Friday, June 7, 2013

The busy summer season

  Ah, summer. The time of year when we all relax and rejoice at end of the academic year. Riiiight. More like, the time of year when everyone scrambles to get data ready for conferences, organize and execute field work, work with summer interns, and try to get papers in before the fall hiring cycle starts.
Luckily as a post-doc I don't have to prepare classes for the fall!
  A few months ago, I hoped that this summer would also entail moving to a new city to start a permanent position. That didn't happen, and until a couple weeks ago, I wasn't sure what I'd be doing come September. Happily, I'm set for another 6-8 months of funding, but the uncertainty contributes to my hope that a permanent position comes around for 2014. And if I want to be competitive for that position, this summer has to be a summer of writing (Oh, hello there, blog I haven't written for in a long time!). One item is my first full-on grant. I want to prove myself as a co-PI that deserves funding and authority when/if we get the grant, so I've volunteered to write the incidental supporting documents as well as contributing to the main narrative. My current PI is writing grants this summer, and though I'm not as excited about their project, I need to do as much as possible to help as a 'backup'. I need to push my recalcitrant collaborators so that my thesis chapters are published when I go looking for jobs. And I need to write up my work for my second post-doc project. Plus the aforementioned interns and conferences.
  I know my list isn't unique. Remember this dustup from earlier this year? Academics don't take the summer off...they're hustling, not sipping gin 'n tonics on the veranda. Well, not sipping them every night. And I'm not even at the professor level! So to all you academics, god-writing-speed, and let's hope we find time to take the laptop out to the veranda every once in a while.

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