Summer changes into fall…

This coming weekend is Labor Day. Kids are heading back to school, college students are starting semesters back up again, it’s starting to get a little cooler, leaves are slowly changing colors. It’s been a very different summer for me, so I feel like a bit of a review and some reflection are needed.

I’m used to not having summers off. I went to Drexel for 5 years, had Fall-Winter co-op, and classes Spring-Summer. So 6 months out of the year I was working full-time and taking a class or two; the other six months I was taking classes full-time and working a part-time job or two. The summer between undergraduate and graduate school I worked as a science teacher and substitute teacher at a day camp in a Philadelphia charter school. Last summer, I worked in my thesis lab; I wrote at least two end-of-year reports for NASA and helped write a year 2 grant proposal on top of working phase shift and overnight shifts for various experiments.

This summer’s been different. I failed my prelim (qualifying exam, whatever you want to call it) at the end of June/beginning of July. The head of my examining committee told me to take the summer off to study, since I had 3 months to retake the exam. I’ve been in lab a few days this summer, but most of my summer has been spent at home in my apartment with my kitties. For me, that’s been a big change. The first week or so was great, because I could sleep and get caught up on some things, but then it got tedious. So I’ve filled in the days with entering the world of Web 2.0, which I love, and reading books, something I haven’t had a chance to do in a long time.

I’m now loving blogging, podcasting, using the Twitter, and attending Tweetups. I’m attending Philly Podcamp September 5-6. Recording Girls Gone Geek is one of the highlights of my week. I’ve been a guest blogger on LiveCrunch.com. I’ve met some incredibly awesome people through Twitter and the Tweetups I’ve been to in NYC, and plan to meet some awesome Philly people at the Tweetup tomorrow night.

Going into this summer, and for the past few years, I thought I had my career plan all worked out. Get my PhD, do a post doc or two, become an associate professor, get tenure track somewhere, and just teach and run a lab. Now I’m not as sure I want to stay in academia. The politics involved (which I did know about previous to this summer) are just seeming to be more than I want to deal with. If Kevin and I ever want to have kids, a tenure track faculty position is not very conducive to that. If I need to take time off because of my health, tenure track faculty positions aren’t very conducive to that either (for those of you unaware of my litany of health problems, I’ll blog about them at some point, I’m getting a little better about not hiding them). Then there is the fact that I’m loving social media, and having a blast at it. Frankly, I enjoy it a lot more than the crap I deal with in grad school at the moment.

No worries, I will retake my prelim. I’m scheduled to get my written questions September 10 and take my oral exam on September 24. I’m much better prepared this time, so I hope/think I will pass. I’ll take a few years to get my PhD, especially since human research takes time (I study the effect of light on body clock rhythms in humans). I’m just not so sure I’m going to stay in academia once I’m done. The interview we did with Dr. Kirsten Sanford on GGG a few weeks ago definitely gave me food for thought.

For now, I’ve got a few more weeks of studying to do, and a bunch of meetings to attend to set up stuff for the new semester coming up. I’m going to keep podcasting and blogging and tweeting, no worries there. I just have to see where the balance strikes itself.