August 18, 2008

Read the book on Female Science Professor!

Female Science Professor is one of my favourite bloggers and has been for a long time. She's now created a blook out of various of her blog postings and made it available on Lulu.com:

Academeology: Random Musings, Strong Opinions & Somewhat Bizarre Anecdotes From An Academic Life

She tells the story:
Part of what I have done with my summer vacation is compile some FSP blog essays into a book-like object. I have long had requests to do something like this, but I have ignored all such requests and suggestions because I didn't think it would be interesting, as in not interesting for me to do and not interesting for anyone else to read. But then my fading short-term memory increasingly made me consult the FSP archives to see what I'd discussed before and what I hadn't, and I got interested in seeing what it would look like if I strung together posts on related topics; e.g. publishing, advising grad students, teaching, being an FSP.

So I started organizing old posts, discarding the ones that I didn't like or that were boring, and putting others together. It was sort of like doing a puzzle, but only sort of because if there were any pieces of the puzzle that didn't fit, I changed them. For example, I added text to make transitions between blog posts and included some entirely new material to help pull the main topics together.

I also made the essays more 'timeless'; e.g., I changed posts that were about something that happened 'today' to something that happened in an unspecified or more general time frame.


I like some of the section headings, which give an idea of the topics under discussion as well as FSP's take-no-prisoners attitude:

  • Acquiring an academic job
  • The Graduate School Experience: Getting In
  • The Graduate School Experience: Professor-Student Relations
  • Speaking of Talks
  • Success, Failure, Ambition, Fame
  • Cruel and Unusual: Faculty Meetings

It looks well worth reading and acquiring for the collection. It should be interesting to see what the catalogue record ends up looking like.

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