Today's rather short post is brought to you by an instructor with 100 student projects to review! lol But seriously, I wanted to take a moment because it is officially the season of course evaluations, and I saw some interesting chatter in my program's slack about this topic. There was the very familiar back-and-forth about … Continue reading Negativity Bias
career
Rest
Fall Break is almost here at my institution. For most of us this means a three day weekend. Because I teach on a Tues/Thurs schedule it means a four day weekend for me. My question is: do you rest on these occasions? Academics in particular, but also many of us I suspect, don't actually take … Continue reading Rest
Celebrate Your Wins
This will be a short post today because my hubby and I are heading out of town for the weekend in 15 minutes. Before we go, I wanted to encourage you all to find some way to celebrate your wins. This is rather common advice in productivity and academic circles, but it strikes me that … Continue reading Celebrate Your Wins
Organize Your Grant Writing
It took me longer than it should have to figure out how to plan for writing grants once I finished graduate school. Not that I hadn't had any experience with writing grant applications before, but my approach was very much by-the-seat-of-my-pants. I was lucky to think about them in time for the deadline. Lucky that … Continue reading Organize Your Grant Writing
Find Your Coven
This post is entirely inspired by Mirya Holman whose newsletter you should subscribe to asap. I sent her "Get Yourself an Academic Coven" letter to my writing group, and we immediately renamed ourselves "Writing Coven." This is good advice no matter what you've got going on in your professional life: find an accountability group. I … Continue reading Find Your Coven
Am I an Early or Mid-Career Academic?
The other day I was scrolling through Twitter when I saw this tweet asking, "Am I early-career or mid-career? A Memoir." And, man, I felt that. I am arguably early-career, having only had full-time employment in higher ed for the past 2.5 years. On the other hand, I've been teaching college classes since 2009. My … Continue reading Am I an Early or Mid-Career Academic?
Make Time for Professional Development
I'm betting that many of us entered academia because we love to learn. We were the kids who read extra books, did extra work, reveled in intellectual conversations. And yet in modern higher ed, many of us are in precarious, overworked and underpaid positions that offer little time or funding for regular professional development. It's … Continue reading Make Time for Professional Development
My Low-Key System for Managing Academic Projects
As promised in my summer planning post, here is a description of the method I use to track my various projects. This method was originally inspired by two academic Gantt chart enthusiasts (one, two). However, I found that the traditional way of setting up a gantt chart (with the projects on the left and "steps" … Continue reading My Low-Key System for Managing Academic Projects
Schedule Time to Think
Years ago I was accepted into an NEH Summer Institute, and one of the biggest takeaways from that experience was the revelation of dedicating time to think. At the time I was an overworked and underpaid adjunct Lecturer and unfunded graduate student, so a week of paid thinking time rocked my world. This is also … Continue reading Schedule Time to Think
Teaching Tip Tuesday: Boundaries
The past few weeks I've seen so many posts about burnout that it made me wonder about how academics in particular (and everyone in general) conceptualize their boundaries around work. Academics receive little to no instruction (depending on your advisor) about establishing healthy work boundaries in graduate school, and then, I suspect, this tendency to … Continue reading Teaching Tip Tuesday: Boundaries
Tawnya Azar 