The last month has been the hardest I've faced in my professional life. Today, our dear colleague Hans Ave Lallemant, passed away peacefully after a rapid decline in his health over the last several days. And last week, we learned that one of our former undergrads died in a horrific car accident, Anita Mantri. Hans was the force that upheld field geology in our department for a long time. He and his wife Maryjo opened up their doors to me when I arrived to Rice as an assistant professor. And then shortly after I arrived, I met Anita Mantri, who was a student in my ESCI 322 class. I remember her as being incredibly positive, always smiling, always interested in geology. Her interests were very different though from the typical student. She wanted to do space medicine, so she was simultaneously interested in planetary science as well as medicine.
Over the years, I have evolved from a young assistant professor, whose primary goal at the time was simply to build up my own career. But very soon, one begins to realize that one's role starts to change. With time, one realizes that one's role is also about mentoring students and helping the next generation. And I think, after 14 years, and now becoming chair of the department, I have come to my full evolution. Now, more than ever, the most important thing to me is not so much my career but make sure that I take care of all our people, students to faculty.
And this weekend was hard. I had to announce the passing away of two of our colleagues, while at the same time, celebrating my little boy's birthday. You want to take the time to gather your thoughts, but you have to compartmentalize things because you really don't have the time to fully gather your thoughts. There are other things going around you that cannot stop. You cannot stop if others depend on you. There are many worlds operating in parallel, some intersecting, some not, and if you were to stop, there would be a cascade of effects.
You cannot cancel classes, faculty meetings, projects on deadlines, etc. Little did my students know today that my lecture on crystal growth and nucleation theory was prepared only an hour before the class. What you learn is that you have to be very efficient in everything one does.
But I have learned much in the few months I have been chair. Perhaps the greatest challenge of all is developing a vision and persuading people to embrace it and participate in shaping it. When you want to build something big, you have to dream, but if you dream too much, it may look impractical or unrealistic. And if you don't dream, it's not really worth pursuing. How do you balance realism with lofty thinking? And when all the people that one needs to bring on board have very different experiences and personalities. There are optimists and pessimists. There are big picture and detail personalities. So I'm constantly being drawn back and forth between different views. There is the pressure to build consensus, but to do it by trying to fit everyone's interests only serves to dilute the mission. I have seen far too many big ideas fail simply because one tried to make everybody happy. But I've also seen the opposite, where one person pushes a vision too far, without buy-in. That fails too. On some days, I feel that we've made significant progress. But on others, it's a step back. This usually happens when I try to communicate part of an idea in a way that gets misinterpreted. I have learned that one must choose their words very carefully. One must take great care in making sure the message is as perfect as it can be. But at the same time, if it's too perfect, you alienate people because it looks like a done deal.
If there's anything I've learned, it's that if you want to do something big, you have to build consensus by persuasion. And 90% of it is about working with people, respecting them, listening to them, and understanding them. Faculty meetings are insufficient. You have to meet with each person individually. There's a lot more you can accomplish by one on one discussions with people because this is where you can really start to understand each person's motivations. These one-on-one discussions are critical to having a successful faculty meeting because by the time faculty come to the meeting, they have already been thinking about things and there are hopefully no surprises. There is nothing worse than being surprised at a faculty meeting. The faculty don't want to be surprised and the chair does not want to be surprised. There is nothing worse than feeling that you were not part of the discussion. I cannot say that I have mastered this, but I am trying. What I do know is that meeting with faculty, staff, students, individually is incredibly time consuming. And while I enjoy it, if you don't do it properly, you will sink yourself. So sometimes I try to meet in groups, sometimes I work with a few faculty and have them spread out to chat with others.
I have also learned that sometimes one has to be a little forceful when it comes to persuasion. It is about selling a vision and convincing others that we have to do this, that if work together, we will all benefit. You may not exactly get that thing you wanted for your lab, but in the long term, everyone will rise with the future improvements. So sometimes, if there is some cynicism, you as the chair just have to over-ride that. You have to be an endless source of optimism and positivity, because if you don't, you will stop dead in your tracks the moment your peers are giving up hope. So sometimes you have to act a little bit alone. Believe in yourself enough to take that risk. Don't waste time with a faculty meeting trying to build a consensus that might never happen. Just do it. Sometimes we don't know what it is we want until we see it. So sometimes the job of the chair is to build that something that nobody even knew was possible. No amount of sitting around discussing things will move you in that direction, so you just have to act. It is of course a delicate balance between acting alone and working closely with the faculty.
I will try to talk about science in my next post. Kinetics of crystal growth, emergence of continents, and more!
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