(Part 3) Top products from r/AskAcademia

Not a new faculty member -- I started out almost 20 years ago -- but I quit a tenured, almost-full-professor position back in 2011 to start over at a different university that was better suited for my goals, in no small part because of questions like these. I could give a very long answer on this because it's something I've thought about a lot, but I'll keep it short and maybe others can fill in their ideas.

Context: I work at a regional public university (26K students) and am pre-tenure but on the tenure track, up for tenure and promotion in 3 more years. I have a teaching schedule of 24 credits every year, which shakes out to three courses a semester (usually two preps) along with expectations for service and a modicum of research production (we're primarily a teaching-oriented institution). Also and importantly: I have a wife and three little kids and they are way more important to me than my career.

With that background, I usually am working on my stuff about 9 hours per day during the week, and maybe 2-3 hours on the weekends although I prefer not to work on the weekends at all. And it works for me, as I just had a successful halfway-point review for tenure and promotion and all signs are indicating that tenure shouldn't be a problem for me when I finally come up for it.

You asked a bunch of questions in that last paragraph that seem unrelated but actually I think they all hinge on one thing -- making sure that there is a space in your life for work and a space in your life for your life, and making sure that there is no unwanted invasion of one space by the other. What works for me is:

1. If you want to have a space for stuff in your life that isn't work, you have to set up hard boundaries around that space and defend it.
   
2. You have to know exactly what you should be doing at any given moment and also what you should not be doing at any given moment.
   
3. You have to choose projects and tasks strategically and manage them rigorously.
   
   To focus on #2 and #3, I practice the Getting Things Done or "GTD" system of task/time management promulgated by David Allen. It would be well worth your time to go read this book, maybe over the holiday break. I won't try to summarize it other than to say, the cornerstone of GTD is having a trusted system into which you put ALL your projects and tasks organized by context, priority, and energy available and focus ONLY on the next action for each project. This way of thinking will train you to distinguish what you should be doing right now from the many things that you could be doing, and also train you to let go, mentally, of anything other than the next available thing until it's time.
   
   So I highly recommend GTD. It's no exaggeration that when I discovered GTD a few years ago it changed my life. You asked about what I do to relax and feel peace -- the first thing I do is keep all my projects and tasks organized and under my control. Otherwise there is no peace!
   
   As for #1, I set aside evenings and weekends for family. That for me is an inviolable law. So, I shut down the computer and don't check email from 6pm to 6am. (I tell students this, and explain why, and they respect it.) I get up at 4:30am so that I can grade from 6-7am every day and not take time out of the weekend. Sometimes (like during finals week) I do have to bring work home. But I've found that I can get a lot done during business hours if I just remain ruthlessly efficient with managing my tasks (see GTD).
   
   So another aspect of having peace in my life comes from the fact that I never worry that I'm not doing enough to give time and attention to my wife, kids, church, or friends. Making hard boundaries around that personal space and fighting to maintain them makes it possible.
   
   TL;DR -- I've managed to maintain a good work-life balance and a productive career by practicing GTD and being deliberate about setting hard boundaries around work and family life.

I remember writing a grant proposal for fieldwork in the first year of my PhD. Me and my supervisor edited it together (he thought ti would be a good exercise. No content was changed, but the entire text was red from the 'track changes' after working on it for two hours!

It's pretty normal and a others said: the learning curve is steep.

(PS: there are some great books out on academic writing. This is one of my favorites: https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Science-Papers-Proposals-Funded/dp/0199760241)

He wants to be a linguist--I think he would also enjoy the etymologies in the Oxford English Dictionary. I suggest taking him to a public library and sitting him down with a copy of the OED and going through a few definitions (penetrate would be a good start).

You've definitely got a linguist on your hands--if he also gets interested in computers and/or programming, he will have a lot of jobs waiting for him after he gets through college.

Please PM me if you want more help/advice.

Edit: He might enjoy these books:

http://www.amazon.com/History-English-Language-6th-Edition/dp/0205229395/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1377654532&sr=8-2&keywords=english+a+history

http://www.amazon.com/Linguistics-A-Very-Short-Introduction/dp/0192801481/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1377654559&sr=8-1&keywords=very+brief+introduction+linguistics

http://www.amazon.com/Professor-Madman-Insanity-English-Dictionary/dp/0060839783/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1377654605&sr=1-1&keywords=the+madman+and+the+professor

Have you seen their Highlights for High School feature?

Also, there are sites like Academic Earth that might be useful.

Here are a few blogs with potential. You'll have to decide for yourself if they have inappropriate content.

Here are a few book recommendations covering various fields, in no particular order (though they should all read #1):

1. A Short History of Nearly Everything
   
2. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
   
3. Einstein: His Life and Universe
   
4. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
   
5. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
   
6. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
   
7. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
   
8. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
   
9. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
   
10. Cosmos
    
11. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
    
12. The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy
    
13. Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind
    
14. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human
    
15. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
    
16. Thinking, Fast and Slow
    
17. Chaos: Making a New Science
    
18. Isaac Newton
    
19. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
    
20. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
    
    And here's a video interview with Richard Feynman they might enjoy.

Read a lot and practice writing have already been mentioned, and those are great and necessary practices that should continue throughout your academic career. Getting external feedback is also great advice. I'll add the following: Writing and editing your writing are two different jobs, so don't edit and write at the same time.

A few books I recommend regularly to Ph.D. students in the social sciences: How To Write A Lot has some tips and tricks about writing routines of academics. If you're writing ethnographic works: Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes and Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography are worth reading.

I would get something like this:
http://www.amazon.com/Schaums-Outline-College-Algebra-Edition/dp/0071635394

And work through it. You should be very comfortable with algebra and probably trig too. You should also just get used to working problems again. Good luck!

Ah, you say something like "Algebra" on /r/askacademia people are going to assume you mean like graduate level pure math.

I think the first step for someone with your background is to just get comfortable with basic arithmetic and numbers again. At least I've found when trying to teach people without a strong math background that before you can get to things like algebra you have to instill a sort of "trust" in calculation. I think the best way to do that is probably repetition, repetition, repetition. Perhaps something like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Schaums-Outline-Elementary-Mathematics-Outlines/dp/007176254X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1458739566&sr=8-1&keywords=schaum%27s+arithmetic

And do the shit out of the problems. That is absolutely crucial. Do them until they're second nature, move to the next section, then the next and then a couple weeks later COME BACK and always be mixing it up but pushing forward.

Give yourself time and find out what interests you. In high school and as an undergraduate you will have plenty of time to explore different options to see what fits you best and in the meantime read some popular science books on climate change to get an idea of what kind of research is being done, what is already known, and a feel for the general direction of the fields. Unless you are a prodigy, you're going to have around 6 years before you are able to even scratch the surface on research and a lot will change in that time. I'll post back in a bit with some book recommendations if you'd like.

Books
The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert
Field Notes from a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert
Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction by Mark Maslin

And as weird a suggestion as this may seem, one of the best lay books on some of the social aspects of climate change is probably Laudito Si by Pope Francis. Take or leave the religious aspects but his analysis of the social impacts is a good general summary of where most social scientists who study climate change stand.

How comfortable are you with math and at which "level" do you want to understand the concepts of weather? I.e., do you want to learn the physics behind it, or just know what fronts, cyclones etc. that they talk about on TV are?

For the former the book Atmospheric Science: An Introductory Survey is a comprehensive introduction, but I wouldn't recommend it to laymen who are just interested in weather.

I happen to teach compensation at the grad level, so I wanted to suggest you get a copy of this textbook or find it at the library. Used, old edition, whatever. It has a lot of discussion on pay structure and some citations to important research articles. It might help you structure your ideas a little bit more, like what aspect of pay structures you want to look at and their effects on which outcomes.

For scientific writing, I like this online course: Writing in the Sciences. As someone from a science/maths background who didn't get to do a lot of writing during my degree, this was great.

For science writing, I've got very practical books that I like: A field guide for science writers, and Science blogging: the essential guide.

Read, read, then write a bunch. Write with a plan, but without too much regard to grammar. Then, when you revise, follow Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace... helped a bunch for me.

I have a friend who uses these. She loves them, but I know they're a little on the expensive side.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07F24KN8N/ref=twister_B07L8P6CXY?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

Additionally, you could punch one hole in each corner and loop 50 on one binder ring then those on a larger binder ring.

This topic was recently a target article for commentary in Brain and Behavioural Science. That piece and all the responses should pretty much cover the current state of the field and give you a bunch of references to track down.

I also reccomend you find the book "Bayesian Rationality" by Oaksford and Chater - they're big proponents of this idea.

I think you are thinking of a reader: like this or this?

https://www.amazon.com/Research-Write-Create-Connecting-Scholarship/dp/0195447417

and the making sense series from oxford will help

I generally recommend a cheap used copy of Writing in the Sciences by Penrose and Katz.

Check this one out too.

You might find this book helpful, it's about finding careers outside of Academia.

August apparently, but he's been out and about doing talks.