How will I balance teaching and scholarship? Probably the same way that I balanced working in a hospital, going to school and trying to have a life: by doing the next best thing. It is always a process of keeping track of what needs done and then doing it. There may not be time to prepare lessons the way the students deserve and there will always be more that I can add to papers, but that is part of the research process. One of my professors at UW-Madison was a "rock star" in the history of science and medicine and once I asked him when he knew to stop writing. He said he could always keep researching topics and discover more, but that is what deadlines are created for: to keep projects in line, to focus the research and to give a point where you have to stop and move on to something else.
Being satisfied with quitting might be the most difficult balancing point. Finding the point where class has been prepared satisfactorily, the ICON quota has been met, all the material has been read for class and papers have been researched ahead of schedule will probably never happen. I have to accept that and keep doing the next best thing.
Cheating also helps, not plagiarism or anything dishonest, but using every minute of time available. Solutions to this problem may be reading while waiting in line, working out the structure of a paper or planning a class while riding the bus or picking up a book at lunch. We all have experience with time management; we just have to get lean and quick. Asking other people for help, especially other graduate students who have been down this road or professors who may know the best way to research a topic can give us useful information and make us feel less alone with our problems. Almost everyone in the academic world loves to teach and there is a lot to learn from someone who has achieved the same goal we strive to achieve.
I also remember one of the Technical Communication graduate students working on her Phd that has six children, a husband attending medical school and a house and a garden. She takes courses at the medical school in addition to her TC courses and is usually in a pleasant mood. She also teaches courses at Tech. She probably does many other things that I don’t know about for her community. She is my inspiration. If she can do all that, I can keep up with my studies. She is the person that I will be thinking of when I think I have too much to do and feel sorry for myself.
1 comment:
Fawn rules, doesn't she? :-)
I think you're exactly right about what you have to do--multi-tasking is probably the only way to make it all happen. But you need to include something about priorities, and these shift as you grow. Sometimes school will be most important; other times, it could be a family situation. The other things ebb and flow, and you need to build in enough flexibility to allow for that--without giving yourself so much rope that you hang yourself!
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