The Professor Is In
by The Professor Is In
The Professor Is In answers all your questions about the academic career. Dr. Karen Kelsky and productivity coach Kel Weinhold, with their trademark combination of candor, humor, and compassion (and a healthy dose of critique), tell you the truth about how the academy works, with strategies for reaching your goals while prioritizing your emotional well being. We go where others don't, breaking down the unspoken rules of academic culture, including all the ways it centers white folks and marginalizes everyone else. Our mission: whether you're in grad school, on the job market, on the tenure track, adjuncting, or deciding to leave the academy and do something else, we are here to support you with insights, advice, and real talk.
Episodes
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3.29: How to Keep Going When You Don't Feel Like It
We continue with vintage – yet evergreen – recordings. It seems like everyone struggles with the desire to quit at times. It’s a natural response to external forces, but you can summon internal forces to manage that impulse. We’re not saying don’t quit! We’re just saying, act deliberately. In…
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Ep 3:27 #LeavingAcademia: The Great Quitting
Academics are bailing in unprecedented numbers, and academia has finally started to notice. Karen was interviewed twice in the past couple weeks–once in Nature, once in the Chronicle — about mass resignations by tenured folks, and the new Professor Is Out community on FB. COVID was the final...
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Ep 3:26 Overcoming Perfectionism
Perfection is the enemy of productivity, but almost all academics struggle with perfectionism. How to resist its siren song? Kel shares her coaching insights from her Unstuck: The Art of Productivity program to give strategies for shutting down the delusion of perfection (which, after all, is not...
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Episode 3:25 Burnout Part II - Academia Has It Bad
One episode wasn’t enough to talk about burnout in the academy. Juxtaposing the WHO definition of burnout with a definition Karen read, that burnout is “investing emotionally in a job and not having that investment returned,” Karen and Kel, along with commenters on the FB Live where this was...
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Ep 3:24 Academic Burnout: What It Is, Where It Comes From
Burnout is on everyone’s mind right now. It’s the end of the academic year, and what an academic year it was. Profs and students both are at the end of their ropes. Kel and Karen talk about the symptoms of burnout, including some that might surprise you, and how to recognize and make peace with […]
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Ep 3:23 Prepping for Next Year's Job Market
You didn’t get the job this year; what to do? Kel and I talk through what makes a competitive record and competitive presentation of that record, so you can know what to prioritize this summer, if an academic job is your priority (and needless to say, it does not have to be). This follows on […]
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Ep 2:22 The Violence of Professionalism
We dig into the definition of “professionalism,” a term thrown around as an arbiter of correct and incorrect behavior in academia. Drawing from insights on a recent Twitter thread, Karen and Kel talk about how professionalism operates as code for the protection of white (male, straight…
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Ep 3:21 Surviving Your New Academic Thing
We did a survey recently and the message loud and clear was: please give us more advice about just… surviving in academia! So today we are talking about managing your transition into your new academic “thing,” whatever it is. We talk about managing your fear and keeping connected to your own…
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Ep 3:20 What Even Is Sick Leave For an Academic?
[Note: Karen and Kel were on vacation in NYC and recording from a hotel room! Please excuse the tinny sound today and next week; it goes back to normal after that!] A tweet went academic-viral recently asking whether academics use sick leave or even know what their sick leave policies are. Short...
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Ep 3:19 Academic Labor Is Labor
We talk about the “capitalist gaze” and how it impacts the creativity of academics. Casting our research outcomes as “products” can be deeply chilling to the imaginative work of scholarship. Research as an assembly line, or as a deli counter (slicing your work into ever thinner slices to maximize...
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Ep 3:18 How Is Academia Like Gardening?
When you think about academia like a garden, the analogy clarifies a lot of things. First off, not every plant can thrive in every spot; also, plants need constant resources in terms of water, fertilizer, sun, and attention. We don’t judge one growing zone over another- they aren’t better or…
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Ep 3:17 Co-Writing As a Productivity Hack
Collaborative writing is a great productivity hack when it works. But how to make it work? In this episode Karen and Kel talk to Dr. Julia Hornberger and Dr. Sarah Hodges, who have maintained a weekly Zoom collaborative writing practice over two continents for the past five years. They explain…
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Ep 3:16 Leaving Academia - All The Cool Kids Are Doing It!
It’s the newest trend! Join the thousands who are saying goodbye (and good riddance?) to the academic career! If you spend any time on Twitter, you know that lately, it seems to be packed with academics loudly and honestly pretty happily announcing their departure from academia. So much so that…
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Ep 3:15 Managing Rejection
Karen and Kel talk about coping with rejection, moving beyond the typical advice to “take a break, come back to it later, etc. etc.” (which is good as far as it goes!) to discuss the deeper issues of identity and emotion that rejection triggers. Drawing from an essay by Dr. Gavin Lamb, “4 Reasons...
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Ep. 3:14 Imposter Syndrome
We talk Imposter Syndrome: what it is, why we get it, how to overcome it. We talk about gendered messages, structural racism, and being told you don’t belong; ie: it’s not Imposter Syndrome if they’re always treating you like an imposter. We ask why it so often intensifies precisely when you...
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3:13 Lighting Your Fire
We are back! Thank you for your patience! Kel and I needed to rethink the podcast; basically we love to talk TO people, and after two years wanted to find a way to make the podcast more of a conversation with the community and less just the two of us (with the occasional guest). So, […]
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Ep 3:12 Your Breaking Point
We talk breaking points. Kel suggests to anyone feeling they’ve reached the breaking point at the end of the semester: pause, and appreciate that it’s showing you, you DO have a limit. Sit with that. What’s it mean to hit your limit and really admit it? That is, rather than judging yourself, or...
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Ep. 3:11 "White People, Don't Start That Bullshit!" - Interview with Deja Rollins
Today we are joined by the remarkable Deja Rollins, speaking about performative allyship. Deja, a graduate student in Communications at UIUC, was the standout star of Karen’s TedX event hosted by U of Arkansas Monticello, and we’ve been working on getting her on the podcast for almost a year. In...
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Ep. 3:10 We Don't Go Back, We Go Forward - Interview with Dr. Samira Rajabi
Dr. Samira Rajabi, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at U of Colorado Boulder, joins us for a discussion of navigating ambiguous grief and trauma in the pandemic academy and the rest of life. Drawing from her research for her new book, All My Friends Live in the Computer: Tactical Media…
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Ep 3:9 The Key to Interviews and Grants
The Professor Is In Ep 3:9 The Key to Interviews and Grants Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:32:54 Subscribe Share Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Stitcher RSS Feed Share
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Ep 3:7 Quagmire of Failure
Part three in our three-part series about getting Unstuck. So much of the academic experience is about feelings of failure. It’s central to normally functioning academia (in the sense of job, grant and article rejections), but it’s far more relevant nowadays to the effort to leave the academy.…
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Ep 3:6 Sea of Change
We continue with the three-part examination of getting stuck and unstuck. Last week we talked about the Island of Perfectionism. Today we talk the Sea of Change (next week, we talk the Quagmire of Failure). The individualism of the (American) academy puts all responsibility for struggle on the...
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Ep 3:5 Perfection Is Not Possible
It’s The Great Resignation, and people are departing their shitty jobs in droves. This includes academics, and not just adjuncts. Tenured and tenure track faculty are proactively departing to a degree never before seen. (Find many of them on the Professor Is Out private FB group!) Karen and Kel...
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Ep. 3:4 - Five Reasons Your Work Gets Rejected with Dr. Jane Jones
We are joined by Dr. Jane Jones of UpIn Consulting (@JaneJoanne) to talk about 5 reasons that your article manuscripts might be getting rejected, drawn from Kel and Jane’s Art of the Article program. Here’s the list: 1) not finishing out of fear [of reactions, reviews, etc.]; 2) submitting to the...
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Ep. 3:3 - Play To Your Strengths
What do you do when you get stuck? Kel has found that her coaching clients tend to devolve into a spiral of self-loathing. But that doesn’t work; it’s just not very motivating! So Kel asks: why does the academy tell us we must automatically be good at every single thing we try in the academic...
About this show
The Professor Is In answers all your questions about the academic career. Dr. Karen Kelsky and productivity coach Kel Weinhold, with their trademark combination of candor, humor, and compassion (and a healthy dose of critique), tell you the truth about how the academy works, with strategies for reaching your goals while prioritizing your emotional well being. We go where others don't, breaking down the unspoken rules of academic culture, including all the ways it centers white folks and marginalizes everyone else. Our mission: whether you're in grad school, on the job market, on the tenure track, adjuncting, or deciding to leave the academy and do something else, we are here to support you with insights, advice, and real talk.
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The Professor Is In