Some Advice From Women in Science

At Harvard’s fourth National Symposium on the Advancement of Women in Science, some leading women gave advice to the future women scientists:

• Beware the myth of “balance” between the personal and the professional. “Balance, imbalance — wherever you find yourself — my advice is make that choice and live with it,” Blakey told the group. “What I do is have an internal clock that tells me how much time to spend on the competing priorities. If there’s one thing I’ve tried to do, it’s whittling that list of priorities down to just what it needs to be — cutting it to just what I can handle. I don’t keep track of what I can’t handle, and I don’t worry about what I can’t control.”
  
• Learning from failure: “What I learned is that you’re not going to have breakthroughs if you don’t take huge risks,” Allen said. “All the work we did was good; it influenced future work even if it wasn’t successful for the project it was built for. One has to push the envelope as far as one can.”
  
• Communication skills: Heidi Hammel of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., whose professional honors include having an asteroid named after her (3530 Hammel), said, “There are hundreds of other people who are great scientists, but they can’t communicate to save their lives, or their careers … . Communication skills are as important as any math or physics course you’ll ever take.”
  
• The value of pursuing leadership positions: Lucy Sanders, co-founder and CEO of the National Center for Women and Information Technology, described herself as a “reluctant leader” when she first was offered an opportunity to move up the ladder at Bell Labs. “It’s scary, because a leader is vulnerable to criticism. There’s opportunity for tremendous failure and risk taking. … But leadership is very creative. It’s a great deal of fun. Something that will force you to learn new skills. It will make you a better communicator, better at lateral thinking. Leadership can be learned. … Please, please go after leadership positions.”