Big day tomorrow, you guys. It's my first day of school! By which I mean it is the first day of the first course that I will have designed from start to finish. No textbook--just me, 50 undergrads, and whatever I feel like talking about. I'm super excited and super nervous, and just hope that ultimately, my students will agree with me when I tell them how awesome neuroscience is. If you have any teaching tips, I am all ears, seriously.
In addition to spewing my gospel 3 mornings a week, I'll also be (fingers crossed) collecting actual data this semester. Being a new TT professor is so weird! You spend all this time talking to all these different vendors and submitting all these purchase orders, followed by a period of about 2 months where you get about 20 boxes a day, and then all of a sudden you're like, I may in fact have enough stuff here to do a real experiment! It is quite something.
But of course there was this little development over the holidays that's threatening to severely limit my productivity, and that's the matter of planning a wedding for this fall. It's true! I am officially, as they say in France, a fiancée. And truth be told, I am really enjoying it. But curse and bless the internet in equal measures! Do you have any idea the rabbit hole of wedding idea free-association clicking that exists out there? We're less than two weeks in, and already I've spent hours upon hours building Inspiration Boards on Snippet & Ink and Pinterest, curating images of vintage luggage stacks, antique trophy bowl centerpieces, and art deco letterpress invites. It is a time-suckage behemoth at which the likes of Angry Birds merely tremble. These next three months will be a true test to the integrity of my will and dedication of my soul to achieving tenure, for there may be no greater temptation to a to-be-wed girl than a well-photographed pair of Badgley Mischkas.
Dr Becca has a new job (NJ) as a tenure-track assistant professor in the neurosciences at New Job University (NJU), located in New Job City (NJC). She is still fumbling, just making a little more money doing it.
Good luck with your first teaching class, I'm sure it will all go well. And who could not be interested in neuroscience?
I enjoyed the summary of your new role and how you look at vendors. Working for one of them (I assume, unless you did not buy anything from Life Technologies), it's the first time ever I read the other side of the story.
Good luck with the wedding as well, isn't Pinterest a great cool app?
Kurt
Thanks, Kurt! Only people with hardened souls could not be interested in neuroscience. And yes, absolutely love Pinterest. But who are all these people re-pinning me?
Congratulations! It's my first day of teaching too! (I'm only adjuncting a magnet school honors bio class WITH a textbook, given that I'm a lowly 4th year grad student). Yeah, wedding planning + science is a strange combo. I got married the weekend after my comprehensive exam, and it was a mad dash to the finish for both of them.
Oooh, good luck to you, Alethea! I hope your day went smoothly!
Teaching tip! If you ever need to perk up the students with a laugh, you can end a description of something scientific that's been done with,
"It's a great party trick - if you're ever at a party with no booze."
Ha! As if that would ever happen!
Congratulations on all fronts!!
Teaching tip - don't think of any lecture/lab/course as a finished product at which *you* succeed or fail. Think of them as experiments that you can tweak the second go around.
Also, most students will never notice if you screw up.
Also, most students will never notice if you screw up.
I really, really hope this is true!
Mazel tov on both counts, Becca!
Wow! Congratulations!!!
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