Summer Plans

Summer unofficially begins on Memorial Day, or so I’ve been told. This year, our graduation ceremony was the day before, and I finished grading final exams and projects three days prior. And since it’s June and the spring semester is over; it feels like summer!

Unlike the academic year when classes are in session, summer feels different as a faculty member not teaching summer classes, nor working as an administrator. When I had heavy college administrative duties for several years, those commitments continued throughout the summer, as evidenced in an analysis of where my time goes. A tricky thing in my charmed life as a faculty member therefore is how to spend my relatively unstructured time wisely over the summer. I don’t have many hard deadlines, so I will need to be self-disciplined if I want to achieve some of my goals. At the same time, it is important to relax and reflect so that I can do a great job when I’m back in the classroom in the fall.

First though, I have to set some goals, even if I’m not under strong compulsion to complete (m)any of them. Blogging about these goals might increase my motivation to actually do some of these things. If they remained solely in mind, without being publicly stated, I am less likely to get anything done. So here’s the list so far. I will divide them into research goals, teaching goals and hobby goals.

Research Goals.

One of my research students has enough results for another paper. We even have the key figure made for a conference presentation in April. It was a complicated figure that took a lot of work to prepare, but she’s a fantastic and capable student. I should write up the paper and perhaps even submit it by the end of the summer. But there is no externally-imposed deadline.

One of the challenges of undergraduate research is that during the academic year, the students spend 5-10 hours per week on their projects. (Significantly more progress is made over the summer.) However, students may have different summer plans. A number of my students are interested in medical school and therefore spend part of their summer shadowing physicians and studying for the MCAT. Others graduate! This means that to really push some of the projects to completion, I have to contribute substantially to the project. (Sometimes I do more work than the students on the project.) At the moment, there are three promising projects in various stages not being actively worked on by students this summer. I should work on one of these projects and push it forward. But again, there is no externally-imposed deadline.

I should outline another grant proposal. These have deadlines in the fall. My current grant ends in December so if I would like more external research funds to pay summer students (and myself) the following summer, I should go out and get more funding. However, being a computational chemist at a liberal arts college with no graduate program in my department means that there’s no huge penalty if I’m not funded for a summer. I have more than adequate hardware and other sources to cover my software. There are internal funds for students, and/or I could take a summer off and do something else interesting. I’m also very fortunate to get paid adequately, so it’s not crucial for me to land a grant. But if you don’t ask, you definitely won’t receive.

I would like to learn how to use a new piece of computational software more adequately. I’ve actually started to make some progress on this goal. Yesterday I did a significant software upgrade which allows me access to some new and improved tools. This morning I spent several hours watching some webinars and trying a few things related to one of my research projects. This was probably the easiest of the listed goals (and the most fun) so not surprisingly I started on it first.

Teaching Goals

I would like to write Chapter One of my Potions textbook. By blogging about the Potions project in my class last semester, I was sufficiently motivated to write the Prologue. But then I did not make any progress towards the chemistry-learning content. Although, I did invent the Hemodote Potion based on chemical principles as a sample project for my students. I have ideas swirling around in my head of how to approach this first chapter. I should just start writing! This project has no deadline. Maybe I should think of it as a preliminary step to negotiating a future book deal, but I don’t feel particularly ambitious in that regard so I’m not sure I can use that as a motivating factor.

The past month I have been working my way through Concepts of Matter in Science Education (mentioned in this previous post). I’ve been thinking a lot about how atoms, molecules, elements, and chemical bonds are introduced, and especially the role of models, diagrams and pictures. It has been a while since I overhauled my first-semester General Chemistry course for science majors. (I overhauled my second-semester course a couple of years ago.) I would like to incorporate some of the things I’ve been learning and thinking about into my fall semester course. In particular, I would like to incorporate ideas I’ve been having about how to navigate the heavy cognitive load in learning chemistry. I don’t actually need to overhaul my course; it has been running quite smoothly for a number of years with occasional fun tweaks such as my New Elements project last year. But I want to overhaul it, because thinking about it gets me excited! This is why I’m in the right profession – I really do love teaching!

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education suggests that one should read student teaching evaluations early in the summer. The article is very amusing, especially when the author shares a vignette from one of his evaluations. The student wrote: “I did not appreciate it when Dr. … engaged in Satanic worship in class.” Racking his brains figure out how such a comment might arise, he remembered a class where in trying to re-balance a discussion he said “let me play Devil’s advocate here for a minute”. I often play Devil’s advocate in class, mainly to show how one can be easily misled by misconceptions in chemistry, but I had not phrased it as such. I usually say, “I’m going to attempt to throw you off by saying…” and continuing with a reasonably argued but incorrect application of some chemistry concept to the problem at hand. The students then get to take apart my error and learn something in the process. Anyway, I read my evaluations after submitting final grades. There was the usual good, bad, but nothing downright ugly this time around.

Hobby Goals. I would like to cook some new dishes. (I’m excited to try something new tonight to kick things off!) I would also like to play the new version of the origin-of-life game Bios Genesis. I received the commercial version over six months ago but haven’t tried it out yet. I had playtested a print-and-play version with older graphics. I feel motivated to revisit Tolkien so I would like to at least re-read The Silmarillion. Don’t know if I will also re-read the full Lord of the Rings trilogy, however I really would like to pull out the boardgame War of the Ring. I haven’t played it since 2012. Both War of the Ring and Bios Genesis are multi-hour commitments with lots of rules to keep track of. Will I do any of these things? I don’t know because there are many other things I will enjoy doing over the summer. I just listed things where I would have to consciously make the extra effort.

There are a couple of things I must do which do have hard deadlines. Our department recently revised its Research Methods course this past year, primarily because we are being flooded with majors and could no longer handle the throughput. I am slated to teach this course in the fall semester so I will need to prepare adequately. I don’t like the feeling of not being prepared when I am in class. That should be sufficient motivation for me to be ready before the first day of classes in the fall. I guess that’s my deadline. I’m also slated to present at two research conferences this summer (one in July and one in August) so I have to prepare my materials. The good thing is that I have more than enough data at this point to present so no scrambling needed. We’ll see how long I procrastinate before pulling things together.

I end this post with a word of caution to myself. Almost all my reading at work is now onscreen. As a computational chemist, all my research and analysis involves looking at  computer screens. I also do practically all my writing on the screen now. During the semester, my homework and exam solutions are handwritten, as are the lecture notes in about half my classes; the latter slowly being converted to digital. But if I’m not careful, during the summer I will be looking at the screen a lot. This past year I got transition lenses on my spectacles for the first time, as I was having a little trouble reading my notes in class. To help me get away from the screen while at work, yesterday I erased the large white boards in my office and my research lab so I can spend some time outlining things on a board, while physically standing up and moving about. I should also try to enjoy a bit more time outside in the glorious summer weather when I’m not at work.

So those are my plans. I might not achieve all of them, and that’s okay. I’m not stressed about them. But maybe writing about them will happily nudge me along. Happy Summer!