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Am I the only one methodologist without any time to make a normal life? In other words, are you working 14 hours daily, like me?
Don’t all academics work 14 hour days? Besides, if we wanted a normal life, we’d get a 9-5 with Goldman Sachs, right?
Thanks God, I’m not alone. Lexine you’re right, but Does it is a normal state?, Okay, I love my job, but I work from 9:00 to 19:00/20:00, I return to my home and I must start studying additional two/three hours. Maybe we must pay our privileges, you know, I’ not carrying on one’s back a lot of boxes.
Still, can’t there be balance somewhere? When I finish my degree I DO NOT plan to be a prof–I look at my professors, especially early in tenure process, who send e-mails regularly at 3am. That’s just not right. Even a great job shouldn’t require 14 hours a day, plus weekends! Right?
Your are right Dear Felipe:
One of the reasons because I’m working a lot is because the money. I love my academic job, but my earns always seem “not too much”, but in addition I feel we must confront a strong “competition”, so if you have to be in a top place, you must work very hard (ISI publications are a very good example). Now I have a job like Research Coordinator, so in there, my time is entirely dedicated only to make research, but every day/week I must do a lot of administrative tasks (I hate it), and I must receive dozens of students and persons (and I’m not taking into account my courses). I feel envy because I guess you are dedicated only to study right now, a lot of hours of silence only dedicated to study your favourites themes.That’s it, I hope we will set contact again!!!
Academic culture has changed, it has become industrialized so that instead of progressing with research and staying on top of developments in the field, people are buried under administrivia and classes (though I love teaching a balance is required!). This is what Henry Giroux writes about when he is discussing the de-skilling of the academy, after all the effort one dedicates to become expert, so much time is taken with the daily grind that one is effectively going backwards. Academics are the worker bees of an information society, one solution might be to try and get off the grid a bit and find ways to subvert the system that seems to be drowning so many….
I think you’re right, however if you got a way for to subvert the system, please, let me know. Now I was thinking how is it possible some people in Europe/USA can work in their jobs, learn other language and manage their own families without come to be dead. For example, now I’m writing here, but i was working from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM, I cannot do anything else, I’m completely tired. In fact, I need to read a lot, however time is not enough, never. Searching by a “guilty” I think one of the most powerful reasons behind this situation is the stupid new technology (mobile phones and e-mails accounts), given it is so easy to set contact with others, we are going to set more contacts than before, if I read one e-mail message by day, right now I’m going to read ten or twelve messages by day…, conclusion is quite easy: if in the past we are concerned about one task by day, now we are concerned for ten or more tasks by day. So you got those results that you can see here and there in our suffered academic world.
I sympathize with how you are feeling, and certainly I can relate. As I see it, although we have ever more “contacts” and “emails” it does not mean we have more meaningful interaction, in fact, I myself feel more isolated than ever.
In terms of subverting the system, I can only speak for myself but for example, I see that the ideologies of competition, and individualism reduce people to worker-bees, the way to work against it is to share, collaborate, strategically partner to share the load. For example if I am applying to a grant and it is going to take 30 hours of work to do all the application, I will partner up and name someone as a co-investigator, and the next grant app, this person will do the app. and name me as the co-investigator so you have 2 applications with the work of one. Naturally this means people have to get beyond the pettiness bred by the competitive mindset!!!
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