academia
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By way of Undine, who blogs at”Not of General Interest,” I found this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The article addresses academics retiring, or, more precisely, not retiring early enough to make room for deserving up-and-comers. The whole piece is fairly obnoxious (“The Forever Professors: Academics who don’t retire are greedy, selfish, and bad for students”), but it brings…
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I could not wait for Friday night this week. I am very tired. I don’ think I have yet managed to get a hold of my schedule or my workload this semester at all. Pushing things to the sidelines because of the proposals just made everything worse, because the work never goes away. It just piles on, sitting there,…
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For my nonacademic readers: Research at universities is supported largely by grants from federal funding agencies, which are extremely hard to get. Professors in the sciences and engineering at large research universities spend a lot of time applying for grants (writing proposals). Overhead is the portion of external grants that the university takes for…
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I miss FSP. I wish she’d post more, and I am sure I am not alone in this sentiment. One question I remember her asking is: Do you actually have to like your students? Or is it at least important not to dislike them? What if there is a student who really pushes your buttons? Perhaps they…
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When you blog for a while, sooner or later you start revisiting the topics you discussed before. Some of them you visit multiple times. A few, ad nauseam. One of these perennial conundrums is what the necessary skills are for someone to become a successful academic scientist or engineer. In particular, how much zeal, drive, motivation,…
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Best of luck with fall NSF proposals, everyone!
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I am done! Both of my NSF proposals have been submitted and I am breathing a big sigh of relief. This is the first time I wrote two NSF proposals essentially in parallel (different directorates, no worries). They were both brand new, from scratch. The original plan was to write them sequentially, but the first one ended up spilling…
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I think I might have never been this busy in my life. Today I was at the Eldest’s swim meet (didn’t need to volunteer, yey!) While all the other parents were sitting around, chatting, playing with their phones and iPads, I had a legal pad, a pen, and a freaking textbook , and was doing undergrad homework problems (i.e. writing…
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