By Female Science Professor

A classic issue for many professors (and, I suspect, teachers in general) is the perception that we have "summers off." Many of us hate getting the "must be nice" comment from friends, relatives, neighbors, even students. Many of us work quite a lot in the summer doing the other parts of our faculty jobs (research, advising, professional service). Summers can be quite intense because they can represent the best—or only—hope of making significant progress with research and writing projects.

In some senses, however, the summers-off phrase is applicable. For example, I have the summer off from:

• Getting paid by my university.

And therefore from:

• Teaching (by choice; I could get paid a somewhat modest amount if I wanted to teach a class in the summer).

• Attending faculty meetings; and

• Doing work for most campus committees.

The amount of time I take off—as in really "off," for a vacation or travel unrelated to work—is about two weeks.

For me, summers are for scholarship: conducting my own research; writing or collaborating on papers and proposals; advising graduate students, undergraduates, and postdocs on their work; reviewing manuscripts and proposals; and doing research-related travel. Some of those activities occur year-round and some only in the summer. For example, advising summer interns who visit from other universities is an event that is unique to those months.

The amount of summer salary I request in grant proposals typically has no relation to the actual time I devote to grant-related research in the summer. I always spend much more time on a project than what I can reasonably budget in terms of salary. Similarly, the random (but low) number that my university assigns to my "effort" on a project never has any relationship to my actual effort, which would be nearly impossible to calculate anyway. In fact, a growing frustration for me has been the ever-increasing emphasis by my university on detailed "effort" reporting. (Effort reporting is an internal system by which universities account for the time we spend on various grants (research) vs. teaching, and what component of our total salary comes from each source. And yes, for those unfamiliar with the term, it really is called "effort reporting.")

I wish I could just check a box that certifies: "I work really hard on all the things I am supposed to do." Yes, I know that people in nonacademic jobs keep track of their hours and activities, but there is a good reason that I am an academic and personally unsuited for most other careers.

I wrote in my blog recently about an afternoon this summer when I was working on a particular project (let's call it Project 1), and an undergraduate working on a different project (Project 2) showed up needing some help. So I helped him for a while, and then, after I went back to Project 1, a graduate student came by who had questions about Project 3. So I helped him. Then one of my colleagues sent me the reviews of a manuscript I had helped write, related to Project 4, so I worked on revisions for a while until I remembered that I needed to revise another manuscript, related to Project 5, so I worked on that for a while. Soon after, I got an e-mail alert about a new issue of a journal, so I skimmed the table of contents and followed links to papers relevant to Project 6 before returning to Project 1. Then I was interrupted again.

That was not an atypical afternoon.

That same afternoon, however, I had to talk with a university accountant about my effort reporting for Project 1, and she asked, "What percentage of your effort—not time—will you spend exclusively on this project during the effort-reporting period?"

I drew a blank. The word "exclusively" threw me. I had no idea what a realistic answer would be and started randomly guessing numbers, none of which the accountant found acceptable or convincing. I do know that I have spent, and will spend, much more time on Project 1 than was budgeted for my salary—more than can realistically be given a normal effort number. I can see why that would present a problem for the university's effort-reporting system, but I don't see why it should.

For those of us paid a nine-month salary by our universities, a common way to get additional pay in the summer is from grants. When constructing budgets for proposals, most of my colleagues and I try to pick a reasonable salary figure, one that is neither too high (causing sticker shock and making one seem greedy) nor too low (causing people to doubt one's commitment to the project). Considering all the essential items that must be in a grant-proposal budget, my chances of also being able to include a decent amount of summer salary are low.

As I work on a grant-proposal budget, if the total starts to get too high because of the costs of other personnel (for example, the salaries, tuition, and fringe benefits of graduate students), my ideal salary request for my own work is typically the first thing to go. And even if I do keep a modest amount of summer salary for myself in the budget, if the grant is awarded but the budget has to be reduced, or if money gets tight because of unexpected costs—for example, when my department mandated a raise for graduate students, including research assistants paid from existing grants—my summer salary gets whittled away because I don't want to take the money from the amount budgeted for the actual research.

It is, of course, nice to get paid something in the summer, if at all possible. I work hard during that time, and it's reasonable to expect to be paid for my work, even if only for one month out of the three. Or for three weeks. Do I hear one week?

For me summers are intense, but not in a stressful way. I enjoy spending a lot of less-interrupted time on research before the maelstrom of the academic year.

The end of summer—defined as that period in which I have "lots of time for research"—comes before the first day of the new academic year. At some point in the late summer, there is a sort of "tidal bore," when the teaching wave rolls in against the research current. Once the new academic year looms large, even professors who have taught a course many times start thinking about classes: preparing or revising the syllabus, creating or revamping course materials, and answering anxious e-mail messages from students who seem to e-mail professors more often and earlier each summer with detailed questions about a forthcoming course.

As such thoughts seep in, there is a psychic battle in my academic soul between the part of me that still enjoys being immersed in research and the part that wants to make a good start on the new term by being organized about my courses. I love teaching, but it can be hard to switch back into hectic multitasking mode.

Even now, at midcareer, something about the beginning of a new school year is still thrilling to me. That feeling of excitement about starting fresh is one of the things I love about my career, and it is a feeling that doesn't fade. At least not until the first faculty meeting of the year.

Female Science Professor is the pseudonym of a professor in the physical sciences at a large research university who blogs under that moniker and writes monthly for our Catalyst column. Her blog is http://science-professor.blogspot.com.