A new approach

Well what do you know, it's been over a month since I last posted, I think that's a new record for me, not that I was trying for one. It just seems that lately I'm too buys, yet to boring, to have anything to write about. Maybe it's just a matter of perspective, but somehow I doubt that the minutia of my days, preparing lectures, grading homework and trying to keep a lab running are all that interesting to many people.

It's really kind of odd now that I'm sitting down and thinking about it. Here I am, with my dream job and I feel that I have nothing of interest to say about it. I think that there are two parts to that; I focus far too much of my time on the teaching side of the job, which is sadly not as rewarding as I would have hoped, and the research side I feel should be kept somewhat under the radar, not that I worry that anyone is going to scoop one of my research ideas from a blog post, but you never know.

But I'm going to try to make the effort to keep turn this blog around and make it a bit more of a journal of what has been going on in my little academic world. I bet this will last all of two posts if I'm lucky.

Right now the semester is winding down, just over a week of classes left and then a week of finals. It couldn't come any sooner! I'm fried. The time off for Thanksgiving was great, but I just didn't want to get back to work after that. The thought of preparing more lectures, then giving them; writing assignments and then the horrid grading... at times I wonder why I do this. At least I have something to look forward to next semester. I'll be back down to only one class, the one I've taught each semester so far. This means that I can pretty much sleepwalk through that class and focus on my real work (or at least the stuff that will get me tenured). That's right folks, I'm looking forward to writing grants and hopefully papers most of next semester.

Actually, one of the things that I'm most looking forward to is developing the structure of my research group. At the moment I have a masters student and three undergrads working on projects in the lab. I'm no longer 100% sure what it is that they are doing there. I just don't have the time to get down to the lab as much as I should, so I'm kind of a sucky mentor that way. Next semester I hope to initiate a schedule of group meetings, yeah that sounds like fun doesn't it. But I realized that it was through the group meetings when I was in grad school that I learned most of what I know now. So I need to get my students involved in that learning experience and start to share my knowledge with them properly. On top of that next semester I'll be taking on another four or five undergrads, so I'm going to have to keep an eye on things to make sure that people are actually working.

So that's about it for now. Next time I may have to rant a bit about my colleagues. Incidentally, if anyone reading this wants to get me a christmas gift a set of speakers for my computer go a long way to at least drowning out the sound of the colleagues in the offices near mine, the laptop speakers no longer cut it.