MEL #004 | The Revolutionary Power of Self-Care with Alyssa Hayes

✨Note: This transcript is AI-generated and may contain minor inaccuracies; refer to the audio for complete details.

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HAYES: Don’t be afraid to say yes to things because the rest of your life can and you can make it work, I’ve said yes to the things that I am willing to say yes to that I have the capacity for, but I have to continue to hold space for myself and for the non-academic, non-work things in my life.

ADAMS: In this episode, I speak with Alyssa Hayes, PhD candidate in nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee and chair of the board of the Computational Research Access Network, also known as CRANE. In this conversation, Alyssa shares her journey into engineering, discussing her motivations to work in energy policy and the support she received from family and teachers along the way. She emphasizes the impact of positive teaching experiences on helping her overcome feeling intimidated to study engineering.

In the leadership segment, Hayes discusses her role as chair of the board of the Crane program, which aims to provide a welcoming environment for underrepresented students in computational physics. Alyssa highlights the challenges of coordinating busy volunteers and the significance of team members aligning on a code of conduct. At Crane, that code stresses self-care and maintaining productivity and wellbeing. Alyssa concludes with advice for aspiring leaders in engineering encouraging them to embrace opportunities while prioritizing their health and relationships. Without further delay, here’s my conversation with Alyssa Hayes.

ADAMS: Alyssa, welcome to the podcast.

HAYES: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

ADAMS: Well, I’d like us to start by taking this back to your initial thoughts about how you chose engineering as a career field. 

HAYES: So you know how like every high school kid gets asked the question nonstop, like, what are you what are you going to do after this? Like, are you going to go to college? What are you going to to college for? I have a 15 year old goddaughter. I asked her the same questions now being on the other side. And I remember thinking in my head,

Okay, the world needs two things, healthcare and energy. Like those are like kind of the foundation on everything else. The society is built on those two core fundamental things. And I was not amazing at biology. healthcare was not going to be an option for me. And I was like, well, I want to contribute to our energy generation. And I don’t know how this idea got planted in my head at such a young age, I have no recollection of learning that nuclear power was the easiest way to make large swaths of baseload energy for the lowest carbon emissions. I knew about renewables, I knew about fossil fuels, but I don’t know what had put that idea in my brain, but it was already there. And so when I was applying around for engineering,

I was explicitly looking for nuclear engineering programs, but at the same time, I was also really interested in policy. And so for a while, I would respond with, well, I think I’m going to go into political science. And this was largely because I was scared to go into engineering because I was a girl. I was often the only girl in my physics classes, which I knew was like a core concept in engineering and I had this amazing physics teacher who would tell me that he thought that it would be a waste of talent if I didn’t go into engineering. I was definitely still like concerned about like the, programming and the coding aspects of it. There were other kids that knew coding. They were all white men. And that was like fully unfamiliar to me. I had no idea how to code. had made like a Tumblr HTML page when I was like 14 or something.

But other than that, I didn’t know anything about programming. And it was really intimidating. That like ended up being something that I had an advantage over my peers on when I did eventually take my physics teacher’s advice. I applied to engineering at a few schools. I got in at a few schools and I got a full ride at the University of Illinois for my bachelor’s degree in nuclear engineering. And while I was there, as a freshman, I took this amazing introduction to Python course.

I’m taught by shout out professor Ryan Cunningham if for whatever reason you’re listening to this. But that class made Python so accessible to me. And I ended up being one of the students who was like the most well versed in that language. I was one of the most comfortable students with it in my department because I took it in like an off semester and a bunch of other students in my department took it with a different professor in a different semester. And so they ended up not having like as strong of a grasp with it. And so I remember thinking like, wow, I got real lucky. I took it in a weird semester with this professor. And so that was kind of one of the things in my brain that made me wanna tell people about like how just having like a more welcoming experience in something as intimidating as like the first obstacles to getting into engineering is so important.

ADAMS: Yeah, you said several really important things. first of all, having the right professors who can teach things in a way that resonates with students, think that’s hugely important. And if you reflect back on Professor Cunningham’s class, is there anything in particular that really resonated with you in terms of his teaching methodology?

HAYES: I wasn’t afraid to write something wrong. We were encouraged to just write anything. Okay. Yeah. So there would be like, would be giving, he would teach us syntax first, and then we would be given prompts that required us to use the syntax we had just learned to like solve like really, really simple problems. But the way that he taught made me feel unafraid to write something that would give me an error because it was strongly encouraged in that class to like learn how to read through the errors and be comfortable with getting error messages and then learning how to work through those, debug your own code and then come out having learned something. And that that was the more important thing, right? That you like understood like the functionality of the syntax that you were learning, not necessarily that you were getting like the right answer as fast as possible.

ADAMS: I think that’s really amazing. And I can see that kind of mindset of, try, try, try, try a bunch of times. It’s OK to fail. And I’m going to teach you how to learn from these errors, as you call them. Because in reality, in the real world, these are going to happen. So you might as well get comfortable with one, making errors and two, analyzing the errors and fixing them now. And I mean, I think that has huge applicability across a wide range of industries and applications. And so it’s just this whole idea. see so many people holding themselves back out of this fear of not being perfect. And so to have learned that early on in this particular class, but then I’m sure that you’ve been able to take that mindset with you in other areas is really good. So I’m glad that you got exposure to that and had that experience really early on in your academic career. The other thing you mentioned that I think is really important is you acknowledged being intimidated, to go into engineering for various reasons, and you did it anyway. And I’m just curious, what it was that made you say, yeah, this is really scary, but… I feel like I really need to do this anyway.

HAYES: I had a lot of support from my family. And I had support from not just that teacher, but other physics teachers whose classes I wasn’t even taking. And I was like one of those kids that was like, I guess, comfortable with teachers. I remember being in college quickly became friends with professors whose classes I had finished. And so that’s another thing where I feel lucky because that’s something that I see lacking in some other kids’ lives, like teachers who only form relationships with some students or students that never form relationships with teachers or whose parents are just like, trying to push them through the motions, but don’t drive them to be the best versions of themselves. And a lot of that is outside of that family’s control, right? 

If like parents are working constantly and don’t have as much time, it’s a struggle out there. I had a stay at home dad and he like, he wasn’t like the most lovey parent, but he expected me to like try my best and to push for like the best version of myself that I could be. He would like, he would say, I’m proud of you by being like, hmm, you had good grades all year, here’s a hundred dollars. And then just walk away. So I knew that like, that people had believed in me. I had not failed super hard in any way yet. And so I think that was part of it too, is that I was like riding like this train of, I’ve been academically successful and like lifestyle wise successful up to this point. And I guess there’s a work life balance that I didn’t fully develop until graduate school. So I just found myself working harder and harder and harder and harder and harder until I got to a point where I was super burnt out. So there were definitely some cons to this thought as well. I think part of it is that I had like that same physics teacher that told me that he thought it would be a waste of talent. Shout out Mr. Louis Klein. not only did he tell me like it would be a waste of talent if I didn’t go into engineering. he also pointed out that in, political science, that it would be a lot more difficult to find, job security and like a higher paying career to make a stable income. And I coming from a low income family, that was something that was important to me. I wanted to like increase my socioeconomic status for my future family. I knew that engineering was a more direct way to do that. And little did I know that he ended up being super right, because I ended up pivoting a little bit. And now my plan after my PhD is to use my nuclear engineering background to support the things that I want to work towards in an energy policy career when I’m done. And so they ended up working together, but I am super glad that I took his advice. I think that was a really roundabout way of answering your question though.

ADAMS: it’s a great answer. It is, it is your answer.

So I share your experience in really wanting to elevate my own socioeconomic status based on how I grew up. And I did the same thing. I was like, looks like engineering is a good way to do that. And now I was not as savvy as you were to know about energy or anything like that. So I just looked at US News and World Report and saw the one that made the most money and said, I’ll be that one. So I’m a chemical engineer.

I’m really excited actually to hear you talk about your interest in policy, because we’ve just launched this new program at UT that includes a certificate in engineering leadership and public policy because of hearing from students like you, but also just getting the sense that engineering students today, I think more so maybe than, in my time really want to have this policy influence, really want to make bigger changes in society and in the world. Some of them are really passionate about that, whether it’s for profit or nonprofit. And so because we have the Howard Baker School here at the University of Tennessee and have a very strong public policy program, it made perfect sense to put those two things together as part of this new engineering leadership program. I’m starting to actually meet real live people who are like, yeah, I’m interested in engineering and policy. So I’m really excited to hear about that.

And so you went from University of Illinois, now you’re here at the University of Tennessee. Can you just talk a little bit about graduate school and why you chose to go to graduate school and what you hope to get out of that?

HAYES: The pivoting choice for that was, in a sense, a failure. So when I was like a sophomore in undergrad, Katie Mummah was one of my like other student mentors. Like if nuclear engineering was a sorority, she was kind of like my big. So but it’s not. I really looked up to her and she had done some internships at a nuclear power company. Constellation used to be called Exelon.

And it was super common for students from the University of Illinois to do internships with Exelon and then graduate with a bachelor’s degree and go be like a reactor operator or just a nuclear engineer at one of their plants. And so originally, like in working on my bachelor’s degree, I was like, probably that. I didn’t know anything about grad school. And I like, developed like a little bit of like a professional relationship with one of the recruiters at Exelon. And I was, I like did the application, I did the interview, everything felt like it was going great. I was like pretty certain that I was gonna get in for this internship over the summer, work at that power plant and that would be it.

I didn’t get that internship. And I turned around and said, well, what else can I be doing  with my time, cause I need to do something else during the summer.

And I switched a little bit into fusion. So at the University of Illinois, between the end of your sophomore and your junior year, you have to pick a topic that you’re going to specialize in. And your options were fission power, fusion power, and radiological sciences. And I was like, well, I didn’t get this internship. Let’s look at fusion power.

And I started working as an undergraduate researcher for Professor Davide Curreli at the University of Illinois. Amazing mentor. I loved working for him. And I started doing research that was heavily related to what’s called the plasma sheath, which is the region between a plasma and a material because in order to have a vacuum plasma, you are containing your plasma on some kind of device. And so there’s going to be a region between the bulk plasma and the material. And so that’s largely the region that I was studying under him. And I got involved in a plasma surface interaction, a side act project that was like funded by the Department of Energy. And so I kind of stayed under that same funding and working on that same project.

When I was applying to grad school options because it was a multi-institutional collaboration. And I basically stayed on the same project and just switched. 

ADAMS: Okay. Great. And so how far along are you in your program? I have a year left. All right. And do you have immediate plans for what you want to do next? 

HAYES: Yes. In May, June-ish, maybe April spring, late spring, I will be applying for the American Nuclear Society and the American Physical Society Congressional Fellowship opportunity through AAAS. So this fellowship allows either a PhD student or not PhD student, you’re done, you have to be done to do this. So you either have to have a PhD or you can have a master’s degree and at least five years of experience.

And you can be at any stage in your career. could be newly minted or you could be 60 years old and you wanna do something new. It does not matter to them. Like the rest of the qualifications are more important. And so basically the fellow gets funded by their society. So I would be funded by either ANS or APS, whichever fellowship I get or accept. And then…

Congress gets a free staffer that they don’t have to pay. And the society gets one of their society members as a staffer in Congress, which is good for them. And they have these fellowships in the other branches as well, but I’m personally more interested in the legislative branch.

ADAMS: Wow, that sounds really exciting. It’s like the perfect combination of all these things you’ve been talking about, the engineering and the public policies. So I look forward to you participating in that. And good luck with your application.

Alyssa, tell us about the leadership situation that you want to talk to us about today.

HAYES: Okay, so there is this program called the Computational Research Access Network or CRANE for short. The website for that is cranephysics.org if anyone is like listening to this and wants to browse around while I’m talking about it. So it is a program that is structured kind of like an academic class where we teach computational physics throughout like an entire spring semester. So we’ll start in like mid January, we’ll end usually after the academic semester is over at like the end of May. It is a long intense program.

But it is designed to be as welcoming as possible in a safe space where students who might otherwise be intimidated by the thought of computational physics to get involved and learn to build those skills and then apply them to potential future research that they may want to do later on. So all of our students come from like underrepresented, under-resourced and marginalized backgrounds. That is our priority in the organization. like 75 % of our students are Black, Indigenous or people of color. We had, I don’t remember all of our statistics, but a large percentage of our students, I think it was almost half, like more than 40 % of our students identified as being LGBTQIA+.

So we’re really, really happy with the level of like diverse representation that we were able to introduce to computational physics through this program, but also in a place where maybe they’re not the only woman, they’re not the only person of color, they’re not the only gay person, and they can bring their full selves to the table in a space that is unique outside of the university space.

ADAMS: I love how you talked in the beginning about something that was really important for you and reducing your feelings of intimidation and really helping spark your interest in your pursuit of engineering was, Professor Cunningham and how he made this computer course accessible to you. And now here you are working in a program that’s sort of doing the same thing at probably a much broader scale. I am really interested about your role and your leadership in this program, because I know you told me offline that you were a founding member of the program and now you have taken that to the next level and now you serve on the board and do other things. So can you just talk a little bit about your personal transition from being somebody who maybe participated in the program, who then felt like, yeah, this is actually something that I want to see grow and I want to take the the leadership responsibility to actually make that happen in the ways that I can do that. 

HAYES: Yeah, so this started in 2021. I was giving like a talk, I think to like an ANS chapter at the University of California Irvine, where I met another graduate student at the time. He’s now Dr. Ernesto Braza Valdez. And you can see him on the website. He is the actual founder of Crane. And through that interaction, he was in the middle actually of collecting outspoken voices who cared about this type of work and who were also people from underrepresented and marginalized and under-resourced demographics. And so he was like, hey, you fit to me. Like you fit those things. And also here are 10 other people that I know or that I’ve met or that know other people who also identify in the same way and also care very much about computational physics and and want to give back. And he had this deep frustration with all of these like, companies and like organizations like DE &I statements and like committees that weren’t necessarily like getting all the way back to the people that he felt needed to be served.

And one of the ways in which he knew that we could help people was to teach computational physics because that was one of the highest value things that we had to offer that he was like that we could be helping people develop these skills. Because sometimes it’s so hard to transfer institutions, to get into graduate school with a specific advisor, to get an internship.

to work at a national lab as an undergraduate or a graduate student, or to even like get in in the first place when there are so many things where people are like, oh, I want a student that has these skills and these skills, but that’s kind of like an entry level research position. And they’re like, but I don’t have those skills and my institution doesn’t teach them. So that was like a place where he saw a gap and he found some people that he wanted to fill that gap. And I was one of those first people.

And we have since taught the program three times, 2022 to 2023. And now we just finished up early or I guess by the time this is released this January. So we finished over 2024 program and our 2025 program is just now beginning. And we have our new fourth cohort of students that I’m really excited to learn more about. 

ADAMS: Oh, that’s great. How do you measure the impact that you’re having in this program?

We have a pre-program survey and a post-program survey. And we found that the program did like make students really think about the more you know, the more you don’t know, especially computational physics. That was kind of result that we weren’t necessarily expecting. The students were like, in the beginning, in the pre-program survey, they were like, yeah, I feel like I can learn this stuff.

And then in the post-program, they were like, I’m a little less confident that I can learn my stuff. But the number one thing that we did see from our respondents in these surveys was that they felt that Crane was a place that made computational physics accessible, that students felt more comfortable in our program asking questions, being engaged than they might have otherwise felt in like a university setting. That’s great. And as a board member, can you talk a little bit about what your role is and the kind of interactions that you have with various stakeholders in the organization? So there’s definitely like a bit of a challenge sometimes in working with the other board members. So this is a working board where basically everybody who’s on the board plus a few more people are the main like people doing the work for the program.

Whether or not we have funding. So far, it’s all been volunteer work up until now, where we’ll get like a little mini honorarium of maybe like $500. Thank you to the NSF. But sometimes like when you’re doing volunteer work, it can be hard to motivate other people and to stay motivated yourself to do the work that is needed to make the program operate.

There’s a lot of work to be done outside of just teaching these workshops. There’s a lot of development that we do. We comb over every single lecture every year to make sure that we’re incorporating feedback from previous years, that there are places that maybe the students were having trouble that we could make more clear. So that costs work, sending out recruitment emails and like we explicitly send them to HBCUs, PBIs, tribal colleges, MSIs, HSIs, et cetera. And so like getting all of the contact information for the physics faculty from those institutions, sending out those recruitment emails, and then reading last year, we had 300 applications to read through and we accepted 100 students and we funded 20 students. So the program is free, but about a sixth of our students historically receive stipends to offset things like childcare or having to work an hourly job that maybe they don’t have as many hours in the week to work that hourly job if they’re doing the program. And so we fund about 20 of our students. so tracking that attendance, making sure they get the money. Like keeping, we keep tabs on a lot of the students to be like, hey, I noticed you haven’t shown up in the last few weeks. Is there something going on? Are you okay? All of those things cost a ton of work. And so like, obviously I’m not doing 100 % of that work. We are a team, but, and there are times when people have to step back for maybe a couple of weeks, another board member gets super overwhelmed. And we’re very respectful of that, but the program also needs to keep operating. picking up when sometimes other people need to take a step back, taking a step back myself when I need to take a step back. So finding that balance, but also keeping like a positive attitude and a positive relationship with all of my peers is really important.

ADAMS: Can you talk a little bit more about strategies that have or haven’t worked well, about keeping those good working relationships with your peers as you’re spending really your discretionary time to try to move this forward. I’m sure you all are busy. Some of you are  students, some of you are working. I’m not sure the status of everyone, but it is no one’s full-time job to get this program to work. So how do you manage that? 

HAYES: So we have a of conduct. And that code of conduct so far has been pretty integral to keeping everybody working together, but also to prioritizing our like health and self care. So one of the tenants in that code of conduct is that self care is revolutionary. That there’s so many things in our lives. And this also ties back to how I thought of myself through high school and through my undergraduate career. And that like my, I thought that my value came from my work. That’s another one in our code of conduct that your work is not your worth. And I have tied so much.

And a lot of times I still do tie so much of my self-worth to my productivity, to my success, to my achievements, and to the quality of my work. And sometimes there are things that I need to take a step back and say, these are also important. My family, spending time with my goddaughter, taking care of my dogs, taking care of myself, finding joy in the day to day.

Staying active and moving those things are also important and those things are also a part of my worth Right like giving back to others and like a non work and non academic sense are still important and so sometimes if there are weeks where I feel I’ve been Maybe neglecting some of those things neglecting myself neglecting my relationship Then I will take a step back

Not necessarily from like my job or my research, but from some of like my CRANE activities or like my American Nuclear Society activities to just kind of focus on those things and ground myself in what matters to me and giving that same respect and that same, I guess, that others are taking care of themselves and giving my peers the grace to do so.

And they all, we all do that for each other, right? So everyone is aware that sometimes other people need to take a step back. And when you have the capacity to put in a little bit more, to offset that, that everybody is kind of doing that together.

ADAMS: Yeah, I loved the statement that you said that was part of your code of conduct, is self-care is revolutionary. I work with a lot of executive leaders, so they didn’t get it along the way. And I’m trying to help them understand that now. And oftentimes, much later in your career, that’s when the accumulative effects of not having appropriately taken care of yourself happen. That’s where health effects start to have both mental and physical health effects. Relationships with your friends and family are frayed and everything is just at a high level of urgency because you didn’t take care of those things all throughout your journey. And so I am thrilled to hear someone at it at your stage in your career, learning those, adopting those, and really even incorporating them both for yourself, but in this particular organization, really incorporating those things as this is the way we do work. This is the way we work together. I think it’s amazing.

HAYES:  I was talking to my therapist about this this week, and we had discussed how you can build a lifestyle that is conducive to your productivity, right? if you have a balanced and structured lifestyle that enables you to find appropriate work-life balance and to take care of yourself when you need to, but then when you have the capacity to put a little bit more in, that when you build that lifestyle, that enables you to end up having like more productivity and then feeling accomplished on top of that. So like it can be like a positive feedback loop as opposed to sometimes we get into like these negative spirals. I’m curious if you find yourself an outlier among your peers, in your what I would call self-care first mentality, where that’s part of who you are and how you want to show up. 

ADAMS: Do you find that you’re an outlier and does that cause any challenges for you or have we finally maybe gotten to the place where this is much more prevalent in the work environment?

HAYES:  It’s hard to tell because I’m in graduate school still because I feel like I’m

I’m kind of the norm, at least in the nuclear engineering department here at UTK But I’m aware that in other nuclear engineering graduate programs that that is not the case. I think there are a lot of students in our department that would say a lot of the same things that I’m saying, or that have like a really healthy work-life balance. Like most of my friends in grad school here have a pretty good work-life balance, it seems to me. But I would…

I would definitely hesitate to say that that’s the norm outside of our department. 

ADAMS: Well, so that’s great answer. I will say that when we sat down to talk, I did not think that a compliment on work-life balance in the nuclear nuclear engineering program graduate students was something that was going to come out. I mean, I didn’t have an opinion either way, but to hear you say, ee all are practicing self-care and not burning out and things like that is amazing to me. Of course, I was a graduate student 20 years ago in a different program, but it was absolutely not the case then. But I’m thrilled to hear you say that this is actually pretty much the norm here where you are.

Okay, Alyssa, what advice would you give to engineers who want to move into leadership roles?

HAYES: Like a fluid or a cat, those things will fill up the space that they are given, right? Like if you say, here’s like my box of capacity, here’s like my time in the day, the effort I have to spend. whatever things you take on will fill that space. If you say, I’m gonna like, I’m gonna give myself two months to write this paper, it’ll probably take you that whole two months or a little bit longer. Like rarely do I find myself doing those things earlier.

And so if you’re like, hmm, I’m like struggling so much with my academics and maybe my research job, or if you are not in grad school anymore and you are working and you’re like, my job and my family take up a hundred percent of your time, they will because that is what you’re spending your time doing, right? Those are the things that you’ve taken on and they will fill a hundred percent of your time. And so a lot of the time it can seem like,

I don’t have the capacity to take another thing on. And sometimes, depending on your situation, that may absolutely be true. But like, I think if you can envision yourself finding like a spot in your schedule and you can like imagine yourself being like, I could go and do this for a few hours a week at this time in the week and you can envision like what it might look like for you and your lifestyle to add that thing on, then you can. And the other things will shift around such that you’ve made room in your box for that other thing to fit in. I guess what I’m trying to say is don’t be afraid to say yes to things because the rest of your life can adjust and you can make it work, especially when you’re doing like, unpaid volunteer our things. But it’s critical that you have the support of your supervisor or your boss or your domestic partner or your family members when taking these things on. Because I think if you lack that support and you constantly have people telling you that you should be prioritizing your job and your family, then it can be a lot harder to say yes and to want to stay committed.

Also on the flip side, if you are the type of person who says yes to everything all the time, maybe don’t. you gotta put yourself first. Self-care is revolutionary. Sometimes I get asked to do things and I’m like, no girl, I cannot be the chair of the diversity and inclusion in ANS or like the vice chair or something because I, my plate is full. I’ve said yes to the things that I am willing to say yes to that I have the capacity for, but I have to continue to hold space for myself and for the non-academic, non-work things in my life.

ADAMS: That’s great advice.

I’m curious about what your personal signals are and how you’ve learned to, tune into those about, you know what, I need to take a step back.

HAYES: I kind of think through my list of my priorities in my head from week to week and say, how much time have I committed or like how much thought really have I committed to each of these things? And if I find that some are lacking and some aren’t have been taking up a lot of my time, then I readjust for like the next couple of weeks. I had a several week span where the thing that was taking up a lot of my time was CRANE recruitment in the fall because it was recruitment season. And so then I said, all right, well, now that recruitment season’s over, I’m going to leave some of the combing through some of our lectures to others. And I know that they’ll pick up on it for me. And I’m going to take a step back and I’m going to spend a lot more focus on my research and on my relationship with my partner and on spending time with my goddaughter and then I will spend more time doing CRANE related things when the applications roll in in December. And finding like, you know, that balance and saying, I haven’t prioritized this in a bit, let me go back to it. Some of these things you have to prioritize every week. And there’s levels, right?  Like everything is fluctuating. I think there’s never like, a span of two weeks where I don’t give like some time or some activity to all of the things that I’m involved in. 

ADAMS: Yeah, that makes sense. Really being, really paying attention and being attuned to what are my priorities? How am I spending my time? And then being willing to just adjust. Yeah, maybe even within a week, even if you’ve set out to do a certain thing a week, I’m sure life happens and you may not have actually ended up spending that amount of time in the, to the priorities that you had planned. So you can adjust for that. And then also over time, you might say, oh, okay, well, even though I did plan to spend a lot more time on, for example, CRANE this was a peak CRANE, you know, a couple of weeks. Well, now it’s time for me to spend more time with my, with my relationships and, and family. And so just this idea, I think of really paying attention, being in tune to what you care about and how you’re feeling and being willing to adjust is, is really important. And it sounds like something that you’ve mastered.

Alyssa, you’ve been talking about how you have made space for things that you are really passionate about and adding them to your schedule. And I know that one of the things you’re passionate about is mentoring. Can you talk a little bit about how people might be able to add mentoring to their schedule? 

HAYES: So there are a lot of programs out there that have a mentoring aspect that you could get involved in. One of those many programs, if you’d be so inclined, is Crane. We have a mentoring aspect to the program as well if you are on our website, there is a tab that says, like if you’re interested in TA ship or mentorship, or I think it might just say TA slash mentoring. and you fill out what is the shortest Google form in the world. You are signing yourself up, to receive an email that invites you to a code of conduct training. and so if you’re interested in mentoring for CRANE.

If you yourself identify as being from like an underrepresented group in physics, and you could be at any career level, right? If you’re a senior undergrad, if you are a graduate student, or if you are in the workforce, we strongly encourage those in the workforce to come back and reach a hand back down and mentor some of our CRANE students. It is something that we have a huge demand for every year that we struggle to fill that demand with mentors. And so all we’re basically asking is to touch base with your CRANE mentee a minimum of like once every two weeks. And in that code of conduct training, we talk about what the expectations are in terms of like the logistics, but then also how often you talk to them and what you’re talking to them about.

what the mentor-mentee relationship should look like, what are some of the challenges our students face, and how you can be one of the key people that help them overcome those challenges. That’s great. So any of our listeners who are passionate about computational physics can become mentors and maybe add a very small time block to your calendar, but that could have a huge impact.

ADAMS: Alyssa, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today.

HAYES: thank you so much for having me. This was great. I’m glad we got to talk so much about self care too. 

ADAMS: Me too.