Our gears are just starting to grind into motion for the new academic year here at Across the Seas U. At the office, there’s the familiar hum of the printer churning out syllabi and registration forms; at home, there’s the still-unfamiliar sound of the alarm clock squawking me out of bed far too early for comfort. New packets of tea have been purchased; the desk flask has been freshly refilled (this year: bourbon, in homage to Bubba).
But I start this year with a doleful backward glance over what I know has been the first truly wasted summer of my post-grad school academic career. Sure, I taught a course, but I only tweaked the semester syllabus and didn’t explore brave new worlds of pedagogy. Sure, I read a few books, but only for pleasure. Sure, I thought about a lot of new projects (and entertained thoughts of revisiting old ones), but literally no progress or new research has been accomplished since about mid-June. Sure, I have excuses, maybe even valid ones, but that doesn’t ease my panic when I think about all those weeks carelessly spent, with deadlines and goals for fall looming ahead.
Q: How long was your longest lapse in research productivity? At what point in your career did it happen? When the time came to shake yourself out of your funk, how did you do it?
Nothing substantial done in the past year. Being chair is just overwhelming.
ReplyDeleteBut I trust you're at least getting in some excellent SHOUTING? I thought that was the best part of being Chair! ;-)/2
DeleteThanks, Edna, for the homage.
ReplyDeleteMy longest lapse was during grad school. I escaped the lapse when my advisors threatened to kick me out.
It is a constant battle to find time for research. Supposedly, my course load is supposed to provide 25% release for said scholarly activities. Except that every waking minute it taken up with committee work, course prep/grading, and of course advising the hordes of the clueless. Not to mention I lab I oversee. Summer is the only time I get anything done... and this summer was a wash as a very dear friend died, and there were obits and eulogies to write.
ReplyDeleteThe 25% of time for research is a joke. It roughly comes out to 10 hours a week. I could do something with that, but it's not something the university seems to take seriously. Except at times of tenure and/or promotion.
Considering a normal work week is 40 hours, and 10 hours is 25% of forty hours, that seems perfectly fine
Deletea normal work week is 40 hours? I wish! More like 80-100...
Deletelongest lapse: 1975-now
ReplyDeletepoint in career: before I got my first academic job.
the time never came: i realized that was but one of two people on the planet interested in five years of an obscure admiral's life. So, i became a librarian...
To clarify, 10 hours/week for research would be fine. It would be great! But those 10 hours are taken up with committee work, lab maintenance, advising, orientation, career days, transfer student meetings, etc. My point being those 10 hours exist only in theory.
ReplyDeleteMy longest lapse was the years I began teaching. I'd been publishing 5-6 papers per year as a postdoc. This dropped to about 1-2 papers per year those two years I was an Accursed Visiting Assistant Professor. It still horns me off that those bastards got the overhead on my Hubble Space Telescope grant, since they did certainly nothing to help the project. They even insisted I pay for my own computer to do work for teaching, from the grant, and got away with it, it all being perfectly legal of course.
ReplyDeleteMy publication rate stayed at 1-2 refereed paper/year when I started on the tenure track here at Middlin' State, and remained that way until I got tenure five years later. I kept pulling in grants, which made me among the biggest researchers here, but that says a lot about Middlin' State: an R1 we ain't, although the admin still has dreams of us becoming an R2.
Last year, my publication rate jumped to 7 refereed papers, the highest it's ever been. I may be only 3-4 papers next year, largely because I now have a gradflake, but I expect it to stay high in the next few years, comparable to what I did as a postdoc. One reason for this is that I've taught all my courses many times now, so I don't need much preparation anymore: indeed, I am well on my way to turning one course, and possibly two, into textbooks.
The biggest reason I snapped out of my torpor was of course that I finally finished funding, building, and learning how best to use my very own observatory, at a fine site in the mountains many miles from campus, operated mostly from my office by remote control over the Internet. The campus observatory I built during my first two years got me enough pretty pictures and refereed papers with student involvement to impress the Provost enough to get me tenure, but the new, remote observatory was more like building a cathedral: it took me 7 years just to raise the money. Once I had it, it took another two years to order, acquire, and install the telescope, and a couple more years to learn to use it most effectively. It's wonderful fun to build instruments with one's own hands and use them to learn about the Universe: I highly recommend it.
P.S. Keep in mind that most astronomers do -not- fund, build, and operate telescopes meant for their exclusive use, nor do they spend particularly large amounts of time observing. Most observe maybe 1-2 weeks per semester with giant facilities their universities could never hope to afford that are shared among hundreds of researchers. But then, I can still do research interesting enough to get published precisely because I get all the time on my telescope: it's hard for most astronomers to observe anything that takes more than 1-2 weeks to happen.
DeleteSo cool.
DeleteThat's amazing, Frod.
DeleteWe humanists (let alone non-academics) sometimes have a hard time grasping just how much effort goes into funding, building, and deploying the resources needed for top- and even mid-level scientific research. My STEM husband is reaching the tail end of the funding/building phase of his career, and it is hard to explain to my/our non-STEM friends why it will probably take another few years before he really sees the fruits of what he's doing. It's just a different world over there.
Ah, but it's also important to keep at least a trickle of papers coming anyway, between the big projects. Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, and his General Theory of Relativity in 1916. This doesn't mean that he published nothing else during the 11 intervening years. One is nuts if one puts all of one's eggs into one basket, since nature always retains the power to say "No."
DeleteFor grad students, this means that, after one's second year in grad school, be ready to be asked by non-academic relatives, "Are you STILL in grad school?" This becomes agonizing, the longer one is a postdoc.
Lull in research? Since I took on Admin duties, I've cut back to two papers per year. This coming year I might do none.
ReplyDeleteHa. I took care of a terminally ill mother, a small child, and a partner with chronic health problems for a year and a half and did NOTHING. It simply was not possible. This is when I learned that there are reasons very few women reach the highest academic ranks.
ReplyDeleteSo true. I have a nine month old baby and I'm lucky if I get to write during her naps. Then, I'm too tired at the end of the day when I put her to bed to do any real thinking! My reading is mostly The Very Hungry Caterpillar and other Eric Carle books.
DeleteThe 4 years or so after I defended my diss. (very bad timing, I realize. Exhaustion played a minor role; juggling dealing with a major family crisis with direct personal consequences with a 4/4 load and a too-low salary -- which limited the options for dealing with the crisis -- played a much larger one). I never entirely gave up presenting at conferences, which helped (though I only learned later that having lots of conference papers and no articles is considered a bad thing), so did getting into the archives and finding exciting stuff (the diss. wasn't particularly archival, but my tangentially-related current major project is, and I've always loved archives), getting settled back into a more stable living situation (the family crisis precluded that for a while), and working out a manageable approach to the few classes I teach (over and over and over and over again). Reading this blog, and other academic blogs, and learning about how others juggle the various parts of their professional lives, has also helped, as has participating in a couple of online writing groups. But it's still a very slow process, especially since my load is now 4/4/2 with additional freelance writing work (marginally connected to my field, but not the kind that gets much respect), and I'm not at all sure where, if anywhere, it's going (but I do at least enjoy the process, which is something; still, I didn't really mean writing and research to become my hobby, rather than part of my job. I'd much prefer to have gardening as a hobby, and writing as a job. But that would require not only time for both, but a job that paid enough for me to afford a yard in which to garden).
ReplyDeleteCome to think of it, my second year of adjuncting (5 courses at 3 schools) wasn't very productive research-wise, either, nor my very first year of teaching. There are definitely some patterns there.