I should have spent the day on the beach

Today the weather was gorgeous. Sunny, dry, with just a few white clouds to make the sky prettier.
And I feel I wasted it. I barely managed to prepare my lecture (because of discussions with students), gave my lectures, talked with students/postdocs/colleagues the whole afternoon. And now I am too tired to do anything useful.
Luckily the weekend is on its way.

Sunshine

This morning was a bit more work than usual, since C#1 had a guest for the night, her tall, blonde friend CelticPrincess. It was hard to convince them that bedtime had arrived. This morning, however, they behaved very well and went to school on time. We might soon organize a double visit, with CelticPrincess' brother (aka CelticPrince) also spending the night - he's the same age of C#2 and C#3, although significantly larger.

I spent some time organizing the children's summer activities, the family vacation, and booking visits to a house we may want to buy(!). I then gave a lecture, talked to a number of students, and have yet a few more meetings before I go pick up C#1 (who has two extracurricular activities on wednesday afternoon).

What is really really useful is my new computer, my first tablet pc. What used to be my own lecture notes, scribbled on several sheets of paper which promptly got lost, is now an editable file which all of my students get a copy of. Which means that in later years the same notes can be used for self-study, or to organize a student-run seminar. I just wish I had bought it earlier.

And if next weekend the weather keeps good, it's time to go to the beach. I love summer, even when it's still spring.

Scientiae carnival: changing career prospects

When you have to make an official speech and have no idea what to say, you can always start with "it's not an end, but a beginning": works at graduation, weddings, but also retirements and even funerals, apparently.

Amazingly, it is also true in my personal life. Ten years ago I wanted to achieve a good solution to the two-body problem, and a family. Five years ago I had achieved that, and was struggling very hard to balance. Now it's getting easier, and I am finding time for further debate.

What kind of advisor do I want to be? How many students can I deal with at one time? How do I choose them? What are my duties towards them during and, possibly more importantly, after the PhD studies? It took me way too long to realize that I can choose the number of my students, just as I choose that of my children (or, more precisely, that of my pregnancies).

Should I, or should I not, go into "sidetracks" like university politics, didactical efforts, and scientific divulgation? I enjoy a bit of this, but do I have the time? On the other hand, can I afford not to be involved in the decisional process?

How do I balance work and family time? As my children grow, I feel I should spend more time (working) at home, so as to be there if they need me. Is this possible? What can I do to facilitate it? It doesn't help that seminars tend to be scheduled in the afternoon, sometimes late in the afternoon, but not in the morning. Maybe I can change that? For next year, I am actually planning to go home midafternoon at least two days per week.

The most important question is, what do I want to do research on now? Gone are the times when I would write and publish anything I could prove; I don't have time for everything anymore, especially if I want to save time to keep learning new things. So I have to make choices, bet on what I think are the most interesting options. At the same time, I feel it's important to follow my own taste, do whatever I think is relevant even if in the short term its impact might be limited.

As a related question, I have to choose which activities (schools, conferences, research institutes) I attend. I can't go everywhere I am invited to. And often a serendipitous choice has proven much more useful than I would have thought (last instances: a school in January, which spawned a research article, and a conference on topic A, not so interesting, which turned out to be packed with hard-to-locate experts in topic B).

Finally, like for everybody in academia, I have to consider in the back of my mind the possibility that I might work better elsewhere. It is not very likely to happen, since it's not so easy to move two full professors working in the same, pathetically small area of mathematics, and not being stars in it either, but it could still happen, and I like to keep my ears and my mind open - keeping in mind what the pluses and minuses would be for the children as well.

So how do I face all these choices? This is something I haven't changed at all, since the day, 20+ years ago, when I discovered that there was such a job as research mathematician and decided to try my best to do it. I get lots of information, both reading (on paper and on screen) and talking to people. I make diagrams and lists for myself, tables with possible plans, and so on.

And after I have removed the impossible and the unreasonably unlikely, I decide with my heart as well as with my brain (indeed, I suspect that in me these two organs have a strange short-circuit). I choose activities I enjoy, students and collaborators I find humanly likeable, participate in events that will make it possible for me to meet again pleasant people who live far away. I choose research problems that appeal to my mathematical taste, and don't worry on where I will publish the outcome.

That's what I have done so far, and it worked very well. It is funny because, although I am not a believer anymore, the idea was originally a religious one: I don't remember the precise words, but it was something like "look for the Kingdom of Heavens, and the rest will be given you as a free extra". Similarly, in my life I have looked for beauty, love and happiness. The rest (a good job in a reasonable university) more or less happened by itself.

I was lucky, but not terribly lucky: it wasn't so hard then. I am sad that I don't see a similarly straight path for the younger people I advise, unless they are willing to leave their country (which I now am, but wasn't at their age). I try to be very honest with them, and I keep hoping that times will change again.

This post is written for scientiae-carnival, which is organized at A Cat Nap by Flicka Mawa.

Resuming, slowly

Now that was a long break. I took some months off... well, just about everything, and devoted my time to research and parenting. It was great. Fabulous.

And it worked amazingly. C#1 stopped sucking her thumb! I can't believe it! And I have now a large (well, large for me) number of papers in the pipeline. Now I am back to teaching/administration duties/advising, so I will have to proceed more slowly.

After what feels like many, many years of winter, spring is really coming.

Long time no see

A lot has happened since. Students S#3 and S#4 graduated, and they got postdocs for this year and next year. Also, S#6 who's graduating in 2008 already has an offer (and more to come - he has done a great job). S#6 had a brilliant idea, with a great statement and a bogus proof. I hope that soon she'll get the proof right. S#7 is also doing pretty well. So altogether I have now three students, since S#6 will probably never graduate, but become a brilliant teacher instead.

I got some administrative responsibility, which I'm making a mess of, but not worse than the previous holder.

On the family front, C#1 likes gymnastics much better than she did basketball. She has a new maths teacher and her problems with the subject seem to vanish; nevertheless, she seems to have inherited my reading style and not my math love.
To give you an idea, she got one 350-page book as Christmas present. She finished it yesterday morning, and at lunch time she was on page 250 of the second reading. She doesn't look like me at all, but she's definitely my daughter :-).

C#2 speaks german fluently, if rarely. He still can't write his own name, and complained that Santa brought a game with letters but none with numbers. C#3 is trying to write more and more, and we're confident that a breakthough on the diaper-in-the-night front is also near in time.

We had a lovely Christmas + Boxing Day, just the 5 of us plus nine-year old neighbor J as a bonus elder sister. We played bingo and Monopoly and two different versions of Labyrinth (ours and hers) and baked cookies and ate them. C#2 expressed as further wishes to Santa that C#3 stop crying so much, and that mama would tickle him (C#2, that is) more often. The second wish has been granted :-).

Mostly, I'm wondering whether to move to a scientific blog in my actual name. I feel that there are not enough women scientists blogging in their own name, and there are not enough mathematicians of any gender. Speaking of which, I'l include two great examples of math blogging: the latest John Baez, with a commented list of free math books online, and John Armstrong with a lovely "Yes, Virginia" Christmas post. Of course if I could write like either of them (both in style and depth) I would definitely blog under my own name.

In related news, C#1 figured out that it's not Santa that brings the presents. She looked very proud of herself, and not shocked at all.

Students update

It seems to get slowly better. I have now read four of five pages of S#7 and it is all pretty reasonable. She is a bit creative with conventions for my taste, but I have to admit that the meaning is at all points totally clear. That's really good.
Unfortunately, tomorrow I will have only half a day for mathematics, since the afternoon I'll be busy with the birthday party, and the rest of the week I will attend a conference with the aim of improving my cv, not my mathematical culture. At least I should meet an old college friend, who chose a different side of mathematics and whom, as a consequence, I see rarely indeed.
I am also optimistic that S#3 and S#4 will finish their dissertations and get a postdoc; in the moment S#3 has a postod and S#4 a dissertation, but improvement is in the air. S#2 got a new postdoc, and a long well-paid one. Since S#1 chose to be a teacher, and S#5 has chosen to leave mathematics, I don't feel as bad as I did. And in a few weeks the number of students that I am responsible for will go down to four, two of them shared... I feel so excited, if I'm not careful I might as well accept another one!

Season change, or lack thereof

I have finally finished selecting, washing, drying, folding and sorting the children's old stuff. Since I haven't done this basically since the birth of the twins, it was not only a herculean job but emotionally draining as well. As I dug deeper into the layer, smaller and smaller outfits came to the light, many of them still looking pretty new. I kept wondering where my lovely babies had gone, and who the big boys infesting my flat could possibly be.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to arrange immediate dispatching, so many boxes and bags are now lying around all over my bedroom and livingroom. A few of them contain also clothes of mine, including the elegant (and, you guess it, good-as-new) outfit I wore for my graduation - in my country we just wear nice clothes, nothing specifically academic. Hopefully all the boxes etc will be gone by tuesday: I can't help being a bit envious of Twice and every other mother of twins enjoying being part of such a group.
After all the work, the children started insisting that we go to the beach. Normally it's way too cold so late in the year, but the sun was shining, and I was exhausted... I decided, why not? The children bathed in very low, very warm water due to extremely low tide. I went with them, water until my knees, clean as it never is during summer, and basically all for us. We spotted crabs and fishes of various dimensions, and a large selection of shells. We stayed until the sun started setting.
On the way home, the twins fell asleep; after a quick dinner, all three are now peacefully sleeping.
It was a wonderful way to say goodbye to the summer, enjoying the calm sea and perfect limpidity of water and air, with dozens of sailing boats and behind them, in a bluish haze, the hills (and the factories, but maybe one needn't be too precise).