I will be in a similar situation really soon, but my only salvation must come in the form of a R01 . . .

Yes, but certain folks who pull strings can obtain emeritus status and appear to be able to renew at will. I’m not very concerned – when I can retire, I will leave the spot for someone new. Best for all concerned. I hope your friend also has the means to persist! So much of that has to do with keeping reapplying and your life has to let you be able to do that (and not be irreversibly discouraged). Even then, from one who made it in, still feels a bit like a crap shoot. You’re not better qualified than a lot of people who were ultimately turned away.

Sorry, but this is the kind of white-washing that I have no patience for. Dr Becca being denied tenure initially was a BAD THING. Full stop.

In the end, it’s good that the error was reversed. But whether we learn something from the bad things, whether we survive, persevere, crumble up, or whatever, does not change ONE BIT the fact that they are bad things that should happen to no one.

You do realize that there are people who are every bit as resilient and resourceful as she was for whom the outcome is very different, no? Think about that! It’s that lesson that shouldn’t get lost in all of this.

Let’s be happy for Dr Becca, but let’s not forget about how effed-up things are that this even happened in the first place. And let’s also remember that her success was not just the product of her hard work, etc., but, as with all things in life, there was also that irreducible element of luck — someone changed their mind. So it is not entirely up to us whether we “we curl up and die or persevere.” Sometimes, despite our best intentions, persevering is not an option.

Here is what I valued in your story.
1. We all face grief and dashed hopes. They help us to grow.
2. Adversity is not the main problem. It is whether we curl up and die or persevere.
3. The bad things are not necessarily the bad things. Sometimes they teach what we are meant to learn.
4. Adversity teaches that we have more support than we thought. I loved the notes re other colleagues and students providing stellar support.
5. Challenging situations help us to find ourselves. You likely know much more about yourself after these lengthy challenges – which can provide a template for future growth.
6. A good “holyday”and cute rhinos make a difference in our lives.

In over 30 years of employment counselling, I have always admired resilience, the creativity and resolve of humans who overcome! Your story provided a model of ingenuity and integrity. Well done.

Heather: Thanks for cheering for us and thanks for the kind reminders. I hope your resilience pays off eventually.

Thanks for cheering. I stumbled on your twitter thread late summer but didn’t follow it through because of my own battle. I am very happy that you pulled it off with a victory and getting additional $$ to move your project forward.

Hi Heather,
Thanks for your kind words and support! I just read your story below. I wish you the best in the future! My understanding is that it is extremely difficult for foreign-born PI’s to make it in France. I have a good friend/colleague who is a French national who just moved back to France a couple of years ago, and even she can’t find a job there, in spite of an excellent funding and publication record in a solid lab at a highly ranked medical research institution here in the States. This, in spite of having connections to French research institutions through her father, a retired professor. You’ve persisted with much less than she has, which is just amazing.

One question: isn’t there a mandatory retirement age in France?

From what I understand, it was not always like this, here, with regard to tenure and salary support. I believe that there may have been a time when tenure at least offered full salary coverage, in the face of funding loss. But, then again, funding wasn’t so difficult to come by, back in the “old days.”

It really is tenure in name only. I was told that the only other benefit of tenure (besides a guarantee of 20% salary coverage and your title) is an extremely meager college tuition coverage for dependents. In fact, my division chief uses the excuse that “tenure here means nothing” as an excuse not to support some folks’ promotion to tenure (he seems to support promotions at his own discretion, though). I have one colleague here who, upon learning that our division chief wasn’t going to support his promotion to tenure, went to a different division chief in the same department (he had some affiliation with that division), and was able to get tenure through that other division chief’s support. Totally a political decision and, from what I’ve seen, not at all unusual for the school.

To Kitsch and Anon: Congratulations for what you have wrested out of the system to date! The scars of the process, and its unfairness in both “failure” and success , will heal and become less inflamed. But they do remain. Forgive possibly (you now have rosier prospects) but don’t forget, or lose your sense of empathy when you will inevitably see younger colleagues encounter the same and not necessarily prevail.

I hope that elder chair decides 2018 is his year to move on, Anon. We have a guy like that in our department, taking up dearly needed space in both office and animal facility terms, but at least not a chair. It’s awful to hope his back problems will finally convince him to retire at 80+ but I’m not the only one who does. Still, aside from being a sexist jerk, his days of influence are mostly past.

(Apologies, this has become long.)

I have been working in France for my entire professional career, after coming during grad school. At age 47, I haven’t successfully obtained my first R01 equivalent yet (means are at a much smaller scale here, overall, so we’re looking at 300-500K for 3-5 years). I got “tenure”, though, in 2004 and one of a couple dozen national start-up packages back then, of 150K over three years for salaries and supplies. I made the mistake of thinking this was a vote of professional confidence and the start of better things, and thought I was safe to do more for the community than my personal advancement or recognition. Grave mistake. So, it’s possible to run a small group on fumes but the lost potential for lack of (luck/persistance/a taste for promoting my brand/popularity) has certainly taken its toll on my morale and sense of optimism.

Imagine your six months of despair stretching to twelve years by intermittent bursts, as you see your prospects dwindle and you “wait your turn” patiently to then be passed by for limited resources, despite the seminars you give and committees you preside. Despair and demotivation particularly when I was refused promotion to director level (which happens in a national competition) first in 2013, after the oral defence – sounds like your Provost conversation except it’s a committee in Paris rather than a person – and again in 2015, after the paper file was (justifiably, because I had succumbed to depression in the interim and production dropped accordingly) no longer deemed strong enough in publications. I hope to have material to try again this fall, but I increasingly ask myself, why? Except for questions of fairness. Mentorship for women scientists is very thin on the ground. I try to provide it, but I sorely feel its lack myself. The leaky pipeline needs an infrastructure overhaul in a major way, and not just for early careers. A “major” advancement is that newly tenured scientists like I had been 13 years ago, now get 15K euros startup money. Yay. Often wrested away by the department for infrastructure. I helped two new recruits recover their money last year for their own work. What kind of message is that? Everything is about useless band-aids for leaky, crumbling dikes.

My Ph.D. student defended in November and got a good job, because I encouraged her all along to do what was needed for that. In 2018 I have no one left in my group, no institutional or major funding support, internal competition for a dwindling supply of undermotivated grad students (on the order of four candidates a year for all the groups in the department) and am looking forward in some ways to reduced self-inflicted responsibilities and time to write. Which I kind of hate as well as enjoy having done. I don’t have to teach and stopped doing so for free when I learned just how invisible the investment of my time was. I feel too old and stuck in my community for the last 7 years, to move again to a more dynamic place and start again at even more of a disadvantage. I can easily think of six female peers within as many years of age who are similarly frustrated in their ambitions by attrition and tiny slights of various kinds, though most have been successful at getting better grants than I have to date (their Frenchness may have helped in part; my group has survived meanwhile on money from private non-profits and a crowdfunded project). To be fair, many male peers have their shares of grant/political machination/bureaucratic frustrations as well, but these aren’t on top of some silent agreement to take them less seriously all along, so they remain optimistic that whatever the setback is, remains a fluke, that it’s not due to their ultimate unsuitability, and that things could improve.

We scientists are optimists in many ways. Certainly we have our large share of creative, sensitive types. I hate to think what would have happened if you had accepted the “experienced advice” of your chair not to appeal. Science is littered with the detritus of many of those alternate endings. Thanks for recording a story that documents the adversity as well as the way you have felt along the way: including the daze of finally obtaining what you sought and understanding the ultimate arbitrariness of it all. An understanding that further success might have helped you, like so many others, to ultimately forget, if you hadn’t recorded it.