 Welcome again. My name is Susan Steele. I'm the moderator of the panel stages and changes over the course of your career. I'm also one of the panelists. And as I was explaining earlier, I'm representing my late husband, Richard early Dick early, who experienced a lot of ages and stages with me. And so, and that are relevant actually to this whole event. The panelists are Judith clavins who's, you can find it Dr Judith consulting calm. That's her right there. Evelyn at Zuckerman, who is, where are you Evelyn there you are, and she's at MITRE and Nina McDonald was at pixel moon. There's Nina. The, the LCL at this point has paid a lot of attention to your professional life, how to define your goals, how to achieve them. But unless you're an island, these decisions are made in the context of other aspects of your life. Usually, and most critically the people in your life, your partner, your children, other people you want in your life, like a partner or friend, and or your location, all of those things enter into it. This panel addresses the negotiation between these parts of your life and how they change over time. The negotiation between these parts of your life and your professional part of your life and how those negotiations change as your life progresses. This is who the panelists are. And I'd like each of them to introduce themselves by talking about who they are right now. And, and that's including whether they're in a relationship or, you know what, and they're familiar responsibilities. So Judy, do you want to go first. Right now I have three jobs. One job. That's not my first or second or third. One job is, I'm at the University of Maryland. My dissertation work a million years ago which is when Sue and I first met was on the syntax morphology syntax phonology interface and complex morphology. I've always been interested in clitics and cliticization, so my dissertation and books and articles have mostly been on. I've done a lot of other wind winding but that's not part of this question. And I'm working on a project on morphological analysis of polysynthetic languages with Macha Polinsky at UMD, University of Maryland, and Smironda Marathon at Columbia University. That's one job. And that's of course part time. Another job part time is that I'm teaching music I teach flute I've played my whole life and really like teaching so it's a time in my life when I can teach a flute and I do that also. And the third part of my life is the business that I started about 10 years ago. Given the fact that I've been in academia, academia and government and business and in IBM in the business world, you know on the dot com. I started doing some career consulting work for people who are trying to make career changes or who are out of jobs. And that work is also part time. It's also taken off and I mostly work with therapists who, you know might be talking to you about what your personal issues are or what you're dealing with and what your challenges are from an emotional and psychological point of view, and I get to the practical how are we going to get you that new job, get you out of the job you hate, you know, further your career whatever. And that has been one heck of a lot of fun. I never thought I'd be doing that. It opened the door. I worked with a few other people and here it is. So, just to conclude I don't want to, I just want to make sure we have enough time for questions and everybody else. I will say that Evelyn and I have lean Superman over there in Israel have been together for 33 years. We finally got married when the law changed, but we would have been if we could have for maybe 32 of those years. And I don't know if what do you think. We've had our share of negotiations between us, and I will get to those when that question comes. Okay, so Evelyn do you want to go next talking about who you are right now. I'd be happy to go next. So, it's where I'm right now where where I'm right now, where you are. I mean not physically where you are right now. So, I am now a computational linguist working at MITRE, which is a federally funded research center located as far as I am concerned in Washington DC said as far as I am concerned because there are many locations. And we work essentially on government projects as they relate to natural language processing. It is extremely interesting for multiple reasons. The first one is that projects go and go for different government agencies. The second reason is that when we managed to bring a new method approach process into a government organization, we have a national impact. And this is very gratifying for me. I spent many years before at Bell Labs and IBM research working on fascinating research. The only thing is that I had the research on which I was working had never seen the light as it has since I joined MITRE. So that part is very interesting. I have been very involved in the education of our children and that has taken a big toll on life and activities besides work. So, I spent many hours at work, but again those hours are very gratifying along the years and we will come back to that. Judith and I have had to negotiate place and workplaces, but all in all, I must say that we have been very lucky to converge most of the times. And you have children, right? So, yes, we have four children together, two girls that are 21 and 24, which we call the second batch. And the first batch is older, 45 and 42. Okay, thank you. And Nina, where are you? Could you talk about where you are right now? I'm pretty much retired at this point. I'm living in Southern California and mostly gardening. I started a web development company in 1999 with some other people and it's still hanging around because I have clients that I host their websites, but I try not to spend too much time on it. I spend a lot of time gardening. What I wanted to do is partly why we moved out into the so-called country. We have chickens and big gardens. So, I still spend time on pixel loom and I sometimes have to deal with things, but not that much anymore. Okay. Okay, so then I'll tell you a little bit about me. So, I'm a retired academic, academic administrator, started as an academic faculty member and then moved into administration of various sorts. You know, from associate dean to provost and basically all the places in between. When I left academia, I went, I started working with nonprofits, not really for money, but just, you know, sort of helping them develop their ability to manage and to be profit and to produce the money that they needed to. And I'm now in the process of becoming, I've written a lot of academic things. I just finished a memoir, which I'm now negotiating with my children to make sure that I don't, you know, but I don't tell them tell things that they don't want me to tell. And I'm, I'd really, really like to write a murder mystery. That's sort of what I'm thinking about next. But I still work with nonprofits a lot. And I've, also, as I said, representing my late husband who died about three years ago, who was also an academic. So we shared academic life for a long time before I moved into the dark side. And then, and I'll, and he then, at one point, when he died, he had just retired from working in. Well, he started out and after he left academia, he started out in startups. And then his portion of a startup was bought out by a very large he was doing e-discovery for law firms. That was what his startup did, the second startup he worked for. And then that part of the startup was sold off to allow the startup to get some money to keep going. And so his part of the startup, the part that he managed was the most profitable. And then, then it was when it was bought, he suddenly moved from academic salary, startup salary to sort of astonishing salary that from, you know, being in, he was working for Ernst and Young, which is, you know, a major accounting firm and they were trying to develop e-discovery. And so that's what he was doing. And he was hired, he had, he was, he was supposed to be hired as a partner. But if they hired him as a partner, he would have had to retire three weeks after they hired him when he turned 65. So they hired him. They had to make up a title for him so that he could work there. But then he worked there for about four years until he retired. And then shortly after that, he became ill and then a few years after that he died. So that's where I am right now. Are there any questions from the audience at this point about who you're talking to? I mean, who we are? Okay. So could now, not can we back up? So we've said where we are right now. And so starting again with Judy, I was wondering where, you know, you say where you are now. Where were you when you started your professional journey and wherever you take that to be? I don't know, you know, where you, I don't know what you take, you can start, you can decide what your beginning point is. I know when, thank you Sue, when Evelyn and I were talking about this beforehand, we were saying like, what is the beginning? Let's see, 13 years old interested in language. No, maybe not. I finished my PhD and had a postdoc at that time when I finished my PhD and had a postdoc, I was in the middle of a divorce with the two old, now two older kids, 46 and 43, or something like that, maybe 45, 45, 40, something like that. And I postdoc at MIT and was single with the kids. I went to IBM after that to the research laboratory. IBM research at that time was doing language, real language research, not just engineering. And I was working on translation. I was working on multilingual applications translation. I moved into computational work when I was at MIT. And that was just fabulous. And I was there single with two kids and I was probably the only female research scientist who had any children, much less be alone with the children. There were about six of us women. And it was a very bizarre environment at that time. I'll let Evelyn tell you her side of when when we met. But she came, my side is she came to IBM to work on French applications, and having just finished her PhD at the Sorbonne, and we met them. We totally closeted in those days. The negotiation was, the negotiation really happened around two or three issues. So to summarize. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness, are we going to be out. And remember this is the 1980s. It was not a friendly place, the world. If we're going to be in the same work together, how do we publish together? How do we like, how do we negotiate that part? And that happens for straight married couples as well. It's not just the gay issue. It's the straight issue as well. You know, who do you tell and how do you tell and do they think that your work is because of the other person or, you know, what kind of, what kind of benefits do you know who has a more senior position? You know, Sue, you may you do and Dick may have had that also. And by the way, Dick was a wonderful man, a very wonderful man. Sorry, he's gone. So that was one issue. You know, or even if you're not coupled, just who you know and and who your friends are. The second issue was of course the children. So as you heard from Evelyn, my, my birth children were 10 and 12 when she came into the relationship. And so do we have more children and how do we negotiate that and where do we live and where the schools good and where can we earn enough and how can we make this work. And of course the third issues was what kind of work was what kind of job do you want and where can you get one. And in a way, as she said, we were lucky we're both in computational so the world, you know, so the world was growing in the computational field at that time. I moved to work from IBM to Columbia University, and in the early 90s when all the layoffs happened, I was one of them. And Evelyn, who was on a contract position hi Nancy that's for me we met. And Evelyn went to Bell Laboratories at that time, but she was driving 60 miles a day, each way across the George Washington Bridge, because of having kids in different places. And, you know, my kids where I worked etc. It was quite a burden. So she had a two and a half hour drive every day to get to work. We obviously worked it out, we eventually moved to Washington DC and both got new jobs. But that's some of the negotiation that went on, and where I where I don't know what the beginning is but that's enough. Someone else, I was going to add a footnote there that yes we met at IBM research, and I was single but within a relationship with a child and during these layoff discussions. I'm not repeating the questions about, am I eligible for X or why because you had a similar situation but couldn't talk about it. So, I became the mouth of both of us there I didn't even know those are questions I could ask thank you very much. Thank you Nancy. They're being the leftist liberal in my life. You want to talk about what you're beginning what you see as the beginning your comparable situation at the beginning. The beginning was so I came as a full bright doing a postdoc at Brown University in computational linguistics, and my advisor in Paris said okay you go to, you're going to the states when you raise okay two years is not a good sign but we'll have a position for you at the University of Paris. And I'm going to try to go fast and not give too many details two years after two years and three months the phone rang, I was at Bell Labs, and my advisor said you have position at the University of Paris, but being in the late 80s. And closer to it, I said, well, I, I'm not going. It was a hard decision to make. And the reason I didn't want to go to Paris is because Judith and I were in a relationship, and we could not be out about it but I definitely wanted to pursue that relationship so that was one of the first glitch. The second glitch is as Judith mentioned 120 miles of turn bike drive in New York and New Jersey, which was pretty horrible. And, luckily, when at the beginning of the 2000 when the so I was at Bell Labs, that became loose and when it got divided or try vested again, and I was looking for a job in 2002. I decided to join a startup. It was like jumping in the totally new water and not knowing what was happening to start up was started by three boys in their early 20s just after a few years after graduating from Swarthmore. And I was already 40 and in my early 40s and we had to negotiate being in New York being in Washington. Weird, really weird times until Judith joined the University of Maryland and we could move together. As we mentioned earlier, the computational world has many positions so it's easier to find them than academia, and we managed to navigate around, but the road was not always smooth until the last three years. Yeah. Nina, do you want to say something about this where where you think you started. Well, mission was. I started by getting married. While I still hadn't finished my dissertation at Michigan, and neither had my husband but we both. We both had done everything but and he got a job offer to be an associate at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. I assume that's where you were heavily. And so we got married because my mother said no you can't move across the country without getting married. It was. Those were the days right. It was the 70s and a lifetime job there. And after three years I finished my dissertation and got a real job, which made a lot more money than my husband's job. And he was still struggling to get his dissertation done because although is the guy he worked for it told him he would have plenty of time. He of course had no time. So, I then worked on something that was called created something that was called the writer's workbench, which was the first kind of programs to provide feedback to writers. And we actually dealt with some of the people at IBM that came down one time. That's, I think was before you're all time there, because I'm a little bit ahead of you. It was an exciting time I mean I was on the today show in 1981. Wow. What, what were you talking about. Linda cherry who was in research at Bell Labs I was in development now we're talking about the writer's workbench. And I tried to show some people the video of it recently and it's just, it's ridiculous. I mean, it's all, it's unix for one thing. And it's just. There's no wissy wig of any kind. I mean, this is 1981, but it was so exciting to the people the guy giving the interview and stuff because it took this text and it spit out a write up about how to improve it and it had punctuation correction and stuff. And, and the way it worked was that my boss the department head was so fearful of this today show is live. He was so fearful of anything going wrong that the whole server was set to only allow us in. And all we did was cat the output of a file that looked like what it originally would have been. But so the server only had to be able to print a file on the screen. And anyway, that was very exciting and then we had telling we're not telling those secrets. All right, it was a lot of time. came and that project disappeared and I became a computer programmer. I, and I mean I was doing user interface design and programming. And you were married at that point. I was still married I've been married 45 years. Oh, I didn't realize it had gone on that long. Okay. Yeah. It seems like it's serious, you know. Last. First grandchild last week. Congratulations. Congratulations. We say that maybe Nina can we say your mother was right. I mean, I wasn't it's not like I was kicking and screaming about getting married it was just, you know, I'm not sure I would have cared that much, but anyway, okay. So, for me, my, I started out in academia as I said as a faculty member I started out the University of New Mexico in an anthropology department. And I lasted a year. I just couldn't. I just felt so lonely. Well, first off, but it was New Mexico instead of Southern California which is where I had grown up. And what I, what I really knew. And there was no ocean in New Mexico. And when I was driving west, you know, when I would drive west out of Albuquerque, and I would expect to see something blue, and instead it would be, you know, maces and stuff and I would think, oh my God, they filled it in. It was, you know, it was just more than I could manage. I was lucky enough and I got a fellowship, and a postdoctoral fellowship and I went to MIT for six months, then I got to be winner. And I couldn't manage that. So then I drove to say I had a Volkswagen van I was driving across country with my Volkswagen van. Then I drove to Stanford, they had they had offered me a postdoctoral thing at the same time that I got my own. And so I went there and then I stayed there for another year. And that's where I met my husband, although we didn't get married until a year and a half or so after I had left. No, was it that long. I guess it was just six months after I left Stanford. And then, you know, and then shortly thereafter, I had a baby and I think I was the first pregnant faculty member. I was now at the University of Arizona, there were just no faculty, no, you know, I don't know that they never had a pregnant faculty member. And they didn't have very many women faculty and very few women faculty with children, like, like Judy was saying, it was sort of weird to have children. This is in the mid 70s, we're sort of the same age group. And having children was nobody knew quite what to do so I, I was, I had my, my baby she was born in November, which is in the middle of the semester. I taught. I went into labor on campus the day before she was born. And then I was back on that was then she was born on a Tuesday. I was back on campus the next Monday, you know, to teach my classes. That's sort of what was considered maternity leave, I think. I mean, there was just no, they just didn't know what to, you know, they just didn't know what to do. There was. So, that was, and, and while I was teaching this class, I walked into the classroom in September. And so I was already pretty pregnant. I was seven months along and, you know, the, it was an undergraduate class, nobody said anything. No, you know, nothing, you know, they just going to be here at two months from now. And that's until somebody came in to my office hours and said now wait a minute, I was just wondering, is this class going to go the whole semester. That was about as much acknowledgement of my pregnancy as, you know, as was possible. So, so that's sort of how I started out, which was sort of floundering in lots of ways, not, you know, not, not making that transition from being a graduate student to academia entirely smoothly and then sort of bumping along into parenthood and marriage and trying to manage that while I was also trying to manage. Floundering equals trailblazing. It doesn't feel like trailblazing it felt like floundering. And then, you know, there was really there were no, there was no child, you know, there was no accommodation for childcare or anything like that either so we, we had to and at this point also, my husband was when I had my baby she I he was on leave from Stanford I was at the University of Arizona. And then. So we were teaching at different institutions and then I took a leave of absence and went up to Stanford and then, you know, and then we had to work out what was going to happen next because we had jobs at 1000 miles apart and a baby and sort of thought it would probably be important to be a little closer together. So, that's sort of where I started which is, you know, it's, I wouldn't wouldn't advise it. But, you know, you just do what comes right. So, are there any questions now from the audience about where, where we started because now we're going to be talking about, you know, sort of the kinds of decisions that had to be made. And what, what factors went into them and whether, and whether how you made them and whether you were happy with the decision what the results of the decision. So, Judy, can you talk about a decision that required prioritizing one aspect of your life over another. This is a little tough one. I'm going to pass and let somebody help start. Yeah. Can I help you? Yeah, absolutely. Here was a very important decision that had less to do to couple in the same work field area, but rather a family issue. Judy was offered a job at University of Georgetown in Washington DC. And her, the first batch of children, her birth children were at the time junior in high school. And it was, and we had to talk it over and over and thought that it was a very bad idea for the junior child to move to Washington that year, the year before going to college. And I remember how difficult of a situation it was we were talking about that with your sister and brother in law, and trying to figure out whether to take the position or not. And that's typically a position that involve family and you had to decline it. That is a really good example, which of course it was so painful I forgot. But yeah, we had the two older children at home. And the younger ones weren't born yet. And it was a tenured position at Georgetown University to rebuild their computational linguistics program. I would have been able to hire two people. I would have had build a lab. And my mother was still living and she's from Washington DC. So I would have been near my mother, which was extremely important. You didn't mention that in the intro. So when you talk about the houses and children, parents, the reason that is in in Israel right now is because of her father who's 89. So we have our parents also so you know you're all pulled. That's a good example. I'm, yeah, that's enough. Well, I had one that concerned me when I was at my labs that wasn't I was invited that the one of the research lab in the west of France that was very prestigious for the work that we're doing in audio and speech. And same thing, the girls that I birthed were way too young and was very complicated. And frankly, that was also a two body issue because we didn't know what you would be doing work wise. And that's something that I had to decline and it was very unfortunate. So we had to make those choices. I mean, sacrifices of our career against family and our values. And people know what the two body problem is. It's, it's when you've got well it's like what Judy and Evelyn are talking about or me and my husband you've got two people who are both having, you know, trying to progress professionally and I mean that's the whole thing is about is how do both of you how can you have it so that both of you are reasonably happy and successful and how do you sort of how do you how do you get that to work, because it isn't always easy. Right. So did you have. Did you want to add anything to that. Evelyn or Judy. No, no. Okay, what about you Nina. I think I've had a pretty lucky career. I mean, I followed my husband to bell labs and I got a job there that I would never have gotten if I hadn't already been on the spot. And it's true that everything fell apart there eventually. And I did his other job for eight years or something as a part of the library network and then things were so bad. Yeah, this was right before it became loose and things were so discouraging because everybody we worked with was being laid off and departments were being canceled. It was just, it was depressing. And my husband had started out of Bell Labs, but he had gone off to Columbia at some point because he didn't like, he wanted to be a professor. I never had any desire whatsoever. And then he was looking for a new job and he got offered a position out here at UC Irvine. I was just so glad to see the back of Bell Labs. And I really enjoyed my work. But I just, the environment was really tough. And I came out here and worked for Bell Labs for another, we moved here in August I worked for them till December when they loosened and then it disappeared the job disappeared. And then I had to figure out what to do. That's a different, different question. Yeah, I wanted to add another question so as we were saying earlier, we were I mean Bell Labs and our house where over 50 miles away. And I remember this agonizing weekends where we're trying to figure out where to move that would be closer for me. We were living two and a half hours in the car. And this is agonizing those issues it was not, we didn't want to have a remote relationship and, but we wanted to have a liveable work life and that part was very difficult I spent 14 years on the new Josie turn bike and, and it's costly. That's because we had the opposite we lived three miles from Bell Labs. And when my husband went off to Columbia, it took him two hours on the train path train way to get to Columbia which he liked better than driving. But it was two hours each way. We got him a sleeper sofa in his Columbia was really nice office is big offices. We got him a really nice sleeper sofa because he had one one term a year he had a 10 o'clock class and ended at 10 o'clock and I didn't want him driving home or home or doing anything at that hour and New York wasn't that safe back then. He had the opposite commute from you, but was sort of seemed fair because he's the one that had left Bell Labs to go to Columbia. It was his choice right. Yes, he has to do that now. Yeah, so. So, we both Arizona offered my husband a job so we both moved, we moved to Arizona. And the one I found in the two body problem was, I mean, so we were together there which was really nice. Although when they hired him, I had, I was actually his senior because I had gotten my PhD earlier. So when they offered him a job. The salary that they offered him was higher than the salary they were offering me. So there was some scrambling around when I pointed that out. And that was adjusted. But it was, I sort of felt like I mean so we were. It was really good because we were, you know, we sort of knew where each of us was all the time you know he was his office was down the hall from my office. We were in faculty meetings together. I don't know that we ever taught a class together but we did write some things together. But on the other hand we always knew where the other one was and it, and I sort of felt that I needed, I needed some distance. I didn't you know I didn't want to be thought of that. In academic circles I think we were pretty much known, even though we had different last names that we were a couple. And, and it was, I found it, it was wonderful that we had a job in the same place I found it difficult to always be associated with this other person, you know, instead of just being me. And I think that's part of what drove me into administration was because then it, you know, I was separate, I was doing different things I was on a different schedule. And so, but that had, you know that had consequences to admit that our schedules weren't the same and there was all you know and, and we were experiencing the university in very different ways because as the as a faculty member, you know, the administration generally is, they're the bad guys. And so, I think he probably heard a lot of nasty comments about what I was doing maybe from people in the university who didn't know that he was that he was connected to me. And, and so, and it was also then, you know, sort of keeping keeping our separate identities. I found it difficult doesn't sound like you guys, Julian and Evelyn found it difficult to sort of be, you did. What I wanted to say is that you found it very difficult to be associated. I found it very difficult to be dissociated. Right, we were closeted. Yeah. And, and so you had to switch to pronouns and he was very complicated but the good, the silver lining on that of that is that we've had a very productive research collaboration together. In the time when we're at IBM research and, and, and later on at Bell Labs, we had several publications you give an eye and it was extremely interesting research and we are doing it together very much. The good news of that. The good news of that same thing is that we managed to support each other throughout the year professionally in, in, in a way that, well, in a way that we would have been any kind of couple, but the fact that we are in the same field, almost the same field made it very comfortable and supportive to grow professionally. Which is sort of different from what I was feeling right. Yes, yes. And, and always my husband has a different last name. And at one point somebody at Bell Labs suddenly said to me, you're married to Ted, right. It's been like three years and we were in departments that were right next to each other. And yet this guy hadn't figured it out. And I really like that. The fact that we were, as you say, independent people. Yeah, yeah. I don't know, you know, I don't know whether my husband never felt that need I don't think of being independent. And I think it may have been a male female thing you know because just like the salary thing where he was offered a better salary than me even though I was a senior and had been there so I think he never felt. I don't think he felt that but but the what my decision of going into administration led to was I think the biggest test which is I decided I started looking for administrative jobs outside of the University of Arizona. I offered a couple jobs. And then, and one of them, when I suggested to Dick this job he said, no way I'm not moving there. So I said okay, then I got another job. And it didn't come with a position for him I mean oftentimes administrative jobs come with position for the, what they call the trailing spouse. This one did not. And I still took it. He was, you know, he could have easily said at that point. Well, you know, good luck. Good luck with that. He didn't. Instead, what he did was he resigned his tenure track position and moved me across the country, which was a really, really big deal. You know, I mean a really big deal. And, you know, I still don't really know why, why that was, I, you know, I had looked back on it and say well what was, you know, what was I thinking what was he thinking and I'm still really not sure about, you know, all of what was going on at that point. I just know that I really felt that I was, I just had to, which sounds really selfish and I think it was really, really, really selfish. But, but he went along, and then we were there on the East Coast at the University of Connecticut for three and a half years or so and then we decided, you know, Connecticut is the land of steady habits, as they say, which means that it's suffocating, right. You just, it's, we were. So we decided to, we decided, I decided to look for another job and I got a job back in California, and he came back and that's when he went into, into startups, he couldn't Silicon Valley was able to do that. So it, you know, it, he was, he was eight and at this point he was in his fifties and in his fifties he made a transition from, well first off from being a full a tenured full professor to trailing spouse, without a position and he did have a, he had a visiting scholar position at Brown, which is just down the, down the road, but then, and then going back to California and learning how to live, how to make his way in a startup environment in his mid fifties and describing him, said, and he made it look easy. And he, and he, and he did. So, you know, in some ways it worked out. I've talked to my son about this and my son says well gosh it made, you know, he really ended up benefiting from that because he got to, you know, have this whole new life so why do you keep worrying about it. But I do still think about that whole, you know, that whole thing and what was, you know, what was going on. So, so I guess when I went to say was I happy with the results. Ultimately, yes, but you know there were some, there were some unhappy, unhappy moments in there. The road not taken. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's happy with all these moves. I mean that's a lot of moves. Well my daughter at that point she had she, she was in great in college when we moved from Arizona. She was actually at the University of Arizona she wasn't happy but she was going to be a senior so, you know, she was going to be on her own pretty soon. And then, but your son, my son you you ruined his life. I ruined his life. Yeah. Our son was in the eighth grade when we knew or just started in eighth grade when we moved to Connecticut. And then when we moved back to California he was. He was just starting his junior. No, he was starting his junior year his junior year in high school. And that's I think when we really ruined his life, although, although he's it. His son is gay. And it wasn't until we moved to California that he sort of realized that it was okay to be, you know, that it, it didn't matter in Connecticut it was still sort of. It was early 2000s but it was still not something that was in high school anyway was not something that was sort of open, but was so when he came to California and discovered that nobody cared. He sort of had a, it was pretty traumatic he, you know, that that was really hard actually for was him sort of coming out. To himself, to himself. Yeah, to himself. Yeah. Yeah. So, so that was, you know, so there was a consequence then for him. In terms of our decision I don't think my daughter's ever forgiven us though, even though she was in college. For some reason it was, you know, we were maybe she was supposed to leave we weren't or something like that, I don't know, you know. So, I want to hear how come people came to this session. Okay. Because, yeah, how come. And are you getting what you expected or what you hoped you might get. And to add to that I'd like to also find know. Yeah, what it must be like for you to hear us who are kind of the age almost of your grandparents. I want to talk about career things and if that does how what your thoughts are about what you're facing and what's coming up next for you. Three questions on the table. What three questions say them again then. Well Nancy said why did you come to this session. Okay. Why did you sign up on putting that out here Nancy your second question is, are you getting what you wanted. Right. And the third question is, what's it like to hear about choices. When you're at the beginning of those choices, does it make any, does it, I mean, does it even well, right. Yeah. Yeah. So can anyone answer one of those questions would I'll answer one. You're welcome. I sign up for the session because I'm turning 30 soon and I'm interested in how other linguists balance their personal lives with their careers, especially in an age where women are progressing, you know, the career world. So it's hard to have that balance when you're, I'm not married but you know I would like to be and I want to have children starting to think about that stuff so yeah that's why I'm here. So can I follow up with that so does any of this resonate then. Some kind of not entirely I mean I don't have kids and I'm not married, but, but I mean it helps. It's nice to see different perspectives. I remember when our older daughter had to go to kindergarten, we lived in New Jersey then, and there was a very fancy private school my husband went all went all through school and private schools. It was his family's plan. And there was a very nice private school for that we interviewed she interviewed at. And we both were Bell Labs at that point, and they had something like 15 holidays that Bell Labs did not have. They said that we were going to be able to find some place to send her and. I mean, it was just ludicrous. So we sent her to this wonderful little school that was, you know, a outdoors kind of place where they just, it was, it was a great little place but they had daycare after work. I mean, taking care of kids is a hard, hard issue when you're working. I mean, when, when I started with my first daughter, she went by both my kids went to daycare. We took her in when she was, we got, I got six weeks of vacation, you know, maternity leave, we took her into the daycare and the receptionist looks at us and says, Oh, she's so little you don't want to bring her here. This is not the right receptionist daycare center. Does somebody else want to say something about about Kelly, Kelly wrote some stuff and then Alfonso had a hand up for a second. Okay, go ahead Alfonso. So, first of all, thank you. Thank you for sharing all the experiences you've had to me. This has resonated a lot actually because personally, I, I just come like my my life was very pretty much lined up for academia back in Spain where I come from. I came to Boston for a postdoc just kind of very much with ADM that I was just going to be here for the two years and then going back to Europe. My family's there. I'm 33 at the moment so my life was pretty much kind of settled as in. Okay, so, you know, like, that's that's what I'm planning to be to be doing. My personal life changed. And, you know, like, you just arrive in a new place and then just start realizing that oh wow, so now I've just got to face and make this decision of, you know, like, kind of stopping these feelings from growing from the stage they were when they started growing and or going back and just, you know, continue with my professional life. So the session has been inspiring and useful in so far as it's actually inspirational, you know, it always works. So to me, I'm just taking the message of, you know, like when, when, you know, when you make decisions following your heart, many cases, it turns out to be, you know, a positive decision in many cases. So yeah, I'm, I'm very grateful for that. And to me to being very inspirational. So yeah, thank you. Thank you. Good to know. And somebody wrote in here that which is I really appreciate this comment which is from Ashley I think about. It's the career paths aren't linear. Could I just underline that. Sparkles. You start off one way you think, well, that's not going to work. Let's try this way and then you run into a impediment and you say okay, let's go. Yeah, so it and that's some, you know, actually, it'd be boring. Otherwise, wouldn't it. In terms of academic, I mean, I think for many academics, life is linear, right you, or it used to be when you if you got an academic position as an assistant professor you became an associate professor and if you're lucky became a full professor and then you know he just went on like that. I, what I realized when I came up became a full professor was that I thought, Oh my God, you know I'm supposed to keep doing this for the next what 35 years or something. You know I wanted. I wanted more I wanted something. I just couldn't see that. So that's, yeah, nonlinear is a good thing to keep in mind. Any other, any other comments. Yeah, go ahead Ashley that's you right yeah. You're the nonlinear person. Did you want to unmute. Oh, it was waving goodbye. Okay, that was a wonderful comment. Yes, it really was. And no, and we haven't spoken about Kelly's comment that Kelly wants to speak up for herself that's possible also. But. Yeah, did you want to. Thank you. Thank you Nancy. I have gotten a lot out of this panel because I'm also in my mid 30s I thought I was going to be an academic, and that has now worked out at all. Well it has but it didn't lead me to where I wanted to go. I just left my position actually at a university so. Congratulations, good luck. Thank you. Thank you so much. Oh, thank you. Yeah, so this is my I'm stepping out into the nonacademic world for the first time, and was feeling a little bit before I came to this whole conference and also this panel that's like, no one has made this decision. I'm in my late 30s so like, I mean mid 30s so I did it too late but I don't feel like that hearing. You didn't do it. No, it's just in time you got here just in time. I'm not to heart. Okay, thank goodness she's here now. Okay. Yeah, and so yeah all of these experiences have really helped me see that, as Ashley said also it's not linear and you need to and also as Alfonso said you need to make the decision that sits right in your heart when the time comes so I've taken a lot from the story. Thank you for sharing that I want to take one. I wanted to take one note from an earlier session from today when Brie and I were talking about her career in voice user interfaces. And she was saying that she came from a STEM family, and there were all these expectations on her that she would be a doctor or maybe a lawyer, but probably some kind of, you know, heavily science influenced engineering kind of career. And so she didn't, she chose neuroscience and she thought she was going the pre-med route. But when it came time to sign up for the pre-med testing, she just couldn't move herself to do it. And so her body was telling her what her brain wouldn't recognize that she really wasn't going to go to med school and something else was drawing her. So sometimes we have to pay attention to other signals than we're used to. Yeah. Quite true. The internal signals. Yeah. The external signals. Yeah. So Janice has a story also. Okay. Janice, where are you? You have a story? Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. I'm wearing my school shirt. Okay. So yeah, I'm a bit younger. I'm in my mid 20s. And I'm hopefully going to be getting married before my PhD is done. And I always thought. You know, You know, You got me picked out already, right? I wish I could figure out a good year to do the planning because it's a lot of work. But I was always open to like going anywhere, but he wants to work for the federal government and I'm in Canada. So that kind of like closes off a lot of options. So I did want to come in here like, how do you balance the two wants of like two different people who have two different goals and everything. So it's great to hear that, you know, even if it doesn't work out at the same time or at an early stage in your career, it always works out in the end. No, wait a minute. If you're going to be coming to DC, Evelyn and I are both in DC. So as Nancy said, we, you know, we're here. And I'm happy to talk about, I've been in the federal government, Evelyn supporting it, other people have. So we're happy to talk to you about how to manage that. I'm touring between saying something that I wanted to say before and making sure we have enough time for people to ask their comments. I'm going to be really brief. Even. Do I use my linguistics training? Absolutely. In many ways that I never expected. Not only in knowing about language, how we use language, what it means in the multilingual area and in like the specific, like the NSF grants, poly synthesis, obviously that's linguistic. However, I use my training and the logical thinking and the reasoning and like what. Doing what, what. Figuring out problems in a with linguistic challenges did for my life. So I use that all the time. It's never lost. So you might not be a full on linguistics professor. Or you might not be have a title linguist, but you will be using your linguistics in ways you never, ever anticipated. So Bravo or field. Okay. Do you think that's peculiar to linguistics? No, I don't. Who's speaking. Oh, you too. Hi. Okay. No, I don't. Oh, I don't think so. I think it's having an open. It's well, as Ashley was saying, it's not, it's not linear. You, you know, you, you, you need to face what comes your way. And weigh and measure what counts. And make sure that your brain is constantly learning, but it might be learning stuff you never even knew you would, you never even knew existed. Yeah, but in the field of humanities, as we are here, any branch of the humanities brings you through another open world and open mind. Well, I do think the linguistics and specifically suited address that has a specific reasoning piece to it. That is more mathematical and more like induction. So, you know, that other fields may not have. So that particular piece of training. And of course being a researcher, you can find out anything. Yeah. So who else would like to, who else would like to speak. Yeah. Oh, no, it's, it's just been great to hear all your experiences. All that you've been through too. And I think with me, it's like I have a lot of ideas. And determination or hope towards them. But like kind of like picking things one at a time almost. And knowing, I guess, where to take those like risks or where to start. Yeah. They are, yeah, there are lots of risks, right? And I don't know, did the other, did the other members of the panel, did you feel like there were places where you were taking a big risk? And you didn't know what was on the other side. When I moved to Columbia. I was director of a research center. I was in an administrative position. I had two appointments. I had no idea what to expect. I go ahead. I, it, it was less in terms of risk. That in terms of kind of make it work with. The children and the relationship. They were yours that were extremely demanding and extremely stressful. And it was to stress about that was very, very costly for me. I mean, you're going to say something. Kelly about that. No. Okay. Yeah. I mean, what I found in, in trying to. Manage a marriage, a professional life to children. It just required absolute, absolute discipline, right? You had a schedule that you had to stick to. And, and whenever there was anything that happened outside of that schedule, it was just like, Oh my God. I don't think I can do it. I don't think, I don't think I can do the birthday party this year because it's just, you know, it's just. It's not, it's, it's outside of the, how we can get through day week. Yeah, it was. That's, I found that to be really one of the hardest things was how, how little wiggle room there was for, you know, for. Did you, did you guys feel that or not? Very much so. Well, thank you. Thank you all for coming. Thank the panel. Thank the members. Thank you very much. And thank you to the people who came and participated. And, and thanks for the LCL. Right. Yeah. Yeah, really great job. Thank you. Lots of thank you, Sue. You do the great job. Everybody. Nancy. Okay. Yay. Yay. Bye bye. Thanks. Okay.