Ms. Madeline Joseph 

So, my name is Maddie Joseph. I'm a rising third year PhD student at Northwestern. I'm in the chemical engineering department. I'm co-advised, which means I have two PhD advisors on my thesis project. One of them is Danielle Tullman-Ereck. The Tullman lab is a protein engineering lab, and the other advisor is Jennifer Dunn. She does a type of sustainability modeling called Life Cycle assessment. And I work at the interface of those two labs. So, I use life cycle assessment and related models to analyze the potential contributions to the environment and sustainability that we could make with the biotechnology we're working on in the Tullman-Ereck lab. 

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Anya Sun 

That's really cool. And then, what made you choose this path? 

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Ms. Madeline Joseph 

So, I always wanted to be an engineer. My dad is an engineer. I started telling people that I wanted to go to MIT when I was in first grade, I did not go to MIT, but yeah. I was really passionate about engineering my entire high school career. I was actually involved in a similar program to you. It was called SWEETS. The Society of Women and Engineering, Entrepreneurship, Technology, and Science. And when it came time to go to college, I went to the University of Chicago, and I was a molecular engineering major there. I had the opportunity to do undergraduate research in Allison Squires lab at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, and I just fell in love with it. I was doing purely wet work back then, meaning I was working like in a laboratory, not doing any kind of computer modeling. And I did it for three years and decided I wanted it to be a major part of my life.  

So, that's how I decided to go to grad school. I chose Northwestern because I'm actually local to the area, and I really wanted to have the next five years of my life be close to home. Also, we have an amazing chemical engineering department here and there were a lot of boxes that the department checked for me. So, not only really strong academic and research program, but also, a community of people that really care about each other, that care about the local community, and care about the global community. 

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Anya Sun 

Yeah OK. And then, were there any specific moments in your career that really inspired or motivated you? 

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Ms. Madeline Joseph 

I think meeting my PI in undergrad was a huge moment that inspired me. Allison is one of my heroes to this day. She's incredibly powerful and inspiring and smart, but also a really compassionate and empathetic person who really wanted to make everyone feel included in her lab, and in the scientific community more broadly. So, just developing that relationship with my undergraduate Pi. I also think about learning life cycle assessment, which is the sustainability modeling tool that the Dunn lab uses. I remember my first week of grad school, Professor Dunn came in and gave a presentation to all of the new first years where she was talking about life cycle assessment, and I had never heard of it before. I was like, “Wow, this can change the world for the better.” From that moment, I was really interested in the technique and all the surrounding research. That was definitely a pivotal moment for me. 

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Anya Sun 

OK. And then I know you mentioned your two PhD mentors and then your PI, but were there any specific people or mentors that made a significant impact on you? 

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Ms. Madeline Joseph 

Yes. I think besides my advisors, so both in undergrad and PhD, all of them, I've only ever worked with women, for women in science, which has been incredibly inspiring. They're such great role models and examples of what empowered women look like and can do in stem. But I also had a mentor when I was doing undergraduate research Chow Chong. She is an amazing scientist. She looked over my applications. She helped me do research, like I ended up being a middle author on one of her papers. We still chat every so often just to check in, and she was a person that made me understand what grad school could look like for me. I had actually not considered a PhD prior to doing undergrad research, so she was a major force in my life that really inspired me to go into stem.  

And then, you know, also my mom. My mom is not a scientist, not an engineer, but she always encouraged me to do whatever I was interested in. I had so many weird little obsessions growing up, and she really facilitated my curiosity. Like, from the time I was a little kid, she taught me to read and read to me every day. I was obsessed with dinosaurs, like that was my first career that I was ever interested in, being a paleontologist, when I was 3 years old, and she was like, “Yeah, do it,” and bought me every book on dinosaurs, checked out every library book on dinosaurs. She literally talked to me about dinosaurs for hours. And I think that was kind of my first, “Oh, I could be a scientist.” And she just facilitated all that. 

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Anya Sun 

She sounds great. And then, when you initially entered this field, were there any struggles that made you reconsider your career choice? And if there were any, how did you push through that? 

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Ms. Madeline Joseph 

Great question. I think one of the really daunting things about doing a PhD, which again that's just the beginning of your career as a high-level scientist, is it's really, really long. It's five years on average for the engineering sciences. I think just that timeline has always been intimidating to me. It continues to be intimidating, even though I'm already through two full years. I think one of the things that you can do to manage the stress associated with unclear long time periods, like I have no idea when exactly I'm going to defend, it could be in three years, it could be in four years, is being really disciplined about the day-to-day and the week to week. And not getting lost on the month-to-month and the year-to-year as much. Just, kind of, having a plan at the beginning of each week about what I'm going to do each day, and then also checking in with myself about how that's actually going to contribute to my long-term goals and project milestones and things like that. So, I think just being organized in small ways really translates to being organized in terms of the big picture, which I think is what people generally stress about.  

And then, I think another thing that PhD students really struggle with, and maybe everyone just struggles with this at some point in their life, is what's called imposter syndrome. So, feeling like you're the only person in the room that doesn't deserve to be there, feeling like everyone is smarter than you, feeling like everyone is more qualified than you. I actually I don't know anyone who doesn't struggle with that. I'm really fortunate to be in an environment where people are really open about their experiences with imposter syndrome. That was something I didn't really quite experience until I was in my senior year of undergrad. I was doing research, and I was like, “I am not a real scientist. I'm a phony. How could I possibly be doing contributive research?”  

And again, just like, trying to grapple with long timelines. That's not something that really ever goes away. But one way I overcome it and manage it, is just by talking to people who have kind of tread this path before me and getting their perspective on the fact. They felt exactly the same way, and had, kind of, a similar strategy to the long timeline where you just do what you can. If you're not feeling that good about yourself on a certain day, it's like, “OK, well, I know I can run this one experiment. I know I can do this one type of literature review. I'm just going to do that for now.” I've actually found that narrowing your focus on one thing that's really actionable, that you can have a lot of ownership over in the moment, that you're feeling really stressed out about, not being good at your job is actually a really good way to prove to yourself that you are good at your job. So yeah, I think those are the two main things in my particular context that I struggle with and constantly work on overcoming. 

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Anya Sun 

That was really insightful. And then, what goals do you have for your future career? 

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Ms. Madeline Joseph 

Yeah. So, usually when people go into higher education, so, like, if you're getting a PhD, basically, people talk about either academia or they talk about industry, kind of a false binary. There are a lot of different career opportunities for people with PHD's, but it's definitely still the case that a lot of people who don't necessarily know about your field or about higher education, in general, will ask, “You must want to be a professor, right?” I actually don't want to be a professor. But I don’t have to do a really traditional chemical engineering job like working at a food company or a pharmaceutical company.  

I think for me, what's really cool about the PhD is that it teaches you how to think, how to develop a project, how to work with teammates that have totally different technical backgrounds, but also like very technical backgrounds, and also working with people who don't have a technical background. So, just like, that exposure to a diversity of different collaborators really empowers you to do anything. Because sustainability is such a policy related topic, I know that I want to do something that will benefit the community, that will benefit the environment, but also is still technical and lets me take advantage of all the technical skills I gained during my PhD. So, what I think that might look like for me is working for a government agency, like the Environmental Protection Agency, or working for some kind of environmental consulting group and helping them figure out what the most viable ways forward are on some important sustainability related topics. But that's not really academia or industry. It's kind of like a hybrid of both of those, and then you're bringing in all kinds of other things like advocacy, policy making, and community outreach. So, just something really integrated. 

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Anya Sun 

Yeah, that's really cool. Like, I've never heard of that before. And then, if any, what kinds of adversaries have you faced because of your gender background? 

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Ms. Madeline Joseph 

So, I'll actually come at it from the opposite perspective initially. So, one big area of privilege or advantage that I bring with me as a graduate student, is that I went to a very research-intensive undergrad institution. So, the institution that I went to is very highly ranked. It has a lot of money. It provided me with a lot of opportunities to gain research skills and technical education. Tons of different things that not a lot of people have access to. So, that puts me in a really advantaged position coming into Graduate School.  

I also went to a really well-funded public school in my area, so I have always been very technically trained. And I came in as a good writer with a really strong stem background. And I think those are advantages and privileges that a lot of people don't come in with.  

That said, one thing that I've definitely encountered, specifically because I'm a woman is, in grad school and to some extent undergrad as well, there's an expectation that you do service. That's not necessarily volunteering like you might think of in the high school context. It's basically anything you do that's not teaching or research. This is just a statistical reality, but it's also reflected in my own experience, women tend to do the vast majority of that labor. And again, it is completely uncompensated; you don't receive additional money for doing a lot of these roles. So, you know, organizing things like social events for the department or volunteering to give tours, things like that.  

Women are definitely disproportionately doing that work. And I think to some extent you are expected to do it. Because someone is expected to do it, and the way that it plays out is, very frequently, the same people volunteer for the same roles. And again, mostly they're women. So, I think that's something that comes up frequently. I think luckily, I'm in a department that's really aware of that, and we're trying to move away from that in a very intentional fashion. But I think a lot of places have not considered how gender disparities come into play when they're not necessarily written in a handbook. It's not like somebody wrote down that 60 to 80 percent of the service work has to be done by women; like that's not a requirement anywhere, but it just works out that way.  

So again, not everybody is looking at that with intentionality. And it's something that puts a lot of stress on women and their time, and it's not compensated. So, I would say that's definitely a challenge. That's not something I uniquely face at all, but definitely something that exists. But again, I think people are a lot more aware of this in 2024 than they would have been even in like 2014. 

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Anya Sun 

Yeah, OK. And then, what do you perceive to be the largest barrier or obstacle to female leadership or just girls in engineering? 

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Ms. Madeline Joseph 

I think burnout is a huge issue. It's not completely unrelated to what I just mentioned. So, I think women tend to be very conscientious, want to be involved in the community, and are very people oriented, generally. And again, that's my opinion, this is what I've observed. And I think, sometimes, that can lead to people overextending themselves and using up a lot of either their free time or their professional time that they maybe could be using to write more papers, to give more presentations, or any number of things that are what people are looking for on paper. They just get really tired. It's a lot of effort to put all that time into it and then not be rewarded. And then, also risk not advancing, particularly, if you're in a place that doesn't do a good job of recognizing service contributions. I think people feel, kind of, stuck or left behind. And I think that can really contribute to burnout. 

Retention is a problem regardless of gender or race, like, these are just hard positions to stay in. They're very demanding. But I think when you put additional demands on people's time and energy like that, it's much more likely that they'll burn out and not necessarily directly from the work.  

I think my institution is pretty good about this, but particularly when you get into later stages in your career, where people are having families, the parental care situation in the United States is just really bad. People are expected to return to work like 12 weeks after they have a child, which is totally unique to the United States. That's not really a thing in other places. So, I think, especially when people are trying to maintain a work life balance and have a family, we don't have systems in place that really allow people to balance both. It forces people to choose. And again, this labor falls disproportionately on women, which means that, a lot of times, women are forced to choose between having a career and having a family which is something that's a problem at the systemic level, and it needs to be changed from the top down. 

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Anya Sun 

Yeah, I totally agree. And then, why do you think that diversity in the workplace is important and in particular, gender diversity? 

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Ms. Madeline Joseph 

I mean this is not an original opinion at all, but I think there's tons of evidence that shows that when people bring their different perspectives, it allows the types of questions that you ask and the types of solutions you employ to be a lot further reaching. So, basically, we're able to try more things because we think of more things when we have a diversity of perspectives. Life experience, I've come to understand, absolutely translates into how you do your science, how you ask questions, how you go about answering them. And I think women's experience is different than men's, different than other gender identities. Those unique perspectives and shared experiences between women foster a sense of inclusion and community. We can come together really powerfully to make sure that we're exploring all the possibilities for solving these big challenges in society, whether that's climate change or biotechnology problems like developing medicines, curing cancer, like all the big headline science problems we want to solve. We need as many perspectives as possible, and women do provide a unique perspective. 

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Anya Sun 

Yeah, OK. And then, what traits do you have that help you deal with the adversity of being a woman in these male dominated fields? And also, how would you suggest someone else try to cultivate those traits? 

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Ms. Madeline Joseph 

So, for me, these are my characteristics or qualities, it's not going to be universal to women by any stretch of the imagination, I think I'm very oriented toward the experiences of others. So, this comes back to bite me, as I explained, because I do end up over volunteering sometimes, but I do really think I try to center the experience of the other. Like, I remember people's birthdays; I bake for meetings.  

I think people would generally characterize me as having a really positive outlook. And I think it can be contagious. People have told me that before, just always looking on the bright side and helping people have an optimistic perspective when they're feeling in distress or left behind or any of these other common emotional experiences in grad school, I think is really healthy for the community.  

I'm also really organized. I'm like a serial spread sheeter; I actually just made one right now. So, you know, advanced planning, both short term and long term, keeping track of everything, making sure to have notes of important meetings that you can refer back to, just writing lots of thoughts down and organizing them, so I can come back to them for a paper or a presentation or an important meeting. All of these things are very much skills. They're not necessarily characteristics. I do happen to be a little bit more organized by nature, but a lot of these skills are totally learnable. We can teach people them, and I think they're not necessarily like the core skills you need to complete a PhD, especially because you need a lot of technical skills to do that, but it's one of those like so-called soft skills that makes your life so much easier. I think those are the two big ones.  

I think both of these things are totally a choice. You can train yourself to be a positive thinker. I think one of the biggest things that people can do is just practice saying a nice thing, whether it's about yourself or about a teammate. Acknowledging people, honoring people when they're doing something well, including when you do something well, like, if you had a really good day of work and you got a lot done, you should take a moment to be like, “Wow, I had a really good day of work and I got a lot of stuff done. I think this might be evidence that I'm actually a scientist.” I did that yesterday or, you know, just taking a minute to tell your teammate, “Hey, I know you've been struggling with this technique, and you've been putting a lot of hours in to get better at it. That result looks amazing,” or like, “Hey, I know you're, kind of, new to service work, but you're doing a great job planning this event. And like, I really appreciate the work you put in.” That's not even a skill. Like, that's just intentional practice. If you start doing it, you'll find that you do it more and it creates an amazing, inclusive, welcoming environment. Anyone can do it.  

Then for the organizational stuff again, just start to do little things. If you find yourself really pressed for time all the time and you feel like you never have enough time to get in what you thought you were going to do, take a step back. If you're going hour by hour, day by day, maybe just sit down and do like a week. Think about what you'd realistically like to accomplish in a week, and then at the end of the week, check back in with yourself. Did I actually finish these things? And if you finish all of them in the first two days, you're underestimating your ability to get stuff done. And if you didn't get any of it done, you're way overestimating your ability to get it done. So, I think checking in with yourself about these things. Have something that you write down and you can reference back to give yourself evidence for what works and what doesn't work. I think that's just a practice that you can build up over time. 

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Anya Sun 

OK, so like to keep a positive attitude, you just have to encourage yourself and others? 

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Ms. Madeline Joseph 

Yeah, absolutely. I feel like a lot of times, people are just like, “Just be positive.” I don't know what that necessarily means. Like, I know what it means for people I think of as positive, like, I can identify habits that they do, but I think, especially, when people are in a rut and somebody's like, “Well, just be positive,” that's not constructive and doesn’t honor their experience. But taking it one compliment or like 1 positive feedback instance at a time, allows you to actually build up a meaningful sense of positivity and support in the workplace and in the research environment. 

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Anya Sun 

Yeah. And then, just for our final question, what advice would you give to other women who want to enter your career field? 

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Ms. Madeline Joseph 

I think there's a lot of pressure to do things the right way, particularly when you get into higher education. If you're in a PhD, there are some wrong things to do, like giving yourself a really hard time or being unconstructive with other people. There are a couple wrong ways to do it, but there's really not a right way to do it. I think not comparing yourself against your peers is really important. I also think that's really important for women in male dominated fields, because sometimes there is inadvertently a pressure to compete with other women, and that's not what we want to do. We want to be collaborators and colleagues, we don't want to be competitors, and I think the fastest way to make someone into your competition is to start comparing yourself against them.  

So, instead of comparing yourself, observing or even better, having a conversation with that person about their strategies for success, and then trying to apply those to your own life. Not just abstracting like, “Oh, this person is better than me in 1234 ways and I'm not doing enough. I’ll never be at their level.” Like, no, there's generalizable and actionable things you can take away from anybody's experience, which is why I think it's really important to have conversations like this, without having to compare yourself in an emotionally destructive way. 

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Anya Sun 

OK, so that's all the questions that I have for today and thank you so much for meeting with me. 

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Ms. Madeline Joseph 

Yeah, of course. It was super nice to meet you too. 

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