The Meandering Life Silvia Secchi says her career has been like a meandering river. “Rivers that meander are very healthy,” she says. “They’re a little slower, but that’s good.”
by Jacqueline Hartling Stolze
T
ired as only a new mom can be, Silvia Secchi walked into her boss’ office at Iowa State University and dropped into a chair, blowing out a big sigh. “Cathy, I come into the office to sleep,” she admitted to her postdoc supervisor Cathy Kling. Kling responded, “Well, is the chair comfy enough? Because otherwise I’ll get you another one.” Secchi laughs about this story now. “I was very lucky,” she says.
A Cog in the Machine You won’t hear Secchi telling other women to “lean in,” a bit of advice she calls trite. But she does believe in supporting other women — and men, too — whenever she gets the chance. She has built her career around long-term professional relationships. There’s a friendship, too, a camaraderie, that she values. Secchi says she is the happiest when working on a big team, especially with colleagues who are also friends. “I like to say that my favorite thing is just to be a cog in the machine,” Secchi says. Secchi’s career has meandered all the way from her childhood home on the Italian island of Sardinia to Iowa, where her current research focuses on the relationships among agriculture, water, and the environment. Along the way, she earned a master’s degree in agricultural economics at the University of Reading in the U.K. and a PhD in economics at Iowa State University. By no means has her journey been a straight shot from point A to point B. “It’s like a river,” Secchi says. “Rivers that 1 6 • IIHR Currents
meander are very healthy. You don’t want them to be straight. They’re a little slower, but that’s good.” Today, Secchi is an associate research engineer at IIHR, a member of the University of Iowa’s (UI) Water Sustainability Cluster (WSI), and an associate professor of geographical and sustainable sciences. Secchi says she never would have envisioned this career when she was an undergraduate studying economics in Milan, Italy. “It’s been very serendipitous. It’s taken me a long time to get here,” she says. When she thinks about being 50 and not yet a full professor, Secchi says she thinks, “Oh, crap! But then I think, no, not crap. I’m really happy. I love my job.” The River of Life Secchi particularly loves having the opportunity to extend her work beyond the traditional boundaries of her field. “When I introduce myself at conferences, I say that I was trained as a natural resources economist, but that I self-identify both as an economist and a geographer.” She has found a comfortable home in the UI Department of Geographical and Sustainable Sciences. Secchi even taught herself GIS (Geographical Information Systems), a useful tool for her research at the intersection of the human and the natural. Her work is largely place-based, and that place is Iowa. Even when she was on the faculty at Southern Illinois University, Secchi kept her Iowa-centered focus. She explores the consequences — positive or otherwise — of land management