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Danielle Counotte's avatar

I'm sorry for your loss. And I can see how that is a moment to reflect on the bigger things in life.

As someone who left the academic rat race after a four year postdoc, I agree that the academic career path is "one size fits nobody". In literally any other line of work, you have much more freedom to tailor your career path to what you want and like to do, and to make it fit your strengths. On top of that, in the corporate environment where I worked, I could ask my manager to prioritize my tasks and decide to drop everything that wasn't a priority. For me it was the biggest eye opener when stepping out of academia: that you can craft a job that suits you, and make it fit in office hours. I'm glad you're finding a way to do that too inside academia, but I can see how hard that is.

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Abigail's avatar

My TT job also includes being a part of the shared governance system - and we (here 'we' means my school, but probably others!) need to do a better job not shortchanging that when we talk about expectations, as early as the job interview stage. *Someone* needs to be willing to be on the curriculum committee, if we want to make the case that faculty should be in charge of curriculum, instead of the oft-maligned admin. Even if it isn't near the top of anyone's priority list. (Some schools do a better job than others at making sure that service work like this is evenly distributed and its importance is clear.)

I mention this here because I think often, when folks hear 'prioritize,' it's this service that often winds up dropped 'to protect time for research.' And as you say, who gets to do the dropping is certainly not equitable.

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