WOMEN IN PLANT BIOLOGY

Returning to Research: Facing Graduate School After Five Years in the Workforce

1991: Armed with a bachelor’s degree (with honors) in agricultural science, I headed out proudly into the workforce. Five years prior, our state Department of Agriculture had employed roughly half of each year’s graduates. The previous year, they took around ten. In my year, none! The political climate had really dried up funding for graduate positions. I took a temporary job as a lab assistant for a graduate student in the department where I had studied. Then one day a fortuitous phone call came in to the head of department from someone looking for a fresh graduate for a six-week position (to use up some spare funding).

This job, described in greater and more social detail in a previous column in the March/April 2006 issue of the ASPB News, was with the Department of Agriculture as a cereal chemist on the pulse breeding program in Horsham, a country town that was a 3.5-hour drive from Melbourne. “Great,” I thought, “here begins my brilliant career as a research scientist.” I realized after just a few weeks that I was only slightly elevated beyond a lab assistant, pipetting out reagents and running gels for experiments that someone else had designed and would write up. In terms of publishing groundbreaking papers, I realized that, at best, I would end up in the acknowledgments section. I wanted to be the one designing those experiments!

It took a few more years in the workforce, hitting my head against the glass ceiling but having a fun social life nonetheless, before I decided that it was time to get serious about my career.

1995: I needed to do what plenty of friends had done immediately upon getting their bachelor’s degree and start working on a PhD. I just needed to find a project that interested me and a supervisor I liked (and who would take me on).

Luckily, my job at that point was part-time, so I had two days each week to look around. I spent at least 12 months being told by potential supervisors that they were planning to offer their best graduate projects to the cream of last year’s crop. It seemed that a fresh bachelor’s degree (with honors) beat a five-year-old bachelor’s degree (with honors) every time. Would I ever get my foot back in the door?

Then, gradually, I started to come across potential supervisors who said that they would rather have a “mature-age” student working with them. I knew (as they soon found out) that with five years’ work experience under my belt that once I settled into the right project (elected by me, not just shunted onto me because I had good grades), I would devote everything to it! I kept knocking on doors. I am the proud owner of three consecutive years’ worth of knock-back letters from the Grains Research and Development Corporation.

1996: A full 18 months after beginning my quest, I finally found a supervisor and a project that I liked, with funding for a graduate student attached. I announced to my parents and friends that I was returning to study.

Having five years of earnings in the bank made things easier. I could eat better, get the odd cab ride home after late nights, and not have to work at a check-out to earn spending money! There were many culture shocks, however. For example, what should I wear? “Undergraduate slob” wasn’t going to cut it at 28, but “corporate office” is impractical in a lab. “Weekend casual”? I purchased a whole new graduate student wardrobe—using Tori Spelling from the TV show “Beverly Hills 90210” as my role model. This earned me more than a few odd glances, and pretty soon I found my own middle ground that I like to call “slightly-better-dressed-than-undergraduate-but-still-relaxed-neat-casual.”

Next dilemma: Who are the office staff here for? In my previous job, I had free access to a full stationary cupboard, photocopier, fax machine, petty cash, staff Christmas parties, and fully funded work lunches. Back as a student, I couldn’t work out why all students (even graduate) were considered pond slime, not to be trusted with even a ream of blank A4 paper to reload the printer themselves, unable to send their own faxes or photocopy essential references without limit. No! We had to woo the secretaries and creep into their domain like eunuchs to beg to send a fax, to justify why we needed more paper for the printer, to ponder with them on who used up the last ream (given out “only last week”), and to adhere to our 100-page-per-month photocopy limit. Not easy in the beginning days of gathering literature from a wide range of sources!

1997: I applied for a few “top-up” scholarships throughout my PhD work, several of which I was told not to apply for “because they don’t give them to the same person twice.” Wrong! Some of the lesser-known funding pools available for mature-age-vegetarian-daughters-of-ex-servicemen-following-a-career-break (you get my drift) were still available to me, often because no one else had found the fund or applied for it.

Once my project was set up, I really did find that I was more settled and focused than the recent graduates around me. I knew why I was there: I was passionate about solving the problem I had been set, and I had other aspects of life (housing, car, adult wardrobe) more or less sorted out.

1999: Experiments winding up, I took a freelance job to earn some top-up funding as a copyeditor with a plant sciences journal. This job gradually took me to my dream job, which I still hold today—editor of Functional Plant Biology (again, see my previous column in the March/April issue of the ASPB News).

Fast forward to 2006: I still believe that returning to graduate school was the right career move for me, as it gained me entry into a job that to this day I love with a passion. I feel extremely lucky to wake up every morning ready to leap out of bed and tackle my inbox (even on a Monday!).

Jennifer Henry
Editor, FPB
jennifer.henry@csiro.au