tenure review

Thank you all SOOOOO much for all of the ideas for while I'm gone.  I've done a combination of all of them, basically.  Now, I need to spend some time actually preparing for the work I'm supposed to go do in the field...  oof.

On a separate front...

Last week, we had a tenured faculty meeting in my dept to review the case of a guy who is up for tenure.  The great thing about it was that he's a superstar and it is a slam dunk case.

The bad thing?  I think that just about every single one of us felt bad after seeing his file.

11 papers per year on average during the tenure review period
5 major grants from federal granting agencies
400+ manuscripts peer-reviewed
12 graduate students, or more, each year in his lab, plus 1-3 postdocs
outstanding teacher awards out the wazoo

is that really, humanly possible?

Here's the math applied to my style:

I spend about 6-8 hours reviewing a paper.  That would mean, for me, over a solid year of reviewing one paper a day and nothing else.

I spend about 1-2 hours a week interacting with each graduate student in my lab.  That would mean that I'd be spending 20 hours a week on the care and feeding of graduate students.

Now add on all the paper writing, the class prep, the proposal writing and logistics.  (I averaged about 3.5 peer-reviewed, solid papers (i.e., not counting book reviews or non-peer-reviewed stuff) published a year in my tenure review period, and I felt like I worked my ass off.)

How the hell does someone do this?  AND, may I add, he's got a 4 year old.  Granted, his wife is not of the academic sort but she does work almost full time.

And to top it off, he's a really nice guy.  I want to hate him.  I want to think that maybe there is some dubious thing going on here.  But in reality, even if you consider that virtually all of those reviews were through his role as an associate editor for a journal, or that he was the lead PI on just two of those grants, it is still a fuck of a lot of work he's done.

Me is envious.  And baffled.  You ever seen such a thing?

I need ideas

I'm going to the field again this summer for 5 weeks.  I am a bit worried about little M, as she and I are so close and the second she isn't happy about something, "I need my mama!"  It's going to be a tough separation for me, but I'm afraid of how tough it will be for her too.  I get to do my research, and she just has a mama that takes off for a long, long time.  Dh thinks it will be a little easier than last summer since she can talk about things more, and seems to understand the, "mama had to go on an airplane for work" thing.  She knows all about airplanes (we just flew across the country and back), and when I was in Africa a month or so ago, she seems to have thought I was on a plane for the entire time...

We are already starting to talk about it.

It will likely be all fine.

But, I am going to put together a whole bunch of little presents for her to unwrap regularly. Little fun things so she knows I'm thinking of her.  I need ideas.  I ordered some cool bath toys that I figured she and her daddy could open every Sunday before bathtime while I'm gone.  I also got some cool paper straws that are her favorite color, and a pack of little plastic sesame street rings that I think she'll really like.  I live in a small house and I hate to be too terribly wasteful or buy way too many toys, given that she spends most of her time at daycare and spends a lot of time playing with her dollhouse.  So, she doesn't really need many toys.

But I need some ideas here.  What have you got?  Anything?

Bueller?

Bueller?

tick tock tick tock

Time goes by so quickly.  I vividly remember when I was 16, maybe even a little into my early 20's, being bored.  Bored silly.

But not in a long time.  Not in a very, very long time.  Now I get panicky about not appreciating every moment enough.  That panic really started once I got pregnant, and I try so so hard to savor every moment with my M.  Dh says this feeling just increases as you get older, and when you start realizing that even under the best circumstances you likely have less than 20 years...  scary to think about.

M is 26 months now.  She talks incessantly, it's like hanging out with a baseball announcer at all times.  Very cute, the running monologue of what is going on.  "Daddy drop his shirt... mama scratching her head... kitty going to get a snack..."  And I love that she's started to role-play with her dolls, esp in her dollhouse.  They like to go potty and wash their hands.  She even puts them on little stools in front of the sink so that they can reach the "water".

She's also crossed psychological threshold recently, where her understanding of time has gotten much more sophisticated.  It is hard to explain, but has made it much more fun to talk with her.  Real conversations happen now.

Her memory is crazy amazing.  Just this evening she was sitting in the bath tub and tells me that she misses Mickey.  I'm like, "Mickey?  What do you mean?"  We don't have a Mickey Mouse toy, we have never been to Disneyland/world, watched Mickey on TV, or any thing like that.  But I had completely forgotten that we do have a Mickey Mouse nutcracker that was out during Christmas time.  It was packed away with all the Christmas decorations at the end of December.  She wanted to see him again.  I'm supposed to be digging him out of the closet right now, but instead I'm writing this.

Work is going ok.  I try so hard to focus on the good, but today I kinda lost it.  I find all the changes in our administrative structure ridiculously frustrating.  It just keeps getting harder and harder to spend my research funds.  We have moved to a campus shared services model for administrative staff services, which means that we don't have any department staff anymore.  They all got merged and down-sized and moved off of campus, as, of course, staff assistance works so much better as a call-center than in-person.  Right?

This also means that everything is set up in a cookie-cutter fashion.  You aren't allowed to do anything that falls outside the norm of how the admin people think things are supposed to go.  But this is ok, cause professors all do the same things, right?  Right?

Planning my upcoming field work has just been an absolute nightmare.  I get so annoyed at how hard it is to buy things, and I tried really hard today to do things by the book so that I wouldn't have to pay for it myself and then do the paperwork to get reimbursed, as that just takes so much time and effort and drives me nuts.  But when I asked what the billing address is (as it is most definitely not our departmental address, I have learned the hard way and wasted hours on...), I got in trouble for trying to organize a purchase myself.  OMG.  I literally wanted to beat my head against the wall.  I needed to beat my head against the wall.  I decided that it is a good thing that I don't keep any alcohol in my office, or I would have drunk it today and been even more obnoxious and angry with the staff person who wouldn't give me the billing address b/c I'm not supposed to interact with vendors directly, even for special custom orders... because there is no reason to need to custom order anything, right?

A lot of rambling.  Sorry.  My brain is all over the place.  But life over here in inB land is good.  Basically really, really good.  I am a very lucky woman, even if my university is leaving dents in my forehead.  :)