"Summer's over and I didn't get anything done."I’ve heard this every August, and I’ve said this almost every August.
Whenever I’ve asked professors and PhD students what percent of their planned work they got accomplished over the summer, no one has ever said “All of it.” Almost everyone says something between 25 to 35%. Everyone from the biggest, most productive super stars with the biggest lab to the most motivated, fire-in-their-belly PhD student with the biggest anxiety. We are horrible estimators of how productive we’ll be over the summer. I was in academia for 35 years (including MA and PhD years), yet every single summer I never finished more than 30% of what I planned. How can we be so poorly calibrated? We never learn. We never readjust our estimate for the next summer. Next summer we’ll still only finish 25-35% of what we planned to do. There are only two weeks in the year when I’m predictably down or blue. It’s the last two weeks of August. It’s not the heat (I mostly stay indoors). It’s not the impending classes (I love teaching). It’s not all the beginning of semester meetings (I loved my colleagues and loved passing notes to them under the table). Ten years ago, I realized that I felt down the end of every August because I had to admit “school’s starting and I haven’t gotten jack done all summer.” The beginning of school is the psychological end of the Academic Fiscal Year. One solution to our August blues lies in understanding what times of the year we do like most, and to see if we can rechannel those warm-glowy feelings to August. If you had to guess the #1 favorite time of the year for most academics, you’d probably guess “The end of school.” The #2 favorite time of the year you might guess would be the “Winter or Christmas break.” What would you guess the third favorite time of the year is? Surprisingly, I’ve heard people say it’s when they turn in their Annual Activity Report. That’s the summary they turn into their hard-to-please Department Chair that summarizes what they’ve accomplished in the prior 12 months: What they published, who they advised, what new things they’ve started, what new teaching materials they’ve created, and so forth. Snore. How could writing an Annual Activity Report be a highlight? Because it shows in black-and-white that we didn’t sleep-walk through the year. It reminds us that the publication that we now take for granted was one that we were still biting our nails about last year at this time. It reminds us of our advises who were stressing over their undergraduate thesis a year ago and who have now happily graduated. It reminds us of the cool ideas we've into hopeful projects -- ideas we hadn't even thought of a year ago.. Going back in a 12-month-ago time machine shows us what we did accomplish. It turns our focus toward what we did – and away from what we didn’t. Once we cross things off of our academic To-do list, we tend to forget we accomplished them. August might be a good time to do a mid-year AAR. It might not turn our August blues into a happy face yellow, but might at least turn it to green. A green light for a great new school year. Have a tremendous school year.
0 Comments
 Thirty four years ago this month, I was drove across country from California to New Hampshire to start my Asst Professor gig. Unfortunately, it only lasted for four years.
Since then, however, I've learned a lot of things that would have made that first appointment last a lot longer. It is unbelievable how much you learn your first year as a professor, and it is also how many mistakes you make. I put together an infographic of some of the insights I've learned from people over the years. Hopefully they'll help you leapfrog some mistakes and start like a star. Let me know advice you have gotten from others or discovered yourself that was useful to you. On a late afternoon about 20 years ago, I stepped into a slow elevator with my college’s most productive, famous, and taciturn senior professor. After 10 seconds of silence, I asked, “Did you publish anything yet today?” He stared at me for about 4 seconds and said, “The day’s not over.” Cool . . . very Clint Eastwood-like.
Most of us have some super-productive days and we have some bad days, but most lie in-between. If we could figure out what leads to great days, we might be able to trigger more of them in our life. For instance, if you want to write a whole lot, there might be a way to set up your day so that this happens with a surprising amount of ease. Think of the most recent “great day” you had. What made it great, and how did it start? For about 20 years, every time somebody told me they had a great day, I’d ask “What made it great? How did it start out? About 50% of the time its greatness had to do with an external “good news” event like something great happening at work, great news from their kids or spouse, a nice surprise, or nice call or email from a grateful person or an old friend. The other 50% of the time, the reason for “greatness” was more “internal.” They had a super productive day, they finished a project or a bunch of errands, or they had a breakthrough solution to a problem or something they should do. External successes are easy to celebrate with our friends. Internal successes are more unpredictable. What made today a great day and what sabotaged yesterday? When people had great days, one reoccurring feature was that they started off great. There was no delay between when they got out of bed and when they Unleashed the Greatness. People said things like, “I just got started and seemed to get everything done,” or “I finished up this one thing and then just kept going.” One of the most productive authors I've known said that got up six days a week at 6:30 and wrote from 7:00 to 9:00 without interruption. Then he kissed his wife good-bye and drove into school and worked there. When I asked how long he had done that he said, “Forever.” About a year ago, I started toying with the idea that "Your first two hours set the tone for the whole day." Think of your last mediocre day. Did it start out mediocre? That would also be consistent with this notion. We can’t trigger every day to be great, but maybe we have more control than we think. If we focus on making our first two hours great, it might set the tone for the rest of the day. What we need to decide is what we can we do in those first two hours after waking that would trigger an amazing day and what would sabotage it and make it mediocre. For me, it seems writing, exercise, prayer, or meditation are the good triggers, and it seems answering emails, reading the news, or surfing are the saboteurs. Here’s to you having lots of amazing days. One’s where you can channel your best Clint Eastwood impression and say, “The day’s not over.”  It's been said that the most frequent last words of adventurous, partying males are probably:
1) “Hey, watch this,” or 2) “Here, hold my beer.” If we heard either of these, our grizzled wise advice would probably be, “STOP, Don’t Do That!” But giving well-intended advice in less obvious situations is trickier, so we've grown more hesitant to do so. We’ve all been burned by giving advice and having someone either trigger their Eye of Death, or break a saloon chair and an unlabeled whiskey bottle over our head. As a result, even as professors we can start drifting toward taking a more laissez-faire role toward advising students about their future. We might say “I will give them advice if they ask.” Yet even if they ask "What do I do?" we can be too carefully non-committal in giving them any advice (“Well, what do YOU want to do?”). A while back, I had an interesting conversation with a person who said his son had been adrift in high school. It all turned in the right direction for him one day when a teacher who he casually played chess with said, “If you work hard, you could be a high-school chess champion.” He focused, and it happened. The Dad then said something similar had happened to him 50 years ago. He had been adrift in high school – good grades but adrift – when a teacher told him “If you work hard, you could be on the debate team.” He focused, and it happened. These two teachers had given each of them a specific vision of what they could be: A chess champion and a debate champion. These mentors didn’t just compliment their talents by saying “You’re sharp,” or “You talks good.” They gave a specific direction that an adrift student could paddle toward. The decided to Be the One who pointed them toward an island. With earnest students, it can be easy to say “Good job,” or “You’re creative,” or “You’re good at this class.” Those are compliments. Other types of compliments can give useful paddling directions. A student might be earnestly good at school but not see where to take their life other than in the general direction their parents, friends, or placement office talk about. Suppose we took the risk that those two teachers took, and we told a student “You’d make a great ________,” or “Have you ever considered ____; I think you’d be really good at it.” They might feel a bit flattered, and a bit motivated to paddle in a direction they hadn’t thought of. Even if go in a totally different direction, if we motivated an earnest student in any hopeful direction, we accomplished more than if we would have given an easier default answer like, "Well, what do YOU want to do?" Let’s circle back to last week’s conversation about the two teachers who stuck their necks out and make laid out specific visions to the guy and his son. Things worked out for both of them. Ten years later, the son had graduated from college, started his own business, and was coaching chess champion hopefuls on the side. Forty years later, the dad had retired as a Fortune 500 CEO to produce a movie. Partly because two mentors decided to Be the One who gave them direction. I’m guessing that neither of their two teachers is still picking saloon chair splinters out of their head. ------ There's a reemerging teaching movement around this Be the One notion. Although it's sort of aimed at teachers of younger students, a surprising amount of it still applies to college students, and also applies to taking an extra effort to say the right words to graduate students at the right time. If you're teaching or TAing this semester, you can check out Ryan Sheehy's Twitter for a booster shot.  In many of my 30 years in academia, I loved helping graduate students, post-docs, and new faculty get started (or to get back on their feet after a fall) and moving in a confident direction. Even though I didn't know very much, I still had some perspective or experience that was useful. In the Land of the Blind, the one-eyed man is King.
One of purposes of this website is to pool together a lot of wisdom from a bunch of us one-eyed Kings and Queens so that that our graduate students and new faculty don't have to learn it by falling off of cliffs. This website tries to pull together helpful "tools and tips on how to graduate, get tenure, teach better, publish more, and have a super rewarding career." The first step was to begin curating some of the more credible insights and experiences from all sorts of people in academia. This way, a person could get substantive advice instead of the top ten things that popped up on a Google search. Collecting these insights ongoing process and I love it when people share things (see the footer below for all of the types of examples of things you could share if you have them). One comment I was given a while back was that it would be even better if I turn some of the insight pages into infographics. There are a few infographics that have been made that highlight some of the insights on a page and at least give a road map of where to click for more. One example is the infographic at the top of this post, which outlines the content on the >New Professors >Start Strong page. Someone also suggested, "You should turn some of the infographics and blog posts into Youtube videos," so people don't have to read them. "I don't like to read," is probably something a person shouldn't put on their PhD application. Still, this is an important point to consider. I'd love to know how this website and it's related content could be most useful to you. You can either email your insights at [email protected] or to my personal email. We can then schedule a call if that would work best for you. |
Welcome...Tips for PhDs is a how-to community that helps us share our best practices as PhD students, new professors, and independent scholars.
Helpful tools and tips on how to graduate, get tenure, teach better, publish more, and have a super rewarding career.
Relevant Posts
All
Some Older Posts
Develop great judgment
Choose the Best Advisor
Give useful advice
How not to retire
Useful sample syllabus
Party with students!
Stay focused
Get into a PhD Program
One way to write a lot
Use PhD case studies
Thank a mentor
Blow an interview
Teach for impact
Ace an interview
Do solution-based research
Am I a mini-me?
Archives
October 2024
|
RSS Feed