this time out, then it would have had a negative impact down the line. For me, it was much better to have this time off and getting enough rest than having to take at least a week off every couple of months to deal with the burn out. This is a difficult thing to do, particularly when you feel that the people around you are working harder than you, but the most important thing is taking care of yourself.
One thing I wish is that there was more of a community of disabled students. This really wasn't the case for me. I know there are issues around disclosure and so perhaps some people are scared to admit they're having problems. I did find a community on Twitter though - I've found lots of other people in academia, who are disabled, or who have my condition - #spoonie and #eds for example.
A final piece of advice would be to not be scared to ask for help, and to make sure you ask what is available for you. For example, my university has a computer suite with adaptive technology, which I only found out about at the end of the third year of my PhD, nearly four years after I joined the university. I now employ a policy of 'don't ask, don't get' - the worst that can happen is that someone says no. It can be tough sometimes, but for me this ultimately meant that I received the support I needed to complete my doctorate.
About the Author Alex just completed her PhD in an Arts and Humanities Faculty. She has an invisible disability called hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. hEDS is a collagen disorder, which means that Alex’s ligaments are too stretchy. Among other things, this causes chronic pain. She also blogs about phd-ing while being disabled and wearing a 'Please offer me a seat' badge on the London Underground at https://pppphd.wordpress.com/
The last thing I wanted this blog post to become is some whining account of my personal experiences, but if you sense any of that while reading it, I sincerely apologise and greatly admire your perseverance if you make it to the end. At the same time, I really hope you do (make it to the end, that is), as it’s not about my experiences (which solely function as an example), but about changes that should be made to a system where PhD students who fall ill are currently being punished for doing so.
Brace yourself (admittedly, it's rather long, too).
The message that you have cancer is never easy to digest, and the timing is never right. I received mine on an evening in February 2015, while pressing my phone against my ear to identify the words my oncologist was uttering (‘I’m very sorry to bring the bad news’, ‘what stage is it?’, ‘we can’t tell, you will have an MRI to determine that’, ‘can it be terminal?’, ‘I’m sorry, we don’t know at this point’, and so on), as I was standing in a busy London street. Just a couple of weeks into my second lab rotation (part of the PhD programme I am currently enrolled in), I realised that the next months would require all my energy and organisational skills. Several doctor appointments, an MRI scan, discussions, decisions about my exact treatment and sketching a general action plan for the next weeks followed.
On the bright side, it turned out my cancer was an early stage, and I was able to receive a specific type of surgery (most likely not readily available to me back home). What’s more, I was positively shocked by all the support I was given from friends and those that didn't even know me that well – Cambridge felt like the best place to get cancer (or, more accurately, the least bad one). Largely because of this I managed to finish my rotation successfully, and arranged a period of medical intermission, starting on the day of my surgery (planning an intermission requires some effort, including the needed paperwork, medical letters and meetings with several people - while it’s no fun to do these things, most people were very supportive throughout this process).
In the chaos of arranging things and coping with the situation, I didn’t quite check the regulations of my funding bodies in too much detail (not that I had much choice anyway; the treatment plan was set up in Cambridge and I needed to get time out for treatment and recovery). Little did I know that, after politely informing them about my medical intermission, one* would reply by stating that this would affect my maintenance payment, and that any maintenance paid during this period was officially to be refunded. This was followed by some options, which effectively included multiple scenarios of the same one (pay back now, pay back later, pay half of it now, half of it later, don’t receive funding during a subsequent term, etc.), ending with the wonderfully paradoxical comment ‘the choice is yours’.
After more e-mail conversations (during which I explained my situation, stressing that my treatment had to be completed in Cambridge and I was fully dependent on my scholarships, in reply hearing that unfortunately no hardship or extension funding was available either), we eventually came to an ‘agreement’: instead of paying back my maintenance stipend during my intermission (which I couldn’t afford to do), I will be left without funding for the last term of my PhD (I still need to find a suitable solution). Of all my ‘choices’, this seemed to be the least bad one. As you can imagine, discussions like these are the last kind you want to engage in while being stressed about your health, work, finances and future, but unfortunately they seem to be more common than we would want them to be.
During the intermission period, I couldn’t wait to start my planned PhD experiments as soon as I was fully recovered. Although I knew that something wasn’t quite right about the way my funding was arranged, I didn’t really know anyone in a similar position and felt slightly powerless as an individual. Yet here comes the beauty of our digital era: one day my friend Edwin (a PhD student at the University of Oxford) wrote this blog post about his experiences, and I messaged him immediately. It turned out that he was in touch with Stella, who is doing a PhD at University College London and has just been through treatment herself. It made us realise that we’re not the only ones going through this, and what’s more, we’ve either experienced issues with funding bodies ourselves, or heard stories of others going through something similar. That’s when we decided to write a correspondence letter to Nature, published just over two weeks ago.
The question arises about what would be a reasonable solution. There is wide heterogeneity amongst funding bodies when it comes to medical leave; some fund part of it, some none. In our correspondence we suggest that PhD students should have the same rights as academic staff when it comes to medical leave (e.g. six months of paid sick leave) – in the end they essentially work like full time employees, so why shouldn’t they be treated as such? Alternatives already exist, one example being the Marie Skłodowska-Curie programmes for PhD students. The European Commission requires that grantees are offered a staff contract, thereby protecting their rights to sick leave. We propose that other UK funding bodies should also provide such basic rights with their grants, at the very least including a decent sick leave arrangement.
One final thing – if you are one of the unlucky ones going through something similar right now: don’t despair. Ask everyone for support; your supervisor, boss, tutor, mentor, College, friends – there might be help available that you are not aware of until you ask. Each problem has a solution, and chances are you will find it when you keep searching. In the same way, we hope that by raising awareness, changes will be made to the current situation, where PhD students who fall ill are receiving a double whammy. (Now, dear reader, you truly deserve my endless admiration by making it to the end of this blog post: thank you!).
*I won’t mention the exact funding bodies involved, and I am grateful for receiving funding from all my sources in order to complete a PhD degree. However, it’s essential to give specific examples like this one to raise awareness of the issue.
About the Author
Claudia Pama is a second year PhD student at the University of Cambridge.
The author has kindly given us permission to re-post this article from her own website. The original can be found here: https://thequestioningaspie.wordpress.com/2016/08/17/why-im-unhappy-with-imposter-syndrome/ So, I may have mentioned that this blog is likely to be a pile of contradictions – and that I might end up changing my mind, or refining ideas about things as I go along.
Well, this is one of those times …
I wrote a blog recently about how I feel that my autism diagnosis makes having confidence in my ability to do my PhD really hard (it’s here if you’d like to take a look). In the post, I mentioned how frequently the term “Imposter Syndrome” was used to describe how often people don’t feel like they ‘fit in’ in academia – that they don’t feel good enough. I tried to explain how having an autism diagnosis, with all that this involves, makes this even more tricky.
Well, my blog was picked up and retweeted by Susan Oman, who is researching wellbeing, including in relation to PhD experiences (you can check out her work here). What was particularly interesting was that in retweeting the blog link, the phrase that Susan picked up on was “I feel like an imposter, but not just that, I feel like an autistic imposter.”
And this is really how it felt to me when I wrote it – like all PhD students experience ‘imposter syndrome’ but being autistic makes this even more of a problem.
So why am I questioning this now?
Well, since I wrote the blog, I’ve been thinking about, and speaking to others about how the notion of ‘imposter syndrome’ actually works, and it occurs to me that the phrase, and what it implies, might not be helping.
What I mean by this is that I had been thinking of ‘imposter syndrome’ as something that affects individual PhD students – and that my individual experience of autism meant that my version of ‘imposter syndrome’ was different/worse/whatever than that of others. Well, the thing is that I do still think this might be the case to an extent – and I don’t think that those who aren’t autistic can understand what it’s like, or can know about it. I do still feel that, but in the past that’s made me quite protective of it, and quite “parochial” (I guess) about the specialness of autism and of autistic experiences.
I didn’t want it to be lumped together with other types of individual experience because how could others possibly know about autism? (Which was my individual experience, and the overriding cause of my ‘imposter syndrome’). So it shut off my thinking about other types of individual experience – people who experience ‘imposter syndrome’ because they are trying to do PhDs and balance childcare commitments, because they have come to academia via a ‘non traditional route’, because they are older than the ‘typical postgraduate’ – or all the other hundreds of thousands of ways that people can feel that they don’t fit in with the model of what a ‘proper PhD student’ should be.
It set me apart from them because the term locates ‘imposter syndrome’ in the individual. It sets it up as an individual ‘problem’ for the individual to overcome.
But I’m not happy with that. Because locating the issue within the individual makes it into a ‘personal’ struggle and creates some kind of hierarchy (“my experience is worse than yours because I have autism” or “your experience is worse than mine because you’re from a Working Class background”). It also has the potential to locate the cause of the trouble in individuals – individual supervisors, individual departments. And this in itself is something that makes raising these issues very problematic for those of us who actually have good relationships with supervisors or with our departments. Indeed, this concern makes it feel troubling for me writing this now, because it feels like it would be so easy to infer from my attempts to absolve myself of any individual ‘blame’ for feeling like an ‘imposter’, that I am attempting to lay the’ blame’ on other individuals. But it’s absolutely not that. I have a really great supervisor and I like the department I’m in. The issue is a far deeper cultural one than that, and I think it goes beyond individuals and is historically and culturally rooted.
So I think that this individualisation of ‘imposter syndrome’ lets the wider systems and structures that lead people to feel that they don’t have a place within academia ‘off the hook’. And really, seriously, if this phenomenon is so widespread, across so many different types of student, different institutions, different academic disciplines – then maybe, just maybe the problem is not an individual ‘syndrome’ but a structural issue. Maybe the focus for change needs to be on the concepts and practices, the systems that are creating the conditions for people to feel like outsiders in a place where they have earned the right to be.
And I don’t feel that talking about ‘imposter syndrome’ really gets us to a place where that is our focus for change.
I don’t pretend to have definitive answers for change, but I do want to be part of something that makes change happen – that makes academia a more inclusive place to be, so that those of us who are ‘non mainstream’ can make meaningful, recognised contributions in a way that does not push us to the brink of breaking, or beyond.
My reasons for this are clear and unashamedly partisan – as an autistic woman, I feel that I need academia. I need to be able to go beyond my own personal experiences and understand how the world works around me. I need to learn, and I love to teach. I also feel that I have something to contribute. I’ve worked really hard to get where I am, and so many people have helped me along the way. But being part of a community means you have a responsibility to it, and to help to shape it, and that’s what I’m trying to do from my autistic perspective.
So the one thing that I feel like I can offer at this point is the suggestion that maybe we should reconsider the language of ‘imposter syndrome’ and begin to talk about something that locates the problem outside of individuals so that we can begin to work within and change a system that actually makes the majority of us feel like ‘imposters’ at some point. Maybe we need to shift our focus much more firmly to ‘hostile spaces’ or ‘hostile cultures’ in the PhD experience and in academia more widely (of which the PhD is a formative part). Because that’s where I think change needs to happen.
About the Author
The author is an autistic woman, studying and working in academia. She has lived and worked in spaces where the pursuit of equality and social justice are presented as ‘given’ priorities – in some university environments, in work and at the kitchen tables of family and friends. She cares personally, deeply and passionately about equality for autistic people. Personal experience of hurt, stigma and troubled identity have led her to try with all of the resources at her disposal to construct a life that works to shield other autistic people from those experiences.
During the month of September 2015, I was invited to an inclusion summit by the American Astronomical Society (AAS). On my way to the summit I took a shared shuttle ride. A very nice and talkative couple shared the journey with me. Their destination was their house and mine the AAS office in Washington DC. Of course, we chatted all the time. I love chatting!
The lady introduced herself as a member of staff at the Fulbright Commission. We chatted and laughed all the way. The conversation reached a point where she mentioned her various trips to a country in Africa, to which I replied "I have been there many times too!". That led me to explain why and to talk about my academic research. It was very good to hear the “how do you do it?” question right after I told them about my work.
When we got to that point, being unemployed myself, I spoke about how some people’s disabilities lead them to make grammatical mistakes in their resumes, essays and in job application forms that are often not user centered. I also spoke of technology like screen readers, which despite being helpful, do not prevent us from making mistakes that may lead to incomplete applications or unattached required documents leaving our applications destined for the rejection pile.
I had the same challenge when doing my PhD. Because I did not ask for a proofreader, upon turning my thesis in I had a whole chapter inserted into the table of contents and during the viva the examiners asked me why I had not included a conclusion chapter. I had written it but it never made it into their hands. Beyond that, my examiners mentioned that paragraphs were repeated and pages were numbered twice among other issues. Luckily for me, my university took action and paid a proofreader, who helped me to correct all the grammatical mistakes and my examiners understood the situation.
However, what about a recent graduate who has a disability causing the occurrence of grammatical mistakes who cannot pay an editor or someone to proofread or help with the job application process? What about the mentality in scientific academia in the field of astronomy and computer science (I only know astronomy and computer science) of a productivity metric based on written publications? What about the fact that people who are disabled are expected to perform like a traditional academic (I still use astronomy and computer science as an example) using the same interfaces and perhaps strategies. As a blind person I have my own strategies; why do I have to be assessed against the established metrics if I have to complete an application that has been made only for sighted users, when I navigate the application with my ears? How much more difficult is it to compete fairly for a job when your cv is destined for the rejection pile because a grammatical mistake potentially has more weight than your achievements, or because we just could not deal with the presentation of the job application?
I choose to use sound to analyze my data but I have to present anything I find in the data visually to my peers. When my collaborators bring data to me no one provides a sound file for me to evaluate the data as a peer. I have also failed to make them aware that I use sound to analyze my data because my performance is at its highest. They provide a chart. It is true that the chart may be embossed so that I can use touch to “read” it but in my case having access to the data behind the charts allows me to hear it and do a more thorough evaluation of possible features that may be significant.
I humbly think that while academia is affected by these sorts of inequalities, some are at a disadvantage. There is no malice; it happens unwittingly but to me this is equivalent to suffer a death by a hundred paper cuts. At the same time I believe firmly that evaluation metrics have to change to establish a heterogeneous environment in academia, that better awareness will decrease the bias of review boards and that we will be able to level the playing field. I do not underestimate the effort this will take. This is a situation that affects all people with disabilities in academia, those applying for post-docs and anyone with a disability who is job hunting. This is robbing people with disabilities from equal opportunities to display our talents and dignified, meaningful work. Anyone may develop a disability at any time. Academics with and without disabilities from every background should unite and work towards leveling the playing field. People with disabilities do things with our bodies that the able-bodied person has never thought of; if we are allowed to participate as equals, a new type of academia will emerge with people exploring, discovering and employing innovative coping strategies the able-bodied would never think of.
About the Author
Wanda is a Computer Scientist and Astronomer with a PhD from the University of Glasgow in Scotland. She is now affiliated to the Office of Astronomy for Development located at the South African Astronomical Observatory in Cape Town.
The most important thing I’ve ever learned how to do is to give myself permission.
If you’re reading this, it’s likely you’re an overachiever, that you’ve pushed yourself to (and past) breaking point multiple times, and that you’re not very good at saying no. I understand; I’m all that and more when it comes to toxic relationships with work. I’m pretty sure the only reason I survived my honours year is that the sound the heaters made at night scared me so I had to go home regularly.
My Coping Mechanism
When it comes to being chronically ill the most important coping mechanism is to give yourself a break. I have had depression for most, if not all, of my life. My anxiety and other brain quirks rear their heads when I push myself too hard. I’m good at ignoring them and getting on with work. I’m also good at getting distracted and forgetting to eat for a week. Neither of these are positive traits. When I gave myself permission (to be sad, to be afraid, to take days off, to take care of myself), a few things happened.
What happened when I cut myself some slack?
I stopped getting so defensive when people asked me about it. I’m constantly afraid of disappointing people in authority, but once I give myself permission to put my health first and told people that, there was very little argument. The people around you often want to be supportive, but can’t take your situation into account until you say “I’m taking today off because otherwise I will lie on the floor and cry instead of doing work”.
Secondly, I got healthier, happier, and more productive. This may seem obvious, but the “don’t do work to do more work overall because you’re not as sick” equation isn’t one I totally get. When I am sad or stressed, my go-to is to throw myself into work and yes, obviously that isn’t healthy or productive, but I liked it. Treating myself the way I would treat a sick partner made me better at research and happier with my life.
I became more confident. The pressures of being a woman in science means we’re not “meant to” have emotions (see: Tim Hunt’s failed “joke”). By giving myself permission to be “feminine” in the sense that I have feelings meant I was being myself a lot more, which made me a more confident researcher. It also meant I wasn’t bottling anything up, so my mental illness let up a lot. It surprised me how much of my anxiety was tied up in the fear of how people would respond to who I was.
Acceptance, Asking for Help and Healing
It also became easier to ask for help - I wasn’t hiding my mental illness any more, or pretending it was a “blessing in disguise” (I went through a few weird stages of relating to my mental health). Rather, I was allowing myself to have it and in the same step letting myself not be superhuman. I still don’t quite get along with the term “disability” but a fully healthy person probably couldn’t do what I push myself to try, so giving myself permission means taking a breath and not getting frustrated with my limitations. This resulted in me both thinking about my mental illness as an illness, and initiated getting on medication, which has been one of the best choices I’ve made.
Giving myself permission was instrumental when healing from trauma. At a recent talk about the barriers women in science face, a panel I was on was asked how we dealt with our personal barriers. I said that I cry a lot. Allowing myself to cry, be angry, and to experience the full spectrum of human emotion has been invaluable. It has contributed to my growth as a human and as a scientist and has facilitated managing my illness while studying and working. 10/10 would recommend.
About the Author
Sophia Frentz is a PhD student in Genetics at the University of Melbourne with a fun cocktail of mental health issues, predominantly depression. She's learned a lot of lessons along the way but still struggles with giving herself a break.
Let me start by saying I have no professional qualifications whatsoever to give anyone advice as to making a decision about taking medical leave. So I won’t. What I will do is tell you what I would have told myself when I was faced with this very decision in my own career, not so long ago.
First, here’s the brief backstory of how I found myself at the point of medical leave.
I was in the second year of my PhD. Anyone from the outside looking in would have said things were going very well. I had completed and passed my qualifying exam (called various things in different country contexts, but essentially the big exam in which you defend your research proposal). This meant I had the green light to go ahead and actually start doing the research I planned for so long and was excited about. I had publications in the works and a slew of upcoming conferences. I was working as a teaching assistant for a course on a subject matter I loved.
But one morning a disastrous thought floated through my head and it was downhill from there. I didn’t know what was happening at the time, but later was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD. You can read more about my experience here: https://thesecretillness.com/2015/09/01/stephanie-33-ontario-canada/. All this to say, I reached a point where I was pretty much debilitated, but I was actually able to keep up with work (for a while), and even still do it well. I think that’s one of our best guises in academia—we can keep up appearances and sustain unhealthy practices dressed up as success—but that’s another story. I probably could have kept plugging away like this, miserably, for some time. But I realized that if I were to actually get better, I needed to dedicate my attention and energy to treatment. Treatment alone needed to be my priority. This could not happen in the (off)balance of my PhD life. Of course, knowing what you need to do and actually doing it are two different things and I wrestled with the decision to a medical leave of absence from my PhD program. In the end I took a 4-month leave and it was the best decision of my life.
Looking back now, here are a few things I would have told myself at that difficult moment in time that might have eased my angst about taking the leap into medical leave.
If you can’t be happy and healthy enough to enjoy your professional success, it’s just not worth it.
Sure, in academia there are tough moments when we all grin and bear it and our work-life balance may get temporarily out of whack. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. When I was in the deepest, darkest grips of my OCD, I received the incredible news that I had been awarded an extremely competitive multi-year federal doctoral research award. This was something I had worked so hard for. This was an achievement that could not only step up my career trajectory, but it would make my life so much easier for the next few years. My funding was secure. No more applying for grants and the award included money for research expenses, meaning no more conferences out of my own pocket! When I got this news, I should have been jumping for joy. Instead, it was like…thud. In fact, it almost made me feel worse. I felt like I didn’t deserve it. I was so consumed by the doom of my OCD fears I could not even enjoy and savour this moment of success. And we all know that these can be few and far between in academia! That’s when I knew how far gone I was—that I couldn’t take pleasure in an accomplishment that I had worked so hard for and that was so important to me. It was at that point that I knew I could not continue to just push ahead in my PhD. I had to get well again or there was no point in continuing. If I couldn’t take pleasure in such an achievement, what was I doing in this PhD?
Things can and will wait.
Academic timelines are brutal. Often everything has a sense of urgency. We are an overworked bunch, for sure. The truth is 4 months, 1 year, whatever it is, will not make that much of a difference, if any, in the long run and the investment in your health will pay off with much greater returns. Yes, I’m scheduled now to finish my PhD 4 months later than I would have if I had been healthy. But the reality for me is that if I hadn’t taken leave for treatment I may not have finished at all and now that I am back to work, I can tell you that the leave did not have a significant impact on my trajectory. There were no critical opportunities in that time that I missed out on—even if there were, I know there would have been others in the future. All of the publications I had in the works still made their way out the door. My career went on.
Medical leave is not time off.
As academics we are notorious for not giving ourselves a break, and when we do we’re often ridden with guilt that we should be working but it is important to remember that medical leave is not time off. It is not a break. Medical leave has an objective—and that is to improve and attend to your health, whatever your needs may be. For me, it provided me the dedicated time I needed to focus on treatment. I was finally able to see a psychiatrist for assessment and diagnosis. I had the time I needed to read and educate myself about my condition. And the kind of treatment I underwent (ironically!) had plenty of homework. Whether your condition is physical or psychological, it is important to remember that the purpose of medical leave is to get better. And that is not something we should allow ourselves feel guilty about!
Don’t half-ass it.
For a time, I toyed with the idea of not taking a formal leave of absence and just sort of “taking it easy” over the summer. But thankfully a wise mentor said to me, “I know you, and you won’t stop working or feel like you should be working if you don’t take a formal leave” and she was right. I can see now that I would not have properly prioritized my treatment if I didn’t make it formal. Maybe this is also a by-product of our academic formalities and habit self-induced guilt—formalizing my leave gave it the legitimacy I needed to allow myself to prioritize it. As an academic I was so used to giving 110% to everything, but I almost thought about giving myself a half-assed leave!
Don’t let the red tape scare you.
There is paperwork but it is doable and you might have to be your own advocate to navigate some of it or perhaps you have a supervisor or partner who can help. In my case, I did have to do some manoeuvring through the bureaucracy, and this was not without some stress and uncertainty. For example, my university initially told me they would withhold my funding during my leave. But I reviewed the policies of the funding agency granting my scholarship and learned they actually had policy for paid medical leave, which superseded my university’s policy. I then had to present this information back to my university. I also had to request leave both from my university and from the granting agency. In the end, it all got sorted out and my university was actually very supportive, which I give them a lot of credit for. All this to say, don’t let any red tape deter you. It’s just part and parcel of the ridiculousness of some university bureaucracies. And as academics we’re used to that.
It’s nobody’s business if you don’t want it to be.
Yes, you need to communicate with your supervisor and the appropriate administration. But actually, very few people need to know, if at all, that you are taking medical leave. And really no one other than probably one high-level administrator who actually receives the confidential note from your doctor needs to know the reason for your leave. I was very open with some people about my leave, and didn’t even bother telling others. You should not feel pressure to disclose anything you’re not comfortable with.
***
I can tell you in no uncertain terms now that if I didn’t take leave and treat my OCD I may have left academia altogether. This realization helped me to cement a new-found commitment to put my wellness first. Everything else stems from that. I’m pleased to say that having returned to my PhD post-treatment, I’ve been able to more than simply re-connect with the passion for my research that brought me there in the first place—I’ve been able to experience what it’s like to be healthy AND pursue a PhD I’m passionate about. That’s a powerful combination. I have more passion to go around. I take pleasure in discovery. And I even enjoy some of my successes. I now engage with my career on my terms. And those terms prioritize my OCD recovery and living well.
About me
Stephanie is a PhD Candidate at a University in Ontario.
I am an overachiever and have Chron's. Both things that are more or less affecting my life. I love to be in academia and back in 2008 I started my second bachelor already with the goal of being in academia as long as possible. My first really bad episode of Chron's came in 2009. I struggled managing class attendance and basically fell back by a year at some point. However, I learnt to deal with things my way and am now on the path to a PhD even if it is an even rockier path than I thought it would be. Here, I share some strategies that seemed to work for me. They are in no way complete and are partly intertwined with other conditions that I deal with in different ways. You'll find some tips that might or might not work for you and might or might not work for certain conditions. I'm happy to learn more about others' approaches and what they have learned as well, so please do contact me at katta@chronicallyacademic.org.
Be radically open about it - if you can
A first principle that I have established with my Chron's is that I'm radically open about it. That means whenever someone is asking what is up, I'm explaining that I'm in an episode and what that means. For some people, that is hard to take in. Let's face it, there's some 'yuck factor' when you hear about it the first time and there is a taboo about bodily functions in middle European societies. It's also worth it for me every time someone tells me "I just got diagnosed with an inflammatory bowel disease and knowing that you have it to helped me come to grips with it and tell at least someone about it", or even just "having heard you talk about your ileostomy made it possible to bring up the issue with my grandfather and make sure he knows that there is someone to talk to". Being radically open about it is my contribution to a normalising it, because when I can say that I'm having an episode and people know its connected to many bathroom trips and an overall exhaustion, I get personally more of an understanding, but in the end others don't have to go through explaining what it means. That approach is kind of difficult to do though, because people can't help their initial yuck reactions when you first tell them. So it's not for everyone (and shouldn't be expected from everyone).
Negotiate the possibility for distance work from home
I made sure that - even though that is technically intended for parents - I could work from home at least partly when I have episodes. My contract now allows that I can flexibly stay at home and work from there (if my direct boss agrees, which they always do, to my luck). However, that also means that I structure my tasks constantly on whether I can do that in the home or whether it requires access to office resources. And I always try to have some tasks on my "can be done from home" list. There is also a set of essential books or papers, that I drag around and change on a weekly basis, so that when I, for example, write papers, I can do so at either place. Being that organised allows me to relax and judge without work stress whether I have enough spoons to go to work, enough to work from home or should call in sick. That extra option in-between is perfect for me as a large amount of sick days also stresses me tremendously.
Have hobbies outside of academia
On the other hand, what helps me a lot is having hobbies. Some of them are active (like Roller Derby), so they are really only an option outside of episodes, when I have enough energy. I have found though that sport helps me be relaxed more in general and made me watch my food with more purpose, which combined leads to fewer episodes. This is sometimes not an option and I'm aware that I am privileged in that I can do this now. There have been times when I couldn't pick up a sport at all because episodes were coming in such quick succession. Another hobby of mine doesn't require me to be active or alert, but rather just occupies me; crafting and in there mostly knitting, so I'll concentrate on that. The great thing about knitting is that these days I can mostly do it without paying too much attention, especially with large but not very involved projects. These get mostly done during my sick days. But when I come out of an episode and see that I got a bunch of centimetres made of my skirt, I at least feel like it wasn't a complete waste of time even though I didn't have the wherewithal to go to work or do anything cognitively challenging because I was so exhausted.
Keep your goals in sight
Now, I don't want to claim that it doesn't suck royally from time to time, when there is this conference you wanted to go to and you can't on short notice, causing stress for you and a replacement and making everything worse in the meanwhile. However, I try to take these set backs and acknowledge them. By that I mean I realise they are there, evaluate their impact and reassess the next steps towards my goal. For example, if I wanted to attend a conference, because of the community and exposure, I assess whether another conference could do that as well and/or when the next conference is coming up and how my time schedule has to change to accommodate this. That way, I never loose sight of my goal because of obstacles in-between.
Written by Maria Niedernhuber "Hypophyse" by Inga Scharf da Silva (20x20cm, mixed media, 2010)
When you apply for an entry-level job (e.g., research assistant, small student projects) in a lab, first go to a paper search engine (e.g., to google scholar or PubMed), or to the publication section of the lab’s website and read their latest publications. Sign up for field-specific email lists and facebook groups (for me, this would be, e.g., SPM list, multisensory list, ISCON) and watch out for project ads.
If you are planning to apply to a small lab, first send your preferred professor a short email with your background (i.e., your field of study, your specialization, your general interest, useful skills like Matlab or Python). Be polite, friendly and positive. Then suggest some follow up studies based on a recent paper and ask some intelligent questions about their research. (Good) professors do not want you to brag about how great you are (i.e., your brilliant grades are less relevant), you need to show that you really want to do science and prove you can do it. Show your professor that you would like to contribute to the larger vision of the lab, and how you could do it. Read your professor’s blog and watch his talks on youtube, because a talk makes it easier to grasp the vision of a scientist than a lab website. Take every opportunity to attend seminars, lectures, talks and go to the socializing events afterwards. If you want to get a foot in the door, talk to at least around 100 scientists (rough estimate). Talk to research assistants, talk to PhD students, talk to postdocs. As a disabled scientist, networking is twice as important for you than for anyone else. It is very important to get along personally and find trustworthy people to work with. Do not use people when networking in science. Please do not talk to people with the idea in mind that you want something from them, because this is disrespectful. Personally, I believe that, in all fields of life, the connections we have with others are perhaps the most precious thing we have. This counts for everyone equally, but especially when you share a passion, which in my case is behavioural neuroscience. We should treat people we meet not with the idea in mind to foster our professional network or anything, but as the precious person they are, who you share a passion with.
If you are planning to apply to a larger lab, it is often best not to email the professor, but one of his postdocs or PhD students (although the latter might be confused about what you want from them). This has two advantages: First of all, postdocs and PhD students receive a lot less offers for contact than your professor, who will never reply to all the emails asking for jobs he will get because then he would not have time to do science anymore. Second, the postdocs and the PhD students are the ones actually doing the research. Your principal investigator might be selling his science to you (e.g., trying to get you to run a hopeless experiment by saying “It is almost significant, we just need to increase the sample size” etc. Generally, your principal investigator will rather give you hopeless experiments than his PhD student, because it does not matter if you fail in your experiment as a MSc student or research assistant or project intern, you will be able to learn a lot and to write up your thesis. As a PhD student, you better don’t fail). The PhD student and the postdoc might give you a more honest perspective on what current data show and whether they think it is publishable. Your initial work in the lab is some type of trade: The senior scientist will train you and you will work for him probably for free or little money (- obviously, this is horrible. Ask your principal investigator whether he would support you to apply to small foundations funding student research projects. If your principal investigator does not want to support you, do not go to this lab).
When you look up the latest publications of a lab before emailing a professor or postdoc, keep in mind that, in many cases, the lab will not be researching exactly these topics anymore, because it takes a while to publish a paper and new projects have emerged meanwhile. Do not expect that the lab will let you do what you suggested in your email just because they invited you. Your suggestions for new experiments based on previous publications only serve to show your potential new lab that you have the capability of structurally thinking about scientific problems. It is extremely difficult for a beginner to figure out what a lab which seems interesting actually wants, unless you are already in there. If you would like to apply for a PhD there, you need to make sure that the experiments you suggest to your supervisor match his current grants and the best way to figure that out is to talk to current lab members about what the lab is up to. You can also start following potential supervisors on twitter to see what they are up to. Twitter is a very low-threshold way to engage in scientific discussions, and a lot less frightening than to talk to eminent scientists at a workshop. To follow scientists whose work you are interested in and twitter interesting follow up questions is a good idea.
As a scientist with a disability or chronic disease, the biggest mistake you can make when applying for an entry-level job is to put your disease or disability before the science. When I tried to enter labs during my BSc degree in Tübingen, I did exactly that – I was worried no one would take me, and therefore, I wrote extensively about how I was sure I could manage to put up with lab life. In other words, I was stupid. Obviously, no one knew what I was talking about. In the first place, you are (or would like to become) a scientist, so put the science before anything else. You come to a lab because you want to do science. Therefore, you come to discuss data, theories and new ideas and in the first place nothing but that. It makes a lot of sense for your professor to pay attention to previous experience, but if your professor pays too much attention to bling bling stuff on your CV (e.g., coming from a prestigious university), this is a bad sign.
Everyone tells you to be passionate. Your principal investigator, however, will not tell you to be passionate. She will tell you to 1. do you job and 2. do it fast and reliably, and 3. without a lot of drama. I am personally very driven and I came to the conclusion that you fare better as a scientist being pragmatic and studying science as a “craft”. Too much passion can remove you from science as well (e.g., I was once broken-hearted because I realised I could not research a certain topic of interest – this almost cost me my career because I did not look for alternative options early enough). Sometimes, passion helps you to last in tough times as a scientist (e.g., the tough times which probably brought you to this website).
If you are in a position to decide whether disclose your disability or disease, and you decide to do so, it might best to do it quickly (i.e., before looking for a new flat next to your new institute). If they do not want to take you because they think you cannot do your job due to your disability, you do not want to be there. Such people will be a hassle for you and you are better off not wasting your time with them. You can be certain that they will not tell you that they did not take you on because of your disability, they will tell you something else. Your principal investigator’s reassurance that he will accommodate your disability or chronic disease does not count anything, until you see that he does it.
In some cases, it might also be a doable strategy to wait until your principal investigator sees that your work is good and tell him when you feel comfortable enough. It lies in the interest of your principal investigator 1. to take on junior staff who excel as a scientist, because they want their lab to be successful and 2. to take on junior staff who do not take up a lot of time, because principal investigators are busy. Remember that principal investigators want you to 1. do your job, 2. do it quickly, 3. do it without any drama. Your principal investigator might also just not care about you as a person, but more about you as a “work horse”, and think that you take up a lot of time because you are disabled (- unlike popular belief, this is not the default status, some principal investigators indeed believe in making young scientists grow and strive). If you can, first show that all their fears are unjustified, then talk about your disability, if it makes you feel better. Be careful: I have come across scientists who first did a good job and their principal investigators were satisfied. When they disclosed their disability and/or chronic disease, they were bullied out of their positions or not promoted because “they might not be able to put up with the stress associated with such a position”. You are very unlikely to figure out whether this happens to you, or not. Sometimes, senior staff will tell you in person, or others, that they “did not put you forward for position xyz, because you cannot put up with stress due to your disability.”, i.e. because they really mean the discriminating things they say. Especially for prestigious positions with many applicants, the selection panel will be happy about any reason to remove an application from the pile of applications to consider. Doubts whether you are healthy enough to put up with your job might possibly constitute one such reason, and you have no way of knowing.
My advice to you is:
As a disabled scientist, you cannot afford to be in the lab of a principal investigator who is annoying and has an inflated ego more than anyone else. How do you avoid such labs? When a professor hires you and you had a job in science before, they will often call the person you worked with before to get an impression of what it is like to work with you. As a student, you should do the same: Get in touch with people who work for or previously worked for your professor (- you can tell this from your professor’s co-authors lists on their publications). For example, before I went to the interview which got me my PhD position, I called the PhD student who only had a second authored paper in Frontiers with my supervisor (normally not a good sign). She said that her problem was that the business of science was not for her, and my supervisor was probably the best supervisor one could get in the universe. Once you receive an offer, or during the process talk to 1. someone who is in the lab. However, you don’t just want to ask the students you are being introduced to when you visit the lab, because your principal investigator’s selection of who you talk to is not unbiased. I am pretty sure that you will not talk to the person your principal investigator might bully. In other words: If you want to know whether North Korea is a dictatorship, you should not rely on Kim Jong Un’s lifeguards for an opinion. That is why you 2. should try to talk to a handful of people who left the lab. Ask them on the phone whether they know of someone who was unhappy in the lab, and try to talk to them as well. The people you talk to about your potential new host lab are unlikely to be disabled as well and might not be able to advice you on that. My personal observation is that scientists who are generally friendly and good mentors are also happy to host a disabled scientist in the lab, so you can take non-disabled staff’s general satisfaction in the lab as an indicator of whether a scientist can host you with a disability and/or chronic disease. Take into account that people you ask for an impression of a principal investigator have their own interests and might be difficult themselves. When you talk to them, ask a few general questions about them (“Why did you choose this lab?” What brought you into science?”). I tend to disqualify everyone as a reasonable source of judgment who does not seem to care about the science directly, saying things like “Oh, it’s so good to have Oxford on the paper”, “It looks so good on our CVs to do abc.”, or brag about their grades in their BSc, and who says profoundly negative and unjustified things about colleagues on a personal level, e.g., “she is a bitch”, “he is really just a prick and I don’t like his personality”. Some junior scientists will hesitate to criticize senior staff directly, so pay attention to hints like “She is very demanding.”, “She is very critical.”, “If you publish any less than three publications in a year, you don’t impress her much.”, “If you work less than 12 hours, you don’t impress her much.”.
You are most likely to work without being paid when you enter a lab for the first time, and training is your so you should make sure that you do not get into a lab which exploits your workforce by making you work extensive hours and skip your weekends. “Big” or, worse, “upcoming” principal investigators with inflated egos might seem very attractive at a first glance, but turn out to be very difficult to work with. The exploitation of your workforce keeps their labs going, so do not sell yourself under value, blinded by the name of a prestigious university or a famous group leader.
Do not go to a “we work long hours”/”we brag about not having a life” lab. First of all, they do not actually work these crazy hours. My guess is that the illusion of the 80-hours week comes from not having fixed working hours. Many scientists just about always do science if they are not busy taking care of their families (frequent moving is a greater obstacle to having a family in science than long working hours), or if they are not busy meeting friends, and busy doing other things. Many scientists who claim to work non-stop spend half a day on twitter, or facebook, or with their buddies in the institute’s gossip kitchen. This means that, indeed, many scientists are always busy doing science – if they are not just busy doing something else. Do you own calculus, and see that, in most cases, their time spent with work does not add up to 80 hours a week. Obviously, there are exceptions to the rule, but you do not want to invest in these exceptions, because they are unlikely to live long, and you want to build long-lasting mentoring relationships. Anyone else I know who actually works that long spends most of his time removing errors they did during data processing when having worked despite having been tired and not concentrated (I have been there, you can learn from my mistakes). I would even go so far as to say that I would doubt the quality of the science done in a lab with a “long hours culture” because stressed staff make more mistakes (see “reproducibility crisis in psychology and life science” etc.). A “long work hours” lab is a no-go. Good science is slow science. Do not go to labs in which principal investigators brag about how many hours they work. These working habits are bad for anyone’s health, and you should take care of your health as an academic with a disability and/or chronic disease. Unlike popular belief, you do not need to submit yourself to such crazy work ethics, and by submitting yourself to such crazy work ethics, you support academic slavery. The time you need to finish a task tends to expand if you have more time available, and you will not get more done by working longer. Moreover, do not go to a lab in which supervisors claim to recognize that working long hours is bad for you, but then continue to brag about how many hours they work themselves despite knowing it better. In other words: If a bird shits into your principal investigator’s brain, it is his own fault. Same for your colleagues. Do not pay attention to your colleague’s career, and your colleague’s bragging about his working hours, concentrate on your own career. Take your time to find your own style.
Try out your professor before you commit to anything (- your professor will do the same): Ideally, you need to have undergone the cycle of a) thinking of an experiment and discussing how it is done, b) running the experiment c) analysing the data d) writing up at least once. If, after a test phase of a couple of months, your professor does not want to give you the chance of doing these things, maybe it is best to look for another lab. To visit the lab for a couple of months before you get settled there gives you the opportunity to 1. arrange the accommodations you might need due to your condition; 2. figure out whether you can establish a functioning working relationship with your supervisors. If you decide that you do not like the lab or that it is difficult to receive the accommodation you need, it makes it easier to leave the lab. Many scientists are passionate mentors – make sure you meet these ones, and not the others! There will be someone to give you opportunities. Be patient.
Figure out whether your lab mates are alright, and socialize. Your lab mates can make your life just as miserable as your principal investigator can (or maybe a bit less). If you struggle with your principal investigator, it might be good to have someone in the lab to talk to, or to back you up (but do not expect too much from them, because there is conflict of interest).
Look for a mentor from the same university, who is not in your lab. Same reason than above – you need allies when you feel discriminated against by your group leader or postdoc or anyone else in your lab. Look for a mentor from a different field than yours. It might be wise to have someone to turn to (where there is no conflict of interest with your principal investigator), because they have an unbiased view on what is happening. Knit your net as dense as possible, because if you fall, you want to fall safely.
Socialize with others with the same health problems and with others with different health problems. Do not let them drag you down when they feel bad, but support them when they need it. Think solution-oriented, not disease-oriented. If a certain solution works for your mate, the same solution might also work for you (independent of your disease).
Research sources of funding and suggest them to your principal investigator, sounding as confident as if you had already obtained the cash for your position. You are more likely to get your supervisor’s support, if you have funding (surprise!). You are more likely to get funding if you have your supervisor’s support (surprise!). This is the chicken-egg-problem of funding academics. To resolve this problem, it is best to suggest some sources of funding outside your university or institute to your potential supervisor and talk about these funding application with confidence, just as if you had already succeeded with finding funding (but without sounding arrogant, it is a blessing to be funded), so they feel you are a safe investment.
Perceive your funders as partners rather than wallets. I previously advised you to put the science first. However, this is not the only thing you need to keep in mind when doing science. You need to recognize that science is shaped by cash flows (i.e. funding bodies funding science, they are frequently also setting agendas, they decide whose work is “interesting” and who can pursue it) – whether you like it or not. Research your funders thoroughly and study how academic cash flows work. Your funders decided to fund science because they would like to enrich the world in some way (e.g., an old lady funding pain research due to a disease-inflicted family history, a foundation wanting to get different disciplines to talk etc.) and you are their means of achieving this. Think of your funders as someone who bets on you as their racing horse to have impact on the world. Find a funder who you share goals with (they will notice if you don’t, and you just waste their and your own time). Do not be offended if they do not take you because many funders have awkward constraints on their funding (e.g., this year primarily funding people with a STEM background from Asia, etc.), so your success does not depend on your own scientific excellence, but on the applications of others and a good bit of luck. Many funders lack a scientific background in the science which you do, so take into account that you write your application for a general audience. You need to tell your funders a story about your research.
While principal investigators might be hesitant to take you on with a disability or chronic disease, a funding body awarding research fellowships or PhD scholarships is more likely to put your application forward to increase the diversity among the individuals funded by the organisation. If you have a mental health disorder, I would advise you only to say that you have a chronic health condition and are therefore a protected minority, but do not say which one (except if it shaped your biography and the story you would like to tell your funders). However, you are still at disadvantage, because, due to your disease, you might not have been able to gain as much lab experience as another person, and your funder is unlikely to take that into account. If that is the case for you, just show what you have and point out that, despite your disability and/or chronic disease, you managed to get as far as you got - it will compare better than you think. Funding bodies are only interested in your past because they use it as a cue to predict how well you will perform in the future. So when you apply for a scholarship, do not worry too much about side issues, e.g. the life time you lost due to a hospital stay and that you are much older than anyone, or some bad grades in your BSc degree - think of what you would like to do in the future and how you would contribute to the goals of your funders with this. For example, if you have been exposed to financial pressures due to your disability and/or chronic disease which caused your performance to deteriorate in some years, say that obtaining a certain scholarship might not expose you to financial pressures and you might be able to show your full potential. Funders are humans, too, and many will show understanding for disabilities and chronic diseases.
Tell them that disabled scientists are persistent – or how else do you think we even got so far? As a disabled scientist, you have shown to be more persistent in pursuing your scientific and life goals in times of trouble. Persistence is the key skill of any scientist (over and above intelligence and other CV bling bling) because science is often frustrating and you will fail as a scientist if you simply give up when there is a problem or when things are getting rough. As disabled staff, it is easy to show your principal investigator that you have this skill – your mere presence in the lab is actually evidence enough.
Servus and all the best of luck for your career,
Maria
About the Author
I am a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge working towards a PhD degree in psychology (with a MSc from University College London and a BSc from the University of Tübingen) and founding member of chronically academic. I am interested in how consciousness works and how this knowledge could be translated to aid neurorehabilitation.
I am a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge working towards a PhD degree in psychology (with a MSc from University College London and a BSc from the University of Tübingen) and founding member of chronically academic. I am interested in how consciousness works and how this knowledge could be translated to aid neurorehabilitation.