Monday, August 13, 2012

Who are we?

I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce myself to this community.  My name is Jessica Kirkpatrick.  I am one of the new members of the CSWA.  As part of my membership commitment, I will be regularly blogging on the Women in Astronomy Blog.

I will find it very helpful in this new role to understand more about the audience of this blog and what topics people are interested exploring here.

There are "women in science" topics that have regularly been blogged about (i.e. two-body problems, work-life balance, mentoring, sexual harassment, unconscious bias).  I am interested in not only continuing to explore these topics, but also branch out into other areas.  I would love your suggestions of topics.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, please comment below to let me know who you are, and what you are interested in reading about here.  If you don't feel comfortable posting a comment below, you can also email me (berkeleyjess at gmail).

I am very excited to contribute to this community!
Jessica Kirkpatrick

2 comments :

Anonymous said...

Welcome, and I look forward to reading your posts! :)

One topic I'd be interested in seeing more of is the Impostor Syndrome. Frustratingly I have often found that people around me want to impose it upon me: many of my peers and even my students think that I am remarkably young to have gotten where I am, and they are not satisfied when I tell them it was due mostly to hard work. When I tell them instead it was due to a combination of good luck and hard work (which may be true), or due to good luck alone (which definitely isn't), then they are satisfied. It's frustrating that they don't want to acknowledge the hard work I did to get where I am.

Anonymous said...

Wonder what those people would say if you told them that you are simply d...n good! A senior male colleague of mine once used that reply in a slightly different context, so I don't know why you shouldn't.

More to your point, I hope you have checked out the Impostor Syndrome section of CSWA's Unconscious Bias resource page: http://www.aas.org/cswa/unconsciousbias.html#impostor