I've been talking to a lot of other first-year professors this week. All of us are sporting the same dumb grin.
You know, the kind of grin a little kid has when he's gotten away with something.
Why the silly grins? For the last many (manymanymany) years, we've had a month "off" at Christmas. For those of us who had to fly home for the holidays, this "month" meant we got to watch as the campus emptied while we ran our gels / crunched numbers / wrote more paragraphs. We flew home as close to the 25th as we dared. If we were feeling especially rebellious that particular year, we might take a whole six days off. Of course, each of those days you were (at the very least) still checking your work email multiple times a day and catching up on literature. And for at least 90% of the time, we were plagued by one of the worst kinds of guilt: lab abandonment guilt.
So this year, I've had two straight weeks of vacation. Sleep-filled, guilt-free vacation. Likewise, my fellow first-year profs have had similar REAL vacations. It's a very odd feeling. I feel completely rejuvenated (who knew that's what vacations were for!!), yet I have this (tiny) nagging feeling that I've gotten away with something.
This past week, I've been doing some low-key semester prep (one class done, one to go!) in meeting interview activities. I still have another week before classes start.
I love my job.
