Blog Posts

9-11-2002 -- Never Forget

9/11/2021

For a website named "AcademicsOnly.org," this is the least ostensibly academic post you might see.

I once saw a photo of a 35-year old man defiantly showing a tattoo on his big upper arm that read "9-11-2002 -- Never Forget." Right date; wrong year. But I don't think anyone was going to tell him that.

Today's the 20th Anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the American World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This was a defining moment for many Americans, as in "Where were you when you heard about World Trade Center being attacked?" Since it was so defining, it's curious why its 20th Anniversary seems to be slipping by so quietly.

One exception of this that's most vivid to me came in the form of a poem that a friend wrote a couple weeks ago and sent to me. It was written by Michael Antunes who is the Top 40 rock saxophonist (On the Dark Side, Tender Years) and actor (Eddie and the Cruisers). Michael said I could share it.

There are a lot of themes associated with 9-11: Heroism, innocent lives lost, reversals of fortune, resilience, and so on. There's a lot to memorialize, a lot to remember, and a lot to celebrate.

While I wish I saw more unified or institutional efforts to do so, it's also important that we take the individual initiative -- like Michael did -- to memorialize, remember, or celebrate in a way that is personally meaningful to us and to those we share it with.

Thinking back to the "Never Forget" 9-11 tattoo that had the wrong year on it, I'm no longer convinced that our deliberate, individual efforts at memorizing, remembering, or celebrating have to be on the right day or even have to have the exact year right. What's most important is that we do it in a way that's meaningful and memorable to us.

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How to Use PhD Student Case Studies

9/3/2021

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If you’re a PhD student, you are in great company. But "being in great company" has a very special meaning that's important not to overlook -- it means you are not alone.  Your bumpy PhD experience is surprisingly universal across different schools and different programs.  If you’re a PhD student in microbiology, you have more in common with a PhD student in history than someone in medical school.  If you’re a PhD student in economics, you have more in common with a PhD student in physics than with an MBA student.

Despite this universal experience, many, many PhD students feel very alone.   They feel anxious about their uncertain future, anxious about their abilities, and anxious about a personal life that seems to be passing them by.

Having been an informal confident to many PhD students in different majors or with different advisors, I’ve found that many of their real concerns are difficult for them to talk about.  This further magnifies their feeling of isolation because they don’t realize how many other people have faced and often conquered a similar problem.  There’s power in knowing someone else found a path out of the same woods you feel you’re in.

For about 20 years I taught an interdisciplinary PhD course at the University of Illinois and then at Cornell.  Aside from the academic objectives, one of my personal objectives of this course was to help students begin to conquer these anxieties.  One way we tried to tackle this was by asking students if they wanted to volunteer to write a short description about a “friend” who was facing a troubling problem.  Many weeks we would discuss one of these anonymously written “case studies” for 10-15 minutes during class.

Download File
Two good things happened almost every week.  First, the 8-16 students in the class all realized that they weren’t alone in some of the problems they faced.  Second, they heard a wide range of rational (non-emotional) solutions and perspectives to each problem they probably wouldn’t have heard from an officemate or a partner.

There are three examples of PhD Student Case Studies in the downloadable pdf, and they can be used in a number of different ways.

If you’re a professor who teaches a PhD seminar, use these if you think they will help your students. One of them could be used as a class filler on a slow day, or they could be used as topics of discussion on the last class session in a course.
If you’re a counselor or in mental health services at a university, use these if you think they would be helpful in group discussions.
If you’re the PhD student in charge of your workshops or seminars, you might find one or two of these to be a useful change of pace to your usual sessions.

There’s power in knowing there are a lot of different ways a PhD student can get out of the woods.
PhD Student Case Studies

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30 Years of Academic Lessons

8/23/2021

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Somewhere in the Arizona desert on August 24, 1990.

This is an update of my column from last year on this date.

Today’s the 31st anniversary of the day when the University Registrar weighed five copies of my signed dissertation, stamped it with a red smiley face, and said, “Congratulations, Dr. Wansink.”  Within 20 minutes I was shifting my Mercury Lynx into 5th gear on the 3000 mile, unairconditioned, cross-country drive across the Route 66 desert to start teaching the next Tuesday. All I needed was a t-shirt that said “Yesterday I couldn’t even spell ‘Perfessor,’ and today I are one.”

I annually celebrate this signature day with good steak, good wine, and having good friends over for a dinner party.  I also celebrate it by writing down the best lessons I learned over the past year. Some is advice people gave me, and some is based on my own hard-knocks experience  – things that are useful to me and might be useful to students and friends as they drive the road.

In the spirit of counting to 31 today, here’s a sample of some of these that might be a boost or save a stumble

Advice to Graduate Students

1. “The ‘P’ in PhD stands for Perseverance.” – The smartest and most talented people in PhD programs aren’t always the ones who graduate.

2. “It’s an N-period game.” When I had to find a new advisor and defend a new dissertation proposal with four months notice, the game theory economist who gave me this advice was implying that there are a lot of second and third chances in academia as long as you keep swinging.  Related to this . . .

3. “Choose your best friend as your advisor.” I heard this from a Med School professor friend who then said “And choose your older brother to be your second committee member, and choose your favorite uncle to be your third.”  We tend to choose our dissertation committee based on who’s most famous.  Consider which professors most want you to graduate. [Read more]

4. Be a Visiting Professor.  Suppose you don’t get a good offer when you graduate from your PhD program (or you get turned down for tenure).  If you “settle” for a tenure-track at a school you’re not crazy about, you’ll be perceptually anchored to that type of school by both you and by others.  Being a 1- or 2-year visiting professor keeps you from getting anchored, gives you more time to strengthen your vita, and lets you swing again.

Career Observations

5. Do solution-focused research.  Developing theory is prestigious, but coming up with a solution to an everyday problem is super gratifying. (Again, this is totally my personal preference and advice to myself.) [Read more]

6. Go to a different conference outside your field every year.  Even if it’s an on-campus mini-conference in anthropology, you’ll learn a lot and it will keep you humble.

7. Leave town for your sabbatical.  Moving is a hassle and there are 100 great reasons why you should spend your sabbatical at home (your spouse’s job, your kids, your doggy, your home, and so on).  But I’ve never know anyone who went away for their sabbatical and who didn’t claim it was a career highlight.  I’ve also never known anyone who spent their sabbatical at home and remembered anything about it two years later.

8. Writing a book is useful. Almost all academic authors are disappointed their books aren't cited more or sell more. Still, writing a book is worth it because it motivates you to organize, distill, and share what you understand about your topic, and then clarify the gaps you might want to fill in next.

9. A Leave-of-Absence is Transforming. Again, this is about moving away and clearing your head. Leaving town to take a 1- or 2-year paid leave of absence is incredibly revitalizing to every single person I've known.  It either gives you amazing confidence that you can also be hugely succeed at something else, or it gives you amazing appreciation for academia.  Maybe both.

10. Being fired is a temporary setback. Whether you don’t get tenure or whether something else in your career goes haywire, they say life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you respond.  If things are looking too dark, contact me and I’ll help you, or I'll find you some help.

11. Never retire.  One of the great beauties of academia is you can always keep doing the parts of it you love most -- even if you don't go into work. (Here are some ideas on doing it without having later regrets.)

Research Experiences

12. 90% of reviewers are great coaches.  Reviewers have either made my papers better or they‘ve made me a better researcher.  If it wasn’t for reviewers, some of my papers would have never been read by anyone other than me.

13. Create a Best Practices Guide for writing journal articles.  – Find 30-40 favorite papers written by other researchers and list out the different strategies, tactics, and words you see them use (perhaps unconsciously) in their abstract, their opening-line, their first paragraph, their introduction, their background, theory section, tables, and so forth.  When you’re finished distilling this, you’ll have a Best Practices guide that’s personalized to what you like in a paper and will be your writing guide.  When I did this, my acceptance rate almost tripled. Also, papers became a lot easier and more fun for me to write.

14. Use a 2-2-2 strategy to unclog your pipeline.  If a manuscript gets desk-rejected, I try to send it to the next journal within 2 days.  If it gets conditionally accepted, I revise it and send it back within 2 weeks. If it gets a revise-and-resubmit that doesn’t require any additional studies, I send it back within 2 months.

15. Field studies are worth the hassle.  They’re messy, hard to coordinate, inefficient, error-riddled, and harder to publish than lab studies.  Still, they are usually memorable and impactful.

16. “Ideas are cheap. Execution is what pays.”   Even a mediocre brainstorming session will generate 3-4 publishable ideas, and almost none will be followed up on. Edison said something like “Publishing in the Journal of [insert favorite journal here] is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”  Executing is what matters.

Productivity Tips

17. “You can either read a lot or you can write a lot, but you can't do both.”

18. "Write the first two hours of every day." The guy who told me this, pretty much said it like a command: no email, no breakfast, no class stuff. Before breakfast and before the kids wake up. It sets a productivity vibe for the whole day. [Read more]

19. Write down the 3 specific things you'll finish each day.  Better to have three things completed than 20 things pushed ahead an inch. [Read more]

Teaching Insights

20. "Imagine your brother, daughter, or younger self in the front row of your class." This will lead you to give your class sessions more context and more “So what?”  It’s also help you cut loose a bit and give the class more punch, fun, and humor.

21. "Teach for where a student will be in 10 years." The guy who told me this is a legend. The idea is to try to get students to visualize their most successful self in 10 years.  If we can teach them as the "ten-years-from-now" person they'll be, we’ll be teaching them something they couldn’t just learn from an online class.

22. Education is a buffet; be something unique. Some courses are meaty and some are refreshing; some professors are fiery and others are more chill. You don't need to be like everyone else. By being your best, genuine, earnest self, you’ll be adding variety to their educational buffet.

23. Hold class previews for participation classes.  Non-native English speakers and shy students have a hard time participating in class, but class previews can help them. An hour before each class, I hold a class preview and we briefly discuss the day's discussion questions ahead of time. Anyone’s welcome to show up. [Read more]

24. Ask good students who the “must-take” teachers are.  See if you can sit in on a couple of their class sessions (most are flattered and only 2 ever turned me down).  Take notes about the good teaching ideas you can use.

25. “Don’t become a parody of yourself.”  Good teachers slowly start to exaggerate the things they’re good at, and they eventually take it over the top and become a parody of themselves.  Dramatic teachers will overfocus on drama. Entertaining teachers will overfocus on entertainment.  Cool professors teachers will overfocus on coolness, and so on. [Read more]

Fun, People, and Things

26. “Fun people accidently say stupid things.  Don’t beat yourself up.” Some academics over-edit everything they say before they speak.  If you have a more spontaneous personality, you won't be happy if you have to over edit everything you do. Small accidents will happen (but we get used to it).

27. Dress-up and show-up early for Meetings.   This is one way to show respect for the profession and for my colleagues. (Again, this is totally my advice to myself.) Like a US Marine Colonel once told me, "Early is on time. On time is late."

28. Don’t apologize for who I am or hide from it.  I’ve had senior colleagues give me well-meaning advice that I should never mention to anyone that I shop at Walmart, play sax in a rock band, go to church, host board game nights, do stand-up comedy, or go thrifting.  What you love doing isn’t worth being self-conscious over.  If those things are that big of a deal at your school, you’d probably be happier at a different school anyway. [Read more]

29. The more 1-on-1 fun stuff I do with different colleagues outside of work, the more I love my job.  The crazier the stuff we do, the more we both seem to love it and remember it.

30. “Max out your TIAA-CREF retirement contribution. Then add more.”  The guy who told me this was a retired English professor -- who had two very nice homes. It’s not flashy or cool to save money instead of spending it, but no one over 50 regrets having done so.

***

Having an academic mind is a Blurse. It's both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because we are almost always looking for better ways to learn or to improve. It's a curse because we're not always very open to what others have found. We feel we have to do it ourselves, or discover it ourselves. If we hear advice from someone else, we might think it doesn't apply or that we're the exception.

Ten of the lessons I mentioned are advice someone gave to me. The main reason their advice stuck with me was because I had just finished really screwing up doing it My Way:

• #3 only registered when I was told I was being kicked out of the PhD program
• #17-18 were only great ideas after I was fired for not publishing enough
• #20-21 were brilliant the day I got the second lowest teaching ratings in the school
• #26 resonated only after I'd been hissed at in class after making an unfunny comment

Hopefully these might give you a boost, save you a stumble, or lead to your own self-discovered list.

Being a scholar and an academic is an unbelievably great calling. Good luck having many, many great years -- each more amazing than the one before. Let me know how I can help.

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Beating the August Academic Blues

7/30/2021

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"School’s starting, and I didn't get anything done this summer.”

I’ve heard this every August, and I’ve said this almost every August.

Whenever I’ve asked professors and PhD students what percent of their planned work they got accomplished over the summer, no one has ever said “All of it.”  Almost everyone says something between 25 to 35%.  Everyone from the biggest, most productive super stars with the biggest lab to the most motivated, fire-in-their-belly PhD student with the biggest anxiety.

We are horrible estimators of how productive we’ll be over the summer.   I was in academia for 35 years (including MA and PhD years), yet every single summer I never finished more than 30% of what I planned.  How can we be so poorly calibrated?  We never learn. We never readjust our estimate for the next summer.   Next summer we’ll still only finish 25-35% of what we planned to do.

There are only two weeks in the year when I’m predictably down or blue.  It’s the last two weeks of August.  It’s not the heat (I mostly stay indoors).  It’s not the impending classes (I love teaching).  It’s not all the beginning of semester meetings (I loved my colleagues and loved passing notes to them under the table).  Ten years ago, I realized that I felt down the end of every August because I had to admit “school’s starting and I haven’t gotten jack done all summer.” The beginning of school is the psychological end of the Academic Fiscal Year.

One solution to our August blues lies in understanding what times of the year we do like most, and to see if we can rechannel those warm-glowy feelings to August.

If you had to guess the #1 favorite time of the year for most academics, you’d probably guess “The end of school.”  The #2 favorite time of the year you might guess would be the “Winter or Christmas break.”  What would you guess the third favorite time of the year is?

Surprisingly, I’ve heard people say it’s when they turn in their Annual Activity Report (AAR).  That’s the summary document they turn into their hard-to-please Department Chair that summarizes what they’ve accomplished in the prior 12 months:  What they published, who they advised, what new things they’ve started, what new teaching materials they’ve created, and so forth.

Snore.  How could writing an Annual Activity Report be a highlight?

Because it shows in black-and-white that we didn’t sleep-walk through the year.  It reminds us that the publication that we now take for granted was one that we were still biting our nails about last year at this time. It reminds us of our advises who were stressing over their undergraduate thesis a year ago and who have now happily graduated.  It reminds us of the cool ideas we've into hopeful projects -- ideas we hadn't even thought of a year ago..  Going back in a 12-month-ago time machine shows us what we did accomplish.  It turns our focus toward what we did – and away from what we didn’t.

Once we cross things off of our academic To-do list, we tend to forget we accomplished them.  August might be a good time to do a mid-year AAR.  It might not turn our August blues into a happy face yellow, but might at least turn it to green.  A green light for a great new school year.

Have a tremendous school year.

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9-11-2002 -- Never Forget

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