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livHello, welcome everybody from the friending meme! I realize I haven't actually created an About Me post in at least a decade, so I should give some background.
I'm a cis woman aged 45. I spent my childhood in SE England and I'm now back here, having travelled around quite a lot in my 20s. From my teens to mid 40s, I was trying to build a career as a cancer researcher, which is the reason for travelling around. In some ways I was academically successful: First from Oxford, PhD in a very prestigious lab in Scotland, post-doc in an internationally famous institution in Sweden, and tenured before I was 30, with a job that was 50% teaching medical school and 50% running a lab in the Midlands of England. But it turns out that the skills that make you good at being a student are not necessarily the same as the skills that make you successful as an academic – I am particularly bad at persuading people to give me money to do my research, and molecular biology is expensive, you can't just sit in a library and think while you're waiting for a grant.
In 2008, while living in Sweden, I got into what was supposed to be a casual, long-distance relationship withjack. By 2010 we were engaged and I searched for, and found, an academic post in England to be a bit nearer to him, though we were still long distance even if not international. We married in 2012, on Leap Day so we have only had three actual anniversaries in 12 years. In 2014 we got together with another couple, ghoti_mhic_uait and cjwatson. I was increasingly unhappy in my job, because I was stuck in a vicious circle of not having any grant money, so not being given any resources (even really basic things like research time and lab space), so not being able to get any publications or grants. The medical school would have rescued me if I'd chosen it; I could have moved into a teaching-focused job and given up on the research, and I was tempted, because I really enjoy teaching med students, but it wasn't worth being 150 miles away from my partners and spending half my weekend commuting.
So I very slowly extracted myself from traditional academia. In 2017 I moved back to Cambridge full time to live with my husband and close to our Other Significant Others (OSOs, for short). I worked as an education researcher and developer at a post-92 university for a few years. Then I got a completely ideal job as online education manager for an organization that runs professional training in genomics, which gave me my first ever decent salary and job security and really used my skills in both biology and education to do something extremely worthwhile. Then the global pandemic hit, which in a way did wonders for my career: suddenly online education in gene sequencing was the absolute hotness, and I got to work on some really significant international projects related to tackling Covid.
However. I have always been a religiously committed Reform Jew, and when my scientific career took me to places with dwindling or newly started Jewish communities, I found myself volunteering with them. Leading services, teaching children and adults, and helping said communities to be more firmly established. I was 21 the first time I was the only competent person in a tiny Orthodox (!) synagogue. And the more I did this the more I built up my skills. Lots of people wondered why I wasn't a rabbi. Well, partly because being a rabbi is an even worse career prospect than academia, but mainly because my husband isn't Jewish. Until very recently it wasn't possible to train as a rabbi with a non-Jewish spouse, and I'm in a polyamorous relationship with several non-Jews. I was made aware in 2019 that that restriction was no longer in place, but I didn't do anything about it at the time because there was a global pandemic and my partners had a baby and I had just started the cool online education job.
Exactly a year ago, I started training as a rabbi at the joint seminary (Liberal, Reform and Masorti) in London. I split my time between a very full class load here in London, and weekends either working with communities – doing what I've always done, but this time in an official, and importantly paid, capacity – or spending time with my husband and partners. My husband and I are childfree, and our OSOs have four children aged 25, 15, 12 and 4. I'm not their mother, but I'm also more than just a family friend to the younger three (the oldest was 15 when I started dating his parents and we get on pretty well, but I'm not a big part of his life in the same way.)
Oh yes, and I conducted most of my social life through LiveJournal from 2003 to 2009, and here on DW from 2009 to now. So that's more than 20 years of blogging. I don't post or comment here as regularly as I'd like but it's very much my online home.
TL;DR: Mid 40s, former scientist and education specialist, now student rabbi. Bi, polyamorous Reform Jewish woman, alloparent to 3 children.
I'm a cis woman aged 45. I spent my childhood in SE England and I'm now back here, having travelled around quite a lot in my 20s. From my teens to mid 40s, I was trying to build a career as a cancer researcher, which is the reason for travelling around. In some ways I was academically successful: First from Oxford, PhD in a very prestigious lab in Scotland, post-doc in an internationally famous institution in Sweden, and tenured before I was 30, with a job that was 50% teaching medical school and 50% running a lab in the Midlands of England. But it turns out that the skills that make you good at being a student are not necessarily the same as the skills that make you successful as an academic – I am particularly bad at persuading people to give me money to do my research, and molecular biology is expensive, you can't just sit in a library and think while you're waiting for a grant.
In 2008, while living in Sweden, I got into what was supposed to be a casual, long-distance relationship with
jack. By 2010 we were engaged and I searched for, and found, an academic post in England to be a bit nearer to him, though we were still long distance even if not international. We married in 2012, on Leap Day so we have only had three actual anniversaries in 12 years. In 2014 we got together with another couple, ghoti_mhic_uait and cjwatson. I was increasingly unhappy in my job, because I was stuck in a vicious circle of not having any grant money, so not being given any resources (even really basic things like research time and lab space), so not being able to get any publications or grants. The medical school would have rescued me if I'd chosen it; I could have moved into a teaching-focused job and given up on the research, and I was tempted, because I really enjoy teaching med students, but it wasn't worth being 150 miles away from my partners and spending half my weekend commuting. So I very slowly extracted myself from traditional academia. In 2017 I moved back to Cambridge full time to live with my husband and close to our Other Significant Others (OSOs, for short). I worked as an education researcher and developer at a post-92 university for a few years. Then I got a completely ideal job as online education manager for an organization that runs professional training in genomics, which gave me my first ever decent salary and job security and really used my skills in both biology and education to do something extremely worthwhile. Then the global pandemic hit, which in a way did wonders for my career: suddenly online education in gene sequencing was the absolute hotness, and I got to work on some really significant international projects related to tackling Covid.
However. I have always been a religiously committed Reform Jew, and when my scientific career took me to places with dwindling or newly started Jewish communities, I found myself volunteering with them. Leading services, teaching children and adults, and helping said communities to be more firmly established. I was 21 the first time I was the only competent person in a tiny Orthodox (!) synagogue. And the more I did this the more I built up my skills. Lots of people wondered why I wasn't a rabbi. Well, partly because being a rabbi is an even worse career prospect than academia, but mainly because my husband isn't Jewish. Until very recently it wasn't possible to train as a rabbi with a non-Jewish spouse, and I'm in a polyamorous relationship with several non-Jews. I was made aware in 2019 that that restriction was no longer in place, but I didn't do anything about it at the time because there was a global pandemic and my partners had a baby and I had just started the cool online education job.
Exactly a year ago, I started training as a rabbi at the joint seminary (Liberal, Reform and Masorti) in London. I split my time between a very full class load here in London, and weekends either working with communities – doing what I've always done, but this time in an official, and importantly paid, capacity – or spending time with my husband and partners. My husband and I are childfree, and our OSOs have four children aged 25, 15, 12 and 4. I'm not their mother, but I'm also more than just a family friend to the younger three (the oldest was 15 when I started dating his parents and we get on pretty well, but I'm not a big part of his life in the same way.)
Oh yes, and I conducted most of my social life through LiveJournal from 2003 to 2009, and here on DW from 2009 to now. So that's more than 20 years of blogging. I don't post or comment here as regularly as I'd like but it's very much my online home.
TL;DR: Mid 40s, former scientist and education specialist, now student rabbi. Bi, polyamorous Reform Jewish woman, alloparent to 3 children.
