Dr. Shellie

"Surely you can’t be a full professor?" asked the man on the airplane.

I don’t think he was referring to the formal academic rank. I think (as FSP has talked about before), he was wondering whether I was a "real" professor.

I am still wondering whether to wear suits to work. Or on the airplane.

In a way, it doesn’t matter: the students I teach know that I give them their grades. The PhD students I advise know that I run the lab. Random men on the airplane? Not really a problem.

And yet: it hits me, over and over again, that our society has a hard time believing that 30-something women can be professors. Why am I asked if I am a student every day? Some of my friends claim I look young. I don’t think so. Whenever I ask someone to guess my age, they get it just right (plus or minus two years). I think it just doesn’t occur to anyone that someone who looks like me could be a professor. And when I do wear a suit, I get mistaken for an admissions officer (yes, that too happened on an airplane). 

My brain is whirring 10x too fast.

Computers for lab are half purchased. The newly installed power strips have misplaced plugs. A student whose sibling died in the World Trade Center will miss class on Sept. 11 for a memorial. I saw a large group of clarinet players standing in a circle practicing for marching band try-outs. Multimedia-equipped rooms seem more convenient than lugging around your own projector, but why couldn’t I find any focusing knob? Was there really a campus-wide decision to take away focus control from the end user? Grilled fish tacos are really pretty good. My student, newly arrived from China, has already had his bike stolen. A large group of girls in dresses and sunglasses were standing outside the nearby sorority early on Monday morning, doing something for rush. Like the clarinetists, I was taken aback by their numbers. I lectured my class today on why they should not ask me whether taking my class will raise their GPA. BestBuy is an electronics emporium, a land of plenty in which $100+ objects beckon from their tidily arranged shelves. I tried hot yoga at the gym. Or was it simply yoga in a room with too many people for the air conditioning system?

And there you have it. The type of blog post I thought I would never write: an assortment of random stuff going through my brain.

Tomorrow I am a teaching a class for someone else, who was called away for a family emergency. There are a few spots in the notes where I could not follow his derivation. Will I figure it out before 9:30am tomorrow? Will I write the offending steps on the board with a poker face, betraying no sign of doubt? Or will I cleverly shift the burden of understanding onto the students, by indicating that the missing parts of the derivation will provide them with an interesting challenge for next class?

When I go to sleep with unresolved thoughts, I dream strange dreams. Will I dream them all year long?

Two years ago I was in the office of a former classmate who had started his position as an assistant professor. He had ICal open on his laptop. Every single available block of time was filled, usually in half hour or hour chunks.

Within 2 1/2 weeks, this has happened to my calendar.

Would you like to have lunch next week? Sorry, all slots are taken.

Would you like to discuss potential research projects? I can meet next Friday at 4pm.