On season 4 episode 4 of the agile academic, I chat with Dr. Jen Heemstra, chair and professor of chemistry at Washington University of St. Louis. Jen and I cover culture, leadership, failure, and what it means to be a mentor.
On season 4 episode 4 of the agile academic, I chat with Dr. Jen Heemstra, chair and professor of chemistry at Washington University of St. Louis. Jen and I cover culture, leadership, failure, and what it means to be a mentor.
On season 4 episode 4 of the agile academic, I chat with Dr. Jen Heemstra, chair and professor of chemistry at Washington University of St. Louis. Jen and I cover culture, leadership, failure, and what it means to be a mentor.
Welcome to The Agile Academic - a podcast for women in and around higher education. In each episode, we tackle topics from career vitality to burnout and everything in between. Join me as I chat with inspiring women about their experiences pursuing purpose, making change, and driving culture in the academy and beyond. I’m your host, Dr. Rebecca Pope-Ruark.
Rebecca Pope-Ruark: Hi, Jen. Thanks for being on the show today.
Jen Heemstra: Thanks for having me.
RPR: I'm really excited to have a conversation with you. So why don't you just tell the audience a little bit about yourself and the work that you do?
JH: So, uh, my name is Jen Heemstra. I am a professor at Wash U in St. Louis in the department of Chemistry. I also happen to be the department chair at least. So that's a second job that I have, at least for right now. And so our lab is focused on an area of chemistry called Super Molecular Chemistry. And it basically means that we build with Lego bricks, but where those Lego bricks are molecules. And we happen to think that biomolecules the proteins and nucleic acids that are in your cells are like the coolest Lego bricks ever. And so the way we approach research is to just look for unmet needs, typically in biomedicine or the environment. And then our group dives into our figurative box of biomolecular Lego bricks and design systems to address those unmet needs. And then we build and test and we fail, and then we rebuild and retest and fail again. And then eventually usually hit on something that we're really excited about and that we can move forward in the world. And so we do research, but then we're also very interested in how we do research and thinking about things like failure and motivation and belonging, and how all of that impacts us as research researchers. And so that's definitely part of what we do in our group and what we talk about as well.
RPR: Yeah, I think it was definitely that second piece that led me to you on Twitter and, uh, where, where you talk about mentoring and, and leadership in, in lab culture. So we're definitely gonna get to that a little bit later in our conversation. So I'm looking forward to that.
JH: That'll be fun. I, I'm sure we have a lot to talk about on that front <laugh>.
RPR: So on the show, I like to kind of dig into, um, some, some different aspects of what I think are kind of higher ed culture in a, in a brighter perspective. So we, I like to think about purpose and compassion and connection and balance. So I'm wondering, and you've given us a little hints of, of this already, but what would you say is your purpose in higher education?
JH: That is a really great question. I would say it that my answer to that is something that has really evolved throughout my career, so I can talk about what it was when I started. I have a pretty clear vision of what it is now. Who knows what it will be 10 years from now. I got started in higher education. Well, I got started doing research because I, well, I actually had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. And then through a series of coincidences, had an opportunity to do research in a chemistry lab as an undergraduate, realized that I really, really loved it. Thankfully had fantastic mentors who convinced me to go to graduate school. And then, you know, the typ maybe typical, maybe not wrestled with self-doubt for many, many years at the 11th hour decided let's go for this faculty career because this is my dream career and I want this so badly and I can't let myself doubt be the thing that stands in the way of me pursuing this dream.
And so, really for me, that initial purpose of why I wanted to stay in academia beyond my postdoc, it had to do with just really loving a lot of the aspects of this job. It, it was the autonomy and the freedom and the opportunity to say, I want to work on this thing. I have this new idea and I wanna be able to pursue it. That's what really got me started. Something I realized along the way is actually goes back to the research we do in our lab, that I'm a builder. I love building with molecules. That's why I became a chemist. One of the things I didn't realize until a little bit into my career is that something that was really, really appealing to me about this academic path was the opportunity to build a research program. Right? You know, one of the scariest yet most exciting moments of my career was standing alone in my empty lab, my first day on the job as an assistant professor, and thinking, wow, in the next five years, this empty room where I'm standing alone needs to get turned into a room full of people doing research with a cohesive research program that brings in funding and puts out papers and how we get from point A where I am now to point B of that place five years from now is terrifying, but also a really fun, exciting challenge to think about how you build up that research program.
And so that was a lot of where I got my drive and purpose in those early years through a, a series of different events and experiences that I went through. I came to, I came to realize just how important it is that we're creating the environment for every single person to thrive. That we're providing the mentoring and the support and the sense of belonging, building up people's confidence, helping them feel motivated that we're providing that environment for everyone to be their best every day. And then as I started talking more openly about that, then all of a sudden I, there were people who were coming to me to share their experience where in their lab or their university that really wasn't happening for them. And I will say that that really lit a, a fire under me and gave me the purpose that I feel now, which is, if you ask me right now, I say my purpose, my life mission, my career mission is create a healthier academic culture for the next generation of researchers.
That's it. Like we have to do better. There is are so many people whose lives are broken or damaged lives or their careers by what they're experiencing in these academic spaces. And there are so many issues that we need to tackle. There's been a lot of progress and a lot of improvement, but there's so much brokenness and I think that we can work together and we can fix that and we can create these healthier environments. We can create these places where every individual can thrive. And that's really what gets me out of bed in the morning. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>,
RPR: I love thinking about culture change and what we can do in higher education to make it a more, just place, a more, uh, welcoming place. A place of belonging for folks who are doing research, who are doing teaching, or who our students are making that just a, a space of belonging for, for everyone. And that's definitely part of the work that I'm starting to think about too, through with the burnout. So why is it important today that, why is that mentoring and leadership kind of preparation, why is that important in today's higher education?
JH: Well, I think it's always been important, but you're right, it, it could arguably be considered more important today than it was in the past. I would say that's partly because of who is in academia, and it's partly because of where people want to go next. And I would say it's partly because of what we want academia to look like in the future. And so if you look at the, who is in academia, right? 50, a hundred years ago, who was in academia was a very narrow swath of the demographics of the world, right? It was people who had just an immense amount of privilege, right? It was largely white men. And if they had a family, they largely had stay-at-home spouses who did all the domestic work, raised the kids, and they had this lifestyle where they could just either be single in graduate school and be completely untied, you know, from any responsibility and work as many hours as they wanted.
And same as faculty, you know, as the, we had this culture of, you know, sure, you can work any time of the day. When I was a grad student, my graduate program had somes once a week. One of the seminars every week was Wednesdays at 8:00 PM right? And that is very illustrative of the culture, this idea that of course you have nowhere better to be at 8:00 PM on a Wednesday than at work because you couldn't possibly have any sort of family commitment that might take you away or, or where you might not be able to do that. And thankfully, academia has much, much more diverse. And so we have to do better. We have to create systems that are more equitable, that are more flexible, that are more supportive. We need to make it possible for everyone who wants to be here to be able to find their place here.
And we have to make it all that much more welcoming because people who were in academia a hundred years ago who looked around only saw people who looked like them, they probably never wondered whether or not they belonged there. But as academia becomes more diverse, it's much more common for people to not necessarily see themselves represented in their peers or in the faculty or other leaders at their institution. And so we really need to be a lot more attentive to how well A, fixing that issue. But b also our messaging around belonging and making sure that everyone feels welcomed where they're at. Um, the second one is where people wanna go, right? Even when I was a graduate student, it, well, I tell people, you know, when I was a grad student, there were two flavors of Starbucks Frappuccino, right? It was coffee and mocha and that's it.
And career choices were a little bit like that as well. Are you going to go to industry or academia? These were the two things as a chemist that you might do. And certainly there were people who did follow different paths, but that was very much so out outside of the norm. People would always ask you, what do you wanna do? Industry or academia, right? Like there couldn't possibly be anything else. And now I think a, a place where we as a field and as academia as a whole have grown a tremendous amount, is really embracing all of the different career paths that individuals might wanna pursue. Certainly, we still have a long way to go on this as well, but I love that we now have conversations about, well, what do you wanna do? Do you wanna do industry or academia or policy or informal science education or government lab or this or another thing, science commission.
Like there's so many different career paths that people can follow and are encouraged to follow. But then that also means we need to be providing better mentoring and better support to help people figure out what career path they want to pursue and how to individualize their experience in academia in order to prepare them for that. And then the third reason why we need to do better is because we want the future to be better, right? That something I talk about often is how a lot of our challenges in academia stem from the fact that we take people who weren't trained to be leaders or mentors or teachers, and we throw them into the deep end of the pool as leaders and mentors and teachers, as assistant professors, we throw them into this very high stake situation with relatively little formal training for these job duties that they now have.
There's also not nearly as much supervision as you might have in other workplace contexts. And that is the root of so many of the challenges that we see. And so the way we can do better is that if while people are still graduate students and postdocs, they're able to have the opportunity to build those mentorship and leadership and teaching skills at that point so that when they do hit that job, whatever it is, whether it's in academia or whether they're a group leader in industry, or whether they're leading a team of individuals as a science communicator, that they actually feel prepared and equipped to be good leaders and to keep growing as leaders. And I think that that is a major way in which we can improve the culture.
RPR: Absolutely. There's so much to dig into there. Coming from my perspective in the, in the work with burnout, we hear, I hear a lot about faculty who are just overwhelmed by all of the work that they have to do, right? When we think about the different layers of that mentoring and that leadership development that we're now asking faculty to do too, as important as it absolutely is, you can, I'm sure there's resistance and, and people can, you can butt up against some resistance with that. So, so how do you talk to people about this, this need in a way that does, that makes it really compelling for them?
JH: That's a great question and it's definitely something we need to think about right at this particular moment. I am going on vacation in a week and a half. I'm in a pretty good place, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't mildly burned out right now. Right? I made it through my first year in a new job, in a new place, and things have slowed down, but not as much as I expected them to over the summer. And I feel good about it because I'm going on vacation a week and a half. If you told me, Nope, vacation canceled, you just have to work straight through. I think I would crawl under my desk and cry for a little bit, right? Because the, the burnout is real. I think part of that is that we need to find ways to reduce that. And I don't have easy answers it, the faculty job, as I'm sure you've seen as well, it has just become so much more difficult year after year after year.
And some of that has some purpose in that it's more difficult, but we're able to do something better that helps students because we are doing a mentorship training or whatever that looks like. Some of it is just realizing that this federal agency that you submit grants to now requires that what used to be one form now has to be three separate forms, and one of them has to be made into a PDF and uploaded in DocuSign and DocuSign and then emailed to someone else. And there's just all of these little things eat away and erode at your time. The endless email requests of just all of these little things that need to happen. I think we need to find a way to deal with that. We need to create more space for faculty space to think space to mentor space to be who we wanna be and, and to not have this kind of constant onslaught of all of these little tasks that really just, you know, erode, Erode your time, but erode your energy as well.
So we need to address that in a very real way. I don't wanna like blow past that. On the mentoring side though, I also think that we can do this in a way that does not require large amounts of time. And I think that involves all of us pulling together and sharing resources and helping each other out. This was really the inspiration for this Mentor First initiative that I started with my good friend and colleague, Neil Garg, who is the chair soon to be done being a department chair, but currently the, the department chair at UCLA in the chemistry department. And we just got to talking about how there are still these ongoing challenges because of unconstructive advising or mentoring practices in our field and in the sciences and research fields more broadly.
And our goal wasn't to beat up or shame anyone, but rather to just encourage people to try to grow and to do better. And so we approach that very much with an attitude of, Hey, I wasn't trained for this, you weren't trained for this either, but we're all in this together and our group members are counting on this to get it right and we can make it, we know you're stretched for time, we know you're worn out, we know you're on the brink of burnout, but we wanna make it really, really easy for you. You know, we want to give you small actionable items, little things you can do that can help you do better as a mentor. And I, I see a lot of people in the community sharing resources. I mean, something I got inspired to do on Twitter was I shared our wellbeing policy from our lab policy manual, and then other people picked it up, ran with it, and edited it. And then I was able to put that back into ours because it was a better version. I know Ann McNeil at Michigan has shared a ton of resources. There's just all sorts of people out there who are sharing resources and making it easier for us to all come together and do better as mentors.
RPR: When you talk about mentoring with the, with folks, what would you say are some of the most important characteristics of a good mentor these days?
JH: Well, there's the things that are really hard to learn, and then there's the things that are maybe most important and most essential. And I think about it that just the simple act of caring, caring and compassion, and having someone's best interests in mind. Now that alone does not make you a good mentor, but I would argue that it's quite difficult to be a good mentor without that. And so critical is to be able to look at a situation and say, yes, you know, I, I want what's best for this individual, even if that's not the best thing for my career. And we could get into talking about the academic reward structure because that juncture right there is also the source of so many of the challenges that we have in academia that we are not rewarded for doing the right thing, right? If supporting someone in a career move that's really what's best for them means that they graduate from your lab or take an internship a month before your grant proposal is due, and that person was gonna be the person who was gonna get the last preliminary data that you needed to write a competitive proposal.
The the academic system creates the situation where you have to choose something that's best for that person, but is going to have a real cost for you. Because then if you don't get that grant for someone who's an assistant professor that might, their tenure case might hinge on that, or their promotion might hinge on that or their reputation within their university. All of these things matter because we reward faculty for those metrics of grants and papers. Those are the coin of the realm, whereas there's relatively little reward for outstanding mentoring. But that's why we're here. We're here to mentor students and postdocs, and so we really need to align the reward structure. We should do it because it's the right thing to do, but it'd be really nice if it aligned with the reward structure too. So I think that's essential. One of the other things that's really important is just understanding what mentoring is and isn't, right?
That something I think we often get wrong is construing mentoring with being a role model, right? The role model is someone where you say, I want to be where that person is. I want to have a very similar career path. So yes, it is helpful for me to hear the things that they did and the decisions they made so that I can emulate that. Whereas a mentor is not that. It's not about that person following your exact path. Rather, it's about helping them figure out their path and follow their path. I think we often get it wrong because we say, oh, well, you know, you need to do this and need that. Here's what I would do. Right? These are phrases that too often come into our mentoring as opposed helping someone think through what they should do.
RPR: I like to think of kind of the connections between mentoring and coaching too. Being able to ask good, good, compelling questions to folks and not be fully invested in the outcome of whatever that answer is or whatever that person's decision ultimately is when it's best for them.
JH: Yes, that's exactly right. And in fact, I've not, I wouldn't call them heated arguments, but lively conversations with people about whether there's really a difference between mentoring and coaching. Because I think certainly there are some nuances that are different, but at their heart, I think that there is a tremendous amount of overlap between those two things, especially in academia. You know, you're mentoring someone likely with the goal of them going on to a different career path than you have. So it's really about what skills they need to build and really about helping them be their best in what they're doing and not just become another version of you.
RPR: So what are some things we can do better in higher education to prepare researchers, especially women, to be better mentors and le leaders in in lab sciences?
JH: I would say we need to prepare everyone to be better mentors and leaders. And I think that a lot of it comes down to the things that we do every day. I think, you know, it doesn't, I do professional development presentations with my lab. A while back I realized that I was giving people advice here and there, and I kind of had my, you know, few different like five minutes snippets of advice. And then I realized that I was often telling the same person the same thing multiple times. And then other people were never hearing that advice from me. I thought, this is not good, right? This is inefficient, it's inequitable. I can do so much better. So I put myself on the schedule to present at nearly every group meeting that we have. And now sometimes people from my lab present as well. And so we'll work through a series on a topic like networking or motivation or leadership or project management.
And so there's a lot of that really direct communication. Or right now my group is doing a book club through the book Crucial Conversations. And so it's a book all about how to have difficult conversations and how to resolve conflict. And so it was fairly simple. I bought a copy for every person in the lab. We schedule a brown bag lunch once a month, and then we take turns coming up with a few discussion questions. We do two chapters each month. Everyone reads it, whoever's up for that month to lead the discussion sends out five, six questions in advance. And then we get together and we talk about it for an hour over lunch once a month. But that's been a really great learning experience, I hope for all of us. I know I've learned a lot, I hope other people have as well. So there's these more formal opportunities, but then there's so many smaller opportunities as well.
And I think those are things where I still don't do this nearly as well as I should, but I'm always trying to get better at it, is say you're in a meeting and you need to make a strategic decision about a project. You can just say, oh no, here's what we should do. Or you can say, well, here are two options, but here's what I'm thinking are the pros and cons of each option from a project management standpoint, what do you think we should do? And now you've just mentored someone on how to do project management, or if somebody is navigating a difficult interpersonal situation in the lab, certainly as a pi you can step in and say, okay, I will step in and we're going to meet and we're going to mediate this conflict. There's also an opportunity to instead try to coach that person through, here's how conflict resolution works.
And you know, can, let's talk about some steps you can bring into a conversation. Let's talk about some strategies you can use. You know, what would make you feel empowered in this conversation? What do you think is really going on here? What do you wanna get out of this? How do you think we can make that happen? And now both of those approaches will solve the problem and get to the end result. One of them might take a 10% longer and a little bit more thought and intentionality, but then that one will have a tremendously larger impact on helping that individual, your lab member grow as a mentor and as a leader themselves. And so I say this as the ideal, but then if you came to my group meeting on Friday, you would stare at me as I say, oh yeah, here's what we should do and why don't we do that? And oh, let's just solve this this way. And I, I fail at this all the time, but I'm always trying to do better.
RPR: I love that you brought up the word fail again. You mentioned that earlier that that kind of, that idea of, of failing forward and learning from failure is really important in the work that you do both in the lab and in the, in the mentoring space, in the leadership space. So can you talk a little bit more about kind of where that interest in really failure came from?
JH: Yeah. So my interest, well, I failed a lot, so that was part of it. So as I started learning about this, I realized, wow, I am an expert failure. If I go back and look over all my years of working in the lab and I average that I had maybe three to five failed experiments or failed results each day in the lab, and I start to do the math, it's like, wow, I have probably failed like thousands of times, maybe tens of thousands of times over my career, right? So this is something that impacts all of us. And if we work in a research field, most research fields, failure is the norm. We're walking into a place every day where it is very likely that we're going to fail. And so what landed for me is the impact that that has on our work. And this actually happened because in 2015, I was talking to my PhD advisor and he just casually brought up Carol Dweck's book Mindset.
And he said, oh, have you read that? He said, no, I haven't read it. What's it all about? I said, well, how you view your abilities has this impact on how you do things and that can impact your success? I thought, well, that's really interesting. I got a copy and I read it. And the thing that stopped me in my tracks was exactly along the lines of that fear of failure that I was just talking about. She talked about how, you know, having a fixed mindset makes us really, really afraid of failure, because if you fail, it just means you're not good at something and there's literally nothing you can do about that, right? And no one wants to be there. But what got me is she talked about how that can lead us to self-sabotage in really subtle ways, because then if we fail, we have an excuse.
And there's a line in there where she's quoting someone else, but she says, nothing is harder than saying, I gave it my best and it wasn't good enough. I was like, oh, I feel that deep in my soul. And I realized I do this all the time at that point as a faculty member, so I wasn't working in lab anymore, but I realized, oh yeah, when I'm reading over that proposal draft that's almost ready to submit, and I come upon a sentence and think, oh, there's a little bit of a flaw in the logic there, the reviewer could pick apart. It's that voice in my head that says, oh, just leave it there. It's fine, because then if we don't get funded, well, it was because I didn't, you know, there were some things wrong with that proposal. It isn't that my ideas weren't good enough, right?
But that's ridiculous. I should want to make it the best proposal possible so we have the best possible shot of getting funded. And so when I came across this in Carol Dweck's book, I was just like, oh my goodness, if ever in my lab we're all walking in this place where we're gonna fail every day, and if we are doing this, how much is that impacting our research productivity? And so I took the discussion back to my group, I told my group about it, I said, I think we should all get copies of this book. You know, buy, run a copy if we'll all read it and we can talk about it. And when I described this self-sabotage principle, or someone in my group said, just let out this audible. Like, oh, I was like, oh, like, is that ridiculous? And, and you don't struggle with that.
Maybe it's just me. And they were like, no, I do that all the time. I was like, okay, then that's why I'm Rene's book, and this is gonna be good. And so it, it really just made me realize that there is this whole set of things, all of the psychology, of how we approach our work, all of the professional skills, all of that sits as like this coefficient in front of our research effort to determine what the outcome of all of that effort is actually going to be. Right? And if we're only looking at research effort and ignoring that big coefficient that's sitting there, we're probably missing out on a lot.
RPR: I love digging into those kind of concepts. I think when we think about, like you said, when we think about research, failure is the norm. I mean, that's, you know, it wouldn't be research, right? We would know what we know already if we didn't have failure. So, so how do we, how do we kind of train ourselves to be okay with that when schooling often trains it out of us, right? Very. And
JH: The reward structure, right? We don't reward failure like we ought to. That's a really hard thing as a group leader, is you kind of have to learn to, um, I forget who said this, but reward outstanding failure. You need to learn that when someone has made all the right moves and something just doesn't work, even though you're stressed out, you're thinking about that grant renewal or that progress support, you gotta just say, wow, great job for figuring that out. And that's really hard to do, but we need to learn to do that as mentors. And I would really love to see academia have rewards systems where outstanding failure could be authentically rewarded. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>.
RPR: Yeah, I think a lot of, um, if, if we go back to those kind of four pillars that I, that I mentioned earlier, the purpose, connection, compassion, and balance, all of those things play into a mentoring relationship and how you work with other people, how you learn to be a mentor, how you learn to be mentored and, and how, what those relationships are like when we think of, you know, how do we have compassion for people who are going through those failure moments when nothing seems like it's going right and be motivating and encouraging that it will get better and something will happen. How do we make sure that we're connected to people in a way that they feel comfortable talking to us and, you know, expressing whatever's going on. So there's, there's just so much kind of emotional intelligence needed as well as the in intellectual intelligence to, to be a good mentor and to be a good academic. I think that we continue to need to talk more about.
JH: Yes. Yes. And the balance aspect of it too is so important to know when you've hit a wall and when it's time to go home. And that idea of, you know, if you've just spent eight hours in lab or nine or 10 hours or whatever, and you get a bad result, there's that temptation of, well, I'm just gonna dive in and do it all over again because I want to, you know, now I'm behind and I need to get caught up. And I always tell people like, no, go home, no nothing good will come of this. Go do something fun. Go spend time with friends or family, do something that feeds your soul and then come back tomorrow and let's troubleshoot and let's try it again. But it's finding that balance to cope with failures so important as well. I have my whole little regimen of like coping with rejection of like, when I get a grant proposal rejected, it's like, okay, I know I'm gonna feel all these feelings. I'm gonna feel them for this amount of time, and here's what I need to do in order to, you know, make that as painless as possible.
RPR: And even modeling that for folks, right? That we, we don't get all the grants and we don't, you know, being able to say, well, that sucks apart from, and, you know, kinda, yeah. Living those feelings for a little bit, and that, that, that's okay.
JH: It, it never ends, right? Mm-hmm. You just go from having failed experiments be the norm, the norm to having rejected manuscripts and proposals be the norm. It's just one type of failure to another.
RPR: So kind of segueing from that, from that idea of failure and some of that perspective, I'm wondering, one of the things that's been kind of really important to me to think about lately, um, with the faculty that I work with, but also just kind of in general in this kind of of higher education, is this idea of career vitality. So I'm, I'm curious, you know, what do you, what does career vitality mean to you in higher education?
JH: I'm curious, how would you define career vitality? I love this question and I'm really excited to dig into it, but I'm curious first how you would define it.
RPR: Yeah. There's a lot of research in the, the higher ed space about this, this idea of career vitality. And I think the easiest place to kind of splice into the middle of is thinking about mid-career, right? Mm. So maybe you've, you've hit a promotion, you've hit tenure, and you're now in this really big space of time. What do we do? What do I do next? We, we see a lot of, you know, flagging <laugh> of our motivation and, um, at, at that level of our career. So it's really about how do we build careers where we're continually or we're, we're tapping into our motivation and our curiosity and our creativity. How do we build careers over time in this, in this kind of space of, of engagement and fulfillment, which is with so much going on and the overwhelm and the overwork all the time, you know, it's, it can be kind of idealistic to think in that way, but when we really do kind of ground ourselves and our purpose and our motivation, our creativity, our curiosity, our perseverance, all of that kind of feeds into how we develop our professional careers and also how we work with, with our students and how we work with our graduate students and our postdocs and the people that we, we mentor as well.
JH: Oh my gosh, I love all of that so much. And I think you're exactly right that, that is so important to feeling fulfilled in your career if you're gonna spend right, the majority of your waking hours, well, I need to sleep a lot. So it is, even if I worked eight hours a day, it's, it's the majority of my waking hours doing work, then we ought to find it fun and fulfilling. I'll say that this is actually somewhere where academia is pretty fantastic. I think academia gets a little bit of a, a bad rap for some of the things that aren't great about it. And there are certainly many things that we can and should and need to improve in academia. But one of the things that is really fantastic about it is how easy it is to keep evolving and to keep reinventing yourself and to keep finding new challenges that both keep you engaged and keep you learning, but also allow you to adapt to the different stages of your life and your career.
And so for me, I think the first several years I couldn't have told you why I found academia so fulfilling, but again, now I can look back and say, oh, it was because this idea of building a research lab was a huge challenge of, of going from nothing to, to building something. And it was the ability to explore new ideas and new ways of teaching in the classroom and new ways of running a lab is the ability to say, oh, well, I think I want to have a lab retreat where we go hang out in a cabin for three or four days and talk about professional development and grant ideas and research projects, and strategize on our group operations and hang out and play board games and spend time together. And someone once asked me, well, who told you could do that? And I was like, well, no one told me I couldn't.
Right? That's, that's what I love about academia, that I could just say, well, I think I wanna try this thing. We try things, sometimes they work great, sometimes they work less well, and we say, okay, well we won't do that again. But I, I think academia provides these opportunities to keep learning all of these new skills and keep yourself engaged. I will say that for me, there's also been a transition in what fulfills me that early on the research may have been the most fulfilling thing because right, it was learning, it was challenging. And some people, I'm sometimes kind of jealous of these people or feel like there's something wrong with me that I'm not one of them can stay engaged in that their whole career. They're like, there's always something, I don't know, there's always a new research problem. I just always constantly wanna be learning more science and digging into these questions.
For me personally, I just don't work that way. I still love research. I'm actually more excited about my labs research program and the people who are in our group than, you know, I ever have been, right? Like, I'm just so jazzed about what we're doing and where we're going. But if that's all there was to, it was 20 more years of the treadmill of write the grants and fight with the reviewers and then get the money, and then do the work and fail the experiments and redo 'em and fail some more and redo them and submit the paper, fight with reviewers, publish the paper. Like if it was just another 20 years of that treadmill, I would find that very unmotivating. It, it, it feels very uninspired to me, but I love working with my group. I just needed something more. And so for me, that was being able to take on a leadership role that both is teaching me new skills.
I'm learning so many things about how university operates, budgets and facilities, and navigating strategic planning situations and decisions that I hadn't before. I'm learning a ton, but also it is deeply fulfilling on that purpose level as well, that if I want to work with other people to try and create a healthier academic culture, this is giving me a bigger opportunity to do that than what I had previously. And so then all of that together just feels deeply fulfilling. And that's where I'm at right now. Who knows what that will look like 10 years from now. Probably the only thing I can guarantee is it will look different from what it looks like right now. But I do think it will continue to be pointed towards that vision of creating a healthier academia.
RPR: It's such a good message to think about being in an industry where we do have that flexibility in so much autonomy, in so many ways to really continue to shape and reshape ourselves and the people that we work with. And some of those moves are lateral, some of those are up, some of those are back, some of those are over, you know, it can, there's, there's just so many things that I think can be overwhelming sometimes. And I think, you know, yeah, we're the fear of missing out on which one you don't pick can be kinda, can, can, can just kind of be stymieing sometimes. But being in a space where learning is supposed to be the grounding of everything that we do, and, you know, using our minds and our digging into these issues and answering these questions and exploring the world in so many different ways, it's just one, it's, it's one of the reasons why many of us do what we do is just, just being in that space of, of constant learning.
JH: Yes, absolutely. But to, and to our, well not, but, and to our earlier conversation, we don't, we, we miss out on an opportunity to convey that to students and postdocs, or to even coach people in that way of, you know, uh, we always talk about what's the next, something you're making me realize is that we always talk about, well, what's your next step? Where do you wanna go? But really the conversation we, we also need to be having is, okay, now that you're five or 10 years in, how are you feeling about it? Where do you wanna go next? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, are you excited to keep doing what you're doing? Some people are wired that way, right? They want to do the same thing for 30 years and be really, really, really good at, they wanna be the best person they possibly can be at that thing. Other people want constant change. I'm someone where I just need constant change. I will get so bored if there's, there's not something new I'm gonna learn today that I didn't know how to do yet, then it's hard to maintain my attention.
RPR: So I always like to wrap up our interviews, um, with one specific question. So the, the broad audience for the podcast is, is women in higher education in and around higher education. So what's one thing you wish all women associated with higher education knew?
JH: Just one. It's gonna say that the short answer, but something I truly, truly wish I knew was like, don't let people gaslight you. When you're dealing with really bad situations and someone says, oh, well, they didn't mean it that way. It was really, you don't have to put up with that stuff. But the key to that is the other thing that is probably even bigger and, and more important, which is find your support group. Find those groups of friends where you can have candid conversations where you can lift each other up, where you can pick each other back up and put each other back together on the bad days. You can celebrate on the good days and really cultivate that group because that is so critical in so many ways. It's when you are dealing with a bad situation. I've been so thankful for my close circle of friends where I know I can go and say, okay, these five things happened in the last two weeks. Is it just me or is this not okay? Right. Each of these things is just so little on its own, and, and people could write them off and everyone in, they'll be like, no, maybe that just, just coincidence, but I, I know I can trust them in that. And most of the time they say, no, no, that's not okay. And we're able to do that for each other and really validate each other's experiences, support each other when tough things happen. But then really excitingly to celebrate each other when the great things happen. And to champion each other, to nominate each other for awards, to suggest each other, for opportunities to be there with emojis and confetti on the text message chain when something, when someone gets promoted or when they win a big award. I think that having, I didn't realize how much I needed that friend group until I found it. And now I can't imagine my career without those groups of, of individuals without those groups of friends.
RPR: Yeah, the very first episode of this podcast is about just that thing, so I'll be sure to link to that in the, in the show notes. So thank you so much for chatting with me this afternoon, Jenna, it was great to see you.
JH: It was great to see you too. Thanks for having me.
Thanks for listening to this episode of The Agile Academic podcast for women in and around higher ed. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. To make sure you don’t miss an episode, follow the show on Apple, Google, or Spotify podcasting apps, and be sure to leave a review. You’ll find each episode, a transcript, and show notes at theagileacademic.buzzsprout.com.