What a difference a year makes.

I’m dead tired after traveling for more than 15 hours- and I dragged a bunch of work with me thinking … well, not sure what I was thinking. Anyway, I’ll blog instead. This post may ramble and be a little disconnected- hopefully you will indulge me.

Remember my posts this time last year? Maybe it didn’t come out so much on the blog at the time, but I was very down- holding on by my fingernails, contemplating shutting down my lab for lack of $$. Two great science friends dragged me to a meeting (*rightly*, and thanks guys) to keep me out there in the network and raise my spirits. I remember distinctly at that meeting- a friend of mine who was just beginning his/her faculty position coming up to talk with me, just sort of glowing with tremendous enthusiasm and excitement for the new faculty job.  I tried to be enthusiastic along with my friend- but I just didn’t really have it in me- having reached the critical third year of my appointment with no funded grants, fatigued from what seemed at the time a lot of pointless hard work.

Sometime during this last year, we had a speaker at one of the faculty group lunches that I attend. She talked at length about her career- describing her early days as TT faculty. She told a story that echoed mine- terrific enthusiasm for her position, lots of hard work and grants submitted, supportive senior faculty colleagues rooting for her, encouraging her to always have something (a grant or a paper) in the hopper… but reaching the TT faculty career point of no return with no grants in hand. She had to lay off people, she worried that she wasn’t going to make it.  Then,  she found out in a very short interval that she would have multiple grants funded- her career turned around,  she ran with it, and she remains today successful TT faculty. Believe it or not- I went back to my office after that, even in my state of extreme science fatigue, with the energy to submit whatever was next on my list. Her story has been in my head ever since.

Anyway, what a difference a year has made for me, things have completely turned around. The lab went from rags to riches (it is all relative)- in a way and to a magnitude that I never could have imagined. We are out of the woods, at least for the moment- and now we have the opportunity to do the projects that I have been dreaming, writing and theorizing over for the last three years. I’m about to send my first doctoral student out into the world fully Ph.D.ed, and she is a mother of 2.

This last week was a big one. I turned in my tenure package a year early, and a grant I wasn’t expecting anything from turned out to be the top grant in the review section. I served my first days as an editor at a great journal in my field- a position to which I was invited, partly because what I write in this blog was noticed by the Editor in Chief. This position is a huge honor, and not to be dramatic- but seeing my name on the masthead made me want to thank my mom, my dad and the members of the academy. I know that in the next year there will be some adjustments and many challenges, but I’m delighted and excited to enter the next stage of my career.

Why am I telling you all of this? Not because I think I’ve done anything extraordinary, or that I’m anything special. I’m not. But I want to illustrate that you can be at the bottom of the bottom of your morale, and with a little luck, good timing, hard work and persistence (put those in any order you prefer)- things can turn around on a dime. You are just never going to know how or when.

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