Let’s say I was taking down a chalkboard and trying to mount a whiteboard in its place. (For the sake of argument, let’s assume I was doing this someplace where I have complete freedom to do such things all by myself, with no work order or “cooling off” period or anything like that.) That would be a quick and easy operation, right?
Ha.
Category Archives: Personal
Irrational exuberance (cramped faculty office version).
Just this month, my department came into possession of five new faculty offices, owing to the fact that brand spanking new faculty offices were created in the old library building, and some of the faculty from other offices in this building are being moved into them.
Forget that our chair actually had to fight for these additional offices (armed with data on student-to-faculty ratios and such) with another department that still occupies much of this building. Forget that the offices we fought for are old, water-damaged, haven’t been seriously cleaned in years, and are painted in such 1970s colors as orange. Forget that the university looked like it was going to try to stick us with the costs associated with disposing of the broken furniture and piles of trash left by the faculty that vacated the offices (and that we will end up eating the costs of installing internet jacks in the offices that need them).
We have more space!!
Feeding the beasts (a little kitchen science).
Tonight in the kitchen, I have cultures to attend to. Since I won’t be on the road again for months, I brought out my jar of sourdough starter to revive with fresh water, flour, and some time at room temperature. And, I have some kefir culture from our friends in Santa Barbara that’ll be wanting more milk. In my mental list this morning, I tracked these as “Don’t forget to feed yeast and bacterium.”
But, it turns out, even if I only fed one of these two, I’d be nourishing yeast and bacterium.
Day 2 of the BCCE: some notes.
I’m blogging again from the lovely Vienna Cafe in West Lafayette, Indiana, at the end of Day 2 of the BCCE. I gave my own talk this afternoon as part of symposium session on incorporating ethics in the chemistry curriculum (along with 5 other very interesting talks). I think it went well, but I always enjoy conferences more when I’ve finished my presenting and can be an undistracted audience for the other presentations.
Below the fold, some of the things I learned in todays various talks and events:
My dinner with Julie and Geeky Mom.
It’s hard to know the best way to blog a dinner (especially when you have agreed, with your dinner companions, that each of you should blog it to discover whether the result is a Rashoman-like situation wherein each description might as well have been of a different event). Also, I was up late packing and up early catching my airport shuttle. So this may be somewhat stream of (un)consciousness.
Which comes first?
This morning, I finished making the slides for a talk I’m giving at the BCCE at Purdue next week. (Any of you chemists or chemical educators in the audience planning on being there?) I feel very proud of myself for having the slides written and ready to use days before I even board the plane. I’m even sufficiently enthusiastic that I may just start writing a paper-version of the content I’ll be giving in my talk.
That brings me to my question for academics and others who work in the media of “paper” and “presentation”:
Which do you typically write first?
Do you write a paper first and then adapt it to a suitable format for presentation*? Or do you write your talk first and then use it as the basis for a paper (which might be more lengthy, formal, detailed, etc.)?
Is this a pattern you’re happy with, or do you ever think you’d rather do it the other way around? (If the latter, what exactly is stopping you or has stopped you from doing it the other way around?)
_________
*Opinions vary on what counts as a suitable format for presentation. There’s this practice in philosophy where, rather than giving a talk, a philosopher will read the audience a paper. This sometimes happens even in instances where the paper has circulated to audience members in advance — which means you can watch the presenter reading his or her paper while audience members read along on their own photocopies of the same paper.
Maybe it’s my early training as a chemist (since, in chemistry, no one gives this sort of presentation), but I have always found the reading-to-the-audience format offputting. But, it’s one where clearly the writing of the paper comes before the “writing of the talk”.
What, exactly, is meant by ‘a life’?
A tale of two job searches (Having a family and an academic career, part 4).
A long time ago, on a flight to a conference, a friend and I discussed the psychology of search committee members. We noticed that even people who thought they were exceedingly fair and open-minded might unconsciously make decisions that don’t seem fair, but do, from a certain point of view, seem rational. So, when faced with two equally talented and promising job candidates, the committee members might opt against the one with visible signs of “a life” (such as children, a partner, even a serious hobby) and for the one with no visible signs of a life. Why? Well, which candidate is more likely to come in every day (maybe evenings and weekends, too) to bust his or her butt for the job? Which is less likely to be distracted from teaching, research, and service to the organization? Which is less likely to need time off for someone else’s medical crisis? Which is less likely to leave suddenly when a partner gets a job offer elsewhere?
The candidate with no life.
For the job seeker, then, we decided the best strategy would be to hide all traces of “a life” from the search committee. Once you had a job offer, though, you could safely ask questions about childcare facilities, employment opportunities for a spouse, etc., because once the committee was at the point of offering you a job, the committee members had a stake in convincing themselves they had made a completely rational decision that you were the best person for the job. Believing themselves to have made a rational decision to hire you, they could accommodate the knowledge that you came with some baggage; not to do so would force them to engage with the possibility that maybe their decisions were not always based on qualifications for the job.
Four months pregnant with younger offspring, as I prepared to fly, alone, to New York for philosophy’s major job-seeking convention, I couldn’t help but recall this earlier discussion on a plane. I was going stealth with my baggage.
Having a family and an academic career: one blogger’s experience (part 3).
At the end of part 2, I had just dropped the baby-bomb on my unsuspecting advisor. Happily, he did not have a cow about it. Now, as we move into the stage of this story that is A.P. (after pregnancy), we lose the coherent narrative structure for awhile.
Given what the first several weeks with a newborn are like, that’s entirely appropriate.
This, also, is the part of the story where particulars start making a huge difference. The decisions we made were contingent on the range of options that were open to us at any given moment; with different circumstances, we might have been on a completely different trajectory. In a number of instances, we were lucky things worked out as well as they did.
Having a family and an academic career: one blogger’s experience (part 2).
Where we left off in part 1: In my fifth (and last) year of funding in my philosophy Ph.D. program, staring down 30, trying to finish a dissertation, and bracing myself for the rigors of the academic job market, I said to myself, “How could having a baby make things noticably more difficult?”
Then I remembered: I’d have to tell my advisor.