Academic Secret

In the short history of a.secret, the following has already emerged as a main theme, it seems. But I'm going to post about it anyway. After all, I personally haven't yet. And I don't see any solutions in the other related posts so additional discussion seems warranted. (In fact, the inspiration for this post - other than desperation - came from Salmon Ella and thistle starting a fight over who gets to claim the resident slacker name. I figured I had to jump in.)

I finally got myself to start writing a to-do list this morning. It's enormously long. The list contains some items that were due a long time ago and many items that would be great to get done in the next few weeks, a month or two tops. Obviously some items are much quicker than others (e.g. the difference between booking some hotel rooms vs writing an academic paper). Nonetheless, the mere length of the list is keeping me away from getting anything done. (Hmm.. maybe I should've put "post to a.secret" on the list so I could cross off something today.)

So what to do? How to attack the list? A few items are related to must-meet deadlines (after all, I don't want to embark on a trip somewhere without having made lodging arrangements), but others are fairly flexible (and have been delayed for longer than I care to admit).

I have heard the advice, and it seems reasonable, that any item on a to-do list should be bounded enough that you can do it in one sitting so it is reasonable to expect to make some progress on it. Okay, fine, so I'll go back and divide the items about writing papers into many subitems. But that's only going to make the list longer, which is only going to paralyze me even more.

So what to do? How do I get anything done when there is so much to choose from?! Seriously, this is a major concern, and I'm sure not just for me. C'mon gang, help me out. Please. Pretty or ugly please, your pick.

It's that time of year again, when large parts of the campus of the elite research university at which I am a grad student have been turned over to summer camps. This week, according to the signs posted here, there, and everywhere, our campus is host to lacrosse camps, soccer camps, science camps, and baseball camps.
Every time I leave my building I run into groups of very young people being led around by slightly-less-young people with clipboards and a whistle around their necks.
Normally the campers are fairly benign. Sometimes I even feel nostalgic when I see a group playing capture-the-flag.
But last week, I was almost killed by a Frisbee that the youngsters were throwing around. And then on Saturday I had to wait ten minutes in line to pee in the locker room at the campus pool because pre-teen campers were too embarrassed to change into their swimsuits in front of other girls, and were instead taking up the toilet stalls changing in private. This gave me ample time to ponder the possibility that they were probably peeing in the pool when not using the toilets as changing rooms.
Call me a curmudgeon. I know the university wouldn't turn itself into kindercentral without good reason, presumably monetary. But I'm soooo over the squealing and yelling and pushing in line at the cafeteria. It almost makes me miss the undergrads.
Almost.

Not that Plaid's stopgap idea for the links section to just have the Wikipedia entries for "Academic" and "Secret" wasn't smashing, but I decided a more enduring solution would be for us to devote the linkspace in the sidebar to celebrating academic pseudonymous (or pseudopseudonymous, in some cases) blogs. Let me know via the comments if you have any suggestions.

Thanks for all the fan mail you've sent us! (Feel free to keep it up.:) We may not be able to respond to messages individually, but we do appreciate them. Of course, what we appreciate most is if you keep on coming back and contributing to academicsecret.

Colorful whisperers unite!

I'm stuck. I have an undergraduate research assistant who seems like a very nice and conscientious person (that is, she seems to take the job seriously) working for me this summer, but she is unbelievably slow. I seriously cannot imagine how she can be as slow as she is with the work she is doing.

Sure, my expectations may be off. But I am comparing her productivity to that of RAs before her doing very similar work. And she is much much slower. So what to do? I don't want to go into attack mode. But this is not reasonable. I think she is interested in graduate school, and she won't cut it with this level of productivity. She's shy and reserved so I am additionally concerned that critical feedback will make her even more timid. I also don't want the quality of her work to go down just because I am asking her to be more efficient.

Do I just let it be and accept the fact that this was not a good investment? I think she will be able to finish what is absolutely crucial to get done by the end of the summer. But I had hoped for much more. It's just painful to watch how someone can be this slow.

Any suggestions on how to deal with a situation like this?

Click image for more legible version.

As per the note on the sidebar of this blog, in addition to having our members post elaborate (or not) secrets, we are also exploring graphical representations of academic secrets. So if you are not a member (or even if you are), we invite you to send in a secret in graphical representation. We got the idea from the site Post Secret.

Note that these short secrets have to be _graphical_ representations. We have now received a few submissions, but they are all just simple text. That won't do. Please resend them in graphical form for consideration. Also, we reserve the right not to post a graphical secret if we deem it inappropriate. We reserve the right to determine what we consider inappropriate.

As clarification I wanted to mention - in response to an email we received recently - that we were not striving to be an academic Post Secret site. That component is just something we added, because it has the potential to be interesting in addition to the core mission of the site: to allow academics (members and visitors alike) to discuss whatever is on their mind.

I was watching a nature show on polar bears yesterday, and it got really intense*. Momma polar bear and her two cubs were being chased across an immense wasteland of ice by a menacing male polar bear. One of the cubs couldn't keep up anymore, and fell exhausted down on the snow. Momma polar bear - let's call her Sophie - had to decide whether to stop and protect the downed cub or keep trying to escape with the heartier cub who was still on its feet. Sophie ended up running away with the cub that could still keep up. I was crying freely when the male polar bear started ripping into the first cub, and the blood got all over the snow.

Deciding that this wasn't exactly the relaxing TV fix I was looking for, I flipped to a different channel. When I saw what was on, I thought to myself 'ah, thank goodness. Law and Order: Special Victims Unit,' and cheered up immediately. What kind of nutcase am I that the death of a polar bear cub totally undid me, but a show about the rape and murder of children seemed like a happy, lighthearted diversion?


*even more intense than the computer-generated polar bear tragedy in Inconvenient Truth.

Career considerations may not be the only ones for blogging under a pseudonym. One's private life may benefit from being discrete as well.

Consider the following. You are someone who blogs every little detail of your life publicly. These details include not only your favorite local ice cream hang-out spot and sushi bar, but also when your ex broke up with you, why, how it made you feel, what you think about the ex now, etc. Then one day you meet a romantic interest. Said romantic interest knows about your blog. Don't you think s/he may be just a little bit put off by the idea that as soon as s/he enters into a conversation with you (never mind whatever else may follow) her/his life will be subject to complete public scrutiny as well? Talk about a turn-off. Well, I guess that depends on your preferences. But I could see it as a big alarm flashing for plenty o' people.

In my first foray into finding and pasting JavaScript into an HTML document myself, we now have randomized slogans. Granted, they are not all exactly clever. They will elaborate and improve if this keeps going.

Afterward, I thought that instead of slogans, we might have used the space to post things that looked like juicy secrets that could come spilling forth on this blog at any moment. Things like, "Sometimes I 'lose' Republican students' assignments out of spite" or "I've shown 41 films already this semester" or "I'm this close to seducing my Dean" or "The middle half of my dissertation was plagiarized from Harlequin novels... and no one noticed!"

The more I think about the possibilities: should we have slogans in the sidebar, or fake secrets?

Let me know if you have any other comments on the template. I'm still not sure what I think of our main text font (Optima).

As if grad school weren't stressful enough, I have to deal with expectations from certain significant others that I am going to nobly self-sacrifice for the benefit of people who should not be here in the first place--that I am going to build a travois of intellectual assistance and drag the dead weight of certain fellow students across the academic wilderness with me, sharing my pemmican and everything.

Aside from the fact that this seems patently ridiculous to ask of anyone, it seems particularly ridiculous to expect me to do it. I don't think I ever gave the impression of being nice, let alone some kind of academic martyr. I don't even have time to clean my own bathroom, and it's not like anyone would do anything for me if I took on this task.

This thankless task, I might add, because as far as I can tell this person cannot tell that I am exponentially smarter and more with-it than they will ever be, and is in fact more likely to stare at my chest than listen to me explain concepts.

And yet, I find myself tendering all kinds of explanations instead of more honestly saying, "It is not my responsibility to keep this person from flunking out of school." I kind of feel like I shouldn't have to; this should be obvious to everyone concerned. But apparently it isn't.

I have plenty of pet peeves about academics, here is one. If you are going to send a response to a query on a mailing list, how about taking the trouble to make it helpful? People will send notes that resemble thinking out loud more than actual advice. “I think I saw something along those lines in Journal X in year Y, or maybe it was Journal Z in another year, you could try searching those.” How is that helpful? Or, “Try Web site xyz.com (or maybe it was wxyz.com)”. Before sending a note to hundreds (if not thousands) of people, why not actually go and check whether it was xyz or wxyz? I find such behavior obnoxious. Do these people actually think that they are being helpful or do they at least realize deep down that all they are doing is posing? Either put the two seconds of work into being actually helpful or spare the list from your laziness. It suggests one or more of the following: sloppy work, disrespect, ambivalence, naivete for thinking that sending that kind of a note is actually going to accrue you anything positive from other list members.

Given the number of pet peeves we likely all have, I recommend commenting on this post if you have a mailing-list related pet peeve. Others are likely worth a post onto themselves.

I've had three faculty advisors (so far) in my never-ending-journey towards a PhD, and I have developed romantic/obsessive/crushlike feelings toward each of them. I haven't acted on those feelings or anything, and in all cases I'm sure they were unrequited.
The weird thing is that only in the case of advisor #2 was the person what you would call "my type". But #2 was way too old for me, and married.
Advisor #1 was someone I would not be physically attracted to under normal circumstances, being at least 5 inches shorter than me and weighing at least 50 lbs less than me. Also married.
Advisor #3 - the current officeholder - is even shorter than #2, and the wrong gender and yet I've still developed crushy feelings and even some sexual attraction.

When the admiration and intellectual respect I have for my advisors is combined with the power and approval dynamics of advisor/advisee relationships, I get the same butterflies in the stomach, blushing, wanting-to-please and fixations that come with romantic crushes. It's like some wires get crossed in my brain, and little things like gender preferences and heterosexuality are no longer relevant in the face of intelligence, a long CV, and the powers to provide me with funding and approve my dissertation proposal.

I haven't told any of my friends about this because they know the advisors in question, and would still be laughing at me to this day.

Thank god for academicsecrets.

If we are going to do this up proper, don't you think? I tried to think of one, but the best I could do was "We could tell you, but then we'd have to flunk you."

We could probably also do better in the links than just the Wikipedia entry for Academic and Secrets. I don't remember whose idea that was anyway. (It was Plaid's!) In any case, I'm not sure what would be links suitable to our theme.