There are the plans you painstakingly make at the start of each academic term. The list of projects you’ll complete by March. The daily research/writing time you slot in on your calendar like any other meeting. The schedule of when you’ll send things to collaborators, getting them off your plate so you can move on to the next project. The time you set aside for class prep and class administration. The downtime on weekends for catching up with your family and friends and doing things that restore your soul.
And then reality hits, and there are the plans (or lack thereof) that you actually follow.
So far, Winter term has been an exercise in rescheduling and pivoting. From the polar vortex bringing near-record cold and wind chills (and 4 straight days of school cancelations for the kiddos — but none for Carleton, of course <eyeroll>), to service obligations that are all taking 10 times longer than expected (and thus still occupying valuable space on the to-do list), to the realities of teaching a course for the first time in 6 years, to collaborators and students and colleagues who are similarly overwhelmed by life and the dumpster fire that is our world these days….well, suffice it to say it’s been a challenging term.
The biggest unanticipated challenge for me? Course prep. I expected that course prep would take up a bigger chunk of my time than it normally does, given that I last taught this course in Fall 2012. But OH MY WORD, some days course prep and course administration feels all-consuming. Having 39 students in a class that requires a lot of hands-on time from me is overwhelming. And for reasons I won’t go into here (*cough* backups that weren’t really backups *cough*), I am creating about 80% of my course materials from scratch. Problem sets. Reading quizzes. Reading assignments. In-class exercises. Mini-lectures. The good news is that I am thoroughly enjoying the process, and redoing almost everything gives me the freedom to reimagine the course from how I taught it previously. That’s a tremendous gift. And chances are good that I’ll be teaching this course several times next year, so putting in the work now will make Future Amy’s life much, much easier. BUT. It is still very, very time-consuming. And most of this time is coming at the expense of my weekend fun time, which means I haven’t taken an entire weekend day off since the first of the year, and my research time.
For someone who’s worked very hard to give herself permission to take time for self-care and restoration, working every weekend has taken a huge toll on me. Before the polar vortex hit, I realized that I was heading quickly into burnout land. The polar vortex gave me permission to hibernate in my house, cancel anything that required me to physically be anywhere else but my house (including class and office hours), and while I spent much of that time working, it was at my own pace and not the panicked, break-neck pace I’d gotten used to. I caught up, sort of. I didn’t have to be constantly “on”, something that’s draining for an introvert like me. And not having to be anywhere meant that I could take breaks to do things that restore me, like craft, color, and work on puzzles.
There’s still way too much on my plate, but I’m at the point where I feel like I can manage it better, and where several things are close to finished. I think I can actually take the majority of this weekend off, for a change! And — dare I say it? — I should be able, starting next week, to get back into my daily research/writing practice, and make progress on something other than advising my research students on their projects.
This is what a computer scientist looks like 