I am not someone who can settle down with a simple life. I’d very much rather challenge myself to learn something new everyday. This is one of the things I like about being a researcher – we get to travel and spend time at other institutes and institutions, interact with other groups, and have the/some freedom to learn new skills as part of our job. That said, I focus a lot on output, producitivity, and outcome as well. These foci often are the cause an unnecessary amount of stress and anxiety. For instance, I am always stressed before giving talks – I focused too much on impressing my audience.
The talk I just gave at Harvard was mentally difficult. My mind has been focusing on data science lately and it took some active effort to switch back to my astrophysicist hat. The audience at my talk was primarily dominated by the typical crowd expected at a prestigeous private university in terms of their age, gender, and race which triggered the desire in me to impress even more.
[As a side note, it made me quite uncomfortable to feel that I am the minority. It’s true that I am almost always the minority in the STEM community, but this is certainly not the case at the institute where I have been spending my time at. To my knowledge, it might be the only workplace where I have actually run into other female colleageus in the restroom. (The typical scenario where there’s always a line outside the female restroom is certainly not true at anywhere I’ve worked at.) The frequency of running into another female scientist definitely says something about the gender diversity in our field.]
At the end, I had to just focus on the main message I wanted to get across and let go of worrying how my audience (the big shots out there) may view me as a female scientist and my work. How did it go? I guess it went well and I am still with four limbs. Now, I can proudly say I’ve presented my research in front of a group of well-respected scientists at Harvard.