This time on Science interrupted I’m going to talk to you about how my adventures in science have been completely interrupted by my bizarre multitasking.
Bear with me, but over the pandemic I have picked up one seriously toxic trait - I sign up for literally any and every conference that I have access to. To the point that this summer I attended more conferences and workshops than I normally would in an entire year (which meant that my daughter also got to go to more conferences than she would have, had these been in-person meetings - wooohoo for making academic parenting much easier). Some of the conferences have been super methodology heavy (like the summer forum on Dynamic Modeling and Behavioral Data Science Meeting), others were steeped in theory (such as the Human Behavior and Evolution Society’s annual conference - you can watch my talk at this conference here), and others provided huge potential learning opportunities, as they were so far outside of my research specialties (such as the Evolutionary Medicine Summer Institute meeting). While this has been an extremely wonderful experience for me professionally, it’s meant I’ve had very little time to do other fun things (like write blog posts!).
On top of this craziness, summer is normally the time when academics buckle down and write up all of the projects they have been working on for the previous nine (plus) months. For me, this meant writing, editing, submitting, revising and resubmitting, and, eventually, finishing up some projects that I’ve been working on for the past few years. Practically, that meant that July was a complete bust because I needed to put a lot of effort getting four of these projects over the finish line (there are an additional four projects living in the mysterious “under review” realm, and three others that I will hopefully be able to knock out before Christmas but that just might be beginning-of-the-semester-and-super-optimistic-me talking). Over the next few posts, I’ll digest some of these papers with you and talk about what this all means big picture.
Finally, this is (hopefully) my final year in graduate school... meaning I am on the academic job market 😱. While that sounds like a thing I should be celebrating, in reality there is a lot of work that needs to happen behind the scenes to get the materials ready, such as compiling all of my teaching evaluations, verbalizing my teaching philosophy, and fully articulating my research interests.
Together, this means I have been utterly and completely lacking in motivation to write blog posts. Not because I’ve grown tired of science, but because I’ve been doing so much science I’m not quite sure which way is up.
I’ll be back soon with some more cool science that I think you should know about. Until then, stay curious my friends.
JDA
multi
