How to Lead with Frisbees and Treats

Go Pee. Academic Management Lessons I Learned from Audie Cornish.

This is Audie Cornish. Audie is my 1-year old Shiba Inu/Rottweiler mix who never has to pee. This is odd, because most larger mammals have a pretty pressing need to pee a couple of times a day. But not Audie. She shuns the whimpering, sad-eyed looks of other pets and sits there happily doing whatever she’s […]

Funny

The Joke’s on You

What makes a funny joke?  What makes a strong grant application?  Sometimes, the same things. In the video below, Jerry Seinfeld describes his joke-writing process and takes the viewer through the evolution of a joke about Pop Tarts.  It took two years, and as you can see, many revisions and rewrites to distill the material […]

The Recruitment Tool You Didn’t Know You Have

If you are based at one of 135 US institutions and you recruit human subjects, you need to check out ResearchMatch.org to find potential research participants from a growing pool that now includes 108,181 individuals willing to be in research.

How to Interview the Hell Out of Academic Job Candidates

How to Interview the Hell Out of Academic Job Candidates

One of my favorite parts of being a faculty member is interviewing students, fellows and future faculty members. For reasons that elude my tiny Fighty Squirrel brain, folks think if you are a female and people liked you when they interviewed, it means you are nice. I’m not particularly nice. Ask my kids. What I […]

Our Obsession with Tenure

Chasing tenure translates into a life people outside the academic do not understand. I am often amazed by the importance professors place on their tenure above their families, their sanity, and their lives. Everything will be OK, tenure or not.