![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
It's going to be a busy summer.
Apr. 7th, 2010 10:48 amI spent an hour yesterday afternoon talking to a professor about the nitty-gritty of postdoctoral research. Somehow, I hadn't realized he'd been to so many different places. I'm reaching the point in my graduate career where I need to go past the stage of contemplating postdoctoral research and into the stage of assessing my options and lining up opportunities. This stage of one's academic career involves a lot of planning; I have to identify who I would want to work with, what projects I'd want to work on, what skills I want to acquire, and how I'll get money to do what I want to do. In the grand scheme of things, this is a tooling-up stage, where I'll be filling out my skills and qualifications in preparation for applying for faculty jobs. That's a completely different ball of wax. Plus, there's the component of how all of that affects my personal life, and how it meshes with my life's philosophies. Somehow, in the last month or two, I've started coming to terms with the fact that I'll eventually be leaving Arizona behind.
So that's one set of plans. There are also plans for wrapping up my dissertation research. I have one more major experiment to complete this summer. I just got my teaching assignment for the summer as well. I won't be teaching a class that I've taught before; I'll be teaching introductory Plant Biology. That could be cool, but it could also be a tremendous amount of work. Probably both.
Along with the research, I need to get geared up to write my entire dissertation. I'm partway finished with the data analysis for my first chapter, and will start working on my second chapter towards the end of the summer. Hopefully I'll be able to get underway with my third chapter next spring.
I'll also be traveling; I'll be heading to Copenhagen and surroundings for a conference in August, and to California for my brother's wedding in July. I think I'm going to declare that that will be it for summer travel, other than Arizona-based trips and probably a trip to Colorado for some friends' wedding. I just cannot afford more travel than that.
And so, it is time to buckle down and get to work.
So that's one set of plans. There are also plans for wrapping up my dissertation research. I have one more major experiment to complete this summer. I just got my teaching assignment for the summer as well. I won't be teaching a class that I've taught before; I'll be teaching introductory Plant Biology. That could be cool, but it could also be a tremendous amount of work. Probably both.
Along with the research, I need to get geared up to write my entire dissertation. I'm partway finished with the data analysis for my first chapter, and will start working on my second chapter towards the end of the summer. Hopefully I'll be able to get underway with my third chapter next spring.
I'll also be traveling; I'll be heading to Copenhagen and surroundings for a conference in August, and to California for my brother's wedding in July. I think I'm going to declare that that will be it for summer travel, other than Arizona-based trips and probably a trip to Colorado for some friends' wedding. I just cannot afford more travel than that.
And so, it is time to buckle down and get to work.
