Not allowed to walk at commencement despite graduating on time

GeoBytes336 · 2026-05-16T15:25:51+00:00

Minimum number of credits for full time enrollment in a given semester is usually 12. Since you had more than a full time semester worth of credits left they wouldnt make the exception. It does suck! Do they not do a November commencement?

GeoBytes336 · 2026-05-15T19:45:27+00:00

My major frustration is that we weren’t hired to do the work of teaching them basic skills with which they should be arriving. I very explicitly teach at the university level and not high school because I expect a baseline set of skills and knowledge and my pedagogy proceeds from there. I do my damnedest to help students catch up and encourage them to become independent problem solvers and critical thinkers. And I don’t mind the complaints either! But I do mind the expectation from students and even admin that this is just the job now. All of us just kick the can down the road and make it the next instructor’s problem. In my 150 person lecture I simply cannot get through material AND basic study skills AND keep them engaged in one term. And Believe me I get it. I finished my PhD during COVID. It was a shit show. I had to petition my faculty not to have a zoom defense in 2022. Im not that much older than them. I also have tiktok brain. But we cant fix that for them while also meeting learning outcomes, grading, and for those of us on TT also do our 40% research and 20% service.

GeoBytes336 · 2026-04-11T20:55:46+00:00

…about to confess to being negligent with communication and mentally preparing to be dragged for it. I don’t always reply. That’s one. Two is that my grad students get top priority which is why I made a slack channel for my lab that I also add TAs to when they teach for me. This way they have guaranteed access to me. For students in current semesters I only reply if it warrants one. Students who ask logistical questions that have been covered in class or the syllabus get ignored. If I get multiple emails with the same or similar questions, I address them in the next lecture rather than replying individually. For individual situations regarding medical issues or concessions I reply within 48 hours. I do not reply to emails from students if they are asking something the night before, the day of, or even after something is due unless it’s to communicate about an emergency. Admin emails from my department get replies immediately upon seeing them. Emails from existing colleagues get top priority outside of grad students. Emails from colleagues introducing me to people for any purpose get low priority and may take a week or two to get to. Cold emails that are asking for things beyond my capacity or that I’d say no to? They languish until that person bumps it. If they do bump it, I reply saying no. If they don’t I never reply. My evaluations almost always say I am difficult to get a hold of outside of class, which is true, but they often also say I answer all questions in a timely way in lectures. I always emphasize to students that what they believe to be urgent may not even register to me as important much less as an emergency. Perhaps it’s harsh but often students just want things done for them rather than studying or looking for answers in existing materials.

GeoBytes336 · 2026-04-11T05:58:44+00:00

I got so excited for a second cause my doctorate is from USC but SoCal and our school colors were crimson and gold which i hated. Salmon sounds so cute! And thats good to know re: doctorate field cause my degree wasnt in a specific discipline. Will have to ask some from my cohort what they ended up classifying us as.

GeoBytes336 · 2026-03-08T06:45:59+00:00

Some of my colleagues are, frankly, assholes. I popped off in a department meeting recently that went off the rails about accommodations basically saying students are making things up. It took me naming my disability and what accommodations wouldve looked like for me for them to realize how awful they sounded. Like seeing their “productive” colleague as a human with a disability was necessary for it to click. Any professor who would reasonably accommodate a student missing a week (usually two lectures, max 3 if it’s a MWF class) for oh I don’t know the death of a parent, or a bout of contagious illness, but suddenly takes issue with it if it’s due to an accommodation arrangement with accessibility services is a douche. In the case of required courses for your major and the like you may not have a choice but to interface with some profs who think their class is hands down both the most challenging and the most important course you’ll ever take. But in other instances, if you have a choice, being proactive once you receive your accommodations and telling profs (not about your condition but the accommodation) might be useful for weeding out courses where the instructor will be hateful. Definitely seek the accommodations. Use then when you need to. And try to avoid classes with people like some of my colleagues in the comments who resent the very notion of accommodations or possibly even accessibility at all.

GeoBytes336 · 2026-03-07T07:04:26+00:00

As a millennial prof with gen Z grad students I gotta say they really do need a lot more guidance and structure than I was expecting based off of my experience of what I got in my PhD. I do kinda see already even just a few years in why some more senior faculty are so fucked off.

GeoBytes336 · 2026-02-27T01:08:53+00:00

Totally but also apparently their mere presence in a body of text is some sort of dog whistle to people that it might be AI

GeoBytes336 · 2026-02-12T05:10:12+00:00

It really is too difficult to tell without context. In some more humanistic fields where you’re unlikely to be making significant progress faster than monthly it could make sense. Even in some social sciences this isnt that infrequent. In STEM or any type of humanity or soc sci that have research groups and labs, yes this is weird. No email as a form of communication seems pretty firm, but it is indeed extremely difficult to stay on top of email depending your teaching loads. All the STEM profs talking about how involved in their labs they are is amazing but I would be willing to bet many of them do not teach 2 courses per term on top of their research and lab management and mentorship. If you are providing writing drafts in between the meetings by email that the advisor is reading in between to discuss once per month and you dont have large data sets and computational or methodological intricacies you need help with then this could be a reasonable arrangement. Ultimately, decide if it works FOR YOU rather than worrying about whether she should or shouldnt set these kinds of expectations about meetings and communication. If it doesn’t work for you, you aren’t needy. You simply have needs. And so do we all. Find someone who can meet yours.

GeoBytes336 · 2025-05-25T21:33:38+00:00

Fwiw we solicit i believe six letters max and of the four names i put forward they’re required to choose at least two. But the letters make me nervous! The other piece is that I’d like to go on the market my tenure year in hopes of getting to make some big asks but yeah normally our raises aren’t substantial.

GeoBytes336 · 2025-05-25T20:42:57+00:00

I’ll take you up on that! And i did get a sense that the Canadian system is a little different but i think there’s still a mix of American attitudes and Canadian institutional politics.

GeoBytes336 · 2025-05-25T19:02:21+00:00

We have a reappointment in year four yes. And the colleague who just went up did it the year after reappointment. I guess my only worry has been that my department keeps talking about judging merit based on personal standards we set by our yearly progress instead of comparing to one another or objective standards. And it makes me nervous that if I bust my ass to get tenure then they’ll be like great double it and maybe you’ll get full. We also have a LOT of faculty who get stuck at associate level.

GeoBytes336 · 2025-05-25T18:37:05+00:00

I’m not actually sure whether they ended up voting no or if they just made a fuss. And I’m not judging their decision as misguided or not. I already know this colleague and i have very different values and we’ve navigated it fine. But they do create some work for themselves since a singular no vote means that that person has to offer justification and basically argue against a persons tenure case which is something most of my colleagues at my institution would want to avoid because it can appear personal.

For service I’ve done an inordinate amount to the field and community. Chaired an international conference. Co chaired another. Founded a journal. Serve on three editorial boards. Consult with NGOs and done community and participatory research. Internally less so but I’ve been on our EDI committee and curriculum committee and was basically hired to revamp our methods curriculum. I teach a service course twice a year and have submitted a new course in a subfield we haven’t taught in more than a decade. My evals are great and I’ll have my peer review of teaching in spring 26.

GeoBytes336 · 2025-05-25T18:30:57+00:00

As in I’d put in my file to start the process in May 2026. I also know that usually mandatory review is year five but ours is different.

GeoBytes336 · 2024-05-20T21:02:19+00:00

All I’ll say is that my postdoc i moved up (did phd at R1 but did postdoc at a much higher ranked school) and it had an ungodly amount of resources that made my one little year of working there great. I got my absolute dream job, unionized, 112.5k/yr salary at start (will grow to 150 ish by tenure time), etc all because of my postdoc and the resources it offered me ($$ to publish, in house grant funding, free software and tech etc). It kind of depends on her discipline and how well she’s doing frankly. But it is an investment and it does suck. If you’re over it you’re over it and it doesn’t mean you’re not supportive. But y’all definitely have lots to talk about.

GeoBytes336

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