We continue with vintage – yet evergreen – recordings. It seems like everyone struggles with the desire to quit at times. It’s a natural response to external forces, but you can summon internal forces to manage that impulse. We’re not saying don’t quit! We’re just saying, act deliberately. In this episode, Karen and Kel talk […]

Academics are bailing in unprecedented numbers, and academia has finally started to notice. Karen was interviewed twice in the past couple weeks–once in Nature, once in the Chronicle — about mass resignations by tenured folks, and the new Professor Is Out community on FB. COVID was the final straw–adding actual physical harm to the decades […]

Perfection is the enemy of productivity, but almost all academics struggle with perfectionism. How to resist its siren song? Kel shares her coaching insights from her Unstuck: The Art of Productivity program to give strategies for shutting down the delusion of perfection (which, after all, is not possible) and opening up avenues for facing the […]

One episode wasn’t enough to talk about burnout in the academy. Juxtaposing the WHO definition of burnout with a definition Karen read, that burnout is “investing emotionally in a job and not having that investment returned,” Karen and Kel, along with commenters on the FB Live where this was recorded, delve further into the elements […]

Burnout is on everyone’s mind right now. It’s the end of the academic year, and what an academic year it was.  Profs and students both are at the end of their ropes. Kel and Karen talk about the symptoms of burnout, including some that might surprise you, and how to recognize and make peace with […]

You didn’t get the job this year; what to do?  Kel and I talk through what makes a competitive record and competitive presentation of that record, so you can know what to prioritize this summer, if an academic job is your priority (and needless to say, it does not have to be).  This follows on […]

We dig into the definition of  “professionalism,” a term thrown around as an arbiter of correct and incorrect behavior in academia.  Drawing from insights on a recent Twitter thread, Karen and Kel talk about how professionalism operates as code for the protection of white (male, straight, cisgender) comfort – quiet, sedate, nonconfrontational, bodies contained and […]

We did a survey recently and the message loud and clear was: please give us more advice about just… surviving in academia!  So today we are talking about managing your transition into your new academic “thing,” whatever it is. We talk about managing your fear and keeping connected to your own values and motivations. Academia […]

[Note: Karen and Kel were on vacation in NYC and recording from a hotel room! Please excuse the tinny sound today and next week; it goes back to normal after that!] A tweet went academic-viral recently asking whether academics use sick leave or even know what their sick leave policies are. Short answer: in the […]

We talk about the “capitalist gaze” and how it impacts the creativity of academics. Casting our research outcomes as “products” can be deeply chilling to the imaginative work of scholarship.  Research as an assembly line, or as a deli counter (slicing your work into ever thinner slices to maximize number of publications) constricts scope for […]

When you think about academia like a garden, the analogy clarifies a lot of things. First off, not every plant can thrive in every spot; also, plants need constant resources in terms of water, fertilizer, sun, and attention. We don’t judge one growing zone over another- they aren’t better or worse, they are just different.  […]

Collaborative writing is a great productivity hack when it works. But how to make it work? In this episode Karen and Kel talk to Dr. Julia Hornberger and Dr. Sarah Hodges, who have maintained a weekly Zoom collaborative writing practice over two continents for the past five years. They explain the technical logistics of making […]

It’s the newest trend! Join the thousands who are saying goodbye (and good riddance?) to the academic career!  If you spend any time on Twitter, you know that lately, it seems to be packed with academics loudly and honestly pretty happily announcing their departure from academia. So much so that the people staying in are […]

Karen and Kel talk about coping with rejection, moving beyond the typical advice to “take a break, come back to it later, etc. etc.” (which is good as far as it goes!) to discuss the deeper issues of identity and emotion that rejection triggers. Drawing from an essay by Dr. Gavin Lamb, “4 Reasons Why […]

We talk Imposter Syndrome: what it is, why we get it, how to overcome it. We talk about gendered messages, structural racism, and being told you don’t belong; ie: it’s not Imposter Syndrome if they’re always treating you like an imposter. We ask why it so often intensifies precisely when you experience professional success, like […]

We are back! Thank you for your patience!  Kel and I needed to rethink the podcast; basically we love to talk TO people, and after two years wanted to find a way to make the podcast more of a conversation with the community and less just the two of us (with the occasional guest). So, […]

We talk breaking points. Kel suggests to anyone feeling they’ve reached the breaking point at the end of the semester: pause, and appreciate that it’s showing you, you DO have a limit. Sit with that. What’s it mean to hit your limit and really admit it? That is, rather than judging yourself, or scrambling to get past it. Instead, embrace the breaking point. And use it as, conversely, a strength. That is, the place where you say no. No to more expectations, more to more demands, no to more...

Today we are joined by the remarkable Deja Rollins, speaking about performative allyship. Deja, a graduate student in Communications at UIUC, was the standout star of Karen’s TedX event hosted by U of Arkansas Monticello, and we’ve been working on getting her on the podcast for almost a year. In this conversation Deja talks about how white folks, particularly in the academy, talk the talk of “allyship” (especially during summer 2020) without taking any meaningful action, or sacrificing any of...

Dr. Samira Rajabi, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at U of Colorado Boulder,  joins us for a discussion of navigating ambiguous grief and trauma in the pandemic academy and the rest of life. Drawing from her research for her new book, All My Friends Live in the Computer: Tactical Media, Trauma, and Meaning Making, as well as her own personal stories, Samira talks with us about the importance of social media communities in navigating suffering, and ways to interrupt capitalist narratives...

The Professor Is In Ep 3:9 The Key to Interviews and Grants Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode 1x Fast Forward 30...

Part three in our three-part series about getting Unstuck. So much of the academic experience is about feelings of failure.  It’s central to normally functioning academia (in the sense of job, grant and article rejections), but it’s far more relevant nowadays to the effort to leave the academy.  Not getting the coveted job is still widely considered a “failure” and academics who have their identity wrapped up in academic achievement so easily take on the identity of “failure” – as in, I’M a...

We continue with the three-part examination of getting stuck and unstuck. Last week we talked about the Island of Perfectionism. Today we talk the Sea of Change (next week, we talk the Quagmire of Failure).  The individualism of the (American) academy puts all responsibility for struggle on the individual. But we remind you, you didn’t just “fall” off your path–in the words of Dr. Roxanne Donovan of The Well Academic, something pushed you off.  The pandemic and the Great Resignation are...

It’s The Great Resignation, and people are departing their s****y jobs in droves. This includes academics, and not just adjuncts. Tenured and tenure track faculty are proactively departing to a degree never before seen. (Find many of them on the Professor Is Out private FB group!) Karen and Kel talk about ways that perfectionism–always the bugbear of academia–can hamper your transition out of the academy just as much as it might hamper your process of finishing that paper, dissertation, or...

We are joined by Dr. Jane Jones of UpIn Consulting (@JaneJoanne) to talk about 5 reasons that your article manuscripts might be getting rejected, drawn from Kel and Jane’s Art of the Article program. Here’s the list: 1) not finishing out of fear [of reactions, reviews, etc.]; 2) submitting to the wrong journal [meaning a journal that is a poor match for your work, discipline, or level]; 3) not demonstrating the import/significance of your work in relation to the field or fields prioritized by...