It's starting to be clear to me that I am no good at keeping this blog updated. My last post was from last November, and it wasn't a "real" post; instead it was advertising a conference I slightly helped to organize. It was a wonderful conference, mind you, but having recently heard all about the benefits of having online outlets for our thoughts and musings, academic and otherwise, for graduate students by the visiting postdoc at my department, Melinda Baldwin, I'm motivated to update more frequently.
The last time I worked on my online presence, about 6 months ago, I maxed out my facebook privacy settings, started to tweet, and built an academia.edu page. The next step is probably to build my own academic website, and most universities offer their graduate students the resources to do just that. Some of my friends have blogs that integrate their professional lives (CV, publications, etc.) with some outside interests, and some run more research-nuggets type blogs, but I'm keen to keep this one focused on work-life balance and productivity issues.
Late Spring means that it's CSHPS time, at the Congress in Waterloo. We just got back from 6 days of conferencing, which went really well this year. I gave a talk for the first time in a few years at this conference, and it was very well received. My audience asked some great questions, and since the talk came from a paper I wrote last fall for my STS seminar course, my normal night-before scrambling went uncharacteristically smoothly. I put a short film clip in the presentation, which usually puts the audience in a receptive mood. It also meant that I engaged in my pre-talk ritual of arriving at the venue with time to spare (45 minutes, which most likely was overkill) to make sure the talk worked on the projector and that the sound worked.
We stayed in a snazzy hotel for the Congress, since the normal rooms were long gone by the time we made arrangements. Good things about this hotel: free breakfasts, a gym and pool, and close to some neat restaurants and the bus terminal.
As usual, some of the best parts of the conference weren't at the talks, but the times before and after, the impromptu dinners and nights of a few drinks on a patio. Since it's easy for me to overdo it at a conference like the Congress, I'm glad things paced themselves so well.
More to come in a few days, including an update about everything going on this summer and some photos of Waterloo.
The last time I worked on my online presence, about 6 months ago, I maxed out my facebook privacy settings, started to tweet, and built an academia.edu page. The next step is probably to build my own academic website, and most universities offer their graduate students the resources to do just that. Some of my friends have blogs that integrate their professional lives (CV, publications, etc.) with some outside interests, and some run more research-nuggets type blogs, but I'm keen to keep this one focused on work-life balance and productivity issues.
Late Spring means that it's CSHPS time, at the Congress in Waterloo. We just got back from 6 days of conferencing, which went really well this year. I gave a talk for the first time in a few years at this conference, and it was very well received. My audience asked some great questions, and since the talk came from a paper I wrote last fall for my STS seminar course, my normal night-before scrambling went uncharacteristically smoothly. I put a short film clip in the presentation, which usually puts the audience in a receptive mood. It also meant that I engaged in my pre-talk ritual of arriving at the venue with time to spare (45 minutes, which most likely was overkill) to make sure the talk worked on the projector and that the sound worked.
We stayed in a snazzy hotel for the Congress, since the normal rooms were long gone by the time we made arrangements. Good things about this hotel: free breakfasts, a gym and pool, and close to some neat restaurants and the bus terminal.
As usual, some of the best parts of the conference weren't at the talks, but the times before and after, the impromptu dinners and nights of a few drinks on a patio. Since it's easy for me to overdo it at a conference like the Congress, I'm glad things paced themselves so well.
More to come in a few days, including an update about everything going on this summer and some photos of Waterloo.
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