Professor Carla Martinez Machain joins the Hayseed Scholar Podcast. Professor Machain talks about growing up in Mexico, specifically outside of and then also in Mexico City, the schools she went to, her interests, doing Model UN and visiting The Hague during an overseas trip when Milosevic was on trial, and then deciding to go to Rice University in Houston for undergrad. She talks about that transition, the decision to go to grad school at Rice instead of the other places she could have gone, how her graduate training included taking 3 years of classes, comps and then her dissertation. She reflects on presenting at conferences (which she says she didn’t enjoy back then but does now), and getting a tenure track position at Kansas State. She talks about getting settled in at K State and she and Brent discuss how her high productivity led her to go up early for tenure. Carla discusses how and why she eventually began to enjoy going to conferences, how she balances work and not working, how she approaches writing and her analysis and her ways of decompressing through running and cooking. The discussion concludes on the topic of her upcoming move to SUNY-Buffalo where she’ll be taking a position this fall, after a decade in Manhattan.