To my younger self, the overwhelmed new professor: You will make it

From ScienceMag:

I see you there, months into your new professor position. Sitting in your empty office, staring out the window, crying. The sunlight hits your face. You are wondering how you are going to make it through. Are you good enough? Smart enough? You are tired. You feel stretched to the point of breaking. The waves of emotions are rolling over you. I am here, your future self, to tell you that you are enough. You don’t break. You put one foot in front of the other, and you not only make it through, but you have fun.

Yes. The university gave you an empty office, an empty lab, a budget number, and wished you luck. They will check back in 5 years to decide whether you meet their ambiguous threshold for getting tenure and keeping your job.

They assume somehow your Ph.D. has prepared you to equip an empty lab. Who knew there were 1 million options for something as simple as an oven! All you ever did was use the oven in your adviser’s lab. You have no idea what features you need. And what about pipettes? Balances? The water system? It is overwhelming.

And of course, because you designed and executed a successful Ph.D. research project, they assume you know how to develop courses and teach them. And write grant proposals. And manage budgets. And mentor students.

I am here to tell you that you figure it out. The Ph.D. taught you how to solve problems and persevere. To evaluate and adjust. You do just that.

A turning point comes early one morning. You are exhausted after pulling your second all-nighter to get a proposal submitted. Your husband and 2-year-old are sleeping upstairs. At this moment, you decide that if this job requires you to give up sleep, give up your health, give up time with your daughter, ruin your marriage, it is not worth it.

You draw boundaries. You determine what you are willing to give, and decide that if it is not enough then, when they check back in 5 years, they can fire you. You will find something else to do. Anything that won’t require you to self-destruct.

You stop working on the weekends. You start picking your kid up from day care. You give her your full attention in the evening. You get 8-plus hours of sleep every night. With time, you regain your fitness. You make friends and find joy exploring the mountains with them. You have a second kid. You start reading fiction again. You and your husband get a home-cooked meal on the table roughly 70% of the time. You consider this a success.

The first class you develop overwhelms the students and buries them in homework. The evaluations are abysmal. But you recalibrate your expectations and gradually get the hang of teaching. Your evaluations steadily improve. At some point a student tells you your class is their favorite.

Your initial proposals don’t get funded, and you are certain if you get any more constructive criticism of your ideas and writing, you will explode. But eventually you have more funded projects than you feel comfortable managing. Your work takes you to fascinating places: a permafrost bog in Alaska, rice fields in Cambodia, and the Peruvian rainforest. You never enjoy managing budgets, but you figure it out well enough to keep your research program running.

You take what you know about parenting two dramatically different kids and apply it to mentoring students. You try to support each one by recognizing their unique motivations and needs. It is not without challenges. But most of them graduate and go on to do amazing things. One even nominates you for a mentoring award, which you win.

You realize the flexibility of the job is a godsend for coping with the expected and unexpected interruptions of parenting. You enjoy your life both at work and outside it.

In 5 years, the university checks in again. You manage to meet their mushy expectations. You get tenure and keep your job. What you gave within your boundaries was enough. And, even though you had no idea what kind of oven you needed, the one you bought for the lab has performed perfectly well. The water system is another story.

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