Academic Seasons

So in the past couple of weeks my job has undergone a bit of change, and I can't say that it's one that I'm really happy to be going through. That's right, the undergrads are coming back soon! As a grad student this annual event obviously had an impact on the day to day routine that we had become accustomed to during the summer months. The campus gets crowded once again, at first it seems that everyone is a wide-eye moron with no clue how to get anywhere, but after a few months they are just morons who don't know how to go anywhere without obstructing your path.

As a prof though the impact is more significant. Sure as a grad student I had to get back into the routine of teaching the students in the labs, but that was a minimal commitment and only required a minimum of effort most of the time. Teaching a pair of classes and supervising a lab on the other hand is a lot more work. Which means that in order not to be too swamped by the first few weeks I'm getting the ball rolling on the courses right now... well I'm trying to at least.

The downside to this is that I have run out of time to do work in the lab. I really do enjoy getting into the lab and doing work, particularly when things are going well. And of course things were going really well just before my deadline to get out of the lab and back into my office, things better be working again when I get time to get back in the lab. The one benefit of that is that the results I obtained gave me the confidence to write an abstract for a conference early next year. Of course at this point what I wrote is almost all speculation, but that's the way we always do it in chemistry. It's a sick game but it gets us to work like mad once the abstract is accepted.

One of the things that I was working on last week was a revision to the lab manual I wrote last January. I think I wrote the whole thing in a week or two, it was over 60 pages long. But it had to be done because the previous "lab manual" was just a bunch of sheets, about two per lab, most missing details and really teaching the students nothing. So I rushed to get one together for the spring term, which I did, but it had a few errors that needed to be fixed. Anyway, in doing the corrections I learned something, my students were stupid shits who don't read. I must have had half the class come to my office over the semester asking how to do a specific calibration graph. So I took the time to explain it to each one of them when they came in because the graph being used is a bit of a tricky one (the axis are ratios of two sets of data). Well in doing the revisions I noticed that I had in fact taken the time to clearly explain the way to make and use the graph. I had gone so far as to break it down into 8 fucking simple steps, yet somehow the students still couldn't figure it out. Next semester it's time to revert to a tactic I used when I was a TA in the labs, the first answer to all questions regarding the lab will be "What does the lab manual say?" I swear that answered at least 80% of the questions students had for me when I was a TA.