Jessica Cail
Interview Posted By: Ashley Smith
1. Can you tell us a little about your background? i.e. Where you grew up, what education do you have, a summary of your resume, did you always want to do what you are doing now, when did you start to become interested in STEM, what internships/ volunteering
My path into STEM is more like a trail into the woods than a straight highway to a goal! I grew up in rural Maine, but I was lucky enough to go to an excellent public school with a heavy college preparatory track, which included plenty of math and science. In fact, as seniors we had 2 hours of chemistry every day! Although I was completely NOT interested in it because I wanted to be a writer (creative, advertising or journalism). Yet, somehow I was shocked to be awarded the top English and the top chemistry student at graduation that year! I still have no idea how that happened - but I still didn't see it coming.
For college, I was accepted into Boston University's College of Communication to study journalism. The program required students to take a certain number of liberal arts courses to give us a broad knowledge of the world and make us better writers. I took a lot of psychology classes, and stumbled into a physiological psychology course. Although I loved the topic, the course felt SO hard, with all the Latin and Greek anatomy, and my first time reading actual journal articles (rather than textbooks). It was like a whole new language, and to be honest, I got some bad grades before I started to figure out how to study in the sciences. However, I was hooked on the topic, and by the time I graduated with my B.S. in journalism, I had decided that I would perhaps be a science writer. Since the news was saying the 90's were going to be the "Decade of the Brain", I decided to get a Master's degree in psychology, with a focus in neurosciences, to make me a better science writer. By the time I finished my Master's degree, I realized that I no longer wanted to cover other people's news...I wanted to do my own research and cover it myself. I stayed at BU and was accepted into their doctoral program in Brain, Behavior and Cognition - earning a PhD in experimental psychology, specializing in behavioral medicine and addiction.
People often ask me how I could make such a huge leap from journalism to science. I tell them that the traits needed for both careers are really very similar: curiosity, objectivity, tenacity, logic, and the ability to write clearly and concisely. In truth, my road into STEM was not a conscious one. For the longest time I didn't even consider science as a possible career. I was an athlete, and a hard-hitting investigative journalist. I wasn't interested in being a brainy geek in a white lab coat surrounded by test tubes. I guess I just needed to reach a critical mass of the right teachers, exposing me to the right sciences, to make me see that I’d always been a scientist. On that note, I’d like to thank my high school chemistry teacher Mark Wicks and my college bio psychology professor Dr. Jacqueline Liederman for leading me in a direction I didn't know I wanted to go.
2. What exactly IS your job? What do you do on a day to day basis?
I’m a visiting professor at Pepperdine University. I teach a variety of courses, ranging from bio psychology and psycho pharmacology, to learning and behavior, to research methods and statistics. I usually teach 14-16 hours a week, hold office hours, and spend the rest of my time grading a LOT of papers and exams. Being a visiting professor means that I teach a full-load , and am guaranteed a full year of classes and medical insurance, but they make no promises of a job after that.
I don’t want to scare anyone away from the field, but I feel I should be honest in noting that more than 50% of PhD level university professors are temporary or adjuncts. These positions are cheaper for the schools because they don’t offer medical insurance, and they don’t have to pay the salary of a tenure track professor. According to the American Association of University Professors, the average salary for an adjunct professor is $21k per year, and you have to scramble between multiple colleges to cobble together a full teaching load of 8 classes per year. Furthermore, all those hours scrambling from job to job makes it very hard to find time to actually DO any scientific research and write articles. This means that just making a living is getting you further and further behind in your publication rate, making it less and less likely that you will ever break out of the adjunct role. Meanwhile, the tenure track professors make $60-100k and teach only 5 classes a year, giving them plenty of time for grant-writing, research and publication.
3. How does STEM relate to your job? How do you use the information you learned from your degree in your job?
I’m teaching courses in the exact fields I studied in grad school, and am trying to get a research program going in behavioral health and drug/alcohol use. I also use my journalism degree to write articles for scientific journals, so I guess you could say that I am doing precisely what I was trained to do my whole life!
4. Have you faced any discrimination/ challenges being a woman in a stem field? If so, how did you deal with it? Do you have any advice for up and coming women in STEM?
No, but my branch of science puts me in the psychology department, which tends to have more women in it than other STEM fields. I consider myself lucky for that. As for up and coming women, I try very hard to be a good example of a woman in science. On an academic level, in my classes I try to make science interesting, fun, relevant, and accessible. On a personal level, I try to show that scientists are not all nerdy boring geeks in white lab coats, I am adventurous, athletic, (I do stunt work on the side! See www.jesscail.com). I hope when students think of a scientist in the future, they think of me, and all the stereotypes fall away. The fact that I happen to be a woman blasting that stereotype is a bonus.
5. What is the best and worst part of your job? What do you look forward to in your job on a day to day basis? What do you wish you could change?
My favorite thing about my career is that is it always changing! I like a lot of movement and variety in my life, and teaching, lab work, writing, are always changing - both in hours and in thinking. Sometimes you have to get up early (yuk), sometimes you have no classes before noon (yay!), sometimes you work until 4am grading papers. Sometimes you go out and see the midnight opening of Avengers on a Wed night. Work, learn, play, learn more...repeat. Academia is never a dull 9 to 5 life! The only thing that would make it better would be to get a permanent tenure-track position somewhere. While I like variety in most areas of my life, job security is not one of them.
I should mention that, like science, absolutely nothing drew me to teaching. I had the WORST fear of public speaking you have ever seen, all the way through my Master's program. If I sat in on the first day of class and the syllabus showed that there was a public presentation in the course, I walked out and dropped the class. Case closed. The one time I had to speak was in my psycho pharmacology class (my favorite subject, and my research major, so I couldn't drop it!) and I had to take medication (beta adrenergic blockers - stage fright drugs) to make it through! I did fine, but I swore I would never do that again. Later, when I was accepted into the research PhD program with funding (meaning, they paid my tuition and gave me a salary to live on in exchange for work) I figured I would be working in a lab as a research fellow. No,it was a teachin fellowship! <cue scary music here>. I couldn't drop a whole scholarship! I was stuck teaching 4 hours of Intro Statistics every week. OMG! At 8am. Noooooo! And even worse?... I'd never even taken statistics before! (they had forgotten that I'd come from a journalism background and didn't have all the same prerequisites). OMG OMG OMG. I'm freaking out!
Long story short, I survived the class and the students liked me so much that they brought me gifts (after grades were in, no bribery here!). They wrote me amazing letters saying, "Thank you for teaching math so clearly and simply!" and "This is the first time I've ever been able to understand math" and "You actually made statistics fun!". Whoa. The general consensus was that I was good because I taught it as if I understood their struggle through the material. Ha! Now you know the secret of WHY this was the case: Because I was teaching myself the material at the same time, sometimes less than a week ahead of my own students! Ooof. I never want to go through that again...
6. How do you balance your work and personal life? Any secrets or advice you’d like to share?
A strongly believe in the importance of play. This is why I do stunts and circus work on the side (see my website). I like bouncing back and forth between the cerebral sciences and the physical arts. Getting outside my head and into my body once in a while keeps me sane, happy, and healthy, all of which make my teaching and science better.
7. What do you define success as?
Academic science is going to be a very tough road if your definition of success is tenure, an R01 grant, and a six figure salary. While those things would be nice, my goal is the same as it’s been since I was18 years old: To investigate and uncover the truth and reach as many people with those facts as possible. Journalist, scientist, or professor, my definition of success has remained the same.
8. What do you think is the best advice you've ever received ? What advice would you give your younger self if you had the chance? What’s one piece of advice you can pass on to us?
My favorite quotation (the one at the bottom of my personal emails for the last 10 years) is “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage” - Anais Nin. I think this is true for anything you want to pursue in life. Do your best to prepare for life’s challenges, but don’t be afraid to follow to opportunities that open to you. If you went back in time and told high-school me that I would someday be a brain scientist and professor, lecturing to huge classes of 250 students, and doing stunt-work on the side, I never would have believed you. But here I am.
My path into STEM is more like a trail into the woods than a straight highway to a goal! I grew up in rural Maine, but I was lucky enough to go to an excellent public school with a heavy college preparatory track, which included plenty of math and science. In fact, as seniors we had 2 hours of chemistry every day! Although I was completely NOT interested in it because I wanted to be a writer (creative, advertising or journalism). Yet, somehow I was shocked to be awarded the top English and the top chemistry student at graduation that year! I still have no idea how that happened - but I still didn't see it coming.
For college, I was accepted into Boston University's College of Communication to study journalism. The program required students to take a certain number of liberal arts courses to give us a broad knowledge of the world and make us better writers. I took a lot of psychology classes, and stumbled into a physiological psychology course. Although I loved the topic, the course felt SO hard, with all the Latin and Greek anatomy, and my first time reading actual journal articles (rather than textbooks). It was like a whole new language, and to be honest, I got some bad grades before I started to figure out how to study in the sciences. However, I was hooked on the topic, and by the time I graduated with my B.S. in journalism, I had decided that I would perhaps be a science writer. Since the news was saying the 90's were going to be the "Decade of the Brain", I decided to get a Master's degree in psychology, with a focus in neurosciences, to make me a better science writer. By the time I finished my Master's degree, I realized that I no longer wanted to cover other people's news...I wanted to do my own research and cover it myself. I stayed at BU and was accepted into their doctoral program in Brain, Behavior and Cognition - earning a PhD in experimental psychology, specializing in behavioral medicine and addiction.
People often ask me how I could make such a huge leap from journalism to science. I tell them that the traits needed for both careers are really very similar: curiosity, objectivity, tenacity, logic, and the ability to write clearly and concisely. In truth, my road into STEM was not a conscious one. For the longest time I didn't even consider science as a possible career. I was an athlete, and a hard-hitting investigative journalist. I wasn't interested in being a brainy geek in a white lab coat surrounded by test tubes. I guess I just needed to reach a critical mass of the right teachers, exposing me to the right sciences, to make me see that I’d always been a scientist. On that note, I’d like to thank my high school chemistry teacher Mark Wicks and my college bio psychology professor Dr. Jacqueline Liederman for leading me in a direction I didn't know I wanted to go.
2. What exactly IS your job? What do you do on a day to day basis?
I’m a visiting professor at Pepperdine University. I teach a variety of courses, ranging from bio psychology and psycho pharmacology, to learning and behavior, to research methods and statistics. I usually teach 14-16 hours a week, hold office hours, and spend the rest of my time grading a LOT of papers and exams. Being a visiting professor means that I teach a full-load , and am guaranteed a full year of classes and medical insurance, but they make no promises of a job after that.
I don’t want to scare anyone away from the field, but I feel I should be honest in noting that more than 50% of PhD level university professors are temporary or adjuncts. These positions are cheaper for the schools because they don’t offer medical insurance, and they don’t have to pay the salary of a tenure track professor. According to the American Association of University Professors, the average salary for an adjunct professor is $21k per year, and you have to scramble between multiple colleges to cobble together a full teaching load of 8 classes per year. Furthermore, all those hours scrambling from job to job makes it very hard to find time to actually DO any scientific research and write articles. This means that just making a living is getting you further and further behind in your publication rate, making it less and less likely that you will ever break out of the adjunct role. Meanwhile, the tenure track professors make $60-100k and teach only 5 classes a year, giving them plenty of time for grant-writing, research and publication.
3. How does STEM relate to your job? How do you use the information you learned from your degree in your job?
I’m teaching courses in the exact fields I studied in grad school, and am trying to get a research program going in behavioral health and drug/alcohol use. I also use my journalism degree to write articles for scientific journals, so I guess you could say that I am doing precisely what I was trained to do my whole life!
4. Have you faced any discrimination/ challenges being a woman in a stem field? If so, how did you deal with it? Do you have any advice for up and coming women in STEM?
No, but my branch of science puts me in the psychology department, which tends to have more women in it than other STEM fields. I consider myself lucky for that. As for up and coming women, I try very hard to be a good example of a woman in science. On an academic level, in my classes I try to make science interesting, fun, relevant, and accessible. On a personal level, I try to show that scientists are not all nerdy boring geeks in white lab coats, I am adventurous, athletic, (I do stunt work on the side! See www.jesscail.com). I hope when students think of a scientist in the future, they think of me, and all the stereotypes fall away. The fact that I happen to be a woman blasting that stereotype is a bonus.
5. What is the best and worst part of your job? What do you look forward to in your job on a day to day basis? What do you wish you could change?
My favorite thing about my career is that is it always changing! I like a lot of movement and variety in my life, and teaching, lab work, writing, are always changing - both in hours and in thinking. Sometimes you have to get up early (yuk), sometimes you have no classes before noon (yay!), sometimes you work until 4am grading papers. Sometimes you go out and see the midnight opening of Avengers on a Wed night. Work, learn, play, learn more...repeat. Academia is never a dull 9 to 5 life! The only thing that would make it better would be to get a permanent tenure-track position somewhere. While I like variety in most areas of my life, job security is not one of them.
I should mention that, like science, absolutely nothing drew me to teaching. I had the WORST fear of public speaking you have ever seen, all the way through my Master's program. If I sat in on the first day of class and the syllabus showed that there was a public presentation in the course, I walked out and dropped the class. Case closed. The one time I had to speak was in my psycho pharmacology class (my favorite subject, and my research major, so I couldn't drop it!) and I had to take medication (beta adrenergic blockers - stage fright drugs) to make it through! I did fine, but I swore I would never do that again. Later, when I was accepted into the research PhD program with funding (meaning, they paid my tuition and gave me a salary to live on in exchange for work) I figured I would be working in a lab as a research fellow. No,it was a teachin fellowship! <cue scary music here>. I couldn't drop a whole scholarship! I was stuck teaching 4 hours of Intro Statistics every week. OMG! At 8am. Noooooo! And even worse?... I'd never even taken statistics before! (they had forgotten that I'd come from a journalism background and didn't have all the same prerequisites). OMG OMG OMG. I'm freaking out!
Long story short, I survived the class and the students liked me so much that they brought me gifts (after grades were in, no bribery here!). They wrote me amazing letters saying, "Thank you for teaching math so clearly and simply!" and "This is the first time I've ever been able to understand math" and "You actually made statistics fun!". Whoa. The general consensus was that I was good because I taught it as if I understood their struggle through the material. Ha! Now you know the secret of WHY this was the case: Because I was teaching myself the material at the same time, sometimes less than a week ahead of my own students! Ooof. I never want to go through that again...
6. How do you balance your work and personal life? Any secrets or advice you’d like to share?
A strongly believe in the importance of play. This is why I do stunts and circus work on the side (see my website). I like bouncing back and forth between the cerebral sciences and the physical arts. Getting outside my head and into my body once in a while keeps me sane, happy, and healthy, all of which make my teaching and science better.
7. What do you define success as?
Academic science is going to be a very tough road if your definition of success is tenure, an R01 grant, and a six figure salary. While those things would be nice, my goal is the same as it’s been since I was18 years old: To investigate and uncover the truth and reach as many people with those facts as possible. Journalist, scientist, or professor, my definition of success has remained the same.
8. What do you think is the best advice you've ever received ? What advice would you give your younger self if you had the chance? What’s one piece of advice you can pass on to us?
My favorite quotation (the one at the bottom of my personal emails for the last 10 years) is “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage” - Anais Nin. I think this is true for anything you want to pursue in life. Do your best to prepare for life’s challenges, but don’t be afraid to follow to opportunities that open to you. If you went back in time and told high-school me that I would someday be a brain scientist and professor, lecturing to huge classes of 250 students, and doing stunt-work on the side, I never would have believed you. But here I am.