 Okay, welcome. Welcome again, everybody. Nice to see you. My name is Ed Berger. I'm currently the interim head of School of Engineering Education. I'm really grateful to hear from the other speakers today, but I'm actually really thrilled to be able to introduce to you Dr. Carrie Douglas, who is Associate Professor in Engineering Education. She's been a Purdue-affiliated person for a while, but she's been on our faculty just in the last six or seven years and is now Associate Professor with tenure. And she has done an awful lot of things in her career. Right now, one of the things that she is, she's one of the key leaders in the scale project that you may have heard about. And there's a lot in the news about scale. There's a lot in the news about semiconductors in general. But oh, by the way, Carrie is also a career award winner on a very different topic in which she's a really deep nationally and internationally recognized expert. So Carrie is multi-talented for sure. And I'm thrilled to see her development over the past few years. I've been part of her mentoring team for five or six years now. And the growth and the leadership in terms of thought and action both in research and teaching has been tremendous. So I'm really thrilled to introduce Dr. Carrie Douglas. So my talks can be a little different than the other ones, but I thought, you know, this is celebrating and so I thought I'm going to talk about what I want. And I invited my grad students here, my team, because I'm sort of giving the talk that maybe isn't like, maybe I wish someone would have given me before I went on to my academic journey. And so I think we'll hit some of the stuff that Maria wanted us to talk about, but it's definitely going to be a little different than the others. The first thing I want to say is that well, this is a road in Door County. And this is sort of what my career path has looked like. It was never a I know where I'm going. I know exactly what I'm going to do. It's more like, oh, this seems really interesting. And this seems really interesting. And along the way, I'm still going. And I think the thing I want to point out now is I still don't totally know where I'm going to go. And so I think as Ed said, I graduate my PhD in 2012. I post-doc for a while. I was a visiting assistant professor. And then I started my tenure track in 2016. So a little bit about me and I think that'll kind of help understand why maybe I wasn't always one to the other is that I have four kids. And I really never heard of anybody being a professor or a tenure tracker successful that had a family. And I don't know, there's actually some research on women faculty members who are at R1 institutions. And the vast majority of them with children are divorced. I think they've done a study. I saw one study that almost all women in tenure track positions in the state of California who were still married well who weren't divorced either had never been married or didn't have children maybe their husband didn't. So I have always been very aware that I want to keep my family together. And being a professor was very overwhelming because I you know we see a lot of examples and surely obviously I mean I want to be clear like I am successful as Ed mentioned I've been on the leadership of over 50 million dollars in external awards. I'm an NSF career award winning awardee but I want you to know that everybody deserves a life outside of being a professor and so that's what I'm going to kind of talk a little bit about because maybe you don't have four kids but you have something besides just your work. And so there are my four kids. We went to a Reds game. My husband's there at the end. I have two dogs. You can see I really like hiking and my four kids now that they're three of the four teenagers they don't always cooperate. So if I'm going to get their picture it's their back sides you know and there's my research team right now and you notice I take them hiking also and they're way more cooperative. And so I'm going to give you Carrie's rules for being a professor. So the first rule is to be a person and yes I know but this is why you all came because you don't know when your pictures are going to show up. So it's never like I am never too busy to be kind and whether that's the staff that we interact with you know the people that help us get our you know in the business office our account managers the cleaning folks our colleagues grad students undergrads like we're never too busy to be kind and be a person because they all have other stuff too. In terms of like being a person to family and friends like we have to show up still like our family still needs us you know and so along the way well I'm pursuing all the stuff that Carrie does there's still life happening right like and so it's important to be part of it. So being present in the moments that really matter so that one picture there with my four kids was you know a first day of school there's a picture of my husband driving us back from the Taylor Swift concert this summer I'm passed out and yes I worked you know like I work late before we go somewhere but that's one of the cool things about our job is that you know we are flexible and so I can make the time to do what I want to do. The chair there is my husband's grandmother she has Alzheimer's and we bring her meals a few times a week her and her husband right before the pandemic we help them move to the West Lafayette area and so recently I took her to get a manicure and pedicure and when she was in there she looked at me and she said if I were a cat I would purr like this is just moments you don't get back so okay I've already used five minutes telling you but so yeah being there and being present and the other is I'm a person to myself like okay so apart from all my roles in life and the things I do for people I have to take care of me too and so I need rest I need to exercise and I'm more than what I do as a professor like okay next rule is to be stubborn and about what you really want and yes my husband would say I'm a stubborn as a jackass sometimes but my point about this is sort of what others have said is I have been rejected a lot. I submitted like three applications to Purdue 10 year track positions and like didn't even get a phone call. I made it was on my third application for the NSF career award that it finally went through and so I think the big difference between a lot of people and what gets them certain is like how do you deal with no and how do you deal with rejection and like I take the no as a challenge like you don't think I'm good enough I'm gonna show you wrong and gets a little chip on my shoulder I'll be but I use it to propel me forward. The third rule is to commit to others success and there's an African proverb that says if you want to go fast go alone if you want to go far go together. The problems we're working on if they actually matter they need more than just me to help solve them and so I want to give to other people and their success because they should work on those problems too so you can see here oh different students we've been to Sweden we've like one student there he left to get a job at Google and he started making way more money than me and so like what their success is is different you know not everybody's gonna be a carry. My student Lara Cruz my former she's now at University of Florida and her and her colleagues this year won best conference paper for American Society of Engineering Education for all best conference paper. I've won lots of not lots I've won my share of division best papers but she got the whole conference best paper I'm so proud of her I could go on and on at their successes also being committed to my colleagues success like it's not just about me so here you can see that I'm like was leading a workshop with scale and we had faculty from 19 institutions and they're coming together and I'm the associate professor and I'm gonna point out like in that one picture right there he's the ECE head at University of Florida like still working and helping other people be successful even though like I'm junior you know like it's not just about me again if the problems were working on it needs more than me to solve them. The other ones like folks from Vanderbilt and just for time I'm gonna move it along and the other is like is knowing who's committed to you so I am not a superwoman is my 13 year old daughter responded don't worry mom no one thought you were but the only like the way that I am able to do all this with four kids is because I am really supported so you know well I'm out traveling or giving talks my husband's waiting online to pick the kids up from school you know or he's the one like you can see like he's out there playing ball with our daughter and so whether you have a partner or not like you need community and you need people that will support you and help you because you are more than your job so and that's my daughter you can see when I was winning an award she came and they came she wasn't totally thrilled it was the only time though I'll say that I saw someone making fun of Meng while he was speaking. And my colleagues obviously also and so like Heidi Diefas-Dukes when I was a visiting assistant professor she helped me write NSF proposal on my research area and so I was able to be the lead PI as a VAP and it was funded at $800,000 so that's part of my being stubborn like if you keep getting told no you show I can bring in the money you'll look at me now. And other colleagues Julie Martin is actually my mentor one of my mentors Ed connected with Julie and well did you know that she's like a sister to me now and there's Shani Perzer and Tamara Moore some of you might know Stephanie Masta and then the fifth rule in my last one is to enjoy the ride we get to do a lot of really cool stuff and go really cool places so these are all things I've done while on work trips we had to go to DC to go to an NSF thing my husband and her and her like our husband joined us and then that night we did a cruise on the Delaware Bay you know they're in Sweden I had to go to UPSLA for a conference I got tea like the afternoon tea in London we've got pretty cool jobs they give us a lot of neat experiences and so with all the you know things that you should be doing I think it's important to say like enjoy it too oh and there's my students they're also part of the enjoyment do you see that souvenir sign probably the best souvenir shop in town I love that I love seeing the different cultures but that's my so thank you thanks for bringing me okay we have a moment or two for questions thank you very much you know one of the when we mentor our younger colleagues a sort of a complaint that I fearly hear quite often is how to do work-life balance because they feel they're working 24-7 and don't have a life but you focus on the fact that you are not just a professor there's a lot more to life than just being a professor what advice would you have for me to convey to these people well there's actually I mean so there well there's books you could give but what like there's the book rest actually the person goes through and talks about different research on when people's brains rest they become more creative like when we are working all the time like how like we're in it we're not actually taking that break and letting that you know our brains work on it passively you know like when you sleep your brain keeps working so I mean it's hard like with I think getting I think the norm the mentality is sort of like if you're not working you know 80 hours a week then you're not going to be successful or something but you know actually it was him I forgot to mention it but I had the Galileo's daughter book up there and the reason is that I don't know if you all know this but Galileo he never married but they did have three children and when he was at his university post he moved his very radically moved his family to a house near campus and his colleagues told him you can't be an academic and have a family and so this message like I read that early on actually I read it in one of my kids books it was who was Galileo but that message has been there and sort of ingrained in the system that's part of why I wanted to give the talk is I think people don't see examples of successful researchers who have an identity besides being a professor. Thank you. So you know that the you talked about one stage of the career of one's life where you know the work life balance with the family and then once you have those people gone that are distracted you enjoy a totally different life and have other challenges and in fact you fall off the end and say oh now I can work all the time and don't have any distractions but when you mentioned this you know I, Wayne and I have shared you know the same kind of the same position in recent years what could we as administrators do or have done could we have done beyond the obvious of not having meetings after five o'clock what kind of deeper thing might we be able to do to promote not for women and for men who have families to promote better work life balance and make it possible for them. I think about a lot it's a tough question I don't think there's one single answer I think their culture communicates as much as any policy you know so maybe you might not ever ask me to have a meeting after five o'clock but trust me I get like it's hard to say no and after a while you start thinking like I'm you know I don't want anybody to think I'm not capable or you know I think earlier in my career I just almost never talked about my kids or my family at all because I didn't want that to be seen as a weakness and so that's how I sort of now I'm making it my mission to be more transparent and say like you know you can do this it's not because I can do it all on my own but you know again like I my husband is fully hands on way more than me but there's a culture I think it's a culture thing and people need to be more willing to talk about the other things and like you said not everyone is going to have you know my like how I spend my out of work time is my family but maybe you want to do the roller derby you know or actually met a professor who she does do roller derby so that's you know or other things right like we need other parts of our life and yeah so I think it's hard because it's so the culture is so pervasive we certainly don't give points and as we move forward promotion and tenure for what you do outside right it's a totally unbalanced kind of evaluation in that respect right and I know people who no offense guys my like I said I'm not sexist because my husband really does take care of the kids most of the time but at the same time I know of colleagues who used their parental leave to get more done for their research and so again like when we're talking about equity and how women you know like oh well this person's on parental leave or on family leave look at all that he got done this year and you know if you compared that to a woman who had a baby and was at home nursing and all of that like it doesn't compare the same so I think because I always felt it I think it made me feel like I had I had to be more and when you're younger you can stay up all night like I could put the kids to bed and then I could do my research and then the older I get that's harder so now it's more like you know okay I need to make time to still be a wife I need to make time to show up for my kids and my other family because I mean in the end they matter sorry like they matter more than like probably Purdue not probably they matter more than Purdue because you know they're the ones with me the whole way through and I don't even like the phrase work life balance actually because because it's my whole life I don't have to figure out how the whole thing works it's not I'm working I'm not like I think it's you know what I have to make the whole thing work like I'm alive when I'm at work and chances are I'm probably thinking something about work when I'm living yeah and I think our creativity depends on our ability to do other things besides just work and I think we have to be better examples for our graduate students yeah a lot of them say things like they don't they're afraid of being tenure track professors because they see how busy we all are and we do model like what it what it takes to be successful beautiful stories and your success your failure and your and show us how to be a complete package we really appreciate that so before we wrap it up we're very happy our Dean is get out from meeting with provost and join us and now thank you everyone and just my apologies for not being here at the very start but you know since here congratulations to all the faculty who are featured here today getting hired into Purdue is not a given it's extremely hard going through an assistant professor tenure track and getting an associate professor is as hard it doesn't it doesn't get easier right so this is a tremendous achievement and so the first thing we want to do with this series is to congratulate our faculty who have been promoted it's not it's not and you heard the last example all those stages getting in was hard once in succeeding was hard right it's very hard to see that so that's really important second thing we wanted to highlight was kind of use the chance for faculty to reflect upon decisions and many kind of things you heard from these faculty are key to other assistant professors to PhDs and postdocs in the audience who are saying hey maybe I want to take that next step but the idea is really that we share best practices what worked what didn't work so we don't burn ourselves down you know out when we're trying to do these kind of tenure track positions in the future how to succeed in the best way possible is the question right so you heard great wisdom on that and the third opportunity here we hope is that when you heard these faculty you had a chance to see what great stuff they're working on and you have chance to collaborate with them and I do hope in fact it has happened in the past that many of the colleagues attending this meeting reach out to the faculty who have just made the presentation I didn't know you worked on that and hey that starts a research collaboration so those are the three things we're kind of celebrating this series thank you all for coming I think this is the last one we have we have one more this year on November 29th right so yeah same place same time so please be sure to be here for that thank you all for coming appreciate it