Maria Jensen
BIO
I'm an Associate Professor in artic sedimentary geology at the University Centre in Svalbard (Norway). I have three children aged 9, 7 and 5 years old.
Twitter: @mariaansine
Maria Jensen
“What I lacked the most was mentoring and support.”
I'm an Associate Professor in artic geology and I had three children within four years, during the first years of my faculty position. They are now 9, 7 and 5 and are the core value of my life. I have fit fieldwork around their needs and benefited from the flexibility of academia to work from home when they are sick, or brought them with me to conferences and workshops. I cannot imagine many jobs with such a flexible schedule, which makes it realistic for two working parents to raise three young kids with no family support in the same country.
For me the challenges of having a family in academia have had little to do with the actual children and their needs, but everything to do with the system's expectations- that an academic career should be a smooth progression from day one until the day you become a full professor. And any deviation from that path is problematic when it comes to obtaining funding.
I live in a country where we have good family leave policies that allows women (and men) to be away from work for many months of parental leave. During my first maternity leave, I continued to work. I had only one child who slept for a while every day, and I was bored. So I co-wrote grant applications, taught part-time and supervised a PhD student who was doing field work. But at the same time I was not allowed to apply for internal funding because I was on leave.
I got pregnant again when my first child was a very active 16-month-old, and I was exhausted by the physical changes in my body. Every day after work I slept against the rails in the playpen on the floor while the toddler was watching cartoons.
I took on more administrative tasks at work to be more visible and maintain institutional recognition, as I wasn’t physically able to keep up with proposal and paper writing at the same pace as before, and I wasn’t able to go to the field while pregnant. But this wasn’t a good choice because it affected my research progress.
For my second baby, I took the full maternity leave and mostly spent it at home. I thought I could manage my field work remotely through a postdoc and that I would be considered part of the team. Neither happened. In addition, doing admin work instead of active research into a project meant not being included in joint publications.
I returned to a very different scene at work- I felt marginalised in all projects that I had previously been involved in, and I didn’t have the stamina or energy to create something new. My academic journey could easily have ended here.
During my third pregnancy I was disillusioned. I didn’t know how to dig myself out of the hole and felt that everyone else at the same stage of career was successful while I had reached very little, and I had no energy or sources of support to figure out how to change this. So when my third child was born I poured myself into parenthood.
I had a four year old, a two year old and a newborn, and no idea what to make of my academic career. What I lacked the most was mentoring and support. So I talked to an academic coach, which was very useful. I got a tiny inkling of hope that I may have something to offer. I built on that. I met people and began to untangle my own ideas and unique skills from the mess of rejections and feelings of being left out of communities. I searched for online support and found smart and kind people who had techniques for turning things around.
I applied for small-scale funding and got it, and used this as fuel to dream larger and found courage to build connections with new communities, share ideas and think differently. It has worked out.
I’m leading several successful projects. I have a large network and I’m currently on a research sabbatical to develop those further and to write. I am far behind on publications. Five years of pregnancies, child births, infants and poorly guided work choices had a high price. So did the massive feeling of exclusion and the lack of support in how to build up a new work platform. But I’m optimistic that I will make it through now, with more ownership of my scientific vision and where to go next. But I would always recommend and work for an easier passage for those who are coming after me.