Reviewing my goals: Academic

One of my goals for 2012 was to review my goals quarterly. This is important, because I've learned that I forget goals! Thank goodness for written language. I've been meaning to sit down and write this blog post since, oh, March? Eek. Anyways, better late than never. I'm going to break this up into a few posts. Let's start with the big goals.


How am I doing on those academic/career goals?


Get something published in 2012. I am happy to report good progress on this front! Sam and I have a little note in press as of this week, and we're about to submit revisions to a journal for the paper I started way back when (2.5 years ago). AND, we submitted my interdisciplinary project, which wasn't even on my radar screen when I wrote these goals. That one has been submitted, rejected, and resubmitted already. Fingers crossed.

Submit Best Project for publication. I'm working on it. It's going to be two papers, not just one. Sam says I have to submit the first one by mid-August. I've written most of the methods (all except the stats) and I'm tackling a draft of the introduction, one paragraph at a time. The analysis is the hardest part of this process. 

Conceptualize my dream job(s). I'm not sure I have a dream job, although I did see a couple of jobs I was excited about. I think I could be happy doing many different jobs. I have a dream destination. Actually, two. If I could land a postdoc in RFC for a couple of years, and then get a job in Jon's Hometown, that would be awesome. That's my dream career path.

Give a talk at the big ecology conference and present at at least one other conference. Yes! I'm presenting at the Big One and presented at a different conference earlier this year. I intend to give a fabulous presentation for all 6 people that attend at the crappiest time ever assigned.

Do an outreach project. My outreach plan is unbloggable because it's awesome.

Update my webpage once a month. Hmm, I did great at this until April, at which point I think I forgot that it was supposed to be a monthly thing. I should be sure to do a good job in June! I'm also thinking of getting my own domain since I'm thinking about finishing.


Overall I think I'm making good progress on my academic goals. It really makes me feel good to have 3 manuscripts in various stages of resubmission/in press. Too bad only 1 of those is going to be in my dissertation.