Alea Iacta Est

Posted by Chad Orzel on April 20, 2006
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The official letter from the department requesting the formation of an ad hoc committee for my tenure review was sent in yesterday. This is the official start of the process– I’m still a little fuzzy on the timeline from here out, but by September, I’ll have to provide the committee with a huge amount of teaching and research material, and then there’s a long process of interviews with students and faculty, external review of my research, and a visit by someone who will be evaluating the lab that I’ve built.

This isn’t the main reason why I haven’t been blogging as much this week– that’s down to grading, lecture and problem writing, the exam we’re giving tonight, and some side effects of medication. My role in the process to this point has been fairly minimal– I gave our chairman copies of all the papers I’ve published, and a short statement describing my research activities, and they did the rest.

It’s certainly working to raise the ambient stress level, though. But we’re only aroud five or six on the dial at the moment, and these go to eleven.

Anyway, the fun has officially started. Consider this advance warning should I crack up completely in the next six months.

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Comments

  1. #1 David Sewell
    April 20, 2006

    “The die is milk”? Cue the Monty Python sketch from Life of Brian with the centurion giving the grafitti artist a Latin grammar lesson… (“lacta” = milk, “jacta” = “thrown, cast”). Nitpicking aside, best of luck!

  2. #2 Kate Nepveu
    April 20, 2006

    The joys of sans-serif fonts. As you can see from the URL, which is taken from the post’s subject, that’s a captial “i.”

  3. #3 Mark Paris
    April 20, 2006

    All I can say is, good luck, although I hope luck has nothing to do with it. But if it does, I hope it’s good.

  4. #4 Chad Orzel
    April 20, 2006

    As Kate notes, that’s a capital i in the sans-serif font used for the post titles. I suppose I could’ve used a “J” instead, but as any Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade fan knows, “J” is a late addition to the Latin alphabet…

  5. #5 Abi
    April 20, 2006

    Wish you all the best!

  6. #6 Jeff
    April 20, 2006

    Good luck! With the getting tenure thing that is, not with the cracking up thing.

  7. #7 Yagnavalkya
    April 21, 2006

    Good luck, Chad, though I’m sure that in an ideal world a guy like you shouldn’t need luck. Though as for the “J” business, if you relly want to be geekily, historically correct, they always had serifs, Maybe you should tweak your template to get a “Times New Roman” heading …