A Good Meeting for Once

In my current job (which I'll write more about later), I am overwhelmed with meetings. We have departmental meetings just about every week. Plus regular departmental committee meetings. Plus regular college committee meetings. Plus the meetings after the meetings.

I've come to dread meetings more than just about anything else in life.

But today, I had a good meeting!! I met with a colleague in Liberal Arts (hereafter LAGal) and a colleague in a related discipline in my college (hereafter AllyGuy) to start a writing group. They are both newish to the university like me (2 years here or less) and each of us is feeling the stress of how to tackle a research agenda on a 4/4. So we're hoping a little group motivation and feedback will help.

I met LAGal through students, which is kind of neat. I offered a special topics course in the spring semester for African American studies in my discipline, and she teaches African American studies in her discipline. She's extremely extroverted, so as soon as the students told her about my class she sent me an e-mail invitation for lunch. We've been getting together occasionally ever since. I love chatting with her because she's originally from River City, so she helps me understand some of the weird, not-quite-Southern, dynamics here. At any rate, we've been struggling with understanding the dynamics of our university when it comes to teaching and research, so she recommended that we start a reading/writing group both for productivity and just to share how to navigate this place.

Well, we've been struggling to identify additional group members as many faculty members at our university are 1) not junior faculty, 2) not interested in research or 3) producing research in teams in the math and sciences. But it occurred to me to invite AllyGuy, who I met during another college meeting. In our college, our disciplines are really the only ones with publication expectations--the other disciplines have more flexible expectations for scholarship. So he and I had discussed in the fall how we felt a bit unfairly burdened to produce more than the "normal" amount of research--to carry the publication arm of our college (particularly without any hope for course releases). He has some awesome projects underway, but little time to complete them so he was all for joining our group.

Our first meeting was over lunch, and we spent a lot of time just catching up and getting to know each other. It's good that LAGal is such an extrovert--she makes a conversation about work fun and thoughtful at the same time. I'm excited about finally having colleagues to work with at this job. It's taken the full two years to get to this point, but I'm glad that this has come together. Our plan is to meet this summer and in the fall. Our first assignment is to send an overview of the work we're doing/want to do to each other next week. So it's good for me to have something concrete to work on with an actual deadline again! I'd better get to it....