ambitions

I was re-reading The Bourne Supremacy recently and this quote struck me:

ambitions are all incompatible (fact-check)

That’s what this semester feels like to me.  Here are the ambitions in conflict with one another:

  • be the best teacher I can be I was reasonably satisfied with my teaching performance in the past, but undergrads during the semester are completely different than summer students and the class is much bigger. The graduate class I’m teaching is a completely new experience and I have to put in a lot more effort.
  • publish the work I didn’t get around to publishing yet It’s tough to find isolated days to write, especially cause my teaching schedule is every day.
  • continue my research on language modeling for text entry/word prediction This is a minor priority right now. I should publish the work I’ve done first.
  • become the modern academic Blogging, twitter, linkedin, etc. I’m still scared of Facebook though. For a while I seriously entertained dreams of writing for ArsTechnica or AnandTech too. I think that’d probably be a lot of fun. A part of me also believes that blogging is not far off from the eventual future of academic publishing.
  • develop an HCI project that I’m excited about It’s important to follow your passions and I’ve had this project brewing for a while. Although I need more time to read more related work, more than anything I need isolated time to implement a prototype of the system. Then I’d need to do some small-scale user testing before turning it into a product or grant proposal.
  • find a good job Adjunct teaching is very little work, quite a bit of stress, very little pay, and there isn’t any concept of job security. I really need to find something I enjoy (and that pays reasonably).
  • help the other grad students here at UD HLT and such It takes a little time and effort, but I think people would be much stronger researchers with a little help. Things like reading each others’ papers or discussing events over lunch can help people grow.

I can really appreciate why faculty often don’t code anything themselves.