An Academic's Life

This episode title is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it's a good reminder that it is okay (and necessary) to rest. This week, I talk about the need for rest as the year wind's down (ugh, don't remind me that 2023 is just around the corner!) and how our prior learning knowledge can create self-beliefs that prevent us from taking the rest that we need. I draw from Susan A. Ambrose et al.'s work on prior learning knowledge in How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching. I close the episode with a few reflection questions about our own prior learning knowledge about rest and work and what we might do to teach ourselves that it is okay to rest. 

Happy listening! 

Do you know that everytime you are mildly (or greatly) annoyed with your office or workspace, you waste cognitive and emotional energy? I've been trying to force myself into loving working in my on-campus office, and I just ..... can't. And I'm envious of folks who can. But forcing myself to try to be productive and motivated in a space that doesn't do it for me is actually causing me a huge energy leak. "Energy leaks" are the ways in which our cognitive, emotional, and intellectual energy dissipates leaving us tired, frustrated, unfocused, and/or resentful. (And maybe many other emotions.) In this episode, I get honest about my office and workplace energy leaks and what I've been doing to stop the leak. 

Happy listening! 

This week I explore Agota Kun and Peter Gadanecz's 2022 article "Workplace happiness, well-being and their relationship with psychological capital: A study of Hungarian Teachers." Kun and Gadanecz provide a really nice overview of the scholarship on workplace happiness and well-being, as well as the necessary components to ensuring employees' happiness, so I highly recommend you all to read their literature review. Ever with the goal of finding ways forward and strategies that work, I share my own understanding of workplace happiness and offer listeners several strategies for finding (or refining their search for) workplace happiness within academia. 

I am currently neck-deep in promotion material writing/organzing (due September 6), but I was inspired to do a little creative writing with an ebook! In this episode I reflect on how my promotion material writing and the ebook adventure have been retraining my brain away from deadline freak outs and internal criticsm. Without giving away what I've learned, I've found that desensitization works really well for me in these particular contexts. 

If you want to check out my ebook (on Kindle and as a print-on-demand), feel free. This is me-in-action learning new (non-academic) things and practicing not being perfect -- both things I need to keep working on. How am I supposed to learn new skills and retrain my brain away from the imposter syndrome if I don't challenge myself?

Happy listening!    

It is GTA Orientation time this week, and I'm neck-deep in training our new first-year composition graduate teaching assistants. If there's one thing I can encourage you to do this semester--as I've been telling our new GTAs--is to pick one support office on campus and get to know the staff. I've found that getting to know various support offices on campus have helped me be a better teacher and mentor, as well as set boundaries. If you're feeling lonely, disconnected, or confused from your program, department, or campus, getting to know one support office can definitely help. 

What does it mean to be happy at work? In this week's episode, I share some workplace happiness research I've been doing (because, you know, us academics are always doing the research) in my own quest for understanding what workplace happiness looks like for me. I share Annie McKee's recipe for happiness at work--"meaningful work," "a hopeful view of the future," and "true friendship"--from her book How to be Happy at Work. (Annie has a PhD in Organizational Behavior and is currently a Senior Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, so she's got the research-based goods.) I close the episode with a few reflection and brainstorming exercises to help you define for yourself what workplace happiness looks like. 

Happy listening! 

These last few weeks have been a little crazy with a water pipe bursting and our basement flooding, so I've been silent. I've been feeling overwhelmed and anxious, and it's hard to slow down and connect with myself when I'm feeling that way. This week, I share a few paragraphs from Dr. Bessel van der Kolk's book The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, specifically the chapter titled "Learning to Inhabit Your Body: Yoga." Dr. van Der Kolk, MD, is a trauma researcher who uses neuroscience and attachment research to discover and develop trauma-informed therapies for children and adults.  

When we're stressed--whether that includes deadlines, flooded basements, or worry about the fall semester--it's hard to remember that we should feel our feelings, acknowledge them, and work through them. In this episode, I also share my own experience learning to inhabit my body as an academic and share some strategies you might want to try. 

Whether you're just starting out as a peer reviewer or you've been doing it awhile and want a refresher, I've got four recommendations for how to be a good peer reviewer. TLDR: Be a good human and provide meaningful feedback. In this episode, I draw from writing studies scholarship and my experience as an edited collections and special journal issue editor. 

If you're looking for some student- and/or faculty-friendly readings on how to be a good peer reviewer (yes, you can use these readings in your classrooms to teach students how to effectively peer review), check out writing studies scholar Richard Straub's "Responding--Really Responding--to Other Students' Writing," MIT's Broad Institute "Peer Review--Best Practices," and Paraminder Dhillon's "How to be a Good Peer Reviewer of Scientific Manuscripts." Oh, and that salty Facebook group is called Reviewer 2 Must Be Stopped!

Happy listening! 

Academia is rife with scarcity mindset--the idea that there are finite opportunities, jobs, and funding to go around and only the best and brightest will survive. For us academics raised in scarcity mindset, we often cannot see new opportunities or potentials because our inner critic tells us that we'll "never be good enough" or "the competition will be so fierce--you'll never get it." As a result, we might be afraid to branch out and take career risks, such as applying for jobs in an adjacent industry, applying for fellowships and grants, or sending in publications to top journals. 

But in this week's episode, I share why we're ultimately limiting our potential when we buy into the scarcity mindset. I incorporate some personal examples and also an example from a friend who just got a job he never thought he was qualified for or deserved. I close this episode with reflective exercises to help you identify where the scarcity mindset shows up in your life and how to retrain your brain against it. 

Happy listening! 

It's summer--the time when academics get down to their research and writing. In this episode, I share my five top writing strategies (based on writing studies' research and pedagogy) to make your summer writing experience as enjoyable and generative as possible without sacrificing your well-being. 

Also, it looks like Anchor isn't transcript friendly (transcripts can only happen in 1 minute audio segments--wut?!), so while I said I was making this episode to get a transcript ... yeah, that didn't work. I'm going to have to find a different platform or something.