Bits and pieces of doing the job:

— Emailing with one program manager while working on a project report for another, from a different agency, and I feel a little like I am secretly juggling two significant others, nly instead of flirty texts we exchange graphs and Gannt charts and highlight slides and requests for revised budgets.

— One program manager is MIA for months on end, but when they’re on, they send out a flurry of emails and are super accessible for a brief period. So the other day I was emailing with them between 12 and 2 am. Yes, all of us involved in academic science are nuts. 

— I’m writing an evaluation letter for the promotion a candidate and want to make the letter as strong as possible. I look up the most highly cited papers and want to highlight the importance and originality of the contributions, and I realize that the papers, while technically fine, sound wishy-washy. The statements of work (in abstract, intro, conclusion) are all weak and equivocal. Reader, if a well-meaning evaluator cannot easily figure out why the hell these papers were written to being with, what’s new and important in them, then your bleary-eyed, attention-challenged colleagues will quickly dismiss your work. Learn how to write clear, concise, persuasive statements of work. What did you do, why did you do it, why should people care, and did you find anything of note/advance the state of the art in some way?

— Will I ever be senior enough not to constantly be assumed clueless in the reviews of my papers? Like, “Are the authors reeeeeeally sure what they say holds, because it doesn’t seem to me that it does, based on me flipping through this textbook.” Yes, we are fucking sure, because I have dozens of paper on the topic spanning nearly two decades. I know how to fucking recognize it.

— At least with papers, I can rebut the above comments. I cannot fight the presumption of incompetence in grant reviews.

— Is there a way to have a sabbatical that actually feels restful? I fear it’s not possible when you have a research group. The work never stops. Maybe you’re not teaching, but all the research supervision happens just as before, so you’re constantly tethered by the needs of the group. Even when I procrastinate, all the stuff I have to do for my students hangs over my head.

— I’m teaching in person this fall, in a gigantic classroom, under a face shield. Both I and the students will be expected to undertake extensive pre- and post-lecture cleaning of our work space. Should be just peachy.

— How is it that the society considers me old/useless/invisible, yet I still have two more decades till retirement? That’s two more decades of grant writing… Man, I better stop futzing around with short fiction and start writing best-seller novels.

How’ve you been, academic blogosphere? What’s new at the dawn of a new academic year?