My Personal reflections after 8 years in the MCAA - MCAA Magazine March 2024

Celebrating the first decade of our Association, we invited members from all five MCAA Boards to share their insights. Sara Ricardo, from the 2018-20 MCAA Board, reflects on her 8 year long connection with the MCAA. Read along as she charts the growth and development of the MCAA alongside her own professional trajectory and shares her vision and hopes for the organisation and its members moving forward.

The MCAA is turning 10, a testament to the hard work and motivation of volunteer members who have dedicated an important part of their lives to making the MCAA what it is. Why do this on a volunteer basis? Because of its people and because of what you get to learn and experiment with, which you would not necessarily be able to do elsewhere.

Until you get actively involved, you have no idea what is in store. My initial involvement was with the creation of the Spain-Portugal Chapter in 2015 and I remember identifying with the people and what was aimed for. The people you meet are a truly positive side of being involved in the MCAA, especially if you are in places in which you feel isolated. In my case, it was compounded by dissatisfaction with the functioning of academia and a need to have like-minded people with whom to talk. The work in the chapter has led me to contribute to the organisation of the Annual Conference and General Assembly, in Salamanca in 2017. By this time, the activities and tasks kept increasing in complexity and the sense of what you could do became clearer. During this conference, there were other important turning points: the involvement with the science policy working group, the seeds of contribution to ESOF 2018 and joining the board in 2018. The space to explore happened naturally. The session that we designed for ESOF 2018 was a result of that: like-minded people with similar interests getting together to act on it. The session focused on the sustainability of the career of what we then called the “lost generation”, senior researchers who were becoming relics of another way of working and suffering strongly with the changes in the academic system, and, more broadly, a reflection on the sustainability of the academic enterprise. The academic system is now actively undergoing this transformation, but it is also true that we have lost much of its talent. This was a theme close to my heart; I left academia in 2018, due to my dissatisfaction with how things were done and my own personal need for a different challenge. Joining the Board of the MCAA, first in 2018 and then re-elected in 2020, intensified the bonds, learning and experimentation.

In the last 8 years, I have seen the MCAA change from a gathering of some researchers to a semiprofessional organisation.

I have always found the MCAA to have a somewhat split personality; simultaneously a cumbersome complex structure mired by bureaucracy and rules, while having a dynamism, talent and energy that runs through it, infused by its people. The latter is the MCAA´s strength, and the former is a necessary legacy.

No place is better to see that cumbersome structure than when one is on the Board. Me, and I believe it is safe to say all my fellow Board members, have suffered the heaviness of that structure. There is a general feeling that you cannot contribute properly because you constantly deal with bureaucracy as the operational arm of an organisation growing exponentially. By 2022, that organisation had ~20,000 members, 30+ chapters in all continents, several working groups and a myriad of partners and collaborators. It became very apparent by this time that the rules of the game had changed. We could not be running this organisation like that, and we needed to semiprofessionalise, be financially self-sufficient, and have some continuity. This transition was led valiantly by the current Board.

In the last 8 years, I have seen the MCAA change from a gathering of some researchers to a semi-professional organisation with a voice at the policy level and a consolidated trusted status in the system. However, the power of the MCAA is its people. It has been challenging to balance the pull of being an organisation in the system and being a worldwide community of researchers with a collective voice in that system. In many ways, the relevance and power of the MCAA that peer organisations see many of our own less active members do not see.

We cannot fully become this community if at least a great majority of the members do not know what our common narrative is and/or identify with it. How many of us do not know what we have done, that we belong, that we can contribute and can have a say?

For the future, I wish we continue to have more dialogue, soften the top-down structure that we have inherited, experiment with ways of contributing and continue to be more transparent, inclusive and fluid, to increase the benefit to us and make our voices heard in Science.

Sara Ricardo
SIRIS Academic
Twitter @safricard
ORCID 0000-0002-8605-2500
LinkedIn sara-ricardo