Almost two years ago, the then rector Rianne Letschert kicked the series off with a story about her ‘unofficial’ career path. Roughly ten editions later, it was her successor Pamela Habibović’s turn last Tuesday.
Her first ‘confession’: she never had a clearly outlined plan for her career. Although she eventually ended up doing biomedical technologies, as a teenager she actually wanted to become an anthropologist or a journalist. Nevertheless, she chose mainly science subjects in secondary school. “Not because I wanted that, but my Dutch was not good enough; I had only just arrived here with my mother and my younger sister after fleeing the Bosnian Civil War. I got on better with numbers and formulas.”
Those subjects led her to Chemical Technology at the university of applied sciences. Her plan was to pass the foundation course and then study anthropology after all, which at that point wasn’t possible with a diploma from a higher general secondary school. “Ultimately, I did complete the study. Not because I liked the subject so much, but because I felt at ease for the first time.”
As a trainee and later on as an analyst in a chemical laboratory, she became interested in research. Although she didn’t have a master’s degree, she approached the director and asked for a PhD place. “He saw my potential and gave me the opportunity. It was a great time, but also lonely: for you the research of four years means everything, for someone else it is just a project. I still try to take that into consideration when I speak to PhD candidates.”
No private life
During her two postdocs in the United States and Canada, she discovered other drawbacks of the world of science. “For example, how fierce and negative competition can be. Some people took their laptops with them when going to the toilet, because they were afraid that colleagues might see what they were working on.”
She also saw how people abused the hierarchal structure. “One supervisor used tremendous mental pressure on one of my colleagues. When he heard that she was going out on the town for the evening with friends, he quickly gave her the assignment to clean hundreds of vials in the lab. When she was finished, he threw them all in the bin. The message: forget about having a private life as a scientist.”
“I allowed all that to happen. Not because of fear, but because I thought working that hard and competition were part and parcel of it all. Now I realise that I should have said something. My advice to everyone is therefore: if you experience something that does not pass muster, speak out.”
More enjoyment
The most difficult time in her career? For Habibović, that was when she had her first child, when she had just received tenure at the University of Twente. Combining those two things was really hard for her. “At home, I felt like I was a bad mother, because I was dealing with work so much. The other way around, I thought at the university that I was a bad scientist, because I wasn’t giving it my full attention.”
What advice would Habibović give to her younger self, one of the researchers present wants to know. “Get more enjoyment out of what you are doing and take more time to do what you are doing,” was her answer. “You don’t need to prove yourself time and again and you are allowed to also say ‘no’ when someone asks you to do something. Although I don’t know if I would have listened to myself, because I thought that working hard was normal in research. While it is not always efficient. Everyone has their own qualities and way of working. So, it is important to have a discussion about what is normal in research.”