text: I love watching my kids take part in various athletic competitions. For Eldest, it’s been swimming; for Middle Boy, it’s been flag football, soccer one season and a couple of years of lackluster swimming, but his main sport is basketball. He’s really good at it and passionate about the game. I’m that parent who yells supportive and possibly embarrassing stuff from the sidelines (I don’t care; all grace and self-consciousness evaporated once I started having children). It’s interesting to see how much these kids want to win, how they compete with all they’ve got, and how much they hustle. None of them have hit puberty yet, so I can only imagine how the games are going to look once all the testosterone kicks in…
  Middle Boy is now in fifth grade and the YMCA basketball season is in full swing. He loves this year’s team, which is mostly composed of his friends from school. (If you felt the need to say “comprised by” here, I hate you with the burning passion of a thousand suns and I will never be your friend, for the banishment of the misuse of ‘comprise’ is among the grammar hills I am willing to die on.) There are a couple of kids not from MB’s school, one of whom is excellent and has had the possession of the ball 75% of the time in the first two games; the team lost both of those games. Honestly, I thought the team was not very good, as there were no plays, just that one kid trying to do his own thing and sometimes succeeding, sometimes not.
  That excellent external kid missed the last two games, and the team blossomed. It was amazing to watch. Suddenly, they moved the ball, made passes, organized offense, every single one of the players got to touch the ball, and nearly everyone scored at least once. The kids played beautifully and won these last two games, all with their nominally best player absent. We finally saw that the team had five more great people, who could both hold their own and mesh well together.
  MB tells me they are joking that they should ‘fire’ that kid who’s their best player. The kid is selfish with the ball, not a team player (focused on scoring himself and blowing far too many good chances that could have resulted in scoring if a play had been executed), and overall just not an asset to the team, or not as great of an asset as everyone had thought at the outset. We’ll see what the coach does when the kid comes back.
  I am not sure that there is any level of excellence in science or in any other endeavor that justifies extreme selfishness. Or rudeness, or being otherwise toxic to other people. We in science, just like people in ‘the real world,’ tend to forgive a lot to people whom we perceive as brilliant, as someone who’d be hard to replace.
  One’s value is not measured when that person is in vacuum, not interacting with anyone else. One’s value to any enterprise and the society at large comes in part from that individual’s capabilities, but at least as much, if not more, from how they gel with the capabilities of others.
  Any team sport will show the same dynamics: if the team has good chemistry, they become much more than the sum of individuals’ abilities. Otherwise, they are not a team, and they will be overrun by the opponents who are one.
  I only maintain continuous membership in one professional society. Mainly because their annual meeting is the only one that I make a point of attending (almost) every year, and you need to be a member or be sponsored by a member to submit abstracts.
  Other societies I’ll usually join for one year if I want to present something at their meeting that year.
  I dont’t find membership to be particularly useful. I let mine lapse from the various societies I belong to lapse frequently, and then join when I want to present something. It is very expensive keeping up society memberships.
  The best advice I ever took (and should have taken earlier) was to just bite the bullet and join as a life-member for my main professional society. The cost savings over my career will be nice, but more importantly I don’t have to deal with the bother of renewing each year, or remembering whether I renewed, etc.
  New faculty: see if you can use your startup money to do this — I know some people have done so successfully. If you have to do it on your own dime, you can take a tax deduction for a professional expense.
  What I like about my professional society: they do lobbying and run professional-development and keep an eye on important statistics in the field and publish a nice magazine about the field. They keep their cost to publish and cost to attend meetings low, and I know my fees are helping spread that cost around. But I do attend every year, so it really is my main community.
  I tend to only join if I am going to their conference that year or applying for one of their grants. Membership itself is useless, it’s the benefits like those that matter. I’m sure when I get a real job, I will be a member of several, but on my paycheck? No way! Also, none of them have adjunct rates…
  Joining professional societies is a relatively simple and inexpensive way of boosting the visible professionalism on your CV—particularly important for women trainees and junior faculty who, for some bizarre reason, are sometimes considered “not serious” about their careers. Considering the “cost” the individual is already paying by taking years away from other paid work to pursue an MS or PhD, and the difficulties and challenges of earning additional research publications and other credentials, the low cost of a trainee membership is 100% worth it.
  As a professor, belong to at least 6 professional societies, which gives me reduced rates at attending their annual meetings and publishing in their journals. These non-student memberships are not cheap and usually require you to also subscribe to the print version of a journal – I probably wouldn’t belong to so many societies if I had to pay it out of my research budget or personal funds. My faculty appointment (at a medical school) provides me with a set amount of $ each year that I can only use for paying my personal professional society dues and nothing else (I’m not sure how common this is?)
  I consider it very important to maintain my society memberships because these societies critically engage in political lobbying to maintain funding for scientific research, they provide career resources and networking for students and trainees, and they also publish legitimate and low-cost scientific journals. Unlike the commercial scientific publishers or the millions of scammy online-only junk journals out there, society journals are relatively expensive even for non-members to publish in, they have rigorous peer review, and they are also way cheaper for institutions to subscribe to. As a professor, I consider it very important to do what I can to support legitimate scientific publishing in biomedical science.
  For many years I was an IEEE member, because it was not very expensive, it looked good professionally, the Spectrum magazine was pretty good, and they had a much better deal on term life insurance than my university had. Initially I had joined for conference discounts (and student membership was dirt cheap), but after about 15 years my interests had drifted enough that IEEE conferences were no longer very interesting to me.
  When I no longer needed life insurance (sufficient savings for my family to retire on) and the Spectrum magazine shrunk to a fraction of its former size, I discontinued my membership. I might have continued it for a few more years if I had been given the prestigious “Fellow” title, but I never advanced past “senior member”. The price was simply too high for the tiny value associated with being a member.
  To be honest I only renew when I’m going to the society’s meeting that year… In which case it costs the same to renew as not to as the cost is deducted from the meeting fee. So I have been a bad society member many times (when the meeting is too far away or otherwise inconvenient to attend).
  Come to think of it, there is one additional big benefit to belonging to a professional society. When going up for promotion, at least where I’ve been (and I think this is fairly general), the “service” criterion is divided into department level, university level, and national. Volunteering to do something for your society’s annual meeting (chairing a platform session & etc.) is one of the easier ways to get something to put on the “National Level Service” line of your CV.