Monthly Archives: March 2014

What’s next?

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Drowning. I feel like I’m drowning.

A decision has been made, and I’m headed for new territory next year.

Meanwhile, the work here and now stays piled up. I need to make forward progress.

If you had to move across the country, what would you keep? What would you get rid of? What would you want to do differently?

I do want to down-size. I do not want a complicated yard to take care of. I do want to be able to hire help for housekeeping. I want to simplify. But, of course, there are also many things I probably don’t want to give up. I have to, though, and I think the advice I got from a friend to leave as much of it behind as possible is good.

A new start. So start new. Start where you want to be, if you can figure out where that is. I’m not sure yet, and I know it is a long road and a lot of work in front of me to get there. Do one thing every day to make progress, and, in theory, I will get there.

First, though, I have to manage the end of the semester. I’m behind in my class, and it is time to triage what I am going to do and what I am not going to do. I just hope that whatever I do is good enough.

And second, I’ve been under an immense amount of stress for months. This might not end today. Or soon. But it would sure be nice if I could get it under some semblance of control so I was sleeping better. Better rest = better productivity, and I need it.

Third, I have gotten to doing some calisthenics: pushups, planks, crunches, arm exercises at home. In short bursts. It’s an epsilon, but an epsilon that I need to make myself stronger. I am grateful for the start.

Fourth, I weed-and-fed the lawn today. One more small chore accomplished. The stuff didn’t say it needed to be watered in, but if I’m right, we should have rain within 48 hours. Here’s to a nicer lawn while selling my house. I am grateful for another small chore accomplished.

I need sleep. Soon. Now. No better time than the present. Good night all.

Decision Made

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It is done. A decision is made. Dr. Jinx is leaving the world of non-tenure track faculty, and entering the world of tenure-track faculty at a school that emphasizes and values teaching, but that still has a scholarship requirement and encourages scholarship. May I find my way to productivity in teaching and in scholarship while I am there.

I am happy to have this decision made; knowing an 11th hour offer from another school with some really good policies was coming maybe on time and maybe not wasn’t helping matters. Talk about being pulled in multiple directions, wondering what the right thing to do is. It was good that I’d made a rubric for evaluating schools earlier; when my mentor told me to go home and apply it, it became clear that the 11th hour offer was unlikely to be enough to overcome the other issues that school presented. And it didn’t — the salary was barely above my other offer for a city with cost of living that is about 1.5 times greater than where I am or would be moving too. Not a deal.

I am sad that they scrambled to put the offer together when I had to reject it, but I did tell them what my other offer was and that the cost of living was comparable to my current home town.

Now I just hope that I can get some sleep and get started on the next things that need to be accomplished. Hopefully my anxiety and stress will go down now that I know where I am headed. Now maybe I can do a better job of concentrating on my teaching and research and do a better job with both. Oh, and all those pesky service tasks I need to chase after (ugh).

I am happy. I am scared. I am happy. Concentrate on happy. One foot in front of the other, one day at a time.

Queasy

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More interviews. An offer that I successfully negotiated to a point where I am comfortable/happy about taking it. A major teaching award.

I should be over the moon happy, but reality is that mostly, I’ve just been queasy and anxious. That seems ungrateful, even to me, but there it is.

The teaching award really put me in a funk for about a week. I think it brought home the idea that you really can be doing outstanding work, and, if you are not a tenure-track or tenured person in our department, you are still not really valued by the department.

Looking at it from another perspective, and this is the one I would like to get fixed firmly in my head, this award represents how much I’ve meant to my students. One in particular. The students wrote letters for me. They are telling me that I made a difference, sometimes a big difference, in their lives. I am honored and grateful for the opportunity to teach them and for the trust that they put in me. I am honored and grateful to be able to make that difference. I hope they know that they, too, have made a difference in my life.

On the job offer, I negotiated the salary to the point where I thought it was advantageous enough to me financially. The department chair himself told me to negotiate as hard as I could, and I did. It appears I pushed them as hard on salary as I could, hopefully while being polite, supportive, feminine — all the things women are required to be. Shouldn’t I be proud of that? So why do I feel kind of squicky about it now? Is it just that negotiating and asking for what you want is acting out of character for women? Is it the chilling news about the negotiation at Nazareth College that resulted in a rescinded job offer? I’m certainly familiar with the literature on women and negotiating, and that literature certainly makes it clear that often you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

That little voice in my head asks me if I have damaged relationships with colleagues by taking the chair at his word and asking for more than was offered. That little voice in my head says I was just doing what I am supposed to do. And it also says that life is not fair. My challenge is to find some peace and some path through all the things the little voice says.

Last the interviews. It was pretty obvious that the first school I interviewed at recently wasn’t as interesting as my current offer. The other one I liked a lot, but there are both perks and red flags with the position. First, the teaching load is lower. Second, they have a nice system of course buy-outs for pre-tenure faculty, even though they are a teaching school. Third, they are a department of 5 faculty nearing retirement, all of whom are greatly motivated to mentor me towards success. On the down side: the school has had financial problems in recent years. No raises. At one point, no contributions to the retirement fund for either a semester or year. There are reasons to believe it is on a healthier track. Things to seem to be getting better. On the other hand, there are also reasons to worry.

In any case, I find it unlikely they can get an offer together before I have to respond to the one I have.

It looks like a big decision is coming on Friday or later today to move to a new school and start a new position as a tenure-track assistant professor. I wish I felt less scared about it all, but big changes, even good changes, bring up a lot of anxiety. I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to stay. The only way is forward. There will be many very difficult moments ahead, but that would be true no matter what. As Lois McMaster Bujold writes,

Tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune.

Onward.

Must be making progress

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I must be making progress.

The job offer negotiation is on, and it started off from a reasonable position.

I feared getting a low offer for less money than I am making now. I know I would have dealt with that if it had come, but I also know that my spirits would have taken a hit if that had happened. Last year’s incident was more than enough of that for one life-time.

Good news. The offer is for more than I’m making now or would be next year, but not overly generous. I know where I want to be on this negotiation so I said, “I’d like to open at this higher amount.” I got some hemming and hawing and referred to talk to someone else, but it wasn’t a “no way,” and it was respectful. They have some reasons. I have some reasons. All I want to do is meet at a good spot in the middle. I think — I hope — we’ve got a good chance of making that happen.

Money can’t buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you’re being miserable — Clare Boothe Luce

Meanwhile the sort-of-kind-of good cop/bad cop routine (in which both players at the school — dean and department chair — are playing both roles) amused me.

I have some more questions to ask about this whole deal. But that’s how this works. You ask questions, you get answers, you ask more. You negotiate. You revisit and refine for a little while.

And one more small victory.

I had a student come by today to do some linear algebra. Over spring break! This is one I sought to put the fear of god into last week on Thursday, and apparently I succeeded. A low score was obtained on an exam. A high score was obtained on a homework. Dr. Jinx wonders how this happened and called a bunch of students in to demonstrate that they do, in fact, know how to do a homework problem. Several succeeded. This one did not. Bad juju. I gave him a zero on the homework problem, and the lecture about how if you put the time into understanding the material, the exam scores would follow right along with it.

I don’t like being the bad cop, but I’m betting that at the end of the semester, having come to terms with this material, this young man is going to be happier with himself than if he scraped by or had to drop out. There is something immensely satisfying about conquering a demon that’s scaring you. I think he can do it. We worked on linear independence and linearly independent functions. He knew more when he left than when he arrived. Success.

I hope I can do what I need to do too. I can walk around the world one step at a time. Watch me.

Fear and Flashbacks and Moving Forward

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Eleanor Roosevelt says that you should

Do one thing every day that scares you.

I don’t know how I’m doing on the one-a-day count, but I know that in this past academic year, I’ve addressed a lot of things that have terrified me.

  • Going on the job market.
  • Deciding to go after tenure-track positions, which required me to write a research statement. I didn’t think I could. I was afraid to try. But I did it.
  • The interviews themselves have scared me on and off. Sometimes more confident, sometimes more shaky.
  • Dealing with my home department and its problems. There are people in that department whose lack of anger management and general fairness creates a hostile and intimidating environment.
  • Having to raise issues outside the department and within, to face these problems.
  • Dealing with people who are acting in an obstructionist manner.
  • Needing to go back to authorities within the university about even more blatant diversity and climate issues.

And I have gotten through most of that, though some is still pending. With a ton of discouragement, and not a lot of confidence. I have kept moving forward, nevertheless.

But tomorrow … tomorrow we open a job negotiation. I remind myself that we should be on the same side. But last spring’s fiasco has left me with anything but confidence on that point.

I am dealing with things that I am not sure are major enough to be called flashbacks, but they are like flashbacks. I am suddenly back in that emotional space where nothing I can do or say will change anything, I am not being supported by the person closest to me, and I am scared and paralyzed. I feel the obligation to say the right thing to make things go right, but I know that you cannot make unreasonable people reasonable. That is beyond my super-powers.

What if this happens again? I don’t want to stay where I am. I will not go somewhere that isn’t treating me right. What if we end up in the grey zone of uncertainty? Then how do I deal? What if I say the wrong thing or don’t deal with things perfectly?

And that’s ridiculous. I don’t have to be perfect. Neither does that dean have to be perfect. We both just have to be good enough. We both just have to want to make a deal that is good for the school and good for me, then work on what exactly that is.

Well, at least this time, I cannot lose a significant other over what happens. Right?

A principles/ideas of the negotiation:

We all want me to accept this job offer, and bring what I have to the school. This negotiation is about making that happen.

Tools that can be used:

  1. Figure out our common goals and priorities.
  2. Ask why the other person has whatever stance they have.
  3. Generate alternative ideas that might help with the problem. This can involve hiring me with a different title, for example.
  4. How can funds get best used to further everyone’s goals?
  5. Find out from others some details on start-up packages.
  6. I don’t have to respond to anything immediately. “I need some time to think about that.”
  7. If offered a salary that is obviously too low, the pregnant pause and, “That was lower than I was expecting/Is less than I am making now.”
  8. Find somewhere that we can have success together.

That’s the basics of what I can do. On the rest I have to trust.

A friend reminded,

Fear is a sign of profound opportunity.

And that goes along with a corollary,

Make the most of the opportunity in front of you.