Keep your Head Down: A Familiar April Chorus

Yikes.  One month since my last post?  It must be April.  And I must be a student.

As long as I’ve been in college and graduate school, I have not been able to handle the rushing tide brought by the end-of-the-semester.  One would think that a veteran of the rhythms associated with student life would be able to keep one step ahead of the changes in pace.  One would think. In this case, however, the thought doesn’t count for much.

Yes, April and December are known for a few things.  Showers.  Christmas.  Spring.  Winter.  Exams. Papers.  And Jesus is big in both months.  On campus, these months are known for cramming, added stress, decreased participation in extracurricular events, and an increase in expectations that you participate in extracurricular events.  Some people have retreated completely into hiding and hibernation.

Each year during these 30-day periods, I tend to keep my head down.  It’s how I make sure I do my best work.  And it’s how I slog through the piles of work that somehow reached enormous heights, despite my best efforts at organization, time-management, and preparation.  My once clean and ordered desk becomes littered with teetering towers of books and stacks of papers, tilted in various angles so I can grab the appropriate bunch.  It looks messy–and it is–but somehow it all makes sense to me–and it helps keep the materials I need near my fingertips.

Putting one’s head down is another way of physically living up to verbal commitments. I told myself I’d work hard at school.  I told my classmates I’d take the lead on this project.  I told fellow organizers that I’d be a student representative for our group–for two different organizations.  I told summer programs that I’d like to take part in their workshops.  Now I need to walk that talk.   While the sun comes up after a long Madison winter, my head goes down–the keyboard and the computer screen are the limits of my field of view.

It’s ok.  In a sense, I know this posture will not last forever–the end-of-the-semester rush has a limited shelf-life: it dissipates as we approach May and finally dies when the term is over.  At that point, I’ll sigh, turn off the computer, stand and stretch–and push open the double-doors to a whole new life:  summer.

3 Bad Email Habits You Must Break

A bad email is like porn: hard to describe to others, but you know it when you see it.

USING CAPS LOCK IN ANY SITUATION?  Give me a break.  Crawl out from under the rock you’ve been hiding under and hit yourself in the head with it. Email etiquette exists.  In this day and age, you can’t afford not to follow it.  That said, it is surprising how many of us have dulled our email-tool with some truly horrifying habits.

Habit #1:  Poor Email Grammar

Ok, kids.  Let’s do some spring cleaning.  Promptly remove all of the following from your email repertoire:

• Exclamation points. You don’t need them.  If your sentence needs this punctuation to have punch, the sentence isn’t good enough.  Try re-writing it.  Try again.  And again until it hits with the force you tried to inject with an exclamation point.  (Same idea holds true for parentheses–if your thought needs to be to dressed in parentheticals, consider that it may not deserve to go in your email! Whoops.  Double whammy).
• Ellipses. Ellipses look like this: “I didn’t get your attachment…please re-send.”  (There’s more on attachments later, don’t worry.  Dang parentheses.)  When I see ellipses, I think: “You, email author, are thinking while you are writing.  Your email is stream of consciousness: thought-out, but not well thought-out.”  Sure, there are probably some casual emails to friends that are appropriate for this sort of thing.  Writing to set up a meeting?  Ditch the ellipses.  If you really want to show a separation of thought or juxtaposition of options, use this–an em dash.
• Abbreviations you learned in your previous AIM life. LOL breaks two rules: 1) Never use Caps Lock. 2) Say what you mean.  You have moved on from the land-of-short-hand-chatting to email country, where conversations are less dynamic and more static.  People may sit and absorb your email for a few days.  You have to put your full thoughts down.  You have to ask for what you want and explain why it should be given. Concisely, yes.  But not with abbreviations that are inappropriate, confusing, underwhelming, and unprofessional.  Trust me, when you use abbreviations like these, no one is LOL’ing.  Ouch.

Habit #2:  Sorry!  I forgot the attachment.

Not much more to say here.  First, you used an exclamation point again.  Stop that.

Second, we’ve all been there–on both ends.  We craft the perfect email, send it away, sit back, and hold a private party at our desks to celebrate how awesome we are. Two seconds later, you get a response from Jim:  “Hi, Andrew.  I didn’t get your attachment.  Can you try sending again?”  Party’s over.

On the other hand, having to play Jim’s role to nudge your colleagues to send out the email again is a bother.  Plain and simple:  Don’t forget.  Revise every email.  Re-read it twice.  Hold yourself accountable–Gmail helps out with the forgotten attachment detector.  Even better: switch to Gmail right now.  You’ll look better and feel smarter. That’s a guarantee.

Oh, and all of the above paragraph goes for spelling mistakes too.  Make your 3rd grade teacher proud.  Hit the spellcheck button already.

Habit #3: Being inappropriate.

A few years back, I worked with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF)–the mid-Atlantic region’s largest NGO dedicated to saving the country’s largest estuary, the Chesapeake Bay.  I worked on the oyster restoration team, a federally funded project that involved the collaboration of national, state, and local governments; several research organizations; community groups; and alliances of fishermen from Maryland and Virginia.  In probably the most dubious email ever written, a leading scientist wrote to a colleague that the whole project of restoring native oysters to the Bay would be easier if they could send the fishermen to China.

Are you shaking your head yet?  You should be.  Never, ever write email that you are going to regret later.  This goes for professional and personal business. If you are heated, writing can be a great outlet.  But, please–don’t press send.  Wait.  Save your draft.  Walk away.  Come back a few minutes later and look at your email like a mirror–how does it reflect who you are?

The point is that email does not die.  It lives on. Forever.  The guy who wrote the email about the fishermen was, for all intents and purposes, shunned from the environmental community in the Chesapeake region.  He worked for an organization whose email was FIA’able–FIA = Freedom of Information Act.  A local reporter sifted through his sent mail, found that gem, and put it on the front page of a regional newspaper.  The scientist’s personal and professional lives went from sliced bread to toast–in about 30 seconds.

What have we learned today?  Employ proper email grammar.  Say what you mean and don’t forget attachments.   Express yourself, but not with high risk communications.  I know there’s more to email etiquette than this simple list, and that’s where I’d love to hear from you:

What other habits have people identified?  What are good codes of conduct when writing email?

P.S. I almost forgot:  always sign your emails with you first and last names.  That’s an act of putting your money where your mouth is, unmistakably.

Andrew Stuhl

P.P.S.  If anyone can find grammar mistakes or any other indicators of hypocrisy in this post, please let me know–it’d be only fair to air my own laundry.

Collaborative Writing: A Party Invitation

(After writing this entry and re-reading the title, I must point out that what you are about to read is not in any way suggesting that collaborative writing should be conceived of as a party.  That said, please read on to discover what I do think about collaborative writing…)

Is there anything more frustrating than collaborative writing? The cons: your partner doesn’t grasp the english language as firmly as you, your partner’s vocabulary is (what’s the word?) limited, or perhaps you both have two interesting ways of phrasing something, and cannot decide between the two.  The pros:  there are ways to effectively manage the process of creating one voice out of two.

Just yesterday my friend Ben and I had to pen a party invitation.  Each year we throw a Tacky Holiday Sweater Extravaganza.  One of the trademarks of this celebration, other than the sweaters themselves, is the generally hilarious email that announces the party itself and signals the commencement of the winter holidays.  In past years, Ben and I have taken turns writing the email, with the other “signing off” on the draft version just before it is sent off into email oblivion.  This year, however, we thought we could combine our brains and senses of humor to make one fantastic invitation. What were we thinking?

As soon as we started, I could tell we were in for some trouble.  We got out of the gate quickly (“Dear Friends,”), but got stuck on our greeting and found ourselves repeating it out loud as if the rest of the letter would naturally flow from its beginning.  One of us would have an idea, but it would be quickly vetoed by the other (“Nah. How about this…?”). Or, one of us would have one way of describing a scene and the other would dissect the sentence, adding and subtracting words until the original and its spirit were buried under a new version.  Our creative juices were quickly drying up–or rather weren’t mixing well.

I remembered something from my relationship history, and something from Bolton’s People Skills about knowing when to pick battles.  It is fair to your partner (however defined) to signal when you really really care about something (a phrase, a gift, one decision over another, etc), so that they can properly account for what is important to you.  This requires some humility on your part, and some kind of filter for prioritizing battles, so that you know when its time to fight and when its time to surrender.  In the same vein, it is fair to your partner to listen for their signals, to learn what is important to them, so that you can connect, rather than just talk past one another.  Up to this point, Ben and I were really just talking past one another, not listening for signals from the other person, and sending out way too many signals that screamed “This is Important!”  In that cacophony of mixed messages, it was really hard to find a single, clear voice.

With this realization fresh in my mind, I started listening to Ben more and sending out stronger messages of how I wanted the invitation to look.  Surprisingly, we broke through our writer’s block almost instantly. Framing my messages as important seemed to catch his ear, and he in turn repeated similar messages to me–making it clear that we were on the same page with how to judge what the other really wanted.  Also, I let a few things off the hook that previously had tripped us up–some punctuation and grammar things.  (Secretly, I knew that I would have one final look at the email once he sent a draft version to my inbox, so I waited until then to clear up these mistakes, rather than point them out to Ben and risk picking on him).  In no time flat, we had crafted (what we thought was) a hilarious email that represented our collective energies.

In the end, I was reminded of how powerful a tool listening really is.  I was also stuck on an important question:  is there anything more frustrating than collaborative writing?  I don’t think so–but it is crucial that we learn how to master this skill. One of the major obstacles in interdisciplinary and collaborative work is the inability of scholars to work together to craft a written work, and it is in the concepts, the words, the formatting, and the narrative that they usually disagree. I had the good fortune of learning my lesson the easy way–through a party invitation.  Hopefully I can translate this good cheer into a tool in my interdisciplinary tool kit.

Capturing Creativity (an apology to my blog)

I’m sorry blog.  I can make it up to you, I swear.

I didn’t mean it.  I had great intentions to create a blog worth reading.  But I did not follow through on them.  I fell victim to the worst blogger trap.  I let you go stale.  Like that leftover half loaf of bread we end up feeding to birds.  I’m so sorry.  But I know where I went wrong.

Blog, I must admit I was not using you to capture creativity.  Instead, I had turned to other sources, like some unsatisfied middle-aged man.

And that’s just not right.  Because, after all, the heart of a blog is its writer’s creativity.  I was sapping that by writing elsewhere.  At least I can admit it–and that is an important lesson.

Capturing the thoughts that bounce around the ole noggin’ is critical to developing new, unique ideas. This isn’t rocket science.  You’ve seen it before:  while in a meeting, someone makes a sudden, quick movement–grasping for their pen and then their shirt pocket (where their post-it notes are stored), to jot down a moment of inspiration.  Or, someone whips out a tape recorder and dictates a few lines of clarity to be remembered later.  It’s not about waiting for inspiration to come; its about not letting the inspiration slip away.

This picture of creativity runs against the grain of its conventional image:  You should be able to sit down with anyone, anywhere and pump out top-notch insights.  But that’s not the way my mind works.  My mind works in the background.  After I’ve thought about something intensely (my dissertation, for example)–I find it is useful to power down the engines on that thought for a while, and consider something else (what I’ll eat for dinner, for example).  Meanwhile, somewhere within the walls of my brain, the puzzles and intricacies of that first problem are being worked out, even though I’m not focusing on them.  If nothing else, conceiving my thought process in this fashion gives me a confidence boost.

I know this is how my brain works–because I’ve felt it.  I’ve had sleepless nights when my brain is racing.  Thoughts fly in and out–in a seemingly random manner.  If I listen to the noise, I can make sense of it.  These are the results of all the processing my mind has done while I’ve been doing my day-to-day.

Sometimes I have to wake up, pull myself out of bed and get the ideas out–like taking out the trash–but this time, the things coming out of the container are worth saving.  I’m just making space for the brain to work on other things. I’m paying attention to capturing the creativity, anywhere or anytime.

This past semester, I employed another strategy of squeezing the most from my creative juices.  I started writing myself emails–and collected them in a folder called “PhD Thoughts.”  I use Gmail (If you don’t, please stop reading and start your own account, or we won’t be friends) and their organization/searhability makes me re-accessing these thoughts later a cinch.  Yet, in my excitement about this newly harnessed and stored creativity, I forgot about you, blog.

Can you forgive me?  I’ve made a renewed promise to use you more (that sounds harsh, I know).

Beginnings

Back to school. This could be a synonym for “fall”–it seems every year this time of year, I’m returning to some form of a classroom.  And, as you might expect, I’m not alone.  Over 15 million students make the trek back to campus each autumn.  Yet, hardly any of us write about what makes the journey worth it.  I’ve decided to document my seasonal migration.

This blog is dedicated to my pursuit of a Ph.D. in the Department of History of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The posts will be a blend of reflections on the graduate student life, tips & tricks to managing people and paperwork, and random thoughts of the hour.

More than that, this blog will explore ways in which we find meaning in the student life.  What do we care about?  What do we complain about?  Are we professionals, slackers, refugees from “the real world”?  Where do we go for help?  These questions, and many more, drive the explorations of the university universe.

In addition, this blog will have a certain polar flavor. My research will focus on the roles of science and local knowledge in shaping environmental change in the Canadian Arctic. Hence, I will add the occasional post that gives the down-low on what’s going on up North.

When all is said and done, I hope this blog will have served a few purposes: 1) to act as a source of personal reflection on the particulars of the process; and 2) to live on as a resource for others embarking on their own educational adventures.

With those goals in mind for the end, I begin the journey toward the Ph.D.