The Spring semester has ended, which means something from a teaching perspective but not from a research perspective. At least that's true for me. I know others can vary in their teaching/research mileage. For me, teaching is basically a fall/spring semester concern. I do teach a couple of weeks during the summer, but this requires little prep work so I don't count it. Research is a year long venture, but does suffer during the fall/spring, especially the fall, because of my teaching duties. A couple of weeks ago on consecutive nights, I woke up around 2 am from bad dreams. These dreams, I won't say nightmares because they were stress inducing but not terrifying, related to these two big areas of my professional life.
The first night it was a research related dream and the focus was on grants, big surprise to people in the field I expect. The dream actually started out on a good note as I was just awarded an R21 grant from NIH! The happiness and relief of having some money to conduct the research I want to do, quickly transitioned to stress as I began thinking about how quickly I could get someone hired and trained to do the research successfully. I became increasingly stressed because the R21 is only a two year grant. If it takes 6 months to hire and get someone well trained (a stretch in my opinion), I basically have 6 more months before we need to be generating most of the data in order to write a larger grant. For those not in the know, it takes a few months to write a proposal (for me at least) and then ~ 9 months before funding decisions are made. Thus, in order to maintain constant funding from the onset of the R21, I basically have 12 months to get most of the work done with an untrained person. I woke up a mix of happiness combined with a whirlwind of stress. I was up about 2 hours before going back to sleep.
The second night it was a teaching related dream. In real life I had just completed final grades for my Spring semester course and was breathing a sigh of relief to have ~3 months to focus on experiments and writing (papers and grants). In my dream, I felt like I was in the same place and at work setting up experiments when I realized my Fall semester classes were starting in a couple hours and I hadn't set up the course website, planned any lectures, etc. I was running around trying to get together some slides for the introduction and to print off some worksheets for the students but couldn't find a printer. To make things worse I couldn't find out where my class was meeting and time was ticking down to the point where I was figuring out how late I would be. Basically this was my adult version of the 'just realizing you have a final in a class you didn't know you were enrolled in all semester' nightmare. Again up for a couple of hours without being able to sleep.
Haven't had anymore repeats of the stressmares™, but apparently my sleep schedule basically requires waking up at 2 am. I do get some reading done I guess, but would rather get a straight 7-8 hours of sleep. Stupid brain.
- Home
- Angry by Choice
- Catalogue of Organisms
- Chinleana
- Doc Madhattan
- Games with Words
- Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
- History of Geology
- Moss Plants and More
- Pleiotropy
- Plektix
- RRResearch
- Skeptic Wonder
- The Culture of Chemistry
- The Curious Wavefunction
- The Phytophactor
- The View from a Microbiologist
- Variety of Life
Field of Science
-
-
-
Political pollsters are pretending they know what's happening. They don't.1 month ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
-
-
Course Corrections6 months ago in Angry by Choice
-
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Catalogue of Organisms
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Variety of Life
-
Does mathematics carry human biases?4 years ago in PLEKTIX
-
-
-
-
A New Placodont from the Late Triassic of China5 years ago in Chinleana
-
Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM6 years ago in Field Notes
-
Bryophyte Herbarium Survey7 years ago in Moss Plants and More
-
Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV8 years ago in Rule of 6ix
-
WE MOVED!8 years ago in Games with Words
-
-
-
-
post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!9 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
-
Growing the kidney: re-blogged from Science Bitez9 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
-
Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens10 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain
-
-
-
The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl12 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
-
-
Lab Rat Moving House13 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
-
Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs13 years ago in Disease Prone
-
-
Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby13 years ago in The Large Picture Blog
-
in The Biology Files
Discussions on the interface between Science and Society, Politics, Religion, Life, and whatever else I decide to write about.
4 comments:
Or the dream where you’re at a conference, its getting late, and you cant find where your presentation is to be held. Www.robert-w-jones.com
Characteristics of academic writing include a formal tone, use of the third-person rather than first-person perspective (usually), a clear focus on the research problem under investigation, and precise word choice. https://writingcollegeessays.org/oxford-style-guide-tips-ideas-examples-and-approaches/ is all about academic writing.
A very good article. Thanks to the author.
Thank you for this post. This is very interesting information for me. WritingPaperSucks is my favorite written service that helps me.
Post a Comment