 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 one the website AcademicsOnly.org that I started 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 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.
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On New Years Day I asked everyone in the family to come up about 10 accomplishments or contributions they were committed to make in 2021. Last night we discussed them after dinner. The idea is a) if you don't specifically articulate something you'd like to accomplish, it probably won't ever be a clear enough destination for you to reach, and b) if you tell and remind other people of your intentions, they might be able to help. There's a lot of things that derail our good intentions. About 5 years ago we did a cool study showing the average person (or at least in the US, Germany, and Japan) starts gaining weight in October, and it takes them from January to April to lose it. Some people saw this as discouraging (like the news headline below) because it meant that it would take them 4 months to lose the weight they gained in the last two. There's a couple other ways to view this. First, your life can be so much bigger and more meaningful than what you weigh. You can contribute things and accomplish things that could overwhelm the importance of losing the 8 pounds you gained since October. If you list out the contributions and accomplishments you'd like to make, it might help put that in better perspective. Second, the other good news here is that most people eventually did lose most of that weight. It happened slower than they wanted, but most good things -- like the other 9 things on your list -- it wouldn't be worth much to you or to others if any of these magically happened overnight. There’s a story about a 66-year old guy who always wanted to go to college. After he retired, he was accepted to a local school, and showed up on the opening day of enrollment to sign up for classes. He’s waiting in line and the kid behind him says, “Can I ask how old you are?” The man answers him, and the kid says, “Wow, when you graduate in four years, you’ll be 70.” The man chuckled and said, “In four years, I’ll be 70 anyway.” Imagine a year from now you're having lunch with a good friend and catching up on what happened in the past 12 months. What would you have had to contribute or accomplish that would lead you to say, "That was an amazing year"? What would the other nine accomplishments be?   |
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