Ask the Blogosphere, the Collegial Favor Edition

I am taking a few days off work to enjoy some down time with family and engage my body in the production of vitamin D.

But work nevertheless follows me. Maybe because I forgot to activate the vacation notice on my email account...

A colleague asked me to switch classrooms. We are both teaching large undergraduate classes. He has been assigned a classroom in another building that is a 10 min walk from the one where our classes usually are (and which is also very very close to our offices). However, he has some materials to lug with him every time and wants to switch classrooms with me. I really don't want to and I am honestly upset that he even asked me, because it's a no-win situation for me. If I switch, I am screwed (I have never taught in that new building, I am not sure if they even have enough board area for the chalk-and-talk teaching style that I espouse and I cannot check now as I am on vacation, and I have meetings before and after class so the 10 min commutes instead of 2 min will make me constantly late for everything...) If I don't switch, I am uncollegial and will not be in this guy's good graces when the time comes that I need something from him. (I know, I am getting major hypocrisy points right here.)

If I were in that situation, I would not even ask anyone to switch. Instead, I would try to find a place in the new building where I could put the materials during the semester, like the administrative office or something. Yes, I actually resent the fact that he asked me to begin with. I am for the time being ignoring his request until I decide what to do (if you knew me in real life, you'd know that not responding is very unlike me; but I am actually listening to my husband this time and not reacting). I have contacted our staff person in charge of schedule to see if there is any way that he could ask someone else or if they could move me into another location within the preferred building instead. I would like to help him (actually, I would mainly like to not look like an evil bitch), but I really really don't feel like doing it. I also really don't want to be known as the doormat and God forbid entice a flurry of similar requests later on.

So what say you, blogosphere? Switch classrooms or not?

What would you do?
	I would keep ignoring him until he goes away
	I would switch classrooms with him, what's the big deal?
	I would explore all other possible options before responding either way
	I move  classrooms for no one and would shame him for even asking
	I move classrooms for no one and would matter-of-factly say that it doesn't work for me
	I would switch, but have him sign a blood oath that he now owes me big time
	Other (leave a comment)
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Cocky-doodle-doo

From the standpoint of a graduate student, advisors are supposed to be superhuman. We are supposed to possess supreme knowledge of all things technical as well as academic, but also be well plugged into industry, federal funding agencies, and miscellaneous professional organizations. At the same time, we are supposed to be master psychologists and instinctively know what the student needs, provide advising when needed even if it is not asked for, be hands off when the student wants to be left alone, provide structure so the student has clear goals towards which to work, but also not be too demanding or smothering and instead allow the students to enjoy life, hobbies, and have the hours they want to work... 


But, alas, advisors are only human. They have all the flaws that other humans have. Some of them -- the evilest of advisors, I am sure -- apparently seem to possess the sum of all the flaws that all the other humans have ever possessed in the history of mankind...  


Yes, it can happen that a professor, perhaps a potential advisor, simply does not like you, and for no good reason at all. You just rub him or her the wrong way. Because that's what happens with humans; sometimes they just don't like you. Advisors are not supposed to let it affect their professional relationship with you, but you can bet your sweet behind that whether or not they like you is a real factor. 

One thing that I really don't appreciate in people at all (and graduate students are people) is being too cocky. I understand it's often a cover-up for insecurities, but I don't care. There's being confident, and then there's being in other people's face with all your perceived awesomeness, and I just cannot stand it. I hate arrogant people. (The fact that they are the ones moving fastest and highest in my discipline tells you that I am unlikely to reach stratospheric professional heights. But I have my distaste for arrogance to keep me company here in the murky waters of mediocrity.)

There is a new student who is currently TA-ing with another department and is considering joining the group. He is well-qualified and on paper looks like a perfect match for my group. But, he has been rubbing me the wrong way from the get go (which wasn't that long ago). I know he shouldn't, he hasn't done anything wrong, but he does. He seems annoyingly confident and comfortable, just completely unfazed by starting grad school and in a new country at that. Even my American students are more apprehensive than him about the new experience, let alone my other international students. The world seems to be this dude's oyster and I fear he is going to be really hard to coach, as the attitude is that he already knows everything. I am about to graduate a student with the same attitude, but even that student he didn't start as cocky as this new kid... So I am on the fence about accepting this student into my group. I probably have to get to know him a bit first, to decide whether he's worth the hassle. The funniest thing is that, being so awesome, I don't think it's even in the back of his mind that I might  not actually want to work with him; as far as he's concerned, it's all about him making "the choice that's right for him." 


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How I hate the syntagma "I have to choose what is right for me/my family" cannot be described. It is such a pointless, bullshit phrase, and is terribly overused in some corners of the blogosphere; of course you are choosing what's best for you and not what's best for my college roommate's second cousin once removed. I hate that phrase about as much as the words "resource",  "novel", "innovative" (especially when the latter two  are used together), "program", and the word "impact" used as a verb. You know, like when we talk about how we are going to  employ novel resources in our innovative program to impact broader audiences in novel and innovative ways (*shudder*), ways that were unimaginable without said resources within our freakin' resourceful, novel, innovative, and impactful program. Which is (obviously!) the best program you could possibly choose for you and your family. 

Ask the Blogosphere, the Teaching Overload Edition

So I am back to teaching in September, and am scheduled to teach a large undergrad course (sophomore-junior level). Normally, this course keeps me plenty busy in addition to  my research and service duties;
at R1 universities the teaching load for research-active faculty in the physical sciences is 1 course per semester, and in my understanding this is fairly typical.

However, this fall I have a bunch of new graduate students coming in and have received  two new grants so  we should really get cracking on those projects. My graduate students need to take a whole bunch of courses in order to be productive, and two course of mine, which I teach occasionally, are critical for their research. I haven't taught these courses in a lecture format in a few years (did offer them as independent study), so when I do offer the first one in the series, I'm likely to have upward of 30 people.

So I am contemplating whether to bite the bullet and offer the first graduate course in the two-course series this semester (fall). It would be a teaching overload for me, as I still have to teach my undergrad course.   A  downside of offering this additional course is that teaching would dominate my semester, especially when combined with advising and committees and other service, so my research would likely take a hit. Also, very importantly, I would be overcommitted and grumpy, so this schedule might then take a toll on my mood and consequently on my family life. However, I have received two new grants this year, so I could afford to sit it out this fall and not submit any new proposals (or maybe just a "little" one, to the NSF in October). I will have submitted all the pending papers by the end of this summer, so the time available in the fall should be sufficient for dealing with the new manuscripts. On the upside, offering the course would enable the whole batch of new students to get up to speed sooner rather than later, which is important for getting a good momentum on new projects and early on, especially on the big grant where I was funded by an agency I am new to and where I really want to make a good impression...

This overload would not really help me in any way regarding my standing with the department (except perhaps that some people would think I am a fool for teaching more than I absolutely have to). The sole reason for me to do it would be to benefit my research students (and whoever else takes it in the fall)

I could also just wait till the next semester, so all this drama would be avoided. But then everything gets pushed back by a few months. Not too long a time, but then again, when your grants last 3 years, you want to be able to produce sooner rather than later (I have also been trying to recruit a postdoc, but pickings have been slim. Only one viable candidate so far...)

So what say you, blogosphere? 

To overload or not to overload this fall semester?
	YES, absolutely. It's no big deal and the students need it
	NO, don't be silly. Just offer it next semester
	Other (leave comment)
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Writing in a Time Crunch

I stumbled across an old post by nicoleandmaggie on productivity and it reminded me of a topic that had  been on my mind a fair bit, especially of late. Namely, I have been really having  problems with lack of motivation and lack of focus for a while now. It has to do with the general boredom/burnout I am feeling about my work, but while I am figuring out where the motivation is gone and how to gain it back, I still have to maintain the operation of my group, i.e., I must keep writing papers and I must keep applying  for grants in order for everyone to remain funded. 

A little while ago, I reported that I had received a sizeable single-investigator grant from a federal agency. The submission was to a special solicitation with a preproposal, and they reviewed every stage (preproposal, proposal) very quickly. Between the proposal encouragement notice and the proposal due date I had a fairly short time to write the full grant.

Even with my lack of focus aside, the short clock on the proposal also came at the most inopportune of times, just weeks before that conference I had organized (there are multiple posts on that experience that I haven't had the patience and/or time to write). So I had this very important proposal deadline, but even if I were to cancel group meetings and collaborative meetings for a couple of weeks, I still had to work on the conference website, logistics, questions from attendees, catering issues... And yes, listen to my own students' talk dry runs. None of this boded well for focusing on a complex technical task of writing a proposal on a very short timescale.

I caught myself panicking. Literally, with heart palpitations and shortness of breath. Thinking "OMG, there is no way I can finish this by the deadline." This deadline was first internal, which I really try to make because I am sick of being scolded by the Sponsored Programs Office (SPO) person. I told her that I would do my very best to meet the internal deadline (which BTW I feel is arbitrary and largely unnecessary  in many cases, such as with single-investigator grants) but that I am working at capacity, putting in really long hours every day because I have the deadline as well as the conference... Then, at some point, I said "screw it" and simply took a few more days to make the proposal just right. I have certainly angered the SPO person by submitting past the institutional internal deadline, but it was still 3 days prior to the actual deadline. As usual, the proposal was submitted within an hour of me forwarding it to SPO. But this is a tangent-rant that I seem to have whenever I submit proposals... 


Back to the time crunch. I was really panicking and was all over the place, unable to focus, unable to get anything done, paralyzed by the sheer enormity of the task. This grant was based on my previous attempts, and I had received enough feedback on it, but even beyond these criticisms I knew something significant had to change. I could tell it din not quite have that special spark that it really needed to have in order to get funded. Something was missing. In some ways, writing over an old text is harder than writing from scratch, as you keep thinking that you have finished more than you really have and keep getting lured into the old lines of thought. But,  I couldn't just scrape everything (references!) because the turnaround time was so short... At the same time, I had to scrape quite a bit of it in order to clarify my ideas and present a more compelling proposal...


So I did what I should probably do much more often. Each day, I would write down what I would do in great detail,  partitioned each daily assignment into very small bits. Like, "30 min to clean up figs 6 and 7 and finish subsection 2.3". When it comes to my work, I have serious perfectionist tendencies that usually make it hard to simply finish things and not go back to endlessly tweak them. I can usually indulge my work-related perfectionism to a point, but this time I had to really curb it in order to make the deadline. For instance, once section 2.3 was done, it was absolutely not to be touched again until the next-to-last read-through, which was also scheduled. 


This partitioning into teeny-tiny chewable bits, forcing myself to finish a task and cross it off , and preventing myself from going back had really calmed me down and helped dissipate much of the anxiety. Of course, the fact that this micro-scheduling works is probably not news to people who work well with lists, but I am not one of those people. For me, lists are usually  more pain than they are worth: they don't come naturally and I don't trust myself that I will put everything down, so I carry a copy of everything on my brain as well in whatever list or calendar I am using. When tasks are in my head, they are color-coded, multi-dimensional, overlapping, and ever-changing clouds (sort of). I have never figured out how to get lists to do this for me.  

While writing this proposal, I felt like a horse with blinders on (or at least how I envision a horse with blinders would feel): I kept taking deep breaths, telling myself to just focus on the small task before me, that nothing else matters. Just redo that  figure. Just write 3 new paragraphs and enter those 5 references and be done with the subsection. I was amazed at how good of a time I was making (and how low my blood pressure was being). 


So this is a story with a happy ending, perhaps because there was a real deadline before me. It's been much  harder to implement the partitioning and strict scheduling (and much easier to get distracted) with open-ended projects, such as writing a paper.


What are your most efficient tips for focusing and productivity enhancement? Are you deadline-driven or self-paced/self-motivated? 

Ask the Blogosphere, Travel Edition

If you are a prof, how many talks do you give in a typical year? (conference talks or lectures at different institutions, where you present the technical work by you and/or your research group)

Profs: How many talks do you give in a typical year?
	0-2
	3-5
	6-10
	11-20
	More than 20
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How many trips for work do you take in a typical year? (include all trips, such as conferences, lectures, panels, collaborative meetings, consulting, etc.) 

Profs: How many trips for work do you take in a year?
	0-2
	3-5
	6-10
	11-20
	More than 20
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