I’ve recently come to the understanding that I am pretty bad at celebrating professional accomplishments. Academic life is a long stream of asking “are we there yet” about your research, so I believe it’s important to schedule some stop points for joy. Which leads me to ask: How do you celebrate yourself??
Continue reading “How do you celebrate yourself?”
Do you field multiple texts a week from coworkers asking you for basic information? Do you dig things out of your inbox that most assuredly landed in theirs just to forward them info they missed? Do you find yourself linking the company website, tech tutorials, and other Google-able information to people who won’t go get it themselves? Fellow female faculty members, you know what I’m talking about. I used to do this, too. Before I made a decision…
Continue reading “Career Talk: How I stopped being the office helpline”I’m sitting in a hotel room in right now, feeling like I should grade for my online summer class, but really just too distracted by my hopes that we will get the rental house we put in for yesterday. Moving is always a whirlwind and I never feel fully informed when making housing decisions, but here we go! While we wait, how about some mirror selfies?
My mom is the happiest person I know, and I was always aware of it growing up. It made me proud, for a while. Then I became a teenager, and I started rolling my eyes. A lot. It was easy to make fun of my mom for being so cheery. Then I went off to college and I started to really appreciate her again. But then, I realized that not only was my mom super happy, she was also really smart about being happy–she made choices to make herself happy everyday. She sings in the grocery store. She laughs super loud while watching tv. She gets excited about everything from running into friends to hearing her favorite songs. And you know what? All of that takes work.
I really started to understand the work of being happy and that appreciation has only grown since I got to grad school, where it’s clear that I can either find a way to enjoy this life, or I can let my potentially demanding job choice swallow me whole. I definitely don’t make the more difficult choice every day, but I do try! So this week, I asked some wise grad school friends why happiness can seem so hard in academia. Here’s what we came up with…
Continue reading “Maintaining optimism in a demanding career–or, why happiness is not a waste of time in grad school”
PhD in Clothes 