Last week, the Chronicle published a series of articles about faculty salaries (go to this page, and you will find a list of links to the series of articles on the topic).  I cringed when I saw them.  Initially, I just decided to ignore them and move on to the end-of-semester tasks needing my attention.  But the topic of faculty salaries kept needling at me, and I finally realized why.  Academics have long been talking about ways to represent the reality of life as a graduate student, adjunct, tenured or tenure-track faculty member, or administrator to others fairly and ethically.  We want to make sure that students know what they are getting into if they pursue a PhD.  We want to make sure that legislators know what we actually do on a day-to-day basis as they enact laws and budgets shaping university life.  We often feel like the realities of our lives do not align with...

Some of our ProfHacker readers started new jobs this semester, which probably meant moving to a new place. When I started the job I have now, one of the hardest and most exciting parts was moving to a part of the country where I had never been (except for my two-day site visit). In addition to negotiating all the demands of a new job, I had to find out where to buy my groceries, board my dog, take a walk, and do all of the other things that are a foundational part of my daily life. One of the best things I did to help me navigate my new home was to get lost.

As I was starting my new job, my husband was working on a graduate degree in another state. When he would visit, I would drive us around. The first weekend he visited, I told him I had found a movie theatre a couple of miles from home. He asked how. I said, "I got lost driving home from the DMV." Afterward, I drove us to dinner a...

I fully admit that there has been a theme to my most recent posts here on ProfHacker: the need to enjoy life. As I mentioned in last week's post, this is largely because of a conscious move on my part in the last year or so to stop whining and start feeling more gratitude for what I have, which means having more fun in life, too. Today's post is in that vein. Most of us are officially enmeshed in the seriousness of the semester. I don't know about you, but I need a break whenever I can get one. So this week, do something child-like for five days of the next week.

As usual, I do not mean anything big. Jump in a pile of leaves. Finger paint. Grab a coloring book and box of crayons for a few minutes of coloring inside or outside the lines. Play a game of Candyland with other adults. Play a game of hide-and-seek with your spouse or partner. Go for a walk around the block and step ...

In last week's post about what the me of the future will say about the me of today, I mentioned that I didn't want to look back and see constant whining, complaining, and negativity in my life. When I look back at my 30s, I see a lot of that, especially in the years after my mother died. I am not proud of it, and it is something I have tried to spend this last year consciously addressing. And I have had some success with that. People have noticed a difference, and I know I certainly feel and act differently that I did a year ago.

One of the things I have been repeating to myself this past year is that I have no reason to whine and complain about many of the things I whine and complain about. As of now, I am where I want to be in life. There is nothing significant about my life that I want to change. While I know that things can change and that in a year, month, week, day, or...

It is pretty common for people to think in terms of five-year or ten-year plans when it comes to mapping out the various paths our lives can take. I remember sitting in a restaurant in college and developing different visions of what I thought my life might be if I accepted each of the various offers I'd received for graduate school. Things did not turn out as I had planned, but I still think that exercise helped me make a good decision.

In this post, I want to explore a variation of the ten-year plan. Instead of thinking of a concrete place where you want to be or project you want to complete, I want you to think about the person you want to become. In other words, what will the you of 2020 say about the you of 2010? This question is partly inspired by another blog post several friends of mine were talking about on Twitter and Facebook a few weeks ago. In "Regrets from the ...

The academic year is upon us. Some people started classes yesterday. Some start next week, and some (like me) start the week after that. After the next month or so, the academic year will be underway for just about everyone I know. We'll be in the middle of lesson planning, meeting scheduling, and research ignoring. Even when we enjoy it, it will be serious work taking up most of our time.

That's why, today, I think you should take $10 out of your wallet and go to a toy store. Wander the aisles. See what toys remain from your childhood and what has popped up since then. And after some meandering, choose something for yourself. It should not be a big deal. Just take that $10 and pick up something fun and silly. Some finger paints. A stuffed puppy. Silly putty. A Toy Story action figure. Pick up something that makes you smile.

Then, take it to your office and keep it there. Or...

Take an index card or sheet of paper and divide it into thirds both horizontally and vertically so that you have nine boxes, kind of like a tic-tac-toe board or the opening credits of The Brady Bunch. Seriously, do it. It'll only take a minute, and you've probably got scrap paper near you. Look back at the screen when you're done.

Okay, now that you have your nine boxes, fill each space with a word or phrase for each of the main parts of your life. I'm thinking of things like family, job, health. Just go for it and fill things in to the extent that you can with whatever comes to mind. Come back when you're done.

The first time you do this, you may find it difficult to think of something for each box. When I first did it about a decade ago, I could only think of four things right away: family, health, teaching, and dissertation. I have also heard of people who fill up the...

Christmas is just around the corner! Okay, that's not completely true. To use another cliche, though, the holiday season will be here before you know it. And it sometimes seems like the season becomes more and more stressful each year. The end of the semester hits hard for many of us, with final exams and papers arriving in huge batches, demands for committee reports to be drafted and revised before break, and that last little push to wring some research out of the term (I never understand academic journals that choose December 15 as a deadline in their CFPs). There are a few things we can do now as summer wanes that will make our lives easier in a few months.

• Revise Your Holiday Card List. My partner keeps a list of everyone to whom we send a holiday card on his computer. As new addresses arise during the year, we revise the master list. If I want to add someone new, I...

One of the challenges in going up for tenure (or applying for jobs or grants) is explaining the significance of your scholarship to those outside your discipline. At my university, we are advised to follow a model first explicated by Ernest L. Boyer in Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate.

Boyer is known for many important things such as leading the United States Commission on Education under President Carter, and this book pushed many academic institutions to re-think what counts as scholarship and how faculty and administrators present their work to others. To be a bit reductive, Boyer discusses four categories of scholarship: application, discovery, integration, and teaching. The faculty policy manual at my university lists these categories (along with the scholarship of artistic activity) as guides for describing our research in tenure and promotion ...

Today is the third anniversary of my mother's death. Her birthday was two days ago, so it's no surprise that this is always a difficult time of year for me. We were very close, and there are still moments when I can't believe she is no longer a living, breathing part of my life. I will never be able to call her on Saturdays like I used to do, and I will never see her when I fly to my hometown in Texas for the holidays. It might seem detrimental to focus on things that will never happen, and that would be true if it were all I focused on. There is value, though, in taking a moment to think of what we can never do. I'm not sure where I first heard of the "I Will Never" list. It was probably from someone's blog or Twitter feed, but I can't remember whose. I do remember reading about it quickly last summer and then not thinking much about it until one afternoon this past March...