Help, I'm trapped in an ivory tower! Or "what the fuck am i getting myself into with this academia stuff"

just had my first ever skype interview. now I'm preoccupied with how my face seemed super red somehow. interesting experience though. somehow it's easier for me since I'm not always the best at good eye contact. plus you can sweat like crazy and get away with it!

Just submitted my first grant application (an R03) yesterday, and it didn't end up being as shitty and blatantly uncompetitive as I'd feared! Still, the paylines are so low that it's a struggle not to think of it as a waste of time.

skype interviews are nice because no one has to travel for what'll be a 30-60 minute deal. I've been interviewed on skype once & have participated in skype interviews of job candidates about 40 times, and yeah, the physical things like eye contact, sweating, skin color, matters a lot less. I think they're pretty ideal for short-form interviews. fwiw my current department skips short-form interviews altogether; we just go right to flyouts

thankfully this is for a postdoc and there's no more interviews. so my my didn't-blow-it performance will stand.

i had a skype interview once, it was awkward, they had a whole committee huddled about two yards away from a computer

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/02/11/unemployed_professors_website_offers_student_papers_written_by_current_and.html

http://theinfosphere.org/images/thumb/d/da/Mr._Chunks.jpg/250px-Mr._Chunks.jpg

Leela: It's putrid. What do you feed him?
Bender: What comes out one head, we feed to the other. Also, Indian food.

wow. with essay grading being as arbitrary as it is im a little in doubt as to whether I could consistently produce A papers, frankly.

i might have to work to get an A from myself

i could swing a B on the regular no prob tho

when i was writing my masters dissertation (and hence filling my gmail with documents entitled 'dissertation' and such) i got a constant stream of google ads for those sites. i had a look and i think one of them claimed that they would, for some vast sum, produce a top quality phd thesis on a topic of your choice in something like three weeks. i think if i won the lottery i'd order one, i'm v curious as to what that would look like.

if you submit it and don't pass your defense do you get a refund?

I wish I could pay someone to write cover letters for me.

so I just woke up from my first, honest-to-god nightmare about tenure. in the nightmare I'm sitting down at a talk and somehow get into a horrible screaming argument with a helmet-haired older rich lady who starts letting me have it about the powerful donors to my university that she is friends with and telling me that she's going to speak to the university president about this outrage etc. I'm panicking and terrified and don't have any way to figure out how we even got into this argument about who sits where but as I wake up I realize, oh god, I'm now terrified about my tenure case in ways that are actually causing shit like this. I find out in late April / May and it looks good but right now my fate is in the hands of a mysterious ad hoc committee and I can't even talk to my colleagues about it, they're not allowed to tell me anything. So it's nightmares like this for me.

I can relate. The first time I got tenure, it wasn't that bad, because I traveled a lot that year and so didn't have to look my colleagues in the eyes very often. But the next year, I interviewed for a tenured position at another university, and so had to go through the whole tenure process a second time, at a significantly better university. That time was bad; the fear manifested itself physically. I got tenure both times and am now happily an employee at the second university, but yeah, I can relate.

haha I've been having weird kafkaesque nightmares about still being an *undergraduate*

tune I know I'm on the outside looking in, but based on your work you seem like an open and shut case imo. (in the positive sense)

Thanks guys, I really do just need some talking down from the ledge and reassurance now. I mean I know that my productivity is not in question (I published a book, a book chapter and four scholarly articles last year alone) but there's this endless terror of the unknown precisely because it is unknown that I can't shake. And since my colleagues already voted unanimously for me they're no longer the locus of the angest- it's all in the hands of the mysterious committee folk. I guess I have to take comfort in the fact that May isn't really all that far away and I'll just have to ride the waves til then.

I've become pretty zen about my fate thankfully--two articles and a book under contract and I'm still trying to get a foot in the door, not sure
there's anything more I can do at this point--and yet I think once you reach your point and have unanimous support you're golden unless there's really big changes afoot for your department.

if politics are going to get in the way of you getting a fair shake, there's nothing you can do about it now anyway, so you might as well just keep being awesome and see what happens! we don't have tenure at my institution, but i've long had the impression that it's a hazing ritual -- the sweating it is part of the experience by design, no? buck the system and don't sweat it!

(fwiw my way of fighting back at work is to get all my shit done and then some but not let it make me lose sleep. unfortunately, i learned this by losing a lot of sleep)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AtQWPM4nERNNdHozb1lOVHZVN1p0a2pjOEtaUTVBSHc#gid=0

http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html

'why I'm leaving harvard...for a sweet job at google'

http://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/

beautiful world of bygone possibility

*nostalgia*

If an icon is animated it only means that the author of the page has better things to do than reading "10 worst web design mistakes". . . . Prof. Dr. Alan G. MacDiarmid put an under construction sign on his site in 1998 and got the Nobel Prize in 2000.

Dammit, if I hadn't spent an hour raytracing a logo for my Geocities page who knows what prizes I could have won!

omg

To sum it up, through curiosity about the new medium, ignorance of w3c recommendations and passion to their profession, web users (irrespective of their scientific achievements) created an environment where everything seemed possible:

Prof. Dr. Winfried Kerkhoff presents his life and work via a site Deleuze and Guattari would give their limbs for

http://www.kerkhoff-w.de/

It's like the Mnemosyne Atlas of bad design decisions.....

the entire original site (for the article) is amazing, they're like passionate critical historians who have turned their inquiring gazes to my own dim past and made it an object of knowledge, there's a place where they speculate about what it could mean that yahoo never deleted its clear zero-pixel gif when it took geocities offline

and it's all written/designed in this awesome just-barely-tacky punk-zine-inflected pastiche of 90s web style, one of the authors' favorite ~phenomena~ is glitter gifs

<3

olia lialina is an old school net.artist and a treasure. her essays "a vernacular web" and "a vernacular web 2" are total classics. she and dragan espenschied (the other writer on contemporary home computing) also edited this book: http://digitalfolklore.org

wow I love all this, thanks for posting it!

That Digital Foklore book looks cool. A review on Amazon:

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Very Nice. 29 Mar 2010
By Ove R. Shair
Format:Perfect Paperback
This book is good. You will like it if you don't have attitude issues. Also it helps if you have critical reading comprehension skills.

+ CAT POSTER

these are my new favorite intellectuals, genuine proper scholars for our age

you should probably check out lialina's artwork too: http://art.teleportacia.org
not really the thread for this obviously

en garde!

http://crooksandliars.com/2014/03/breitbart-wingnut-says-liberal-professors

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/03/27/the_unc_fake_class_scandal_athlete_got_an_a_for_a_one_paragraph_paper.html

this story is killing me -- i can't believe people have tried to malign the learning specialist who works with these students for speaking out
i heard her and a history professor from UNC being interviewed on the radio maybe a week or so ago and the amount of crap they've gotten for speaking up about the poor education that profit-generating student athletes receive is O_O

college sports make me sad at this point

https://thebluereview.org/faculty-time-allocation/

DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO

HLC visit concludes today. Fingers crossed.

http://actualcasuals.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/no-time-to-be-complacent-about-replacement/

A few years ago I learned I would have to engage in the annual ritual of submitting an exhaustive Expression of Interest (EOI) in order to be on an eligibility list to do what I had done for the past seven years. Making it onto the list by no means equated to a guarantee of a teaching contract. Rather, the outcome was a determination made by phantoms in the faculty of my suitability to continue to be considered for casual academic teaching.

This shift in thinking was made clear to us all at an induction meeting.

The end of summer had truly arrived. Usually being invited to attend a staff induction meant momentary respite from the excessive stress and uncertainty of the casual academic lifestyle. Not this time. Instead, casual academics were schooled on our apparent complacency. We were told that our hard work and loyalty to the institution had been keeping inexperienced, but potentially dynamic casual teachers out of the system.

Sounds like being an adjunct in Australia isn't much different than being one here.

here = usa

HLC visit concludes today. Fingers crossed.

Crossed, boss!

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okay that's weird

update: in a week the academic council will meet and hear my chair's case for my tenure and the ad hoc committee's independent view. they will either vote that day, or in a week, or in two weeks. And after that vote, the president gets another week to review the case and either ratify it or reverse it. So I might know my fate in two weeks. or three weeks. or four weeks. Hard to say.

This is a good article on the transition from being a student in an elite grad program to teaching at a regional public university.

what's said about teaching at a regional public university applies pretty well to teaching at non-flagship research universities also ime, esp wrt undergrad lives involving jobs, children, the military, etc

no sympathy for the sheltered elite

i really wish i had done a better job of creating some sort of life raft to get out of academics while i was in grad school.

what a fool, only one career, shoulda been working at two careers at once

so the book isn't generating nibbles?

I got an interview for a postdoc, but didn't get it. pretty sure the interview went well so hopefully it was factors beyond my control. didn't really get final confirmation on the book until late December so it wasn't a big factor in most applications. I'm a pretty weak candidate otherwise! my advisor thinks I shouldn't lose heart yet and give it one more shot in the fall since I'll have the book in my corner but eh. life is passing me by. no idea what else to do though.

I'm an English phd but would be best served by American Studies positions, but there's like a handful of those.

im in this weird limbo of not good enough for anything tenure track (or preliminary to that) and not a specialist in composition and rhetoric (so many jobs in that, comparatively).

yeah, i'm not prolific enough to even register as a researcher, don't tick enough boxes to make it into resource-constrained departments with narrow want-lists, and apparently i code as too rarefied and aloof for low-end pedagogues to think i would be good for their babies. all i want to do is teach, but it's as if i can't be trusted to do it.

i don't know what else to do either. i'm overqualified for most of the nonacademic jobs i apply for (i actually had an interviewer tell me i would be bored in a job) and nothing seems particularly set up to let anyone in to any line of work other than at the ground floor, which does the opposite of mitigate overqualification.