Hi Professors!
It’s currently mid-November and that means that the end of the fall semester is now on the horizon. I’m curious to know: How are you holding up right now? I’ve been hearing from my clients as well as my friends on the tenure track that this semester has been exceptionally challenging for them.
Grappling with current global crises and navigating campus politics, combined with an already challenging workload, is really taking its toll on many WOC faculty. This can manifest in different ways for you: sheer exhaustion, burnout, or that sinking feeling like you can never get caught up in your work.
With just a few more weeks left of the term and the calendar year, how can you manage to finish out the semester in a more gratifying way? This may be a good time to take a moment to reflect on your goals for the end of the year. In this episode, I’m going to talk about checking in with yourself and reassessing your priorities for the final weeks of the semester.
Professors: Are You Looking Forward to Thanksgiving Because You Can Finally Take a Deep Breath?
Whether one celebrates it or not, the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States provides academics, staff, and students a little respite during the fall semester. When I was a professor, I remember that the 2-day break usually came at a time when I absolutely needed to take a rest.
As a professor, I’ve always taught on the quarter system, which is only 10 weeks long. In this system, the academic terms are short and intense. When the Thanksgiving break would come around in late November, I felt like I could finally exhale after a long stretch of course prep, conference papers and travel, writing recommendation letters, and grant writing.
For one or two days, I was nourished by reconnecting with good friends and family and I could temporarily forget about the work that lied ahead of me. But come Saturday, I would then be faced with the reality that I would need the entire weekend to work on grading and preparing for the remainder of the quarter. And, I would inevitably have writing to catch up on, too.
Sometimes I felt as if I came up for air briefly during Thanksgiving only to re-submerge myself in the deep end of overwork until final grades were submitted in mid-December. To be honest, many of my academic terms had this relentless feeling of being underwater most of the time.
Does this pattern sound familiar to you? And do you find yourself stressed out thinking of the things that you need to complete before the end of the year? Is your To Do list seeming to grow longer and longer by the hour?
First of all, I hope that you can actually take real time off during the upcoming break. Unplug your laptop and log off your work e-mail for a bit. Don’t worry. Those e-mails will still be there the following week.
Second, check in with yourself and listen to what your body is telling you. Do you need to power down and catch up on sleep? Or do you feel the urge to take a hike and a long walk outdoors? Do you want to just chill out and watch a K-Drama? Whatever it is, pay attention and try to accommodate your own needs.
Third, take a moment to acknowledge what you have been through during the term. Sometimes, as a WOC faculty, it is enough to acknowledge that you have survived the semester in one piece.
But beyond that, I’m sure there are real wins that you can also be proud of. Maybe it was a new course that you designed that has gone well. Or the article that you worked on last summer was finally published. Perhaps you delivered a conference paper that was well-received.
When there is so much on your plate, it can be easy to overlook or forget about your accomplishments. Make sure to celebrate them.
Now, when thinking about heading into the final stretch of the semester, what are some things you can do to help ensure that you stay afloat at the end of the term?
Reassess Your End-of-Semester Priorities and Manage Your Expectations
One suggestion may be to take an honest look at your To Do list and reassess your priorities.
Here are four questions that you can ask yourself right now:
1. What can you remove from your current To Do list and postpone until the new year?
You may have had an ambitious list coming into the semester. But so many things can intervene during the term, including family crises, health issues, or other major life events. How can you be gentle with yourself and give yourself permission to shift some tasks to the new year?
2. What are 1 or 2 top goals that you have for the end of the semester?
If one of those goals includes focusing on your own research and writing, then what can you do right now to set that up for success in December? Examples may include ordering library books through InterLibrary Loan or scheduling co-working sessions with other faculty members during finals week.
3. What are some obstacles that may prevent you from reaching those goals?
To give you an example, let’s say that you really want to put some solid hours into archival research, which you enjoy. Classes are done and you’ve submitted your grades. You even booked your travel and hotel.
An obstacle could come in the form of a colleague asking you to serve as the chair for a program committee for an upcoming conference. All of the labor for that would require you to start planning and sending off multiple e-mails immediately.
In this case, don’t be afraid to guard your own time, say no to things you don’t really want to do, and maintain boundaries in order for you to prioritize your own goals.
4. What systems of support do you need to have in place for you to accomplish your re-defined goals?
Maybe this is as simple as scheduling Zoom sessions with a writing accountability partner. Or it could be something that you set up in order to make your life at home easier.
These are four practical questions that can help you to check in with yourself and reassess your priorities at the end of your academic term. They can also be useful to keep in mind as you move forward in the academic year.
Additionally, I wanted to mention that these are individualized strategies that are best going to work for you and your situation.
But what really lies underneath these workarounds and these interventions, however, is a culture of overwork and pervasive burnout in higher ed. Dr. Rebecca Pope-Ruark, recently published a book called Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal and she says that “we need to normalize talking about burnout without normalizing the culture that causes it.”
Fortunately, it does seem that more and more academics (and former academics) are speaking openly about their experiences. Books like Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Drs. Emily and Amelia Nagoski and recent podcast episodes by Dr. Leslie Wang, for instance, are great resources for learning more about the burnout syndrome and ways to acknowledge, recognize, mitigate, and even overcome it.
This is a big topic, and one that I expect to touch on in future podcast episodes.
In the meantime, I hope that this episode will help you to clarify and reassess your priorities as well as manage your expectations for those last few weeks of the semester. And I do hope that you have an excellent, restful break.
