A week in the life

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So academics have their summers off, right? We may not be teaching (although plenty of us teach at least some summers), but we have plenty of other things going on. Here's what I have on my plate this week:
  • Meeting with my REU student to go over more preprocessing steps. We have five Landsat images to process and analyze and are just getting into the preprocessing now. It can be very tedious and requires great attention to detail.
  • Attending a MA proposal defense. Graduate students have to have committee approval of their proposed thesis work before their travel funding is released. Most students finish this in April and May, but some are still working to plan their field visits in what remains of the summer.
  • Attending a REU cluster meeting. We are going to be discussing articles from two visiting speakers. I still need to read the papers and they are on topics quite outside of my discipline and area of expertise. Reading like this is usually best done near a computer so that I can look up unfamiliar terms.
  • Attending a meeting for the Ohio Geographic Alliance (OGA) in Columbus. The meeting is scheduled for four hours and it takes more than two hours to drive each way, so this is essentially an all day meeting for me. I will be writing a separate post about OGA (hopefully this week). I recently joined the steering committee and so far have just attended meetings. We are holding a workshop for teachers in August, and I am excited to see how that goes.
  • Taking care of a range of personal and family obligations such as taking my daughter to the orthopedist (she injured her elbow in a bike crash a few weeks ago) and a jewelry class, and picking up my husband at the airport. My daughter is out of school now, so she either comes with me to the meetings above or plays at a friend's house.

Comments

  1. KorineJune 14, 2009 at 1:20 PM

    And most of us are on 9 month appointments, so not only do we work during the summer, but most of us don't get paid for doing that work (unless funded on a research grant)!
    I do appreciate the flexible summer schedule though...

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  2. MCHJune 14, 2009 at 1:58 PM

    Good point, Korine! I do have some summer research money this year (0.5 month) and get some professional expense money for the REU program (i.e., I can buy books, data, supplies, save it for travel, etc.), but the rest is not paid. Of course, we are expected to do service and I volunteered for that steering committee position! :)

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