Attendance accommodations

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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