I realized today that I've been working at my job for seven weeks now. Time flies when you're having fun, I guess. Here are seven quick(ish) thoughts about those first seven weeks:
1. Kids are adjusting fine. I am here to send off the elementary boys three or four mornings a week, depending on the week, and I pick them up from school four or five days a week. Stella stays with my husband for my half-day out of town, which is fine by her if exhausting for him, and with a college student who comes to our house for the morning on the days that I work from home, and with a family in the town where I work on my long day over there. I go and nurse her down at lunchtime and she seems to be happy with the arrangement. She was excited to go back today after a week away. "Teessa! Zaa!" she exclaimed when I told her where we were going. (That's "Theresa! Sarah!" for all y'all who are not fluent in Stellish.) She's having a lot of fun with their princess costumes and sparkly shoes, because sparkly shoes are thin on the ground at our house.
2. The work is really fun. I have a manuscript almost ready to hand off to some readers before I submit it to a journal, which is exciting if nervous-making. I am expanding one of my dissertation analyses to see what it looks like in a different sample of kids, and I'm jazzed about that too. I was invited to participate in a qualitative study, which is a new methodology for me. I have two postdoc mentors and they have been so SO helpful and encouraging. Today I was talking with one of them about a slightly obscure interest of mine (okay, it's probably fairly high on the obscure scale: I want to take a crack at writing code to evaluate the emergence of pluperfect in school-aged children). When I got home there were two articles in my inbox from her about emergence of present perfect in slightly younger children. So there's lots of support and enthusiasm for my work, which is invaluable.
3. A small part of the job is admin stuff, which is not my favorite thing to do but I can't complain. I have to track down the previously funded people to make sure they're fulfilling their service obligations, for instance, but most of them are friends of mine and I am looking forward to checking in with them. If the yuckiest part of your job is still something to look forward to, that's a pretty good job.
4. I got a nasty letter from a publisher last week. Remember when I wrote a grant in the spring? I've been planning a study that looks at the reliability of an instrument widely used by clinicians. I wrote to the publisher requesting permission to use part of the instrument in an online study and got a response that blew my hair back. (Addressed, infuriatingly, to Dr. Moist Gladly -- come on, guys, you can spell my name correctly when you make veiled threats in my direction.) I am talking to the university legal office about the situation, because I think (a) the "fair use" clause covers me and (b) the publishers are mostly trying to cover up the author's dearth of reliability data. I don't have my heart set on doing the study -- this started as a way for me to get some practice writing a grant and getting IRB approval for a project -- so I'm mostly interested to see how it unfolds. How will copyright law and academic freedom intersect, especially given the university's desire to cover its figurative butt? Stay tuned.
5. Occasionally I wish I were a little more involved on campus. There are a million cool ways to be plugged in and I keep reading about them on the email list for postdocs affiliated with the neuroscience program. There are lectures to attend and well-known speakers to take out to pre-lecture breakfasts and research chats and neuroscience-oriented outreach to kids in the community and lots more. There are also, however, five kids in our community an hour away from campus, five kids who need their mom. So.
6. I am thinking uncertainly about next year already. I can probably renew my contract for a second year. There's some expectation that I'll be applying for faculty jobs for next year, but [whispers] I don't think I want a faculty job for next year. I am very happy with my low-stress no-tenure-clock no-teaching-responsibilities job.
7. One of the bits of Laura Vanderkam's book that I liked was they way she writes about finding your dream job: what kind of work would you do even if you didn't get paid for it? Academics get flak from many different quarters: commentators on Fox News say academics are a bunch of godless liberals; pragmatists say academics are ivory tower denizens who couldn't hack it in the business world. This week I am all filled up with a happy vision of my purpose at work: I get to investigate my ideas about how kids learn to communicate, one of the things I am most passionate about. I get to solve the puzzles involved in getting computers to do the stats and the boring bits of my language sample analyses. (I should revisit this post the next time I am exasperated with my stats program. I will not be saying "I get to solve the puzzles" at that point.) I get to write about my ideas so other people who are passionate about children's communication can keep nudging our understanding of human language forward.
And I get paid for it. It doesn't get much better than that.
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