How to recognize you have become senior faculty
I am back from holidays and trying to plow trough the RSS feeds/content alerts that accumulated in these two weeks. I might post on couple of things that catch my eye.
Here is a funny editorial from Gregory A Petsko talking about the project to sequence Homo neanderthalensis.
The editorial is actually more about senior faculty members and in particular how to identify one:
- You are senior faculty if you can actually remember when more than 10% of submitted grants got funded.
- You are senior faculty if you can remember when there was only one Nature.
You are senior faculty if you still get a lot of invitations to meetings, but they're all to deliver after-dinner talks.
- You are senior faculty if students sometimes ask you if you ever heard Franklin in person, and they mean Benjamin, not Aretha.
- You are senior faculty if a junior colleague wants to know what it was like before computers, and you can tell her.
- You are senior faculty when the second joint on the little finger of your left hand is the only joint that isn't stiff at the end of a long seminar.
- You are senior faculty if you sleep through most of those long seminars.
- You are senior faculty if you visit the Museum of Natural History, and the dummies in the exhibit of Stone Age man all remind you of people you went to school with.
- You are senior faculty if you find yourself saying "Back in my day" or "When I was your age" at least twice a week.
- You are senior faculty if you actually know what investigator-initiated, hypothesis-driven research means.
- You are senior faculty if you occasionally think that maybe you should attend a faculty meeting once in a while.
- You are senior faculty when your CV includes papers you can't remember writing.