Finished grading the final for my giant class and just submitted final grades!!!
Yay!
Now the summer of leisure catching up on paper writing and submitting commences, but not before the great May cleansing of backlogged editorial and refereeing work ends.
My graduate students have been very patient as the end of semester kicked my butt, but are now eager to pounce.
xykademiqz 
Bahaha, I have a student who is just like that cat!
I am doing the same dance (but Brad Pitt looks better 🙂 )
Congrats! Hoping to be there myself within 24-36 hours.
@EarthSciProf: Hang in there, just a little longer! We are all cheering you on!
Grades are entered. Will give them a final check in the morning before I hit ‘submit’.
Need to work on my response to what I do in the summer. Ran into some neighbors on way home from work tonight and they asked if I had the summer ‘off’. Rattling off a long list of what I have to do this summer is probably not the best response. But it is better than ‘No, I don’t have the @#$@#$ summer off though I’m only getting paid for 1 month of the 2-3 summer months because I worked my butt off to get a grant funded so that I could get paid’.
Congrats on turning your grades in!
And sympathies on getting yet again the perennial “You must be off all summer!” question. I swear I get it every year, and it feels like it’s from the same people. They must think I lie when I say that I don’t have time off but that I don’t get paid by the university and that any salary I do have over the summer is from grants. I think maybe the disconnect comes from three sources: a) they can’t believe you work if you are not paid, why would anyone do that? b) you are “just” a teacher, and all K-12 teachers have summers off, so must you; c) research = googling.
xykademiqz, now that you are done and have tons of time (j/k), I have a blog idea for you … can you tell us what what makes a grant for NSF spectacular in the eyes of the review panel?
dafs, I wish I could answer that. If I could, I’d bottle it and sell it. I personally am willing to overlook flaws in details if the idea is novel, exciting, generally feasible, and the PI looks like a competent individual. But panels are crazy, and often have I seen a good proposal sunk because someone pulls on something minor and can’t let go. I sometimes wonder if these people can get over their egos and wanting to be the smartest person in the room to realize that they are tanking a potentially great proposal and that the work won’t be done as a result of their nitpickiness.
Here’s some old writing on the subject , the proposals category from Academic Jungle. This one is probably closest to what you are asking about.
Good luck!
fair enough … 🙂 thank you for the links