The Inaugural Post
Well, everyone else seems to be posting blogs these days, and I do enjoy reading them, so why shouldn't everyone else be subjected to my twisted, often boring ramblings as well?
A little background...I am 29 and a college professor at a University in the northeastern United States. Boston if you must know. Good luck trying to figure out which...you can't swing a dead cat around your head in this town without hitting a University...
I studied Chemical Engineering in college and graduate school. Somehow, somewhere, I got it into my head that I wanted to be a professor. I really enjoyed college and graduate school (in retrospect, of course - I tend to actually hate everything while I am actually doing it), and I always liked the idea of a job where I could pursue problems or ideas that were my own. I never thought that I'd do well in a job where I was being told what to work on, and that work being sacrificed on the altar of corporate idiocy and profit. I truly believe that Dilbert-esque bosses and situations are far more common than most people might believe, and that Scott Adams is just a genius.
So here I am, almost two years into a tenure-track professorship. And can I tell you, I do not have a f**king clue as to what I am doing... Sure, I show up for work every day, and I go through the motions, but I have absolutely no idea what being a professor actually means. If people think that their corporate workplace is bad, and that they would give anything to pursue ideas that were their own and of interest to them, let me tell you, it isn't all it is cracked up to be. A University can (and often is) managed by people who are incredibly incompetent as well, often rivaling their corporate counterparts.
Case in point: I am an experimentalist. By the very nature of that description, I need to perform experiments to do my work. I need to formulate hypotheses, and then carry out experiments designed to test these hypotheses, and gain knowledge from this. It is generally accepted that in order to carry out experiments, one needs a laboratory or other suitable facilities to perform the work in.
That is all well and good, and I would happily be doing experiments, writing papers, and otherwise advancing the cause of humanity and the pursuit of science, but for the little problem of not having a laboratory. That's right. I'm an experimentalist, been at the University for going on 2 years, and I still don't have any freaking lab space. Why you might ask? I can point to a variety of different reasons, but the most obvious is just gross incompetence on the part of the higher ups.
I literally have never seen a more dysfunctional management system in place than I have at my current workplace. One of my friends and colleagues who is a senior faculty member recently had a discussion with the Provost, and the Provost had no idea that I wasn't happily whiling away my time in my lab, churning out results. The f**king provost! The guy I sent letters and emails to this summer telling him about the situation, just magically assumed that in the intervening months, this group of morons, with no intervention, had fixed this sad state of affairs.
This is just one small example of what I have taken to calling the Theatre Absurd. The older I get, the less tolerance and patience for idiocy and incompetence I have, but sometimes, I really just have to laugh at how much of a joke this all seems.
And then I realize that I should probably just shut the hell up, because my problems are trivial in comparison to a lot of other things that people have going on in their lives.
Then again, here I am, 29, and I have no idea what I really want to do with myself, and somedays I just feel like I'm going a little crazy. Or alot.
I watched 'Garden State' with Zach Braff and Natalie Portman this weekend. I really enjoyed it, and it has a kickass soundtrack that I have subsequently downloaded from the iTunes music store. One thing I thought when I watched it was this: Who the hell has a life like this? I never once in my life went to party where people were taking bong hits, popping X, and playing spin the bottle...Maybe I just wasn't running in the right circles...
In any case, I think Zach Braff is awesome, both for this and his work on 'Scrubs'...
A little background...I am 29 and a college professor at a University in the northeastern United States. Boston if you must know. Good luck trying to figure out which...you can't swing a dead cat around your head in this town without hitting a University...
I studied Chemical Engineering in college and graduate school. Somehow, somewhere, I got it into my head that I wanted to be a professor. I really enjoyed college and graduate school (in retrospect, of course - I tend to actually hate everything while I am actually doing it), and I always liked the idea of a job where I could pursue problems or ideas that were my own. I never thought that I'd do well in a job where I was being told what to work on, and that work being sacrificed on the altar of corporate idiocy and profit. I truly believe that Dilbert-esque bosses and situations are far more common than most people might believe, and that Scott Adams is just a genius.
So here I am, almost two years into a tenure-track professorship. And can I tell you, I do not have a f**king clue as to what I am doing... Sure, I show up for work every day, and I go through the motions, but I have absolutely no idea what being a professor actually means. If people think that their corporate workplace is bad, and that they would give anything to pursue ideas that were their own and of interest to them, let me tell you, it isn't all it is cracked up to be. A University can (and often is) managed by people who are incredibly incompetent as well, often rivaling their corporate counterparts.
Case in point: I am an experimentalist. By the very nature of that description, I need to perform experiments to do my work. I need to formulate hypotheses, and then carry out experiments designed to test these hypotheses, and gain knowledge from this. It is generally accepted that in order to carry out experiments, one needs a laboratory or other suitable facilities to perform the work in.
That is all well and good, and I would happily be doing experiments, writing papers, and otherwise advancing the cause of humanity and the pursuit of science, but for the little problem of not having a laboratory. That's right. I'm an experimentalist, been at the University for going on 2 years, and I still don't have any freaking lab space. Why you might ask? I can point to a variety of different reasons, but the most obvious is just gross incompetence on the part of the higher ups.
I literally have never seen a more dysfunctional management system in place than I have at my current workplace. One of my friends and colleagues who is a senior faculty member recently had a discussion with the Provost, and the Provost had no idea that I wasn't happily whiling away my time in my lab, churning out results. The f**king provost! The guy I sent letters and emails to this summer telling him about the situation, just magically assumed that in the intervening months, this group of morons, with no intervention, had fixed this sad state of affairs.
This is just one small example of what I have taken to calling the Theatre Absurd. The older I get, the less tolerance and patience for idiocy and incompetence I have, but sometimes, I really just have to laugh at how much of a joke this all seems.
And then I realize that I should probably just shut the hell up, because my problems are trivial in comparison to a lot of other things that people have going on in their lives.
Then again, here I am, 29, and I have no idea what I really want to do with myself, and somedays I just feel like I'm going a little crazy. Or alot.
I watched 'Garden State' with Zach Braff and Natalie Portman this weekend. I really enjoyed it, and it has a kickass soundtrack that I have subsequently downloaded from the iTunes music store. One thing I thought when I watched it was this: Who the hell has a life like this? I never once in my life went to party where people were taking bong hits, popping X, and playing spin the bottle...Maybe I just wasn't running in the right circles...
In any case, I think Zach Braff is awesome, both for this and his work on 'Scrubs'...
posted by Professor B at 9:26 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home