Productive (adj)

In addition to some extra letters after your name, the ins and outs of grad school should leave you equipped with the following set of peripheral skills. And they're nothing to sneeze at; grad students are hard workers and their own greatest critics, but we often overlook the boring professional development going on behind the scenes. Many of these build on skills from elsewhere in life or from previous education. They translate well to the outside world, especially to whatever your eventual career will be. 1. Giving a talk. This is no small feat; people in general are terrified of public speaking. We learn from experience how to pull a chunk of research and make it digestible to an audience of experts or nonexperts; how to organize it; how to deliver it in an allotted timeslot and how to answer questions. The best way to work on this skill is to practice: at informal presentations and local conferences. Then you're ready for the big leagues. Remember, no one likes...

Here are my tips for putting together a successful panel for an academic conference. Committees are happy to get panel applications rather than individual abstracts because it means less work for them. These are simple tips that have worked for me in the past. Your experiences may differ, of course, depending on your field of study and the particular conference, the vicissitudes of the conference committee, and the "trendiness" of the topics that year. -Find another person whose work and your own have the same broader subject matter or approach. It helps if they are from a different institution or department from your own, but it's not necessary. Don't be afraid to venture outside your own level: professors and postdocs and grad students can happily be housed together. I have found it best when you are at least acquainted beforehand. -Ask them to join your panel. If yes, you are now a twosome, and it gets easier. (If no, repeat step one.) -Brainstorm for ...

Following in the footsteps of my friend Sarah Kriger , here are my new year's resolutions. 1. Post something worthwhile on Productive(adj).  Links to other online stuff I do (see 2 below) don't count. A year off with a new baby is a unique time to take stock of how things are going research- and life-wise, and I ought to take advantage. I know those of you who have followed this blog long term (and it would have to be long, since my update schedule has been outrageously bad) have heard some of these before, and to them I apologize. All I can do is try to do a little better. With a year off to look after the strangest & most adorable baby ever, and all the time off from parenting that her 6 naps a day afford me, I think I have a chance to decrud my blogging. [weekly] 2. Keep on with the Weekly Roundups over at the Bubble Chamber . I say "keep on" because by and large this has been something I've been able to stay on top of during school. So, stay the ...

RealSimple just posted an article called How to Be More Productive . These kind of articles pop up all over the place, especially over at Lifehacker ; this one drew my attention because the items on the list are so innocuous, even pleasant. Get more sunshine, do something mindless, be present when a compliment is given, get physical, and work in small increments all sound manageable, and in some cases enjoyable. I'd love to take a sunny walk and do some mindless activity, and who doesn't like getting compliments? The best tip is probably the one to break your projects into smaller, more manageable chunks; this is the mindset behind Getting Things Done and is also at work in the Pomodoro Technique . It's definitely motivating to cross smaller tasks off of a to-do list, especially when projects in graduate school easily growing to monstrous size in our imaginations. "Pass comps" or "write thesis" are impossible tasks to tackle in one go, but "re...

Apologies for this post being a little later than I'd have liked, but I've been under a cloud of "blegh" for the past week and it's been difficult to get anything done. Like having a lingering cold, except instead of sneezing you don't have the energy to do anything except watch season 3 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In this week's roundup over at The Bubble Chamber  I wrote about some new research exposing the potential pitfalls of sexual stereotyping, and linked to the disastrous EC's "Science: It's a Girl Thing" video (which was so offputting when released this past summer that it immediately went viral). Fortunately, the marketing for the EC's continued " Science: It's a Girl Thing " campaign seems to have overcome its initial pinkwashing and now features girl models doing more than strutting the catwalk: taking pictures, standing in front of blackboards, and daydreaming. Writing about "Science: ...

On Friday, January 25th, York University Science & Technology Studies graduate students from Katey Anderson ’s Science & Technology as Material Culture course (plus a few hangers-on, including yours truly) got a behind-the-scenes tour of the artifacts at the Canadian Science & Technology Museum , courtesy of David Pantalony . The grounds of the CSTM David Pantalony (right) and the muddy-footed tour group  We checked out the collections in storage, as well as the “artifacts in the wild” on display to the public. In addition to performing material analyses of artifacts, we explored storage warehouses, skulked around in backstage areas off-limits to the public, and toured the museum’s library. In this post I’ll describe our time at the CSTM, as well as David’s approach to artifacts, material culture, and his curatorial work. The storage warehouse An exciting... something. The CSTM is a little off the beaten track as far as Ottawa’s museums go. L...

My supervisor warned me recently about how small responsibilities can pile up. Her strategy is to take 3 straight days to work on a project (a paper, proposal, etc.) because by day 3, your focus is so concentrated that it's much more efficient than continuously returning to the same project for many days over a few weeks. But when things get busy, distractions eat away at your ability to focus. One of the worst, she said, was email: administrative, teaching, and miscellaneous emails pile up and erode productivity, meaning that she doesn't ever have 3 straight days to focus on one project. Things work a little differently for me. I like to move between projects, to tackle multiple things in a day. I enjoy the feeling of crossing things off my to-do list, and since email is the biggest part of my graduate assistantship, I like to read and respond to any that come my way ASAP so that they're not hanging over me (leaving small tasks undone for days, on the other hand, ...