At this stage of my career, my longform CV is 50+ pages. It’s a document into which I plop everything: every technical program committee and grant-review panel I served on, every student defense I sat in on, every contributed conference talk one of my students gave. Every dollar I received for my work, both intra- and extramurally. The only place I expect to submit this document is to my institution for annual reports and stewardship of my professorship funds. I would also submit the whole thing (perhaps with small changes) if I were applying for a new job or if I were being considered for an award. 

Abbreviated forms of the CV are solicited fairly often. For example, federal agencies typically require a 2-page biosketch with education, appointments, a certain number of relevant papers, and highlights of synergistic activities, which generally means noteworthy professional service and/or awards. I recently had to write a 3-page version of the CV for an internal funding solicitation. I also have a one-paragraph biosketch that is useful to share when I write letters of recommendation or evaluation for peers. 

However, in recent years it has become more common to receive requests for a full CV from people who  already need something else from me, such as international PhD students who need a letter of support and a research plan to apply for a visa, graduates applying for the green card via the NIW mechanism and are asking for a letter, and, with alarmingly increasing frequency, people soliciting evaluation letters for tenure and promotion. 

I am not comfortable sharing the full CV with random people, not because there’s anything secret in there, but because not everyone needs to know every single thing about my record. It feels like being asked to show people your underwear; not everyone is entitled to that information. The full CV should be reserved for the cases where I am being evaluated for something. It is intrusive to ask for it to supposedly corroborate my worthiness as an opinion giver. You should be able to make do with a blurb or a 2-page biosketch, especially when coupled with information that’s readily available online (department page and Google Scholar).

Recently I sent in an evaluation letter for promotion with an abbreviated CV, and they came back to specifically request the full one. I felt really irked by this request. I already produced a letter you wanted and you presumably had enough information to decide I would be a good person to ask in the first place. Why do you need a document about me that will be as long as your candidate’s whole dossier? 

Blogosphere, how do you feel about sharing your longform CV? 

“My tongue is strong because I hold it too much.”
– Kathy Fish, Strong Tongue

This year has been very busy, much of it thanks to the extra service to the institution and the profession that I’ve taken on. And the more service I do, the more often I get casually insulted. People are absolute $hits, and they seem to be extra $hitty to the women who are supposed to help them. Every single member of our administrative staff (predominantly women) deserves a f*cking medal because I’m sure they deal with 10x the nonsense that befalls me.

Example 1: I took over the communication for a small technical community in advance of organizing a biennial conference. Like the apparent idiot that I am, I created a mailing list and sent out an email to the community members to inform them of new happenings, to which one member of the community (from Western Europe) basically told me to go f*ck myself, blocked the list and blocked me, and wrote all about it in a follow-up email, wherein he also informed me that I have ruined the last shreds of usefulness that email as a medium once possessed. While I generally love to have such supernatural powers attributed to me, this was not a celebratory moment on the whole. Yes, please, do tear me a new a$$hole as a thanks for the service I am volunteering for.

Example 2: No one is more defensive and pissy than a colleague (generally, but not always, male) who really didn’t want to have their attention drawn to the fact that all members of their instructional team (TAs and/or in-class undergrad helpers in flipped classrooms) have the exact same ethnicity and gender. All I did was recommend some additional helpers on top of those the colleague requested (usually people like more help rather than less, especially given budgetary constraints), and when the colleague came back to ask who these intruders were (all chosen from among our very top students, mind you) and I noted the various benefits of having these extra people, including the fact that they came from a variety of backgrounds, I was greeted with an email rant on how the presumably idiot likes of me conflate background with race and sex and ethnicity, because it couldn’t occur to the colleague that I might not have wanted to go into the possibly tricky details over email; it’s apparently much easier to assume I am an idiot, a thought that is somehow never too far from some (male) colleagues’ minds. Then the colleague treated me to a deep dive into their own history that can be summarized as “rags to riches” or perhaps “bad boy done good” lest I assume the colleague is as they appear at first glance. I won’t make that mistake again, because at first glance the colleague appears like someone who is not a douchebag, and now I know that’s not true. F*ck me for offering extra helpers (on top of those hand-picked by instructor) who are top students and for hinting that the variety in helper background might be a good thing for our undergrads.

Example 3: A little while back, I was on the committee with another woman and a bunch of men. The committee chair was a man. He ended up assigning significantly more work to the other woman and me than to the men. When I brought up that he overloaded the two women on the committee, the colleague reacted with shock and dismay, like, how could I accuse him of all people of sexism (I don’t see why not him; it’s not like he’s had a sterling reputation as a supporter of women, which I’m somehow sullying by my baseless accusations). Then he went full martyr, offering to step down from chairing the committee if I wanted him to, to which I said no one was asking him to step down, but I was asking him to redistribute the workload more evenly. Which he did. Eventually it all blew over, but I remain the difficult bitch for bringing it up. Of course there was no apology and no accountability or self-reflection, just pouting  followed by a grudging acquiescence to my complaint.

In all these anecdotes, I have had to hold my tongue, absorb other people’s outbursts, and generally keep my $hit together despite being the injured party, while the offending party got to add insult to injury and act offended themselves.

It’s also amazing to me is that fifty- and sixty-year-old people are unable to control themselves enough to not be dicks over email. And that there is never, ever, an apology of any kind.

I’m so tired of all this. And it’s not like I can escape it by retiring, because this $hit is pervasive.

Anyway. 

So, how’s your summer been, blogosphere? 

It’s peak insanity time in the semester (also decade), so we all need some levity. Here’s my contribution.

Blogosphere professors, do you have any visible tattoos? I am particularly interested in hearing from women and/or folks in STEM. I ask because I’ve been dreaming of getting tattoos pretty much forever, and I know this makes me a midlife-crisis cliché (“all middle-aged women get tattoos lol”), but I also mostly don’t care since my desire for coolness has gone the way of the dodo, as did my ovarian function.

However, I am worried about the perception by 1) undergraduate students and 2) colleagues, but mostly students. I am in a very male-dominated field that hasn’t grown less male dominated in my twenty years as faculty. This semester, I have five girls in a class of seventy. I am still aware that most people don’t think I have any business being where I am, in a position of professorial authority in my area. I am worried that having visible tattoos (I’m thinking inner forearm) will further label me as someone who really doesn’t fit.

Granted, this is actually a combo of gender and area: I don’t know any male faculty in my area who have visible tattoos, either, even among younger men whom students tend to admire. In the arts and humanities, I suspect there are (some? many?) faculty with tattoos, as I imagine this type of personal expression is probably more expected and accepted, by both students and faculty, than it is in STEM.

So what say you, academic blogosphere? To tat or not to tat? Any tips for tats?

Hello bloggy friends, this is your friendly neighborhood academic! Only I’m not so much friendly as I am grouchy as f*ck.

I have reached a level of business that is probably a bit like the eye of the storm. Around me, the vortex of job demands suctions everything in its path, yet I sit in the middle, pretending that things are not as crazy as they are. Pretending that things are not completely out of control.

I have more tasks competing for my time than ever before and than I ever thought possible. And it’s not because I don’t say no, because I promise I say no all the time; I’m a veritable Queen of No these days. I delete, unread, way more emails from all sources than should be allowed in a civilized society. Yet, with teaching overload, endless admin tasks, nonstop proposal writing, conference organization, editorship, and trying to run a research program, advise graduate students, and get papers out, I am now at the level of overwhelm where I am late with everything, disappointing everyone, and I can’t even muster the energy to care.

Everyone wants my time/attention, and they will just have to get in line and I will get to whatever they need when I get to it.

There’s no amount of prioritization that will help it. Other than death, the only solution is retirement, something I’ve been dreaming of with increasing frequency. Alas, I’ve got another decade and a half till then.

I read online that people are much happier in their 50s than in their 40s because in your 40s you are an old young, while in your 50s you are a young old. That’s true; I feel better about myself as a person, about my inner worth, and about my relationships with important people (my husband and kids) than ever before.

But the decade and a half that I still have to devote to the job seems simultaneously brief and positively endless.

As for my fiction writing, I haven’t worked on the next novel since the semester started and I left off at about 40%. I really want to get back to it, but I don’t have time, or actually I don’t have guilt-free time. How can I write when there are all these job-related obligations I should fulfill instead? I’ve been trying to stave off the writing cravings through short fiction and quick prompt-based writing games on social media, but that’s like eating granola bar when what you really crave is a huge steak.

I’m not a child, and I know I need to suck it up and do what needs to be done. But it’s getting increasingly difficult to push myself to do things I don’t want to do, because there’s no end and no respite. I’m being overly dramatic now, and things do get better between semesters, but breaks are only enough to sort-of catch up, not to get ahead of the work or to actually rest.

I don’t know if this is garden-variety burnout, midlife edition, or if perhaps we are still reeling from the effects of Covid, and by that I don’t mean physical but mental. It’s definitely true that students after Covid are not what they used to be. I have more students than in the past, but they are on average much more poorly prepared to tackle class material. The math level has dropped off the cliff for reasons I don’t fully understand, but it makes it very hard to teach students physics when they lack fluency in basic algebra and introductory calculus. I’ve always enjoyed teaching undergrads, but I feel increasingly hopeless at how vast a chasm of ignorance I face every semester. I literally have to remind (reteach?) people how to do a cross product, that a^n-b^n is not equal to (a-b)^n, how to use the chain rule in differentiation, how to perform integration by parts. Something like 75% of people cannot calculate the first derivative without making some sort of calculation error along the way.

I really shouldn’t complain. In the corporate world, I would be treated to the analogue of “take the old dog behind the barn and shoot it.” I am aware that keeping a job through disillusionment and burnout is a great privilege.

But it doesn’t change the fact that after twenty years in the ever-more-grinding grind, it’s hard to be chipper about it. That I literally cannot remember the last time I had a free, restful weekend, and not just anxiety-ridden forced downtime during which all pending tasks loom like an ominous specter.

And this doesn’t even touch on everything that’s going on politically. I know as grownups we’re supposed to hold it together, but it’s been years now of holding it together. Eventually, everyone needs to unclench.

The vaguely scatological metaphor aside, how are things going with you, blogosphere?

It’s always funny—by which I don’t mean ha-ha funny, more like “I want to bury my face in your ratty sweater and wail like a banshee” funny—when people ask if my winter break was restful. No, it was not restful. It is never restful. I was playing catchup the whole time and almost—almost!—managed to get everything done. One collaborative proposal in, one collaborative proposal underway, major revisions of two papers returned, two new paper drafts, and so, so many journal manuscripts handled as editor. The organization of a conference, all the reviewing duties. The tail end of the extra service duties I took on last semester. Then there’s my own fiction writing, which, granted, is entirely self-inflicted, but is just about the only thing that I crave to be doing these days.

Then, of course, there are family demands on my time, even though the kids aren’t little, but now it’s helping with AP Physics or AP Calculus or middle-school essay writing, and it’s managing everyone’s disparate nutritional needs (middle-aged people having an ever-increasing list of food sensitivities, high-school people having food allergies, middle-school people still having issues around the tastes and textures of common foods).

So no, the winter break wasn’t relaxing. It was productive, though, so while I haven’t exactly entered the new semester all fresh and dewy like a newborn filly, I have shown up with a mostly clean plate and steely resolve, because I have teaching overload yet again.

This weekend isn’t going to be relaxing, either, and it’s making me a little twitchy. Yesterday and the day before, I reviewed an author friend’s book as a beta-reader and sent her my comments, which happened in the pockets of time around teaching two classes, holding group meeting and individual technical meetings with students, and some conference organization stuff. This morning I worked on a fellowship application for one of my undergrads; this afternoon will be devoted to commenting on a junior colleague’s proposal that’s due Monday. Tomorrow, I have to read and comment on another friend’s book, which I’ve been sitting on for two months, and I know this isn’t for work, but this person has read both my finished books and is a very supportive in general, so it’s important to me to return the favors.

I haven’t touched my manuscript (Book 3) in several weeks. Originally I thought I’d have a full draft by this time, but, alas, it’s at only 50%. The good news is that I got another piece of short fiction picked up by a pro-paying market. It’s been a while since that happened and I needed a win. I also have at least half a dozen shorts that have good bones and need to be edited before submission, but I’ve had neither the time nor the headspace.

I guess I do a lot of service, both for work and as a fiction author. Occasionally I get irritated because these feel like things I should eschew in order to focus on my own goals. But giving back is important. For example, by helping edit other people’s short fiction and novels, I’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t and why. Helping others literally makes me a better writer. Also, there’s the benefit of having other writers be willing to read and engage with your work, which cannot be beat and is something that would otherwise have to be heftily paid for. Most importantly, these people have become my friends, and let me tell you, in any endeavor that blends creativity and business, supportive friends who understand exactly what you are going through are priceless.

And this holds for service in my job, too. I like service tasks where I can do concrete good. Stuff that helps propel junior people, stuff that enables us to recruit and retain the best people, stuff that enables other access to the resources they truly need for the work in the classroom and in the lab, stuff that strengthens my technical community.

So yeah, I get growly or whiny when I get overwhelmed and it feels like everyone else’s needs come before mine, and maybe I would benefit from having an assistant whose role would be to decline all requests on my behalf, but at the end of the day, the work for others is aligned with my values, and it creates a better work environment at my job and a better writing community for my (increasingly important) creative outlet turned side hustle. And the forced time away from my manuscript will enable me to re-approach it with a fresh outlook.

How was you winter break, blogosphere?

McSweeney’s never misses:

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-am-a-passionate-mid-level-university-administrator-and-im-gonna-administrate-the-shit-out-of-this-place

Happy New Year everyone! WordPress alerts me that xykademiqz has been around for 11 years, and it’s still kicking. Barely kicking, sure, but kicking nonetheless.

I’ve been busy trying to clear out the massive work backlog from the fall semester, and I’m almost—almost!—done, but shh, don’t say it out loud, lest someone should hear and bury me under a steaming new pile of mindnumbing obligations.

How have your holidays been, blogosphere?

I just learned that a longtime supporter of the blog and a reader-turned-real-life-friend, Alex Small, passed away yesterday after a battle with brain cancer (diagnosed in April).

Alex was smart, funny, and passionate about his students and his work as a professor of physics at Cal Poly Pomona (edit on 12/23: in memoriam for Alex in CPP News). Here is a nice recent article about his life and career in honor of his lifetime achievement award from the OSSC.

Alex wrote eloquently and prolifically about problems in academia. Here are the links to some of his published essays.

CHE: https://www.chronicle.com/author/alex-small

IHE: https://www.insidehighered.com/node/5902

Heterodox Academy: https://heterodoxacademy.org/authors/alex-small/

More of his writing can be found on his blog Physicist at Large.

Alex also wrote science fiction, much of it under the pen name R. S. Alexander. Below are some of his short stories.

https://www.abyssapexzine.com/2019/03/a-missed-diversion/

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01835-y

https://365tomorrows.com/2016/09/24/revise-and-resubmit/

Goodbye, Alex. You will be missed.

Also known as “how to channel one’s fury over spending 85% of grading time deciding how much partial credit to give for barely relevant scribbles”