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amazing what 24 hours can do
Yesterday when I broke down and made that calendar, it was because I was beginning to feel really overwhelmed -- paper due that day; a meeting today which would involve figuring out with a student whether we thought we had time before a deadline in March to write another paper; classes start week after next and I'm going to need to do way more class prep this semester than I did last semester, and I haven't done any yet; and slides to make for an hour-and-a-half tutorial for a workshop in early Feb. that I'm also one of the organizers of. And that was just in the near future.
Turns out that the Jan. 20 deadline for the paper wasn't hard and fast (which isn't necessarily a good thing: There's nothing like finding out about an hour before you intend to submit a paper that the deadline has been extended and that you could spend another week on it...sometimes, the approaching deadline is a sign of relief, not of pressure); I got more comments from the other organizer of the session it will be in in the evening, so I spent most of the morning working on them, and then got it submitted before lunch. After lunch I met with my student to discuss the literature review he'd done for us to be able to decide if we really could write the paper we want to write, or if we'd have to settle for the paper we could write, and we determined in fact, that we probably can write the paper we want to write, so long as it's actually a subset of a paper that we (hopefully) can write. We've got an outline and have split up the reading and by the time we meet again next week, he's supposed to have at least part of the introduction written. Then, I met with another colleague this afternoon to discuss some papers that we've both read recently, and came away from that with a joint agreement to write a paper filling in a hole that we see in the available literature. So over the course of the day I finished one paper only to have its spot in my brain taken up by two more (a trend which I hope doesn't continue, because my brain cannot function exponentially!), and yet somehow I'm feeling excited and stimulated and thrilled.
Seeing how well I thrive in the context of academia serves well to confirm to me that I really am in the right career. This is comforting, since up until about 4 months ago, I'd spent 10 years working towards being an academic without ever having any real experience of being one, and there was always the possibility that I'd get the Ph.D. and realize that this life just wasn't for me. Luckily, that hasn't happened, at least not yet. :)
Turns out that the Jan. 20 deadline for the paper wasn't hard and fast (which isn't necessarily a good thing: There's nothing like finding out about an hour before you intend to submit a paper that the deadline has been extended and that you could spend another week on it...sometimes, the approaching deadline is a sign of relief, not of pressure); I got more comments from the other organizer of the session it will be in in the evening, so I spent most of the morning working on them, and then got it submitted before lunch. After lunch I met with my student to discuss the literature review he'd done for us to be able to decide if we really could write the paper we want to write, or if we'd have to settle for the paper we could write, and we determined in fact, that we probably can write the paper we want to write, so long as it's actually a subset of a paper that we (hopefully) can write. We've got an outline and have split up the reading and by the time we meet again next week, he's supposed to have at least part of the introduction written. Then, I met with another colleague this afternoon to discuss some papers that we've both read recently, and came away from that with a joint agreement to write a paper filling in a hole that we see in the available literature. So over the course of the day I finished one paper only to have its spot in my brain taken up by two more (a trend which I hope doesn't continue, because my brain cannot function exponentially!), and yet somehow I'm feeling excited and stimulated and thrilled.
Seeing how well I thrive in the context of academia serves well to confirm to me that I really am in the right career. This is comforting, since up until about 4 months ago, I'd spent 10 years working towards being an academic without ever having any real experience of being one, and there was always the possibility that I'd get the Ph.D. and realize that this life just wasn't for me. Luckily, that hasn't happened, at least not yet. :)
no subject
Pish and tosh. A serious, hard-working grad student is just as much an academic as a serious, hard-working post-doc is just as much an academic as a full professor is just as much an academic*. Just because you were paying for the privilege rather than being paid, doesn't mean you weren't one.
*Well, okay, so Gertrude Stein's rose-times-three doesn't always work. Darn.
no subject
I disagree. A Ph.D. student will work an average of 4 years (sometimes more, rarely less) doing research on a dedicate, single subject. This is the exception, not the norm, among academics (at least in the sciences). It is unlikely that I will ever spend 4 years on one topic to the exclusion of all other topics ever again in my career as an academic. The training that you get as a Ph.D. student trains you primarily to write a dissertation: This training often (if it is done right) translates nicely over into writing journal articles and books on a wide variety of topics at the same time, but unless you are very lucky, it does not train you in writing grant proposals, developing your own courses, sitting on committees, editing books, running conferences, etc. Ph.D. students differ significantly from academics in that the former are primarily researchers (except in some places where they are primarily teachers), but the latter are neither primarily researchers nor primarily teachers.