It feels weird to be giving advice to first-year faculty, because I still feel like I don’t know anything, but my spouse recently pointed out that I’m now more senior than most of the people I turned to for advice during my first year…

I follow higher ed coverage from both The Guardian and my local paper, so when “UK” shows up in my RSS reader, I nearly always have to pause before I can parse whether it refers to the University of Kentucky or the United Kingdom.

Let’s be honest: I’d much rather be at my department’s writing retreat today (with free lunch, to boot!) and that my kid be going to (definitely not free) summer camp. All that said, I’m deeply grateful that a professor’s schedule is flexible enough that I can respond to a sick kid pretty easily.

One of my favorite perks of academia is finding a personally interesting book through the university library.

The bassist for one of my favorite bands is an academic by day, which must be the reason why they have the only song I’ve ever heard with “post doc” in the lyrics.