academic adventures
sciencewoman | November 12, 2008Where we left our heroine at the end of the last episode, she was on her way to pick Minnow up from daycare. Work day's over right? Should be smooth sailing from here to midnight. Maybe, maybe not.
(Note to Lab Lemming: Don't worry about the time to type up these posts. They were compiled from short emails I sent to myself throughout the day...this is lazy blogging.)
5:20 Arrive at daycare. Have the following conversation:
Teacher 1: So-and-so's parents just had a baby boy.
Teacher 2: Yeah, and Tyler's parents are having a girl.
Me: Tyler's mom is pregnant? Seems like…
sciencewoman | November 11, 2008Where we left our saga, our heroine was getting ready for her class. The work day had begun in earnest.
9:10 am. Start the last minute lecture prep. Decide to not make the overheads I need for an example at the end of class...we won't get there anyway I think.
9:30 am. Class. Discuss problems with the latest homework assignment, brief student presentations on a previous assignment, lecture with powerpoint and on the board. Damn, I reached the point where I need the overheads. Have to let class out 8 minutes early, even though we're running a bit behind the syllabus.
10:45 am. Discuss the…
sciencewoman | November 5, 2008From my email box:
My name is Annie Fox and I am a graduate student in Social Psychology at the University of Connecticut. Currently, I am conducting a study examining the role of blogging in the lives of Academic mothers. We have identified you as a potential participant because your blog came up in our web search for relevant blogs. Consequently, we would like to invite you to participate in our research study.
Your participation would involve the completion of an anonymous online survey. The survey contains a mixture of multiple-choice and open-response questions, and should take less…
sciencewoman | November 1, 2008InaDWriMo is, and I quote:
International acaDemic Writing Month is the academic's answer to NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. It was originally created by StyleyGeek as International Dissertation Writing Month, but because so many of us who had already finished our degrees were interested in a little challenge, the D was loosely interpreted as acaDemic. This means that you can write your dissertation, a book chapter, an article, a grant proposal - anything goes, as long as it is academic.
The festivities are being ably hosted, once again, by Dr. Brazen Hussy. To participate, all you…
sciencewoman | October 29, 2008 It's one of those days where it is now almost 4 pm and I have yet to get working on tomorrow morning's lecture. I'm also going to miss a self-imposed deadline to get a draft out to a collaborator. Instead, I spent the morning getting flu shots for Minnow and I and working with a student on a proposal to get a particular dataset for use on his/her thesis. There's a student-only RFP available and we're about 2/3 the way through the proposal. One of the pieces I was helping with involved contacting some other people who might be interested in having the same dataset for their own projects, and…
sciencewoman | October 21, 2008
Dear Administrators,
I understand that Dr. Bigwig in a field related to -ology is coming to campus this week and that we're all very excited to have him here. I'm glad that we are throwing a reception before his lecture. Free food is good. I even support the decision to move Dr. Bigwig's provcatively titled lecture to the evening, in the hope that the general public will be lured onto campus to hear him speak.
But please lay off the pressure on the faculty to attend the event. We'd like to come. We're interested in the topic. (We like free fancy food.) We even like to occasionally mingle…
sciencewoman | October 17, 2008It seems to me that sending off a big grant proposal should occasion a sigh of relief, a glass of wine, and a few minutes away from work. But when I submitted my proposal this afternoon, I barely even got up from my computer. Instead, I dove right into the next item on my to-do list. I'm seriously over-extended right now, and the light at the end of the tunnel seems to be receding into the distance. I'd been holding today in my mind for the past few weeks, but now when I realistically evaluate things, I won't have a moment of rest until after the end of the semester. Hurried hallway…
skookumchick | September 29, 2008OMG, has it been a busy few days. I'm just starting the second shift of working today, after an 8-5:30 day of back-to-back meetings, and tomorrow will be all day in a workshop, but I need to share some updatey things, including a belated announcement for the October Scientiae (yay!) below the fold.
Jen at Deliberate Pixel has had a tough month, but is going to pull out all the stops to get us an October Scientiae carnival. Get your posts in by Friday on anything or the theme "being a good example even in a misstep" and she'll post the carnival this weekend. Thanks, Jen!
Everyone is gearing…
skookumchick | September 22, 2008There are 999 messages in my inbox. An inordinately large number of them are flagged "urgent." There are 1710 messages in my "to sort" mailbox. This is a local folder where I dump messages from my inbox and outbox when I start getting error messages about having too many messages in my IMAP boxes. I am afraid of scrolling through my email because I will undoubtedly find a lot of things I have forgotten to do. And I don't have any more time to do them now as when they came in. I find I'm actually terrified of my computer, repository of all email-related requests, which makes my…
skookumchick | September 17, 2008The press release for our big grant came out today. I have so far been interviewed by the student paper, and the local NPR station, and I have already learned some things about what not to do in interviews with friendly reporters. Some tips are below that I'll add to over the day, and please share some of your thoughts in the comments.
We wrote some talking points to share with all the main grant members who were more involved in different parts, and may be less prepared about others. Don't forget to read them carefully, annotate them, and add to them BEFORE your press release goes out.…
skookumchick | September 5, 2008Just got word that our NSF-ADVANCE grant that we'd been waiting on was finally funded. W00T!!! Start date of October 1. It's not listed on the NSF website yet, but I'll post the link when it is.
It's $3.9M. The president of the university is the PI, and I'm one of 3 co-PIs. It will fund my research assistants and my major research for 5 years. Not bad for a newbie assistant professor.
I think I'm going to take the evening off.
Updated 9/6/08: the NSF award information and abstract is here.
skookumchick | August 25, 2008So, have you been asked whether you are married or have kids on an academic job interview? Many of us have, even though the people interviewing you are not supposed to ask. What strategies have you used (or would have liked to use ;-) ) to deal with these awkward questions? Do you wear your wedding rings? Do you change the background of your computer screen before using your laptop to give your presentation? If you are part of a dual-career couple, when do you bring up your spouse to take advantage of spousal hiring opportunities?
This thread stems from a comment on this post about an…
skookumchick | August 24, 2008I got an email from a reader a few days ago posing a doozy of a problem: she's heading to an interview this week at an institution, and part of her interview involves having "beer with the guys".
With her permission, I share with you an edited version of her email:
Hi ladies,I am a job candidate for a tenure track position in my field interviewing at a university in the south in 2 weeks. These are huntin' fishin' PhD folks (of course 95% white dude phenotype). There's 2 women of around 30 faculty in the department (grad students are 50% female). I have some colleagues (three relatively…
sciencewoman | August 13, 2008I work in a three story building. My office, lab, and teaching space are on the first floor. The departmental office, kitchen, and chair's office are on the second floor. The third floor contains some colleagues' offices, labs, classrooms, etc.
Obviously, most of my time is spent on first floor, but most days I wander up to second floor at some point. I get to third floor <1 x per week. And >90% of the time, on my way back down, I get off at second floor rather than first. Despite the fact that the doors are painted different colors coming off the stairway. And I always feel like an…
skookumchick | August 12, 2008As I'm transitioning away from an academic/personal life of long-distance commuting, I thought this would be a good time (or perhaps the last good time?) to share some of my tips for how to help one's marriage/partnership survive two academic careers in two cities.
Of course, I only have this last year as experience with faculty life (although my husband has been a faculty member for 5). But before that, there was 4 years of my commuting as a grad student (a 3.5 hr commute), and 1.5 years of LDR (a plane trip) as an undergrad. But that was a long time ago, and I was a different person then…
skookumchick | August 6, 2008ScienceWoman blogged about her thoughts about going into Tenure Track Year 2 in time for Cherish's August Scientiae on transitions. I've been thinking about it too, and in particular with respect to how I accomplish some of those academic goals - good teaching, good research, good citizenry - without killing myself. Having my husband in the same town and only one house to worry about will be a start, and it is that latter aspect which makes me propose a new book to discuss this fall.
I was packing a bookshelf this weekend, and I came across a book a friend gave me when I graduated last year…
sciencewoman | July 28, 2008As Alice has reminded us, the theme for this month's Scientiae is "transitions." Seems like a totally appropriate thing to be contemplating as I gear up for the next academic year. A few months ago, I reflected on my lessons learned as a first year faculty member. I felt like I'd learned a lot but still had a ways to go before I really felt up to speed. Maybe it's optimism generated by a few months away from the classroom, but now I'm feeling much more comfortable in my role as a not-quite-so-new member of the department.
For one thing, classes start in about a month, and I actually know…
sciencewoman | June 26, 2008For the last two weeks, I have been utterly consumed by logistics. I've come home from a trip to Utopia and a research project there, have been in the field twice locally scouting a project here, and am preparing for field work in Midwest next month. I'm starting to have dreams about losing boxes of field equipment to the airlines. At the same time, I've been continuing to do lots of thinking about "what I want to be when I grow up" - when I go up for tenure, or go back on the job market, what will my research program have become, in which subfield will I fit or which subfields will I…
skookumchick | June 11, 2008I had a meeting yesterday at 4, but was stood up (by a colleague who is now completely apologetic). I had another meeting today I thought at 1:30, but no one appeared. I went back to my office, saw I had got the time wrong and it was at 2:30. The meeting had been scheduled for 2, and I had misread the change of time email. In addition, I scheduled another meeting at 3 so I would have ended up talking to the 2:30 person for only 30 minutes. So I swapped my 3:00 meeting with the 3:00 person's 3:30 meeting, which worked out well for the 3:30 meeting person as she had the meeting on her…
skookumchick | June 3, 2008ScienceWoman mused about the completion of her first year here, and I had hoped I would develop similar observations and reflections while on Isle Royale. Truth be told, rather than taking the hiking time to think, uninterrupted, about the last year, I did anything but. Think, that is. Instead, I turned the intellectual brain off, and instead looked for orchids and wolf tracks and birds, and engaged in random brain static conversation with my husband about our house and his developing job. It was like a brain vacation.
However, on the 600 mile drive back, I did have chance to think a bit…