Curious graduate students seeking to understand the balance of academics and parenting filled Braun Auditorium last night to hear personal perspectives from a panel of scientists.

The Women’s Committee on Graduate Life (WCGL), which aims to improve the experience and success of female graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in chemistry, hosted the event as part of the quarterly Perspectives Seminar Series.

“We tried to choose speakers who represent both a wide range of careers and a wide range of family situations,” said WCGL Secretary Lisa Perlson, a graduate student in Chemistry Operations. “The most important message of the speakers is that you do not have to choose between having a family and having a successful career. You may have to be flexible regarding such things as your time schedule and where you live, but if you keep an open mind about these issues, you can excel in your career and have a meaningful family life.”

Perlson said that the lecture would help students realize that they are not alone in trying to balance a career and parenting.

“It is important for students to see that they are not breaking new ground in trying to balance a full-time career and a family,” she said. “There are many others who have done this before and there are many models for students to look toward as they think about their own futures.”

Ross Beyer, a NASA postdoctoral scholar, identified with the difficult decision of when to have children.

“We knew that we were getting close to graduating,” he said. “At that time we knew we wanted to have kids, so we did an analysis. When is the good time to have kids? When we graduate? When we get that faculty position? We concluded that no time was a good time to have kids and that therefore all times were equivalently good times.”

Beyer’s wife, Rachel Mastrapa, also a NASA postdoctoral scholar, said that the issue of health insurance was an important challenge for her when she had a baby.

“I negotiated a job for myself that would have health insurance,” she said. “The fatal mistake I made was me being the health insurance person. When it came time to have the baby, I ended up having to take a month of family leave time, which was unpaid. The real lesson I took from that was to have the person not having the baby to be the insurance.”

Beyer discussed the challenge of trying to fit both work and family into her daily schedule.

“I thought being a scientist would be great because I would be able to set my own hours, but the only time we can get work done is when the child care center is open,” he said. “In a lot of ways, I felt really pressured to be productive in those eight hours and that was not a good mental situation to be at.”

He noted that parents have to make difficult decisions in choosing between jobs and family time:

“The thing that I think is most important is you decide what is important to you in your life,” he said. “If science is all that you care about, you should do that and you should be happy about that. For us, it was more important to do our science jobs but we also wanted to have a daughter first, so we had to balance that with daycare.

Beyer noted that the issue boils down to compromise.

“I may not be writing thee papers a year, but I’m still getting work done,” he said. “There are trade-offs. “

Chemistry Prof. Robert Waymouth discussed how — although academia offers flexible hours — academics always have work they could be doing.

“The hardest challenge is finding those blocks of time when you can really be productive,” he said. “I still haven’t figured out how to do that. But one of the advantages of being academics is you really do set your own hours. You can come in whenever. But you will always have to make compromises. The job will take an infinite amount of time if that’s the amount of time you want to give to it.”

Waymouth said that choosing when to work involves making difficult choices and often sacrifices.

“You have to decide what are those times you want to be home and what are those times you’re going to be working,” he said. “Life’s always a balance. You’re almost constantly evaluating what you want to do. It’s just a question of where you want to put the balance.”

Denise Lee, a graduate student in chemistry, said that she was motivated to attend the discussion due to the dearth of many women in scientific professions.

“I’m interested in academia and there are no female faculty members in the Chemistry Department,” she said, clarifying that there is one female lecturer that does not do research.

“So I was interested in seeing how they balanced work and academia and everything else.”