Jennifer Provencher
BIO
PhD candidate in Ecotoxicolgy and Wildlife Health research. Mom of a 5-year-old daughter.
Instagram: @jenniferfprovencher; @jenniferprovencher
Twitter: @jenni_pro
Jennifer Provencher
“I have learned that I can be a great mom, and a great scientist, and a great scientist mom.”
I entered my PhD knowing that I would likely want to have a child during the course of my studies, but wasn’t really sure how it would all play out. With this in mind I purposefully looked for a PhD supervisor that had children and were more likely to understand the joys and challenges of parenthood. I ended up with two co-supervisors that had children, and although there were challenges, felt supported throughout my thesis work as I balanced work and life with a baby and then a toddler.
This was not always easy as my research is focused on migratory birds in the Canadian Arctic, which can involve weeks and months of travel and field work each year on seabird colonies. I ended up not being able to run the second year of my dissertation field program, and after years of preparation I had to send a field crew off with pages of instructions, detailed data sheets, contingency plans A through Z, and hope for the best. It was hard to let that field work part go, but it also opened the door for other work to get done.
After my daughter was born I also spent much more time doing community consultations (trips that are a few days to a week), rather than the field work (weeks to months at a time). These are the skills that I continue to hone and practice today, and have been at the root of establishing ongoing collaborative community projects that are still growing with partners.
I have also been luckily enough to have gone on to find a village of supportive colleagues (with and without children) that have welcomed my child at meetings, conferences, poster sessions, and seminars. She has coloured at the back of rooms, made custom bracelets for colleagues and learned to make paper snowflakes while I have engaged with colleagues. During my first post-doc it was common to see me walking around the daycare pushing a stroller, as I finished a conference call before whisking her into daycare between meetings.
Part of the challenge is that there are always people in every group that will question why children are there, but there are also always people that welcome moms in science. I seek them out as if they have a homing beacon, and have learned that these are the people that I want to work with.
I have learned to be confident that I belong in science, and that my daughter is an important part of that practice. I have learned to walk confidently into science fora with my daughter at my side, and not apologize. I have learned to focus in meetings with her on my lap. In one online meeting recently she even started playing with my hair, and while everyone had a smile on their face, the meeting carried on.
But I have also learned that I love being just a scientist. I have learned that I truly love 100% focus on research questions and brainstorming with colleagues. I want to dive deep into conversations and analysis with collaborators, without having to multitask. And this means that many times I don’t bring my daughter to science events, or I make sure that she is occupied during conference calls these days as we all work from home. I don’t always bring her to conferences, even if childcare is available. And while I 110% support these tools for parents to take part in meetings, we need to remember that their use is not mandatory. I find the hardest part of being a mom in science now is the looks that people give when you are NOT taking advantage of the daycare at conferences.