Like all good academics, I bristle at the not-infrequent suggestion, from innocent but insufficiently browbeaten friends and family, that I “take summer off”. In point of fact I am simply not paid for the months between the spring and fall semesters when I’m not teaching, which is the case for many university faculty in the U.S. But then also, free from the constraints of teaching, the summer months are the one long window each year when I can concentrate on everything else I need to do to advance an academic research career: writing up and publishing results, applying for new grant funding, advancing projects to the point that other members of the lab can pick them up when the fall semester starts and I disappear under a new wave of student emails and grading.
Forget New Year’s resolutions. For those of us on the academic schedule, the time to make ambitious and possibly Quixotic plans is now, when the summer months stretch ahead in their full, pure possibility. Of course the list of summer plans has to shrink once it’s subject to actual time constraints. But it’s nice to inventory what could be done, to name the possibilities and maybe learn from the ones that never materialize.
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