A new year, a new outlook?

Happy New Year everyone! May it bring you wonderful things... luck, joy, contentment, success, etc.

It turns out I was far more worried than I needed to be about telling my advisor. I received a congratulations and even a plethora of advice (on childcare, etc.)! Needless to say I hope my productivity lives up to expectations so that this positive trend of interactions continues.

Speaking of productivity, I'm wondering what will happen to my undergraduate students who I mentor in the lab when my little person is born. I was thinking of still meeting with them weekly while I'm on maternity leave, but I'm not sure if this is realistic. If I leave the baby with my husband for a couple hours between nursings, can I go into campus? Will having an episiotomy prevent me from being mobile for a couple weeks? So many questions and frankly I have no idea what's realistic to expect. Any experienced advice from other women out there is welcome. I really don't want to leave my undergrads feeling as if I've abandoned them.

I also wonder how the arrival of a new little person (/ huge part) of my life will affect my outlook on jobs, science, etc. I know so many talented, career-oriented women who stopped in their career tracks and chose to focus on their family. Is a switch going to get flipped in me too? Of course I realize I'm not suddenly going to be a maternal robot without capacity to make a rational decision, but I also assume having a child will have a very very large impact on my life outlook.

Is there really an ideal job for a female scientist who wants time with her family? Is either academia or industry better suited for this? I have mixed opinions at this time, and may post on them later.

Take a deep breath... and jump

Today is the big day, i.e., the day I tell my advisor I'm expecting (more than just data). Some potential conversation starters....

~Talk about research. Hopefully goes well. Followed by...~
Me: "So... Guess what. I'm pregnant."
Advisor: "Uh. Okay."

~Talk about research. Hopefully goes well. Followed by...~
Me: "There is one more piece of data I thought you might find interesting... I'm having a baby!"
Advisor: "Get out."

~Talk about research. Hopefully goes well. Followed by...~
Me: "Did you know data suggests a well-rounded, happy worker is a more productive worker? Speaking of rounded workers, I will be pretty round in the coming months..."
Advisor: "Are we done? I've got a meeting in 5 minutes."

~Talk about research. Hopefully goes well. Followed by...~
Me: "There was one more thing I wanted to share with you. I'm pregnant."
Advisor: "That's wonderful! Congratulations!"

Expected outcome: Unknown

Pregnant Postdoc

The cat is out of the bag...



At least to you guys. Is it wrong to post this on a blog before you even announce it "in the real world?"



Things I am stressed about:

- Balance. Duh.

- The future. A postdoc is so temporary (possibly even more temporary once I tell my advisor I'm pregnant). The unknown is scary because it's just so... unknowable.

- The baby's health. (I assume this is a normal mom worry, coupled with my typical worry-worting.)

- Reactions of my boss. Reactions of my labmates, peers, potential employers. Reactions of my boss. Reactions of my childless friends. Reactions of my boss, my old bosses, and other academics.



Things I am excited about:

- The baby.

- A new exciting chapter in my life.

- Announcing it to lifelong friends.



Stay tuned for freak outs, other excitement, and how the conversations go with my postdoctoral advisor. Yikes!

(p.s. Any words of encouragement or advice are welcome. Words of warning are just too darn late!)

Thanks for the little things

As we come upon the Thanksgiving holiday, I find I have one additional little thing to give thanks for. My postdoc advisor.

My advisor said to me today: "I'm so glad you decided to join my lab." This was after a discussion of what I've been up to recently.

Nevermind that I'm not sure it's deserved. Nevermind that I don't have piles of publishable data yet. Nevermind that I sometimes wonder whether I'll get my postdoc contract renewed next year.

For today that was a wonderful thing to hear.

Hypocrisy is an ugly beast

I was very angry yesterday because my Ph.D. advisor let me down yet again. We do this dance every time I need a letter of recommendation. He says he'll write it, then he goes into a phone and email black hole until the day of the deadline (or after). I don't understand what's so hard about responding to someone's email and saying "I did see your email, and I will get back to you by ---." Is it really more effective to completely ignore the person, thereby stressing them out?

I should add that I try to keep my emails to a minimum and I'm very courteous and grateful in them. The last thing I want to do is piss him off. But how can he be too busy to meet a deadline he agreed to... and then I find out he's off camping? Everyone needs a break, but shouldn't you finish up your obligations beforehand?

So with a recent deadline for a fellowship, he as usual stopped picking up his phone and answering his emails. Then an hour before the website stops accepting submissions, he finally picked up his phone. (I always know he's done with a letter when he finally stops avoiding calls.) He said he was done and had submitted it. Except I had just called the fellowship office (shamefacedly) to ask if he had submitted, and they hadn't received anything from him. It turns out he had submitted a letter for something else by accident... and the deadline for that something was still a month off! So we went back to our little game until he finally submitted just before the deadline.

The several days leading up to the deadline were so stressful for me. I had worked hard to submit all my materials on time, all my other recommenders had submitted on time, and all I had was this missing letter from my advisor who was ignoring me completely. I think one thing that finally helped nudge his hand was when I called on a few friends who are still in his lab to go to his office and bug him in person. (The in person reminders were the only way I used to be able to get him to do anything when I was his student.)

I should also add that he once sent me a letter one week after a deadline. Luckily in that case it was something I could mail in and I had accounted for his usual irresponsible quirk by giving him a deadline that was a bit earlier than the actual. So I still managed to get the application in by overnighting it.

I think the thing that bothers me most is that he used to complain so much when I was a graduate student about how his students always leave him with unfinished papers and then he never hears back and has to do all the work, or else it's like pulling teeth to get them to respond. I have always been prompt to respond to his emails when we were publishing together. I even respond promptly to his current students who still periodically email me with questions about the apparatus I built. Hypocrisy is an ugly beast.

The 1-minute girl scout

I have been having a lot of fun recently contacting people with things I thought they might find handy. Here are a few illustrative examples in no particular order:

1. Suggested to a friend of mine at another university that he consider a post doc with Prof Y whose invited talk I went to and thoroughly enjoyed. It seemed like a perfect fit for my friend's interests, and a potentially great fit personality wise.
2. Found an article right up the alley of a science writer friend of mine and asked him if he'd like to get a copy (he did).
3. Told an assistant prof I know at another university about a grant program I think she'd benefit from.
4. Told a post doc friend of mine at yet another university about a job website I thought he'd find handy.
5. Sent a lawyer friend of mine who's struggling with work-life balance and family issues an article on the best family-friendly law firms in the country.

I basically just shot someone an email when I thought of them in conjunction with something I came across. Fyi, I use the term 'friend' above loosely. The thing that made this all fun and unusual is that I did this for people I don't usually see or speak to, but who I know or met at different points in my life. (I've always done this for people I see more regularly, but that's not the point here.)

I think some people would call this savvy.
Some would call it networking.
I just did it because it made me feel darn nice and useful.

And now I have all these people feeling like I'm thoughtful. Maybe one day they'll even send me something handy that comes on their radar. Sounds win-win to me!

Pick your poison / antidote

I have heard many academics lament / complain about the hours they work, the lack of compensation given the hours, the loneliness of a job spent mostly writing grants, the pressure to wow your academic peers with your ingenuity (ie, very few professors have name brand recognition in their relative fields, and these few have a lucky cascade effect where their success means easier funding and prime pick of postdocs / students, which leads to more success and funding, etc...). Sure there are perks like flexibility (you get to decide which specific 60-100 hours of the week you want to work) and relative freedom to choose projects that interest you (assuming you can get funding for them). And for some there's also a joy in teaching / motivating students.

But are the tradeoffs worth it? Most graduate students leaving a PhD program clearly don't get that impression, hence, the massive influx of people into industrial jobs. Jobs which also have their pluses (high pay, no fund-raising responsibility) and minuses (some inevitable drudgery and boredom, longer total time at a lab bench before you have management authority relative to academia, more bosses to answer to, and less control over what questions to pursue). Notice I did not list hours. In general, the idea that industry is a 40 hour per week job for PhDs is a complete fallacy in my experience and in the experience of those I know. But in general it probably is still fewer hours than academia. I've also been asked by a friend to include opportunities for mentorship as a plus. For those PhD students who enjoy teaching and think they can only get that type of mentoring interaction in academia, there is actually plenty of opportunity as you advance to teach and motivate a team of people (not to mention some smart summer interns that flood large companies each year).

Notice I also left out "politicking" from both sets of lists. Though many students run from academia for precisely this reason, I think any job that involves human beings involves politicking. (I hold to this belief even more firmly after speaking with people in other fields such as ministry and non-profit orgs who have had similar experiences.) I will say that the brand of politics changes in industry. Many academics get away with more blunt statements than would generally be considered acceptable in a professional environment.

So what is the point of this post? Mainly it's just a haphazardly organized, mini-summary of some recent conversations I've had with students and faculty. I'd also be curious if anyone has any additional major points to add to the above mentioned pluses / minuses of industry versus academia.

What women can do to get ahead

There's an article called "Ten Things Companies - and Women - Can Do To Get Ahead" that I came across, and there's one particular item I found interesting that made #3 on the top 10 list for women. (If you're curious, the other 9 items were somewhat typical advice such as network, articulate your skills, have an elevator speech, etc.)

Item 3:
Dare to Apply: McKinsey, citing internal research from HP, found that "women apply for open jobs only if they think they meet 100 percent of the criteria listed, whereas men respond to the posting if they feel they meet 60 percent of the requirements." That by itself, if it holds true across the corporate world, could be holding back a lot of talented women.

First it makes you wonder how the data was gathered (eg, an objective assessment of candidates' experience compared to the requirements for the job, versus a subjective self-assessment in which case some interesting gender self-perceptions affect the results).

But assuming for a moment we can believe these numbers, what does it tell us about women in general? (Yes, let us allow ourselves a little room for generalizations and stereotypes here.) A couple possibilities:

1. Women are less willing to face rejection / failure, ie, "I will only apply for a job I'm very likely to obtain."
2. Women take metrics much more literally and do not leave as much room for the nuances of what actually goes into hiring decisions, eg, "My background is in 'limes' not 'lemons' so I don't qualify."

It also makes me wonder if women would hold others to those same standards. For example, if a female hiring manager and a male hiring manager were both given the same candidate to interview who met 60% of the job requirements - would men be more likely to consider this adequate? Would women hold the candidate to a higher standard? Hmmm.....

What women (don't) wear

A CNN article today reported on a declaration by an Egyptian cleric that women will NOT be allowed to wear an all-covering veil (niqab) anymore in areas of universities frequented only by women, eg, female dorms or all-female classes.

There is no specific reason given for this other than the speculation that it's meant to counter extremism. Also, the article mentions that there have been protests by women who choose to wear the niqab and are now being denied this right.

I for one don't understand why anyone has to dictate what a woman should or shouldn't wear. Although, you might play devil's advocate and ask if it would bother me if at the opposite extreme some women (or men) chose to attend university in the nude. I would personally find this distracting, though I don't think it would offend me as long as no one lingered in my "personal space" (which I assume would be of a much larger radius in this situation).

For now we will just satisfy ourselves with this quote from a cleaning lady who was apparently interviewed for this article:

"The niqab should be worn under two circumstances... A very beautiful woman should wear it to prevent men from fighting over her, and an ugly woman should wear it to hide her face."

Parenting pickle

Some graduate students were telling me about a student in their lab who attends conferences with her small child. They spoke of it with a slightly disparaging tone (only insomuch that they could still walk the fine line of being PC), and I couldn't help but feel sad that there was no sense of empathy for what it must be like to be that mom. Although it's possible she takes her child along because she wants more QT, I think it's more likely that she does it because there aren't too many alternatives. This made me think of other moms I'd heard of who take their children to conferences (a brave few I think given that I have yet to notice the presence of children at any conference I've attended). These are the reasons I've heard people give for doing so:

1. The child is small enough that it is still nursing
2. The cost of childcare is too high for students / post docs to leave the child with someone
3. The spouse works full-time and there is no nearby network of family / close friends who can watch the child

These are the reasons I've heard people give for why this is a terrible idea:

1. It makes it difficult for the mom to concentrate on the talks
2. It makes it difficult for anyone else in the same room to concentrate on the talks (I assume this mainly applies to louder children, or to people who are easily distracted because they hate/love babies)
3. It's unprofessional (I'm not sure what this means unless it means 'different than what's typically done by those in the profession,' in which case this is certainly true.)

I've also heard that some people will book an extra room for a grandparent / spouse who can watch the child during parts of the conference. (Some women have also been known to try this solution if they're nursing while going on job interviews.) This sounds like a great solution although it's somewhat cost prohibitive.

Long story short, I think people need to get over it when someone tries to live their life and balance their job in a way that isn't "the norm." The face of academia and the job market in general has been changing (slowly but surely) over the last few decades. I for one am excited about what this world will look like in another few decades. (Who knows, maybe they'll have temporary daycare available at conferences.)

Ebb and Flow

I decided it would be interesting to quantitatively track my perspective on "desirability of an academic job" this week. First an intro as to why...

A graduate student I spoke with recently was surprised / disappointed when I told her that being a postdoc didn't automatically make you any more certain of your future and that many postdocs still wonder whether they really will end up in academia.

She said "darn! I was hoping to have the answers by then." But I had to tell her that, alas, just being 1 year (or N years) "wiser" doesn't mean you actually have all the answers. (In fact, many of the faculty I've spoken with echo the same sentiment of "still trying to figure it all out.")

And now to the plot! At the beginning and end of each day I recorded my desire to go into academia on a scale from 1 to 5 (Monday was retroactively averaged since I started this Tuesday).

1 = No way, Jose
5 = Academia, here I come!

A few observations:
~ Though my desire does fluctuate, the average is definitely a significant shift upwards relative to my theoretical plot from graduate school
~ In most cases I gave higher ratings at the end of the day. Apparently I enjoy working in my postdoc enough that it makes me want to stay in academia. (Or maybe I'm just not a morning person.)
~ I was surprised that specific events didn't always catalyze the ebbs and flows of my desire for an academic job. Rather a lot of the fluctuations were related to whether I was over-analyzing the future (as usual), was tired / cranky, was optimistic for no particular reason, etc.
~ I wonder what it would take for me to feel a "5" on any given day...

All in all, this was a rather fun and interesting self-reflection game, so I may play it again next week.

Notes on points A and B
A: Met with my advisor who was feeling overwhelmed. This was not for any reason related to me, but it still made me question my sanity in wanting an academic job.
B: Submitted a grant application for money I was unlikely to get, but it still felt good to get it off my plate!

Save the cheerleader, Save the nerd

An assistant professor said to me recently that there are two things that make his job particularly difficult, in ways he hadn't imagined before becoming a faculty member:

1. It's a lonely job, meaning he spends a lot of time sitting alone in his office and writing grants
2. There is no one cheerleading for him and telling him he's doing a great job. Most of the cheerleading comes from other assistant profs he knows, in the form of group commiseration.

I've heard before that writing is a fairly lonely event, but I picture myself getting up from my desk every few hours and doing something like speaking with a colleague down the hall, or visiting my students in the lab. I also figure there will be a somewhat large number of interruptions from students and visitors knocking on my door, which is something I will have to learn to manage.

What surprised me is that this faculty member felt like not having a cheerleader was one of the unexpected aspects of academia. Did he have a cheerleader during his graduate and postdoctoral work? If so, what planet is he from, and when can I visit?

I do find that most of the cheerleading that occurs in graduate school (and in the postdoctoral community) comes from friends and peers. It would be nice if more positive reinforcement trickled down from the faculty ranks, and I wonder if the lack is due to any of the following:

> Faculty don't have the time to spend on leadership tasks such as how to motivate and manage their team given their fundraising/ networking/ service obligations
> Faculty don't realize how helpful and motivational this type of support is
> Faculty don't care how helpful or motivational it is
> Faculty don't know how to motivate students in this way

I suppose the answer varies from faculty member to faculty member. I've seen very caring people who want to engage their students but lack the people skills to do so. I've seen faculty who couldn't care less about students. And I've also seen the rarer species of faculty who both care and are good at motivating students.

I think the moral of the story is don't rely on finding a cheerleader, but do keep close to you any friends / advisors / colleagues / family who fulfill this role. And most of all, work on becoming your own cheerleader, because we all have those days where we need a boost.

Can't talk the talk...

I heard an invited talk recently by a young professor from a MRU, and I was surprised by how poorly it went. A few characteristics of a poorly prepared / delivered talk:

• The talk has no central theme / unclear introduction and motivation of the overarching scientific problem.
• The speaker is unable to explain the data he/she is showing, not because it's at the frontier of what's known, but because they didn't think twice before including any and every bit of data their students emailed them.
• The speaker's research area is in "X-Y engineering," but whenever they're talking about X and are asked a question they say "well, I'm not an expert in X" and regarding Y "I'm not an expert in Y." This makes me as an audience member wonder what exactly their expertise is.
• There are many interruptions from the audience, not because they're excited, but because they're confused or just don't believe what's being presented.
• The talk is going so poorly, that the speaker her/himself offers to stop before it's finished.

This particular talk fulfilled all of the above criteria. What surprised me most is that this person survived academia long enough to become a faculty member at a top MRU. How?!

And for those of you wondering if this person was just having an "off day," the professor's graduate students commented that this was fairly representative. Again, how is this possible?

On a broader note, many people comment on the lack of presentation skills possessed by people in the scientific community (think back to conferences you've attended where slides were too jam-packed or where half the audience was asleep or had their eyes glazed over). Content is of the utmost importance, but I wonder if we could all stand to learn a little more about how to effectively present that content, eg, by borrowing from disciplines (such as advertising) where presentation is king.

Diddle me this

Observations of a recent "budding romance" in the lab have led me to the conclusion that there is something fundamentally different between wooing in academia and other professional settings such as industry. There is much more overt sex talk in labs between graduate students. Though some of this may be a direct function of the age of the workers (and their lack of familiarity with sexual harassment training and lawsuits), I think there is something intrinsically casual about the academic workplace. Despite being paid to work, graduate students (and many postdocs) are essentially just continuing their already very long stint "in school." This means a lot of the casual aspects of school - dress, mannerisms, conversation topics - carry over.

My husband tells me that the same is true of topics other than sex, eg, religion and politics. There isn't nearly as much talk of anything contentious in typical workplaces.

Clearly, academia is not your typical workplace.

The grass is chartreuse on the other side?

Another postdoc told me that he can't wait to be done with academia. He's decided to go into industry instead. His reasons? He is tired of taking orders from someone (we'll come back to this). And he'd like to make more money (this one is obvious, so we won't come back to this, though a future blog with salary numbers may be in the works).

Tired of taking orders?

I happen to know his advisor and this is one of the most lenient, easy going faculty members you could hope to meet.

One of the biggest draws of the academy is that you can run your own show however you like (assuming you're able to procure funding). From what I've seen of industry, there is no end to the amount of middle management you have to answer to. This includes reasonable, smart people, but also many petty, political, possibly insane people. If anything, he will be taking many more orders from many more people.

So I told this postdoc that he's nuts. And I told him why. We'll see where he ends up...

A Ph.D. friend of mine who's in industry told me recently that the only reason academics complain about academia is because they've never been outside of it. I heartily agree.

Roll over, roll over...

...and they all rolled over?

My advisor wants us to bring a new undergrad in the lab for a project that is completely unrelated to anything any of the grad students or postdocs are working on. The idea is that I would do the hands-on mentoring, and an emeritus professor would get a chance to have some fun in his retirement by "overseeing" the project. Apparently I was chosen based on my potential to be a great mentor to this student.

My worries:

1. That I won't have time to add this to my growing list of projects. I doubt the emeritus professor will be very involved in the training that is required in teaching even basic lab skills to an inexperienced freshman/sophomore. Though I enjoy working with undergrads, I wish this student would at least be able to work on something that would be helpful for my project, thereby making it a more synergistic research relationship.

2. My advisor wants to give this undergrad his/her own lab space. I'm worried this is going to cause a huge stir in our lab since we're over capacity as is. I recently heard two grad students in a heated quarrel about chemical hood space, and I worry that there will neither be space nor tolerance of an undergrad taking up prime real estate.

We shall see how this goes! I plan to bring up these concerns with my advisor, but still oblige and mentor the student (I'm not sure I have the option to really say no anway).

Learnin' by doin'

"...they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end..." -Thoreau

This quote comes from Walden (which I'm currently reading), in a section where HD advocates students building their own [simple] school by hand rather than relying on expensive contractors, builders, etc. which only drives up the cost of education for future generations. More broadly, he's advocating for learning by doing. Another example is a student digging and smelting his own ore to make a jack-knife (and reading however much is required to accomplish this) rather than spending that same month attending lectures on metallurgy and getting a store-bought knife from Papa. He poses the question of which student has learned more by the end of that 1 month period.

This reminded me of the general structure of most engineering curriculums I've come across. Students spend a lot of time in the first 2-3 years learning book concepts, equations, and drawing simplified systems and solving them. It isn't until the final year or so that hands-on lab courses or group projects for engineering come into play. I think the argument is generally: You have to learn the basics to understand those hands-on projects. But I would argue that the high attrition rates in engineering come from the "dry" mode we adhere to in teaching concepts. For people who learn experientially (which is the majority of people), those connections would be make that much more concrete if they saw the actual physical representations of what those models and equations apply to.

I'd love to have the opportunity to introduce more hands-on learning into the courses I'll be teaching. Something to ponder for now...

Premature abstracts

I have been working on a conference abstract recently.

Background for those who are unfamiliar with how presenting at conferences works:
1) You find a scientific conference you're interested in attending
2) You typically present either a poster or at an oral session, so you find a session that best matches your research area
3) You submit an abstract (and sometimes a short paper) to your session's chair(s) online
4) When your abstract gets accepted (there's no strict entry guidelines for giant national conferences, so likely it will get accepted), you book your plane tix and go

The problem:
Abstract/paper submission is done many many months in advance of the actual conference, especially for the huge conferences.

Why this makes sense:
There would be no time for session chairs to review abstracts at large conferences otherwise. There would be no time to publish and bind conference programs listing presenters either.

Why this doesn't make sense:
No one has their data pre-packaged and ready to go half a year in advance. The general consensus is that you write vague, related stuff, or package up your old stuff and sprinkle in some predictions and findings. Then you make the science happen.

I think most would agree this is sub-optimal as far as proper scientific approach.

The other general consensus is that no one reads your abstract anyway, so no one will ever hold you to the fact that you said you'd present on "Monkey interactions with banana-shaped robots" when in actuality you end up presenting on "Robot-monkey love: evolving interface programming." Hey, at least they both involve robots and monkeys. (The crowd might be angrier if they showed up to hear about robots and monkeys and then you surprise them with a talk on "Groundhog habitats in space")

So why can't we come up with anything better than this system?

Here's one idea: Let's submit a short abstract half a year in advance to make the program coordinators and printers happy. Then we submit a real short paper/poster one week in advance of the conference- to be submitted and available only electronically. And we shall ponder whether or not this piece is optional...

Incidentally, when I said no one reads your abstract, I should add that the 2 biggest things people look at when choosing talks:
1) Who's giving it? (Famous professors win. You don't have to be one- it counts if they're a co-author)
2) What's the title? (Relevance and sex-appeal, ie, a currently trendy topic wins)

A little experiment on goal progress

Ever wonder where the time goes? Ever wonder how you're going to reach all your publishing/ research goals?

I sure do.

Something I tried for a while in grad school, and am now planning on resurrecting:
Goal Progress file


I will update this document daily with what I achieved, where I made progress, and generally which of my projects received my time. That is for my professional goals. I will also have a personal goals section to highlight the things I think are really important - Did I help build the confidence of any grad students, eg, encouraging them? Did I make someone smile or feel less stress that day? Did I have any positive beneficial impact on a fellow living being? (I think these latter goals can be harder to reach, but they make life worthwhile.)

I used to keep this file (minus the personal goals section) in my last couple years of grad school, and I found it kept me motivated. Instead of thinking "I accomplished nothing!" I was able to look back and see how my time was spent. It also kept me more accountable to myself, so that I didn't waste as much time or procrastinate as often.

I'll do this for a couple weeks then post on whether it helped keep me positive and productive.

Academia -> Industry -> Academia

A recent question from muddled grad:

"How difficult/easy is it to go back to academia if you do an industry stint? Does it make a difference on what type of job it was."

I think this depends on your industry stint. If it's research-based and you publish while you are there, it's significantly easier. Otherwise, the sooner you return the better. I know another woman who worked in industry and decided to return to an academic post doc after 2 years. It's definitely doable if you:
(a) maintain your academic network
(b) don't wait too long

The latter comment is due to the notion that your area of expertise (and possibly your lab skills) will be rusty if you leave for a decade. I've heard 1-2 years is not an unreasonable leave period. Also realize that you can always take a "step down" if the openings are hard to find. Eg, if you're at a rank 2 university, it may be easier to secure a post doc at a rank 25 university, even if you've been out of academia for a few years. Still, don't wait til you're 65 to make the switch. (Personally I found leaving for a bit made it easier for me to realize what I wanted to do. When I came back to academia, it was with renewed energy and insight.)

I think the harder thing is women who leave academia to raise a family and then would like a way back in once their children are old enough. This is a significant problem, and one I think deserves more attention.