Finding the Shoe That Fits Posted on March 19, 2007 Making decisions that affect your career trajectory is not easy, says Mary Ann McCabe (bio).

I think balancing work and life is something that we could do a better job of helping young professionals with. Particularly young women who still really, I think, feel some unique tensions in how to be a parent and be successful at the same time. And at what stages to make which tradeoffs.

I think that's especially important for people who want to pursue tenure track academic work and pursue independent grants and whether to delay being a parent, whether to delay being an independently funded researcher. I don't know what the answers are. I really think they're individual for everybody. But I think it reinforces the need for us to also illustrate some alternative career paths and some ways for people to be able to sort out early in their career what they're the best at and what they like to do the most.

And I think it's easy for people to come out of graduate school believing that they want to pursue the same path as their mentors did in graduate school. That's a very common concern that even our, you know, both the trainees that I've worked with and also even our fellows talk about, and it takes a long time to sort out whether that really is the shoe that fits.

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