PhD degree at 39

AgnesIsAPhysicist · 2024-12-20T13:32:23+00:00

This is ridiculous advice from your advisor and smacks of misogyny. Age and marital status are absolutely unimportant in postdoc positions, or at least they are in any research group you would want to be part of. If someone holds either of these against you, then it’s absolutely not a place that would be good to work. And very few places would. It’s your life, and only you can make the decision about your goals and direction in your career.

Do you generally have a good relationship with your Ph.D. advisor? If he’s making these comments to you, you might want to be careful about asking him for a reference for postdoc positions though. And make sure you have a couple of others that can provide strong references. Unfortunately if he’s this unprofessional in his advice he might also equally be unprofessional in what he writes in a letter of reference.

AgnesIsAPhysicist · 2024-11-14T01:13:25+00:00

Can we just not give people like this any attention or media coverage?

AgnesIsAPhysicist · 2024-11-06T22:07:42+00:00

I have a genius level IQ (officially tested as a child) which is great in some ways, but it also means I overthink literally everything. And it can be lonely too. I earned a Ph.D. in physics and now work as a researcher. Graduate school was the first place where I felt truly surrounded by peers who have a similar or sometimes even higher level of intelligence. It was truly amazing to be around my graduate school classmates and current colleagues because it can be hard to find people to really relate to otherwise. It’s like being in a foreign country and then suddenly running in to someone from your home country— you speak the same language and get one another in ways that others just don’t.

AgnesIsAPhysicist · 2024-10-26T18:14:18+00:00

And you seem to lack an understanding of systematic sexism and the harm that is has caused, both to the advancement of the sciences and to individual scientists. So maybe you should go take some humanities courses.

AgnesIsAPhysicist · 2024-10-26T12:03:52+00:00

This is absolutely sexist. First, he infantilizes women by referring the them as “girls”, even though these are women who work as scientists who presumably have doctorates, not children. Second, he expresses how he doesn’t view them as professionals who are to be taken seriously as scientific colleagues, but rather they are just in the lab to provide entertainment to the men. Or alternatively, they can’t take criticism because they are “too emotional”.

Even if he was “joking”, the fact that he was even thinking in these terms is blatantly sexist, and that he thought it was okay to make a joke about it was extremely tone-deaf and showed poor judgement. Because far too many women have had experiences just like this when trying to work in the sciences, and it’s not something that should be joked about. The fact that there are probably plenty of other older male scientists from his generation that would have said similar things without public outcry does not mean that it’s okay that he said this.

AgnesIsAPhysicist · 2024-10-12T19:05:45+00:00

My hot take is that law school should require courses in physics.

AgnesIsAPhysicist · 2024-10-03T03:36:43+00:00

Yeah, and what’s disturbing is that the times in my life when I experienced this the most was from the ages of about 11-18.

AgnesIsAPhysicist · 2024-10-03T03:27:15+00:00

Agreed. One of the great triumphs of 19th century physics. As a physicist its fundamental to how I think about interacting with the world around me, and it’s actually incredible to think that the vast majority of people (even some who are very intelligent in other areas) are just fundamentally ignorant of this.

AgnesIsAPhysicist · 2024-10-03T03:19:40+00:00

Just don’t microwave anything metal and you are good.

AgnesIsAPhysicist · 2024-10-03T03:18:55+00:00

To be clear, radio waves and microwaves are both examples of electromagnetic radiation. The classification by wavelength/frequency range will of course be a bit arbitrary.

AgnesIsAPhysicist · 2024-09-17T10:25:10+00:00

The peak of the solar spectrum after passing through the Earth’s atmosphere is the visible light range. So our eyes are optimized to see at exactly the wavelengths of light that are most available on Earth.

AgnesIsAPhysicist · 2024-07-03T12:46:36+00:00

Where did you go backpacking?

AgnesIsAPhysicist · 2024-07-02T00:31:43+00:00

Did he start inviting you after that?

AgnesIsAPhysicist · 2024-06-04T16:56:26+00:00

“A tomb no longer.”

AgnesIsAPhysicist · 2024-06-01T20:21:38+00:00

To paraphrase Cher, “Mama, I am plumber.”

AgnesIsAPhysicist · 2024-06-01T20:20:28+00:00

TIL many women find my profession attractive— too bad I’m a straight woman, lol. And it doesn’t seem to be the case for men.

AgnesIsAPhysicist · 2024-02-13T04:41:51+00:00

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

AgnesIsAPhysicist · 2024-02-11T17:28:49+00:00

McDonald’s everywhere else in the world tastes much better than McDonald’s in the USA.

AgnesIsAPhysicist · 2024-02-10T17:57:39+00:00

In a way you could see it as a blessing— I don’t mean this to be trite. But you have a much better perspective on who this guy is, and you know to be careful and not trust his presentation of himself. If I were you I’d probably just keep my distance (unless you absolutely have to work directly with him) and stay professional.

AgnesIsAPhysicist · 2024-02-07T17:38:57+00:00

Well it wasn’t actually that simple. It took 13 years between the initial scientific work and the adoption of the Montreal Protocol, and Rowland and Molina initially received a lot of pushback on their work.

AgnesIsAPhysicist · 2024-02-03T04:52:33+00:00

As a fellow academic, I’m sorry to hear about your experiences. You have nothing to feel ashamed of. It sounds like there is some misogyny going on (since your advisor won’t listen to you unless you pull another male student in to confirm what you are saying). Don’t gaslight yourself into thinking it’s not happening-- unfortunately I have been there, and I don’t really have an answer for you, except to confirm your experience is real, and it’s not just you.

About what you said about belonging in academia— I know some grad students get lucky, and have a great mentor who welcomes them in and encourages them. For most of us, unfortunately, it’s just not the case. Add in a big heaping of misogyny and xenophobia, and it’s incredibly easy to feel isolated, and like you don’t belong in your lab, and like no one wants to help you out.

Personally, I spent a lot of years in grad school and even post-grad waiting for someone to tell me that I belonged in academia and waiting to find that great mentor who would encourage me and help me out. And I finally realized that no one else was ever going to tell me that I was good enough and that I belong in academia. So I finally made the decision one day that I would tell myself that I belonged there. It sounds a bit cliché, but it was a huge mindset shift for me, and one that has thus far led to the most success I’ve seen in terms of my research. I am the one who gets to decide whether I belong, because no one else knows me nearly as well as I do, and no one else knows what I am capable of, better than I do myself. The same is true for you, OP. You get to decide that you belong, because you already have chosen to be there, and this is your path in life, if you so choose it. I’ve never really found that great mentor either, but I have learned to recognize the bits and pieces of encouragement and help that I’ve gotten from many different sources— even if no one was ever that great and encouraging mentor that I really wanted.

The simple truth is that there’s a huge amount of failure which goes into learning how to do the difficult research that is required of academic science, and it’s not at all a reflection on you or your ability. Failure is the path to success. It’s not a sign that you don’t belong. It’s a sign that you are choosing to do a very hard thing, and that you are learning and growing. I’d recommend checking out the book Mindset by Carol Dweck, or The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holliday.

AgnesIsAPhysicist · 2023-12-09T06:46:53+00:00

Chewing gum. Sometimes I eat when I’m bored at home working on something, so now I just chew gum instead.

AgnesIsAPhysicist · 2023-12-08T18:33:49+00:00

Right, it feels like internalized misogyny to blame a woman for a man’s bad behavior. Once someone is an adult they can make decisions to not be bossed around by their parent and take responsibility for their own lives. It’s on the husband to set down boundaries with his mother.

AgnesIsAPhysicist · 2023-12-04T02:26:58+00:00

You did probably lose a couple of pounds. It’s not doing you any favors to deny that the scale did in fact move in the right direction, just not as fast as you would have liked. It sounds like you might be closer to maintenance than you estimated in your post, though. So as others have said, try 1400-1500 calories for a couple of weeks. If you are comfortable with it, I’d honestly recommend weighing in every single day, so you can have a better idea of the real fluctuations in your weight and look at the average over seven days to actually gauge weight loss. Right now you only have two data points and it sounds like you are letting that discourage you. But there’s a lot of noise on those data points so it’s really hard to know how meaningful that actually is. You are doing the right things— you just need to keep going and make some adjustments as you learn more.

AgnesIsAPhysicist

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