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ACADEMICS ONLY

Welcome to Academics Only

10/1/2020

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You might be first person to read this.  It's brand new website.  The video gives some background, but here's a bit more detail.

Academics Only is a intended to grow into a "How-to" community for anyone interested in academia.  It's specifically intended to grow into a community that's super helpful to new people:  frustrated PhD students, anxious new professors, and independent scholars.  There's separate resource tabs for each group, and there's a monthly blog that's usually of general interest.

Academics shines most brightly when it's cooperative.  Here's a place where we can share the ideas, strategies, and systems that we think will help others.  Right now most of the content is being moved over from my old website, so needs to great advice from other people. A lot of people could use your help.

For instance, if you created a useful Teaching Tip Sheet, here's where you could share it.  If you read a helpful article on how to write more clearly, here's where we could post a link.  If your advisor gave you a great template creating a conference poster,  here's where they could share it.  It's for basically anything you personally created or discovered that you've found used and that could help others.
  • A pdf handout of teaching advice
  • A tip list on surviving grad school
  • Favorite career-guidance articles
  • A checklist for submitting a paper​
  • A list of inspirational quotes
  • A productivity aid you developed
  • The goal-setting system you use
  • Relationship tips for scholars
  • Your most useful go-to websites
  • Helpful academic How-to articles
  • A method to keep perspective or manage stress
  • Or whatever makes you smile or work better

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​You can either send me what you have, or you direct me to what you discovered and I'll track down the author.  Also, you can either post it with your name or post it anonymously. Just shoot me an email and we can schedule a call if needed. 

Academia can be incredibly rewarding -- for you, your students, and those influenced by your research and other projects. I hope some of the ideas here can help speed you down that road so you can have a bigger impact and a lot of fun.


Let me know below what might help you most.
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30 Years of Useful Academic Lessons (learned the hard way)

8/23/2020

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​Today’s the 30th 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 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 30 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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Using a 3-3-3 Weekly Recap will keep you focused

1/20/2020

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There are 100 things on your mental To-Do list.  There are daily duties (like email and office time) and pre-scheduled stuff (like classes and committee meetings).  But what still remains at the end of the day are the things that are easy to put off because they don’t have hard or immediate deadlines – things like writing an intro to a paper, submitting an IRB proposal, drafting a grant, completing some analysis tables, and so on.   At the end of the year, having finished all of these might be what makes the difference between an exceptional year and another “OK” one. 

But these projects are also the easiest things to put off or to only push ahead 1 inch each week.  If you push 100 projects ahead 1 inch each week, you’ve made 100 inches of progress at the end of the week, but your desk is still full and you’re feeling frustratingly resigned to always be behind.  This is an incremental approach.

A different approach would be to push a 50-inch project ahead until it is finished and falls off the desk; then you could push a 40-inch project ahead until it falls off; and then you can spend the last of your time and energy pushing a small 10-inch project off your desk.   This is the “push-it-off-the-desk” approach.

Both approaches take 100-inches of work. However, the “push-it-off-the-desk” approach changes how you think and feel.  You still have 97 things left to do, but you can see you made tangible progress. For about 12 years, I tried a number of different systems to do this – to finish up what was most important for the week.  Each of them eventually ended up being too complicated or too constraining for me to stick with.  

Eventually I stopped looking for a magic system. Instead, at the end of every week, I simply listed the projects or project pieces I was most grateful to have totally finished.   Super simple. It kept me focused on finishing things, and it gave me a specific direction for next week (the next things to finish).  It’s since evolved into something I call a “3-3-3 Weekly Recap.”

Here’s how a 3-3-3 Weekly Recap works.  Every Friday I write down the 3 biggest things I finished that week (“Done”), the 3 things I want to finish next week (“Doing”), and 3 things I’m waiting for (“Waiting for”).  This ends up being a record of what I did that week, a plan for what to focus on next week, and a reminder of what I need to follow up on.  It helps keep me accountable to myself, and it keeps me focused on finishing 3 big things instead of 100 little things.  Here’s an example of one that’s been scribbled in a notebook at the end of last week:

Even though you’d be writing this just for yourself, it might improve your game.  It focuses you for the week, it gives you a plan for next week, and it prompts you to follow-up on things you kind of forgot you were waiting for. 

Sometimes I do it in a notebook and sometimes I type it and send it to myself as an email.  It doesn’t matter the form it’s in or if you ever look back at it (I don’t), it still works.  I’ve shared this with people in academia, business, and government.  Although it works for most people who try it, it works best for academics who manage their own time and for managers who are supervising others.  They say it helps to keep the focus on moving forward instead of either simply drifting through the details of the day or being thrown off course by a new gust of wind. 

If you work with PhD students or Postdocs, it could help them develop a “Finish it up” mentality, instead of a “Polish this for 3 years until it's perfect” mentality.   It’s also useful as a starting point for 1-on-1 weekly meetings.  If they get in the habit of emailing their 3-3-3 Recap to you each Friday, you can share any feedback and perhaps help speed up whatever it is they are waiting for.  Especially if it’s something on your desk. Ouch.

Good luck in pushing 3 To-Dos off your desk and getting things done. I hope you find this helps.
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How to Not Retire from Academia

6/30/2019

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Tomorrow I retire from Cornell; it will be two days after I turned 59.  My Mom and Dad both retired from their union jobs within days of their birthdays, and I never remember them saying much about their jobs after that day.  Someone else took my Dad’s place on the production line, and someone else took my Mom’s place filing papers.
 
But academia is different. It’s one profession you never really have to retire from.   A lot of us have a lot to say, and we’re passionate about saying it even when we’re officially through with our job.  Many academics imagine themselves retiring in their early 70s, and even then maybe only transitioning to half-time until they befuddle us by changing the lock on our office.
 
Even retirement parties are somewhat pro forma.  If you feel you have a calling for academia, you don’t feel any different the day after you retire.  I just had my retirement party last month and it seemed like a birthday party, except that people gave speeches and gave me a cherry wood captain’s chair with the Cornell logo on the front and a touching engraving on it.
 
In 30 years of academia, I only once went to a retirement party that didn’t just seem like was another birthday party for the person who was retiring but who was going to be at work again tomorrow at they exact same time they always are. But seeing this one retirement party had a striking effect on me. It happened about 15 years ago, and I was asked to be one of two faculty speakers at the annual Spring meeting of the university’s Business Advisory Committee; it was also doubling as a retirement party for an amazing man.

He was one of the most notable economists at the University. He occupied a rare niche at the intersection of economics, real estate, finance, and law. He was widely published, widely influential, and even his economist colleagues spoke of him in awe. This year was his retirement year, and his speech would perhaps be his Last Waltz in front of a group like this. We got to know each other throughout the day and up through the closing reception.
 
On the rainy long ride home, we sat next to each other in the back of the dark and quiet chartered bus. I asked him which of his many accomplishments he most proud of, and which had the most impact. At one point, however, I asked a question that was not met with the same warmth and candor. I asked, "In light of all of the remarkable things you’ve accomplished so far in your career, what’s your biggest professional regret?"

Silence.

Then he eventually said, "I don’t have any regrets. If I had to do it again, I would do everything pretty much the same way."  After another long pause he then recanted a bit and said something like this:
"Well, maybe I have one regret. My work lies at the intersection of four areas – economics, finance, real estate, and law. I have a very complete picture of how these interact and how they influence everything from real estate prices in ghettos to land speculation prices in the middle of nowhere. The problem is that I’m the only one who sees the big picture. Some of my papers are published in economics journals and finance journals, but a lot of my other papers are published in real estate journals and law reviews. Nobody else sees the big picture because they only read one type of journal. They don't read all four.”

I said, “Would it be easier for people to see your big picture if you were to write a book that pulled all of this together? That way, everything would be in one place and you could connect all the dots.”  He chuckled and immediately dismissed this, “I don’t know about marketing, but in economics they don’t reward books.”  

After 45 years of research, here was a great man who was retiring with one needless regret. Yet, what he let get in his way was how he would be rewarded or whether a colleague might think he was simplifying his research for the amateurs.  It seemed to me that writing a book would have been a potentially transforming project. 

​The metaphor that is relevant for us is not the metaphor of writing a book. The appropriate metaphor is for anyproject that might ratchet up our level of impact. It is any project that may not be rewarded with the respect of the “professor next door,” but it is that which we think is critically important. In fact, it might be even be actively derided. That’s what happened to a number of metaphorical books. It happened to Carl Sagan’s award-winning Cosmos series on PBS, to Gary Becker’s famous Business Week columns, to Steven Levitt’s “Freakonomics” to Paul Krugman’s New York Times columns, to Richard Posner’s Federal Judge appointment, and to Stephen Ambrose’s National World War II Museum. 

The notion of an "unwritten book" can be a powerful and useful metaphor for us.  For many of us, there is at least one metaphorical book that would take our ideas to a new level of influence. It might be starting a website and blog, presenting research in front of a House subcommittee in order to propose a law, making class modules for science teachers, writing a review article in a related field, starting a company, or starting a new class and turning the notes into an engaging distance-learning course.  What’s interesting is that most of these “unwritten books” probably wouldn’t have to wait.   They were something that could have been started much earlier if we would have removed our self-limiting barriers.

---

I remember another topic that I discussed with that eminent economics professor on the long ride back home. It was how quickly he said that his research years had passed.

​He said that after he graduated with his PhD, he blinked and had tenure; he blinked again and he had an endowed chair; he blinked again and he was riding with me on what he called “his retirement bus.” The idea of starting a career of activism research when “the time is right” could disappear in a blink of an eye. 

Time to start the next chapter. 
​
Activism Research
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    Welcome...

    Academics Only is a how-to community that  helps  us share our best practices as PhD students, new professors, and independent scholars.

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What have you created or found that's been useful and could be helpful for other PhD students, new professors, or independent scholars?  ​
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​Send an email to AcademicsOnly@yahoo.com if you have something you think would be useful to share with others on this website
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