Infrequently asked questions

This post is for your questions. Do you have a question? Ask it in the comments.

As this site has grown in visibility, and my social media has more exposure, I’ve been getting a surplus of unsolicited questions. Some folks are looking for personalized career counseling, others are just trying to understand how universities and work, others want to know about ants, others are just curious about my opinion on stuff, others are wondering about diversity and equity issues. A few are interested in my personal life.

I think it’s usually great and nice that I get these questions, and I’m flattered that folks think my feedback would be useful. But I just don’t have the time to deal with all of them on an individual basis. Up to this point, I’ve engaged with a few, others I’ve replied with a polite answer that I don’t have the time, and I’ve ignored adversarial ones. I really don’t like blowing people off. This all isn’t unique to me, I realize, I’m just being transparent about how I’m handling such inquiries.

As an experiment, I’ve created this post to field such questions. I can direct them to ask here, where I everybody can benefit (or not) from the answer. (Also, other readers can chime in with their thoughts too, though my plan is to just provide an answer rather than engage in an extended discussion, which y’all can do if you so wish.) If your question involves such detailed personal things that you wouldn’t want to be public (even if anonymous), then it can’t be dealt with here. But then again, I don’t have the bandwidth for that kind of counseling anyway.

Okay, so, here you go. Fire away. Anything you wanted to ask me?