Category: Academic Life

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A new summer job and assorted busy-ness

I found these birds' eggs on Providence sidewalks not long before I left.

Things have been pretty busy for me lately! Andy and I made our big move from Providence to New Haven (note to self: I am now too old to not hire movers), my laptop died at about the same time, and a few days later I took off to Victoria for a week to attend the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (more on that later).

As if all that weren’t enough, I’ve started a summer job in Yale’s Instructional Technology Group. I’m an Instructional Innovation Intern, doing web design for Yale professors who want to put course materials online. I love it. In addition to the perks (a snack cabinet! Wii breaks! great coworkers!) I’m learning a ton and improving my CSS/HTML skills. I’ve basically taught myself (with pointers from Andy) everything I know, and it is unbelievably nice to be able to ask someone when I have a question. It saves a ton of Googling and I get the perspective of someone I trust, right away.

I’ll also be starting a summer teaching gig next week — a writing class for pre-meds. While I’m really happy about all these activities, I’ll be busier than I’ve been in a long time, and the big question is whether I’ll actually be able to make any progress on my dissertation. Stay tuned!

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The best-laid plans …

Panic Button by star5112
"Panic Button" by star5112

I’ve been working hard to get the second chapter of my dissertation finished before the end of the month. I wouldn’t say I’m panicking, exactly, but I’m definitely feeling a heightened sense of urgency. It’s been funny to watch all my carefully designed notetaking and citation plans get shoved out the window now that I really have to write. All these months I’ve been carefully entering sources into Zotero, only to completely ignore them now because I feel like I can’t spare the time to figure out how to use Zotero’s citation tool.

This always happens to me, and I feel like it’s basically okay. Sometimes, when push comes to shove, I just need to write and not worry about Getting Things Done or workflow or whatever. As it is, I’ve been inventing dates and approximating quotes, knowing I’ll go back and fix them later.

There was a New York Times article recently on the science of concentration. Winifred Gallagher, the author of the book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, recommends that, when working, “don’t get distracted by anything else, because it can take the brain 20 minutes to do the equivalent of rebooting after an interruption.” For me, this is certainly true, and, while making up quotes is pretty extreme, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about when I say I’ll do whatever it takes to get words on the page.

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New York Times contributor: End the university as we know it

Photo of Columbia Universitys Minerva sculpture, Alma Mater, by wallyg.
Photo of Columbia University's Minerva sculpture, Alma Mater, by wallyg.

Mark Taylor, the chairman of Columbia’s religion department, has published a New York Times opinion piece that’s sure to cause a splash. “End the University as We Know It” argues that the university’s current incarnation  is obsolete and irrelevant.

Taylor advocates getting rid of the “division of labor” model of academic departments, in favor of “problem-based” ad-hoc departments like “Water” and “Life”; increasing collaboration among institutions; encouraging grad students to produce works other than dissertations (Taylor mentions, oddly, video games); training grad students for jobs other than faculty positions; and abolishing tenure.

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