Nice new corner! Come and chat!

[NeverEverAnythingEver]

We have our new board! Calling all cademics/aspiring academics/fed-up academics - come and chat!

Half-term and inset - When I lecture DH takes time off. Otherwise I take time off. No one seems to mind at work.

Summer - combination of DH time off, me time off, summer camps, or take kids to work.

Us vs them - I don't see that in our department. It's generally us (academic + admin + support staff) vs Senior Management... Our admin and support people are good, some of them excellent, and all of them nice.

Our dept is a ghost town most days but especially in half terms.

NeverEver: Please write them & say you'd like to withdraw the submission unless they can come to a decision in (give them 2 weeks from receipt). I'm smouldering at them making you wait a year.

@NK5BM: Me too. I'm having a good spell for pubs & just got one into a high impact PPJ, after My boss/corresponding author wrote a fairly bolshy cover letter saying "Reviewer X is WRONG on almost every count". I 100% agreed but never would have had the nerve to say that so bluntly. It's funny because I took a while to come around to liking this boss, but I'm his number one fan in the cheering section now. :)

I do argue with reviewers. They are not always right.

And I am prepared to be told I am wrong too as a reviewer.

That paper - my coauthors voted to wait ...

There is no one in our department on half term. I took the whole week off. Seminars and all meetings don't run in school holidays either as it was found to disproportionately exclude women. Hurrah for that!

Our department has a culture of telling everyone when you are working from home (about three of us refuse to do so, having decided that our home offices are now an extension of the department), exactly where you are when you are not working locally, and in some cases who you are waiting in for or what tasks you are hoping to accomplish despite being off sick, and what's wrong with you. All via our staff VLE. We've had an official ruling round via HoD that we can take one day's annual leave per week in term time without permission.
No, I've not heard of many (any? Have I just outed my department?) departments that do that, either.
So I can not bother to say I'm working at home and check my email twice while baking gingerbread men with the DCs, for a day or maybe two, but I can't really take them to the play farm with friends and then be tagged in their FB photos, or go abroad.

(I also refuse to say more than "at a conference, checking email intermittently" or "on holiday, catch me when I'm back". If I'm ill I tell the admin person).

namechange We had the Office 365 thing where you get to tell people whether you are free or not and in the office or not and none of us could bring ourselves to use it. I often wonder why we are so touchy about it.

Thanks v. much, r.e. advice on teaching statement.

First, and expected, job rejection received. I'm almost certain it is due to a lack of publications, forthcoming or otherwise. Today I've identified a list of journals, and will spend the next few weeks extracting two papers from the thesis. After that, it'll be sending them out: I'm aiming for good, but not nec. stellar (the ones in my field that are tend to have acceptance rates of around 3% and publish articles by already well-established academics) journals with a sensible turnaround time (I don't have months and months to wait).

And then I hope.

No joy on extending institutional access. Cut off is three months after submission, and that is that. From my perspective as a newly minted Ph.D, a year seems more fair given e.g. turnaround times for journals.

I shortlist as my Departments REF Nazi (yes, that's often how I feel about the REF). Humanities.

For an entry-level job, in some disciplines (History, English) I've seen applicants with books, or book contracts with very elite academic presses. That's the stars. BUt most who want a serious go at being shortlisted need to shoe a research trajectory if not actual publications.

So what conference papers, developing which essays for publication in which journals? That's the sort of trajectory - showing that you're on the way, and importantly, that your understanding of "The Way" matches that of those of us (I'm angling for a tad of sympathy ) who try to make sense of the REF and help our colleagues through it (or protect them from its full brytality).

bigkigsdidit, can I ask, did your department's policy on not holding seminars/meetings in school holidays come about as a result of Athena Swan work? If not, how did it come about? Do you know? Thanks.

Hmm. We are very hot on Athena Swan - eg meetings out with 10-4 are banned too - but I think the school holidays thing is historical.

Basically, no one used to go!

It is a bit different in that we're a research institute so no undergrads about

Thanks, bigkidsdidit, I've heard some really good stuff from departments that have gone big on Athena Swan, really transformed how things work in terms of workloads, scheduling etc. I think we're going to try to start working on it and I'm quite looking forward to it. Interesting that you had a historical school holidays 'ban' though.

We've just gotten our Bronze award, second try. I must say I've barely noticed anything, other than a little more visibility of issues as far as actually talking about them, although almost always in the context of a report or request from the Athena Swan Committee! Action? Doesn't seem like anything has changed, although there is now a bunch of things written in the Bronze application that weren't true when I came back from mat leave (and I learned how much that meant when I was asking if I could maybe retroactively get just one of them, which would still be beneficial, and after some confusion, finally, got "oh, you just read that in the application? but that's not approved policy or anything" The only thing apparently approved was a new set of formal interviews about how you were going to keep on track for your research during your mat leave...)

I'll come and say things about Athena Swan when I've got some food in me ....

Interesting, murmation, thanks. I must admit when I say how many departments in my university have bronze and silver awards, despite some of the policies I know are in place across the university, it did make me wonder if it's really as helpful as I'd thought. But I have friends in other universities who seem to have used it put in place really progressive practices. I'm in the social sciences not STEM.

I do think Bronze is meant to be 'being aware of issues', so I suppose that fits us. The people involved are really gung-ho, so maybe they will actually make some changes happen.

I'm realising now that mat leave has massively impacted my career, and that's partly due to me not standing up for myself as much as I could. I should have complained mightily when my two big admin roles multiplied by 200% and 4000% (seriously, we went from handling 2-3 things a year to 2-3 a week!!), but I was in the midst of major Imposter Syndrome, what I now know is exacerbation of my underlying medical condition (never mind lingering pregnancy problems -- it's only been a year since I've not needed a walking stick, and I still have fairly significant pain at times), and very much was terrified that I would be seen as 'not pulling my weight'. So I hunkered down, did the best I could, and my research suffered.

Something I'm wondering -- I think I'm losing sight of what is 'normal'. I feel like I'm running ragged this semester, but I also know that that is what academics is like generally. So far, every week of the semester, I've forgotten about 3-4 things I'm supposed to be doing (even if they're on my calendar), and only reminded at the last minute (or a bit past...) by some happenstance, like a student emailing "Is there a quiz this week?" and things like that. With this regular occurrence, it makes me worried what things I'm not getting reminded of and might turn into big disasters... But, is that the normal state of affairs? People are just so busy and stressed it's almost impossible to keep on top of things? I really don't know anymore.

The aims of Athena SWAN are in any cases completely opposite to the current trends of academia.

For example, expanding student numbers in many UK universities is putting pressure on teaching rooms. The lecture rooms are typically fully occupied from 9am to 6pm to accommodate all classes. But Athena SWAN aims to have lectures scheduled in core hours to fit family responsibilities - it is just not possible to allow everyone to lecture between 10-4 when some lectures have to be given 9-10 and 4-6. In reality the decision of who gets to avoid the unpopular slots becomes very polarised between departments, very political.

Similarly, Athena SWAN wants people to be able to work flexibly, with all meetings/lectures/seminar scheduled in core hours of e.g. 10-4. I.e. people should be allowed to work in the office 30 hours per week. But most academics on a full time contract are expected to work 40-50 hours per week to keep up, and many of these hours have to be on campus if e.g. you work in a lab. Flexible working only makes sense if people can work 10-20 hours in the evenings/weekends after their kids are in bed. Again in reality many people are forced to come in for 9am - but then again most schools have breakfast clubs so why shouldn't I (on a professor's salary) pay 10 pounds or so to ensure that I'm in by 8.30 for lectures?

BTW following up on an earlier post nobody in my university is allowed to take half term off because teaching/meetings continue as usual. You can only take that week off if you can find somebody to cover all your teaching and responsibilities. It is more usual for people to come in and do their teaching/urgent meetings and work shorter hours that week, than for people to be away the whole week.

why shouldn't I (on a professor's salary) pay 10 pounds or so to ensure that I'm in by 8.30 for lectures?
I'd be happy to pay for early nursery care but anything before 8.45 at our nursery has to be booked before the timetables come out...

I'd be happy to pay for early nursery care but anything before 8.45 at our nursery has to be booked before the timetables come out...

Indeed, I have the same problem - I have to book before school care long before timetables are known.

And as pp said there seems to be lots of politics involved. In some departments the above reason would suffice to ensure that you are not given a 9am teaching slot but in others everyone is expected to be available 9-5 or even 9-6 for teaching.

Ironically in my own university our Athena SWAN silver departments are enforcing that their staff can't possibly do 9-10 or 4-6 slots, with the net result being that other departments don't have the discretion to say that staff can be given exemption from these slots for family reasons.

There seems to be a lot of wanting things without wanting to actually do the things the necessary to achieve them.

Not quite the same, but we had one hilarious meeting discussing the problem of the fact our School has one of the (if not the) lowest student:staff ratios at the Uni (calculated in some weird way based on hours taught, so students can count more than once if you have multiple classes). This is worrying as our Head has to keep justifying the high numbers of faculty he has. Several suggestions about what to do were put forward, but all shot down as that would mean that individuals would have to teach more. I don't see how we could possibly increase the ratio of teaching to faculty if faculty don't actually teach more! Yet people seem to want some kind of free lunch. Let's look better without doing more work... And the scary thing that it comes down to is that the other way to increase the student:staff ratio is to have less staff -- which means, of course, the remaining staff teach more than they are now...

Interesting stuff on Athena Swan, everyone, thanks.

I know what you mean about run ragged and forgetting things, murmuration. I was trying to organise meetings with students today and double-booked myself twice, one time because I had the wrong week in my diary for a lecture. I ended up inundating the students with emails arranging and rearranging. Not very professional. At the moment I'm constantly feeling like I'm going to forget things that need doing, never usually big jobs, just little things that need doing, emailing students, photocopying handouts etc. None of this is helped by our printer and our photocopier constantly getting jammed.

I've so outed myself if anyone here is a colleague or student I happened to bump into and rant at this afternoon!

I'm going to have to work on one of my non-working days this week (I work three days, 60%). I hate doing that, but I've committed to giving a paper in early Dec at another department and I really need to make some progress...

I was going to write a great long essay about Athena Swan, but I think murmur has it: wanting to get to a state of things without wanting to go through the necessary process.

Anyway.

I've just written a draft of a 1-hour presentation in about 4 hours. Tomorrow I shall make slides. It will be fun. Then I will forget everything and go in a panic when the presentation is due in a couple of weeks.