Preparing for…everything!
I’ve probably mentioned before how I never intended to get a degree in engineering. I started college with the notion of being a research scientist, but initially decided I wasn’t scientist material. I spent a couple years switching through various majors and ended up in journalism for a while. I managed to even bag a couple awards for my writing. Fortunately, I ended up being second in line for a journalism position, and when I didn’t get it, decided that I missed physics and should go back to school. One unexpected side effect of this detour in my education is that I got a lot of very valuable experience writing. I didn’t realize it until much later, but a lot of science and engineering revolves around writing, and that background, as useless as it seemed at the time, has come in very handy. As an undergrad back in physics, I…
T-minus 1 month and counting
Lately, I’ve been discussing a lot about proposals (see here and here) and some work outside of academia but I’ve only briefly touched on the some of the other aspects of being a professor. Presently, I’m finishing up a young investigator proposal which is due shortly and consuming most of my time (hence my lack of posts at GEARS). Well, the fall semester starts at the end of August so as soon as I’m done with this proposal, I’ll have to focus more on teaching preparation. Luckily, at SnowU, I only have to teach one class in the fall and one in the spring. Unluckily, however, my first class will be a senior comprehensive lab-project course. In addition to a class full of seniors, there are usually about 10 graduate students who take it who did not go through UG at SnowU. Now, many new profs negotiate to have their first semester off from…