Perspectives of Early Career Engineers Through the Lenses of Diversity, Work-Life Balance, and Men

How can diverse categories of engineers be supported in their education to complete their degrees?

• Get help finding co-mentors who are more capable of advising you along whatever axes are relevant

• Find people like yourself and support each other. Make this easy. Community is very important, but often lacking.

• Support them! Find other people who are closer to their status.

• Careers shouldn't be in the hands of only one close advisor.

• Time to graduation should be allowed to grow without penalty.

• Students who need to take off time shouldn't be penalized.

• Academic culture is a problem. There are a lot of obstacles and challenges that don’t need to be there. Bring actionable discussion on how people should act

What advice do you have for a mentor who is working with astronomers who identify along a different axis than they do? What should they know that many don’t seem to have thought about? What qualities of a mentor make them effective?

• Good mentors provide affirmation. Unsatisfactory mentoring can lead to a toxic relationship.

• If you are a mentor, use Google to find failure modes of mentoring marginalized groups, to help you learn how to be a better mentor

• Advisors often keep moving the goalposts. Set them, and leave them there. Grad school does not work like earlier schooling, but more like the work world. As such, you can do your best and it may not be not good enough

• There’s a myth of innate talent: People have it or never will. You're cut out or not cut out. But graduate school is not a priesthood. Once you're in, you’re all wheat, not chaff.

• It's too easy for advisors to drop the ball. Things all too often fall through if they only affect the student., because the academic system does not necessarily reward work which does not directly contribute to an advisor’s academic record

• It is on you as a mentor to figure it out, don’t put it on the student

Have you ever felt unsafe/threatened at any point in your career? How can the astronomy community come together to prevent things like this from happening to others?

• Support your students to keep them out of bad situations or get them out so that they don’t have to skip activities if they've been harassed at them.

  • It’s hard to call out bad behavior, but it hurts scientists' careers if they avoid conferences or other work related events because they don’t feel safe

• Conferences / workplaces / research groups need a code of conduct, reporting mechanisms, enforcement of the code of conduct, and consequences need to be imposed on those who don’t follow it.

• Codes of conduct with enforcement and consequences can come from funding agencies. That’s where the power is.

• Help people who’ve been harmed to succeed in their career

Have you felt that having a family conflicted with your career advancement? What are/were your concerns? What changes can be made to support astronomers with families?

• Strengths come with being a parent in academia, and stubbornness of purpose. Two kids looking up at you can make you feel appreciated.

• Banding together helps. Some campuses are better than others. 43% of women leave full-time STEM employment after their first child and 23% of men. An unpublished study finds that this may be as high for women as 70% in the physical sciences. See links to other articles below.

• “You can have it all” is not true. Getting a degree, having a disability, having kids - are all full-time jobs.