• Winter Break Dispatch

    *hacks through cobwebs with a machete* Anybody here? It’s been a long while, but I’m never really gone for good! I’ve just been very busy, busier than usual—or whatever “usual” once stood for, back in my ancient professional past—so blogging has fallen by the wayside. The little free time I do have goes toward recharging

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  • How Vital Is Your Vita?

    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-

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  • A Serving of Service

    “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,

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  • Tip for Tat

    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

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  • 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

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  • Whine and Cheese

    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

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  • Academic Levity

    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

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  • Undecim Anni

    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

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  • Sad News

    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

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  • Music to Grade Tests To

    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”

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