Wow. It feels like yesterday when I interviewed for my faculty position in 2011. I was straight out of my phd program and I never had any intentions on going into academics. In fact, when I started my Master's degree I also didn't have any solid plan to go beyond two years of post-graduate education. I just knew that I wanted to write. Initially I thought I wanted to be a science writer and an editor of a medical journal (without knowing that you actually had to publish a ton of your own research to do this first). While I didn't ever have the clearest long-term vision of what I wanted to do in my career, I had an amazing mentor in my graduate program who steered me into the direction of academics. I honestly did not even know what tenure was or what it would take to achieve tenure when I interviewed for my job with my soon to be chair, but I was somehow able to convince him to give me a tenure-track faculty position. I figured I would give it a try until I was no longer having fun. Early on, I thought it would be fun to chronicle my adventures and challenges throughout this process.

And yet here I am 6 years later, I just got tenure (!), and I haven't had time to write a single damn blog post. In between the 40+ grant applications, 65+ peer-reviewed papers, two kids and a dog, I have been sleep deprived for multiple years and unable to bring forward the emotional energy needed to recount my experiences.

While it's quite possible this blog will be intermittent due to the continued pressing demands of academics and motherhood, I'm going to give it a shot. There are a lot of experiences that I hope to write about here, such as:

1) How I handle gender bias in my working life

2) How NOT to travel with a child in the midst of potty-training

3) Literally the WORST way to travel with breastmilk while on a work trip

4) That time my breastpump broke while traveling at a conference and I had to take a $50 cab to find a replacement part, making it back 5 minutes before my talk in front of over 200 people. Oh, and the replacement part was NOT the problem...pump still broken!

5) The general daily ups and downs of balancing being an academic and a mom.

Hope you will stick around for the journey!