Happy last day of 2010!
Some of you might be super happy to see it go, while others had a fabulous year (hmm...I smell a blog roundup/carnival?).
Now is the time when we make our resolutions for the upcoming year. My life is split up into three main categories, Teaching, Research, and Life. (I'll save how they each make up my day for a later post...I don't want to freak out any of you considering PUI positions....it is the holidays, after all.) Because of this, I always make resolutions for each area of my life.
In past years, my teaching resolution has been let's just get through this. Now that I'm more established, I feel like I can start focusing on specific areas.
For research, I just want some damn publications. To get publications, you have to just suck it up and write up your stuff. While this might sound very easy, particularly to those of you at research institutions, I assure you it is not. Doing research at a PUI brings in many new issues with respect to publishing.* The pace of research is much, much slower. Funding is a huge issue. Just getting your institution to agree to matching funds can be a giant hurdle. And how are you going to write a grant when you have two new preps? Something I didn't expect was how intimidating it would be to submit publications under my new institution rather than LargeU. Call me crazy, but work done at small PUI is viewed differently than work completed at Big Name Research U.
For Life, I usually resolve to keep a better balance between life and work. Ha. For 2011, I'm going to keep it more attainable. I am going to read more (Any!!) non-work books. I have a number in my head that I'd like to reach by Dec 2011, but I'm going to keep it there, for now.
Have you made any resolutions for 2011?
*while perhaps these issues aren't specific to PUIs, I never encountered them as a grad student. Maybe this is because I wasn't the PI, but I believe it has more to do with institution reputation and the emphasis on research at R1s.
