This weekend I had a rare opportunity to give thanks to someone who was likely unaware of the tremendous impact they had on my life. There are many great teachers and mentors that contributed to my decision to go into and stay in science, and each one of those people and experiences helped shape me. Therefore, they each represent a piece of who I have become. Here I will share one of those pieces:
When I was a junior at Centenary (my small liberal arts undergraduate institution), our small biology department of five faculty got two new professors in one year. For me, this meant a range of new and exciting classes in my junior and senior years that were at the cutting edge of scientific research - a rare treat! One of these professors was a female scientist, who among other things, developed a 3 hour lab course where we the students got to be researchers. Each group had a small piece of a larger project and by semester's end, the picture that emerged forever changed my perspective on the possibilities of scientific research. If you're like me, you still have several binders of notes from classes you took in college. The binder from this class is one of the ones I've kept over the many moves in my academic career! As part of this course, I also had the chance to present several times, which was new for me. I wasn't that great at first, and like many other women, I wasn't shy about admitting it in the middle of my presentation. I had been made to feel inferior my whole life, I felt no hesitation in admitting it to myself or others. After class, my professor pulled me aside and told me how smart I was and how well I was doing in the course. She told me that it was not okay for me to say those things about myself (because they weren't true), much less in front of an audience. This has stuck with me throughout my scientific career and I now twinge every time I'm in a seminar and a woman does this (sadly, this occurs often).
So, imagine my surprise when I get a facebook message (yes, we're friends on facebook!) Saturday morning that this same former professor and her family are visiting Auburn for her daughters swim meet! We meet for coffee. Me a new PI and her a now seasoned professor. We reminisce about folks we overlapped. She is now at a new university, and we have new people in common there as well. I joke about my teaching and adjusting my expectations to my students, realizing that I was among the crop of students she had to adjust her own expectations against. I remind her of the awesome lab course I took with her that did so much for me. She laughs because she ended up never teaching it again because of how much prep time it took and how much effort it was for her. I completely understand as the design for my current active-learning course was inspired by this ambitious design she modeled and it has been a solid amount of effort for me as well. I only hope that the experiences I am giving my students will be the same as the one she provided. Though, now I wonder if I will be able to keep up this momentum for future courses in an equally demanding position.
Nonetheless, my ability to share with her the impact she had on me not only as a scientist, but as woman scientist felt amazing. I only hope that it made her feel as good. And perhaps I will have another opportunity to learn from her. In addition to teaching, she now helps PI's at her home institution develop active learning courses and research based learning courses, and other learning experiences I've never heard of. I am definitely humbled by how much I still have to learn about teaching. But like my students, I will continue to 'learn by doing'.
