Nice day in academia

This has been a very nice academic day. First of all, it is a gorgeous spring day. Classes are over but finals have not begun, so I have only a few things to grade for the next several days. This morning, a student in Latin American Studies whose honor’s thesis I am chairing, defended that thesis on reactions to the Argentine dollar peg—congratulations to John Hyatt on an interesting paper and good defense.

This afternoon I’ve finished up another article for submission and put it in the mail (yet another journal that does not do email submission—do they get too many submissions to make email work well?). I remember some time ago, Michelle (aka La Profesora Abstraida) had talked about the goal of having three journal manuscripts out at a time. Or was it Mungowitz? Vegreville? A quick look at her archives didn’t yield anything, and I don’t have time for more searching.

I think it’s a great goal—I’ve been into writing books, and so for the past three years or so have not written as many articles, which I am trying now to catch up on. It is not easy to have three going at once, but if you’re well behind that, it might be useful to think about whether there are other things you might need to spend less time on. Being behind also will make the tenure process very stressful, and later will make full professor a distant goal.

I’m not sure if I am in the majority or not, but I really enjoy the process of research, writing and publication (though the sting of rejection is still there—next year PS: Political Science & Politics will publish a piece I wrote on the issue of rejection in Political Science, which I wrote after a very annoying rejection I got from a top journal). The article I've just sent off is especially fun because I co-wrote it with my dad.