I was inspired to write this post by one of my fellow classmates who is going through a similar situation. I’m finding Collaborative Curiosity to be a fantastic experience but I just can’t keep up the way I wanted to. Remember how I had all those grandiose plans about taking the course for credit and winding up with my boilerplate funding application? Yeah… that’s not gonna happen. ( ._.)
Well, at least not the way I planned. In short, I took on this intensive, accelerated summer course in the middle of my own schedule, which is on the quarter system. Although I wasn’t taking classes this quarter, I was teaching, working, proposal writing, summer planning, and searching for research funding. In the midst of it all, both my advisor and my boss announced their departures from the university. All this while I’m still trying to recover from multiple physical injuries. Some folks might think this is a lot. As far as I’ve experienced, most of those folks have never been in academia. (#NotAllAcademics)
[insert feelings of severe inadequacy]
It did, however, get me to thinking about a few things, I’d love to see discussed, though…
As I have fallen behind in #CuriousColab, I naturally also fell into pondering about how community and university partners navigate different scheduling arrangements and priorities. Naturally…
https://storify.com/AmandaMichelle/timing-in-cenr
But I learned an awesome thing at the Color of Violence conference this year:
Source: Gerd Leonhard; h/t Anil Dash for creating the term.
So, while I’m not exactly finding joy in falling behind, I’m choosing to take a joyful view of a less-than-desirable situation:
- I don’t have a grade riding on this class.
- The course instructors already provided the latitude to embark on this experience in the way that makes the most sense for me. This means:
- I’ll still get to do the work, even if it’s not on the ‘established’ schedule.
- I can still chat and hangout with the rest of class, as my schedule permits.
- Allowing myself to take the time I need to deal with all the things pulling for my attention means I’ll do a better job of tending to each of those things.
- I don’t have to feel guilty for taking part of my birthday to treat myself to a mani-pedi, instead of doing work all day.
And to be honest, I think this is an important lesson to consider when thinking about CEnR. Sometimes (often, from what I hear), things don’t go ‘according to schedule’. Would you rather try to fight the process and potentially damage a partnership or would you rather work through the kinks in a deliberate, thoughtful manner and come out with something wonderful in the end?
This is not to say that deadlines aren’t important. But as we discussed in last week’s grants hangout, sometimes we have to decide that a certain opportunity is too restrictive for our capacity. There is certainly much joy to be found in the relief that comes being so honest with ourselves.
So this post ended up being as long/longer than what we’ve been assigned for class. There’s gotta be a way to JOMO that, too… I did tag it with ‘reflection4’, since I did talk about some partnership management stuff. Let’s run with it.
