Earlier, I described the big project that I have to do that always gets assigned over Thanksgiving break. Last year, I had to spend about 90% of my break working on it. I lost out on some important family time, and it was just generally unpleasant. Armed with an extra year of experience and the important lessons I learned last year, I tried to make sure that my project would be more manageable this year. It's amazing what an extra year of experience is worth: All the right things fell just into place, and I won't really have any work to do over the break this year. There's really only one potential problem: I'm skipping school on Monday and Tuesday in order to make it to Michigan for more than 1 day.
Normally, this wouldn't be an issue. I don't typically have classes or obligations on Tuesdays, and my only class on Monday is with a class-is-optional type professor. However, this Monday and Tuesday, we have a job candidate visiting the department. I'm supposed to go to hear the person give a talk on Monday, and then there's a meet and greet with all the grad students on Tuesday. It will be a decent sized crowd, so it's reasonable to assume that my absence won't be too dearly missed. However, there's also a chance I'm going to need to meet with the professor who assigns the Thanksgiving assignment. Last year I opted out of meeting in order to spend some extra time with family, and I ended up in the dog house for quite some time.
I thought I'd cut off this issue at the pass by setting up the meeting earlier this week. The meeting was short and sweet, and I thought we discussed everything we needed to. But then I got a cryptic mass email (to everyone in the class) that indicated I might have to go to another meeting. The problem? By the time I find out whether this is the case, I'll already been in Michigan. I couldn't just talk to the professor about wanting to meet early, because that would have drawn attention to the fact that I'm going to miss the job candidate (which in practice is meaningless--my input will have exactly 0 bearing on the hiring process--but in theory it makes me look like I have bad department 'citizenship'). Hopefully this won't turn into a 'thing,' because there's really not much I can do at this point...
2 comments:
Wow, cutting wood is way less complicated...
No wonder people became hippies in the 60's and just "dropped out" man! The weird part is hippies that hung around and became anarchists are now professors and politicians messing up students vacations and our government...
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