Saturday, March 14, 2009

Three Strikes

Yesterday was a day of three strikes...
Strike 1 - I have a graduate student who is not engaged in work. A clockwatcher, the student leaves promptly at 5 pm every day and arrives at 9 am on the dot. Research is not a 9-5 job, rather it needs to happen in patches and it's best not to leave when you are in the middle of a thought or experiment. You get out of research, what you put into it. Yesterday, I arrived at work at about 7:40 am. I walked past their office and noticed the light on (it is usually not on when I arrive). I looked in and was excited to see the student there working. I thought, maybe the seminar speaker yesterday brought things around for the student or maybe it was just figured out. I got to my office and downloaded my email and found that my excitement was totally unfounded. The early arrival was simply to "make up" the time since 3:30 would be the end of the day. What? What? What? There was also no explanation as to why this was happening.
Strike 2- Space and money = power in academia. Oh, and maybe rank factors in. I have none of these. Well, I guess I should say that I currently have space but that won't last long due to some complicated factors that mean that I can't stay in my current space. I had thought I had found a solution that would work perfectly. I even had a verbal agreement going back a few months and that was reaffirmed recently. But no - over the last week it has come crumbling down. This is making me very stressed out because it means that I will be letting down my students (they need space to do their research and research to get their degrees) and (of less importance), it will be very hard to get tenure. Have I made a giant mistake?
Strike 3- I got a wonderfully impersonal email at exactly 5 pm yesterday that said my recent grant submission is NOT funded.
Three strikes! I am not doing any work today!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

AARRGGGGGH! Don't know what else to say. Sometimes life and work is the pits. It's hard to keep working along when stuff like this happens. Hope you did something for yourself Saturday. Love, Mom

Papa John said...

Hey. Did my subscription to this blog expire? Do I have to pay my bill? I haven't seen any updates for the past month. What gives?
J