Wants, Needs, Desires

- I want to be a scientific/medical writer

- I want to lecture at a university/college

- I want a job where I get paid to watch TV and write reviews

- I just want to be a reviewer in general

- I want to learn how to make hexagon granny squares

Dual-Career Couples

This is my new term for today.  I found it when I was searching for advice for couples that are starting out in professional careers, especially academic careers, and are struggling to decide who’s career is more important.  I know ‘important’ isn’t the right word but when one person leads in a relocation and the other follows, the leader’s job is essentially deemed the most important.  Take for instance my partner A and I.  A is an academic librarian.  He currently works in a university library as a science librarian.  I am still a PhD student for at least another year so at the moment, the relocation issue isn’t much of an issue.  He commutes to another city to work and then comes back home.  I attend school in the town we live in so I don’t have to commute.

The problem is starting to arise though when I talk about options for my future career.  I may want to do a postdoc at another university and possibly in a different country.  I may also want to teach at universities and colleges in the US.  These are some options I’ve thought of.  A is starting out in his career and wants to build up some experience, which is understandable, and doesn’t want to move for a few years at least.  His response to my career ideas is “see you when you get back”.  He doesn’t want to move, especially to a distant place where he may not even speak the language.  Also, I don’t think he wants to jump around from job to job and worries that he may not find a job where I am, not wanting to do a job he doesn’t like.  We both have careers to develop though.

I have looked at the options in the city he currently works in.  The university doesn’t do research I’m especially interested in and there isn’t much in the line of government or industry jobs.  When does my career take priority though? If I stay in school for the next 2 years, providing him with 2-3 years of work experience in the meantime, can and should he move with me somewhere else and support my career choices for awhile? Should we take turns or should we decide that one person has more earning potential and follow their career indefinitely? These are all questions I don’t have answers to and neither does A.  Good thing we have a couple more years to think about it.

Open- or Closed-Access Publishing

As a graduate student at the beginning of a research career (or, let’s just say a career of some kind), living with a librarian, I often find myself defending the closed-access system of research publishing to an open-access advocate.  The part that annoys me most about this though is the fact that in theory, I’m an open-access fan.  I love what open-access stands for and the fact is that when I do a search for a research article (usually in Google Scholar) the articles that are free are the ones I read first, since they don’t require signing into the library website.

The problem, and my agrument in defense of closed-access, lies in the fact that young scientists need to develop a strong publication record to be competitive when applying for grants and jobs.  The ’strength’ of the publication record is usually measured by the number of publications, how many are first-author, and what the impact factor is of the journals.  That impact factor is the clincher.  Open-access journals don’t seem to have as high an impact factor and without a high impact factor, how will people know that my research is good? There is almost a stigma in the academic world, at least in my field, that you only publish in open-access after you’ve been rejected from closed-access journals- essentially, when your research doesn’t measure up.

So, the question is, do I wait a few years to build up my publishing record and for the open-access journals to build up their impact factors? Or, do I publish in an open-access journal now and help the journal build it’s impact factor while I build up my publishing record? Well, when I put it that way…