With the new university year just about to kick off, I thought I would brush off that most essential of items that no faculty member is ever without: the Academic Time Planner. Here’s what it looks like:
Things to do this year:
- Prepare and deliver a great number of mind-blowing lecture courses that make even the most tedious subject seem exciting. Time commitment: 40 hours/week.
- Mentor students, exhibiting God-like levels of omniscience and patience while helping them discover their inner potential. Time commitment: 40 hours/week.
- Participate fully on faculty committees, embracing the opportunity to contribute to the great engines of bureaucracy they represent. Time commitment: 40 hours/week.
- Write grant proposals that will bring in millions of dollars to help make the world a better place in the future, while paying the bills in the here and now. Time commitment: 40 hours/week.
- Carry out research on esoteric challenges which, despite their apparent obscurity, are vital to the continuation of life as we know it. Time commitment: 40 hours.
- Write bucket loads of peer reviewed papers for high impact peer review journals that, while possibly unintelligible, nevertheless appear awfully clever. Time commitment: 40 hours/week.
- Talk to people all over the world about awesome stuff that they really need to know – whether they realize it or not. Time commitment: 40 hours/week.
- Participate in important committees and advisory groups that are critical to creating even more important committees and advisory groups. Time commitment: 40 hours/week.
- Hobnob with people who are interested in what we do here – and who might even give us some money to do it! Time commitment: 40 hours/week.
- Continue to build the Risk Science Center into a kick-ass place for risk science. Time commitment: 40 hours/week.
Total time commitment: 40 hours/week
Sorted! And I even have some time left to actually have a life by the looks of it. Not like many of my poor colleagues who are so over-commit that their work is their life.
Go figure that one out!
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
And it all starts will the minor upgrade from the Masters track to the PhD track in grad school. If you had a time machine, which point would you go back to Andrew, to change if you could, anything?
I’m not sure. I actually think we are our own worst enemies here – we over-commit in part because we are engaged in what we do, but by doing so we raise expectations, and so the viscous cycle goes.
sorry, “with” above, not “will”… mobile keyboards.
A workaholic’s a workaholic, it’s a syndrome!!