The summer period can be particularly stressful for academics, whether it's because you miss the structure of "normal" term or because you don't feel like you even GET a summer any more. This is the first in a short series of episodes considering how we can make the summer ours again and enjoy this part of the academic year. Today we're talking about the benefits of combining some "acceptance" with some "resistance" so that this doesn't feel more painful than it needs to!
In this episode I talk about some other episodes of my podcast, including:
Transcript
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode 38 of the PhD Life Coach. Now, I tweeted recently about the academic summer coming up and how it made me feel, and I got tons of replies to it. Lots of people have a lot of thoughts about academic summers, whether you are a PhD student, whether you are a teaching academic, research oriented, academic, whatever it is, this notion of what an academic summer even is and what we end up doing through that time period really stirred up some opinions.
And so I decided that I would do some podcast episodes about it. At first I was planning this as a single podcast, this one, but the more I planned it, the more I realized there is way more to say about academic summers than that.
So this is going to be at least a two-parter, possibly a three parter, we shall see. So what do you mean by the academic summers? Well, certainly in the Northern Hemisphere, our academic years run September through to June, July. Those of you listening in the Southern Hemisphere, this may run out a slightly different way for you, but we're thinking about this upcoming longer holiday where there is much less teaching usually unless you're teaching summer schools and things like that, much less teaching, much less structure.
One of my favorite family memories was that my nanna, whenever it came round to the summer, she would always be like, “Ooh, you must be looking forward to your long holiday, Vikki, must be so nice to get all that time off” and I'm sure you've had similar comments from people who don't understand all the things there are to do during an academic summer. But the fact is that even if it's not time off, the time does change for us, the priorities change, the way it works change.
The challenges that I've had with academic summers have really changed as my career progressed, and I think some of that is a passing of time and a changing of how academia is. But I think some of it is that as you get different roles and responsibilities, different things become difficult.
So when I was a PhD student and early postdoc, even into my early lecturing years, the thing that I found most challenging was this long, unstructured stretch of time. So really I went from having regular meetings, journal clubs, seminars, all this stuff, through till kind of early July and then things didn't start properly again until mid-September.
And so all the way through that period, I lacked a lot of the scaffolding that I usually had. And you may find those to yourself, particularly if you're in the earlier stages of your academic career, still doing your PhD and things like that.
A lot of the things that kept me on track just simply weren't there anymore. And in many ways my brain revelled in it. It was like, “I've got so much time, I'm not going to be taken up with this and that I'm going to be able to get so much done.” I had all these really optimistic plans as to what I would get written, but actually it was really easy to become lethargic and to sort of drift and to procrastinate because you felt like you had lots of time, and so you kind of could. And then suddenly the summer's going through and you are looking at your to-do list and going, “oh God, I haven't done half of this.” And you start having to chuck things off your to-do list, and then you start beating yourself up about that and realizing that actually you're not going to have done all the things you intended to do before the new academic year started after all.
As I progressed further through, it became less of the challenge of a long, unstructured summer and more of a challenge that the current academic year would leach further and further and further into my summer, because you find yourself in involved in exam boards and module and program review and appeals and all these things that sort of eat into the beginning of the academic summer.
Then you also found that next academic year started impacting on the summer too, because you were being asked for next year's timetables and next year's assessments and getting next year's virtual learning environments up and all these different tasks that actually sometimes it can feel like there is no bit of the summer where you're not in either last academic year or this academic year in terms of all your sort of admin and teaching duties.
And this is especially true for any of you who teach summer schools, who get involved in outreach activities through the summer and these sorts of things as well.
So as I progressed through, it became almost the opposite problem that my summers were somewhat more structured than they used to be, but I never got those clear periods of time where I could really crack on with all of those things that I said I was going to do during the summer, that I had every intention of trying to do during the summer.
This really reached a head for me in 2020, as I know it did for lots of people. I was Head of Education of my School, so I was overseeing all the post-grad programs, all the undergraduate programs in my discipline through that time and, Like for a lot of people, it just never really stopped that year.
There was so much to do closing down the 19/20 academic year, and then we were immediately getting ready for the next year. We were trying to do admissions when we didn't have A level results. We were trying to plan for a virtual welcome week, virtual inductions, all of this stuff.
I don't think I took more than four days off that summer. It's the closest to burnout I've ever been, and it really made me say, no, this can't be like this anymore. This is not sustainable. And to really start to question some of the things that I was telling myself that I had to do and that were non-negotiable.
It was so bad it put back on the table so many things that I had been telling myself were just “must dos”. And so that's what this session is really going to be about is thinking, what things do we need to choose to accept in order to remove some of the kind of pain and frustration around what we think the summer should be and what is not, and what things are we going to choose to resist because maybe they're not as necessary, as compulsory as we're telling ourselves they are.
What I learned more than anything is it doesn't have to feel as bad as that. You know, really that's the overarching message of everything I do is that things are tough in the sector. There's nothing wrong with you if you're finding it hard, but we can make decisions about what we focus on and what we tell ourselves that mean that it doesn't have to feel this difficult. That we can reclaim bits of what we want it to be and take ownership over how we feel and how we think during these times.
Before I do though, I want to refer you back to one of my old episodes, because before Christmas I wrote an episode called How to Rest during the Holiday Period. It might surprise you. It might not surprise you to know that it is my least listened to episode. I check all my stats every now and again, how to be your own best supervisor, my first ever episode remains the top one. Highly recommend it. How to Rest Over the holiday period is the least listened to episode of all 37 that I've released so far.
It's a really good episode. I highly recommend that you go back and listen to it but think about it in the context of the summer. So whenever I say Christmas, the winter break, translate that to the summer. In that episode, we talk about the importance of making decisions in advance about what you're going to do. We talk about the when am I going to work? What work am I going to do? Where am I going to work? Who am I doing work? Or who am I going to prioritize? Why am I choosing to work and exactly how I'm going to do it?
And we talk each of those through and how important it is to decide those things in advance so that when you are doing them, you can be in the moment getting the benefit from them rather than telling yourself that you should be doing something else. Because the worst thing about a holiday is if you're not working but you feel like you should be or you are working and you feel like you shouldn't be because then we get the worst of both worlds. We don't get to enjoy the time with our friends and family. We don't get to be productive in the times at work.
So if you haven't listen to that one. It's episode 11. Go back and find it. Just delete out Christmas. Insert summer and think about it for your summer break. For this one though, we are sticking with this idea of acceptance versus resistance, and we'll start with acceptance. Why not?
Where I see an awful lot of pain coming from in myself and in clients that I work with, other people that I speak to is in people who are not accepting what summer is and what summer is now for academics. I see so much pain coming from people saying that it should be different to this. We shouldn't have to do as much for last academic year. We shouldn't have to be preparing as early for next academic year.
This is a really classic example of how thoughts can be true but not helpful. I think all of us would agree. I can't imagine people not agreeing that it has got a bit crazy how the two years now smush together and how little time we get in the middle for rest, recuperation and work that's for our own sort of careers and benefit and that side of things.
However, just because it's true doesn't mean that spending lots of time thinking it helps. If we spend loads of time thinking, “I should have time to write my research. I shouldn't have to do this. This is such a pointless waste of time. Management's taken over, academia shouldn't be like this.” If we spend loads of time thinking those thoughts, we end up feeling frustrated. We end up feeling sad, disappointed that we don't get the summers that we think we should have. We end up inducing all these emotions that don't help us get done, the things we need to get done,don't make us have a summer that we enjoy.
It's not like, because we think all that stuff, we go and write loads of papers and ignore it all. We'll talk more about that in the resistance section in a second, but when we are not accepting the world as it is and we're kind of fighting against it in our heads, but not externally, we just end up making ourselves feel guilty and disappointed and cross.
And so my first step that I would really recommend - and as I say, don't worry, I'm not saying just like do as you’re told, we're going to get to the resistance bit - the first step that I would say is, let's accept that some is less structured. If you're a PhD student, even if you think that seminars should carry on and meetings should carry on, and all that structure should carry on, Let's accept for that for a lot of us, it doesn't. If you're an academic, even if you think that you shouldn't be doing teaching relating activities all the way through to the beginning of August and they're starting up again halfway through August. Even if you think that that shouldn't be like that, it is in most universities.
We can believe that it shouldn't be like that, but spend time thinking different thoughts. So I'm not going to try and coach you out of the thought that it shouldn't be like that. I think we can, we can keep that thought. I mean, you can try to coach yourself out if you want to, reconcile why it's okay the way it is. But sometimes we can just choose to be like, yeah, I believe that it shouldn't be like this, but I also believe that keep banging on about that inside my own head doesn't help me in any way.
Because then what we get to do instead is we get to say, okay, what if that's the circumstance here? That's the facts. This is how it is. Then we get to look at that with curiosity and go, okay, so how can I make this summer closer to what I want it to be?
How can I do less of that and more of this? How can I enjoy the bits of this that I do get to do? How can I prioritize the things that I want to prioritize? Because we are doing it from a place of acceptance that this is how it is. I am going to be getting emails about the structure of teaching and learning outcomes and whatever else, all the way through the summer that I think I should be spending on research.
Okay. That's how it is. Then we get to plan for that. If you're a PhD student who thinks you should get more support during the summer, you are probably right. I mean, your supervisors are exhausted. That's partly why you're not, but you're probably right that in an ideal world, you would get more support during the summer.
But if we start from a place of “okay, but I don't”, then we get to go, okay, how can I solve for that? I value that it doesn't happen. I accept that. So how can I start to structure some of those things myself? How can I put solutions in place that help for me to strive and thrive and enjoy my academic summer? So we get to think about this acceptance.
The other element that a lack of acceptance does is I still hear academics, particularly people who've got permanent teaching jobs, saying, “I'll get that done in the summer. I'll get that done in the summer. Things will calm down after that. I'll get it done then.”
Part of accepting that our summers have changed is accepting you are probably not going to get all those things done. I have left academia with a whole bunch of papers that I never wrote and I'm not going to now. I think some of them have been on my summer to do list for probably 10 years, maybe longer. And every summer it was, “no. This year it's going to be top. This year I'll get it done. This year I'll get it done.”
And there is so much freedom in saying, you know what, I'm probably never going to write that project up. Because then you get to take it off your to-do list so you don't feel so guilty about it. You get to decide, actually, I'll write up a quick and dirty blog about it just so that people know roughly what I did and what I found, won't bother with peer review or anything, let's just get something out there.
You get to make those decisions rather than keep having this delusional to-do list of all these things that you're going to do over the summer that stems from not accepting that the long empty summer is not the long empty summer anymore.
We get to make more realistic plans that are compassionate to us, that take into account the environments that we're working in, whether it's a PhD student or as a senior academic. We get to make decisions based on what's real and what's best for us within that context.
So that's the element to which I think acceptance can be really, really helpful here. I'd also recommend that you check out episode five of my podcast where I talk about how accepting where you are is the first step of getting where you want to be. That goes into this in a lot more detail, and particularly is good for any of you who are struggling with the “I should have done this already” thoughts. Really pervasive thought, you know, I should have done this before. It doesn't help us move forwards because it makes us feel guilty. When we feel guilty, we're much more likely to procrastinate and things like that. So check out that episode too.
The second part of this though, is about resistance. And this is about the idea that accepting things as they are doesn't mean just blindly accepting them and kind of kowing down to what we need to do. Is kowing a bad word? I dunno.
That acceptance doesn't have to mean that we just tolerate everything that our universities throw at us and just do as we are told and give up our hopes and give up what it should be and just, you know, go along with it. That's not what we mean here.
By acceptance, what we mean is accepting the bits we can't change, but also thinking about the bits that we can either change or resist. One of the questions we can ask ourselves when we're deciding, you know, what could I resist, what could I decide that I'm not doing or that I'm not spending much time on, is really starting to make a list of things that you think you must do this summer. And I want you to list out all the things that you think you want to do, all the things that you think you have to do for your job role, all the things that you think other people expect you to do, and really get that massive list out.
And I would really try to work through it and try and identify whether these are things you want to do, that you need to do, that other people say you should do, that you just feel obliged to do and so on.
And we're going to query all of those. Because the truth is there is no universally accepted rule about what you should do during an academic year, during an academic summer.
I'm just starting reading this book “On being unreasonable, breaking the rules and making things better” by Kirsty Sedgman, not very far through yet. I'm going t talk to you about it more when I've read more of it, but one of the things she talks about right at the very beginning is how we all think that our beliefs are about what's reasonable, are entirely sensible, entirely common sense, and that in actual fact, everybody has different views on what's reasonable. It's not as common sense as we think it is.
And if you think about an academic summer, all academics, all PhD students have different perspectives over what are the must-dos over the period of the summer, between the two academic years. And if we can start to really look at our own assumptions of what we think we have to do, through the lens of the fact that other people have completely different perspectives to you on this, then suddenly we can start to query them a little bit and we can start to say, “well, do I have to do that? Maybe I don't have to do that.
Does everybody do that?”
You know, the more I would talk to junior staff when I was a more senior member of staff and they'd say, “oh, I have to do this and I have to do that”, and I'd be like, “I don't do any of those things, or, oh yeah, I did that, but I spent like half an hour on it”. And they were like, you know, I've spent days on that. I thought it was super important. It's like, “oh no, half the staff don't fill it in anyway.”
You get to realize that some of these things that you make assumptions are necessary, are either not necessary or can be banged out really quickly with very little thought because they're not that important anyway.
I've got to acknowledge here that this can vary hugely between your level of precarity. It's much harder if you are a temporary member of staff to say, oh, I'm just going to get this done badly. Similarly, it can sometimes be harder for people, from minority groups to kind of resist things without it being interpreted as a sort of stronger form of resistance. Somehow we allow white, middle aged men to go, “oh no, I don't even do that. I don’t how to do it” and forgive them for it in a way that other groups don't necessarily get forgiven. So take all this within the context that I accept that it's not necessarily as easy as it sounds, but we get to decide which things are we just not going to do or which things are we going to do quickly.
Is it true that you have to review every lecture before next year? No, absolutely not. You can decide you're not going to review any of them, you can decide. One of my colleagues used to have a rolling process where she would review a certain proportion of them every year. So every three to four years, the whole curriculum would get refreshed but she didn't refresh every lecture every year.
Is it true that next semester will be easier if you've got everything up on your virtual learning environment in advance? Possibly, but will next semester be easier if you've had a decent break this summer and you've got done that piece of research or that piece of teaching scholarship that you really wanted to get done and that's important for your career? Yeah, probably that too.
So we get to decide which things we're just going to choose not to do. And remember, get rid of all the all or nothing thinking here. We don't even don't have to think, oh, I'm just not going to do that. We can think I'm going to do that quickly. So, I'm going to roll over my virtual learning environment from next year, get a couple of bits on it. That's enough. I don't have to spend two weeks perfecting it.
We get to resist some of the things that we are being encouraged to do. If you're filling in 14 different forms, it's all got the same information in it. Cut and paste, do it quickly. Don't, I've said, think I've said in a previous episode, don't bother to change the fonts if they look scruffy, just get it done. Hand it in.
You can also choose to resist the pressure that tells you you have to write up every data set you've got, or the pressure that tells you that you should be publishing X amount per year. You can resist that pressure too. You can decide, you know what, given the management's responsibilities I've got, given the teaching responsibilities I've got, there's one bit of writing I'm going to work on, and I'm going to resist the pressure to be working on more than that.
You can decide which elements of this you are going to resist, and the more of this we can decide in advance, the more of this we can go, you know what, I'm not going to do those things, the easier summer becomes. Because the fact is you're probably not going to do all the things that you are currently saying you must do.
At some point, urgency and acceptance and everything else makes you take them off your to-do list and go, yeah, no, that's not going to happen, isn't it?
How much nicer the summer will be if you decided at the beginning, we are not going to do those things, and that's okay. The only way I got through the pandemic summer was by accepting that that was just what my summer was, and resisting the thoughts that I should be doing something different.
One of the things that over the years really helped me with the resistance stuff, the deciding that it was okay not to do some of the things that I thought I had to do was seeing that, when I handed on roles, so admin roles and things like that, when I handed them onto somebody else., they didn't do all the things I was doing.
They did some things that I wasn't doing. They didn't do other things that I was doing, and the world didn't fall apart, you know, and I saw people get made… thankfully, my department only voluntary redundancies, but I saw people take redundancy and they were absolutely busy with everything that they thought had to be done.
And after they left, some of that stuff didn't get done and it survived. I've seen people unfortunately off on long-term sick and the things they used to do don't get done and the department ticks along. I've left. There was loads of things I thought I had to do that don't get done now and the department's fine.
It ticks along without us. An awful lot of what we tell ourselves is absolutely crucial, is non-negotiable, must be done, and we drive ourselves crazy trying to do it, if we weren't there, it wouldn't get done and the department would carry on. It would be okay.
And that's not to make us feel, I don't want you to take that as meaning that we're utterly unimportant. We get to make our decisions and we get to make our impact. And I have no doubt that I made a big impact while I was in the school for the 20 however many years it was that I was there.
I have no doubt that I did really important things, and I'm proud that I did them. But I also recognize that there was a bunch of stuff that I probably needn't have done. I could have done less. I certainly could have done less in those summers and they would've been just fine. So I really encourage you to start now.
We're at the end of June. We're sort of heading into conference season. We're heading into that summer period. Start now listing out the things that you think you have to do this summer and start deciding which bits of this are you going to accept that this is just what they're paying you for. And which of this are you going to resist?
Which are you going to choose not to do? Which are you going to choose to do a quick and dirty job of and get out the way as quickly as possible? Because ultimately you get to pick and if you are in a position where they're not paying you over the summer, so you are a nine month contracts, which I know are common in the us less so in the uk or if you are a precarious member of staff so you don't have summer contracts, really, really think hard. About what the must dos and what the must dos are and really pick apart which bits you can actively choose not to do.
How do you decide? That's always the question I get and this… I'm going to refer another episode. There's an episode called How to Make Decisions You Love. I would check that one out because a big part of that is deciding what would be my reasons for doing this. And you get to look at your reasons and decide which ones you like best.
So my reasons for doing my principal fellowship application was because I felt that I deserved the recognition. I felt that it would be important for my career progression going forwards. I wanted to because I felt like I would learn a lot from doing it, and so I decided to do it. Other things you might decide that your reason for doing it is because you've been told to. Your reason for doing it is because everybody else says you should, and you get to pick apart whether there are other reasons, because having been told to or everyone else doing it doesn't mean you have to do it.
And it certainly doesn't mean you have to spend that much time on it. Another way to decide is to ask other people how long they spend on things because I think particularly junior members of staff and people who haven't got permanent positions make assumptions about how long other people spend on things.
And so sometimes if you've all been given something you've got to do, you know, you've got to do module review or whatever it is, ask some senior members of staff how much time they spend on it. Because I'm pretty sure, in fact, I know I used to review the, I used to review the reviews. If everyone had to hand them into me and I check them out, there is a massive range of quality and there were people that spent far too much time on it. It's not that I'm saying do a shoddy job. There were people that spent far too much time, too much detail, unnecessary levels of statistics, unnecessarily detailed narratives.
We just needed the key points, and so talking to other people about how they choose what they do over their summers, how do they resist things, how do they not feel guilty or manage their guilt about the things that they're not doing, can also really help you to decide which things are going to be your focus and which things are not.
In next week's episode, we're going to think more about how you can structure your summer to support you through that. So this will be, again, whether you're a PhD student all the way through to senior academic, how can you divide your summer into sections and what are the benefits of doing that and how you can prioritize different elements of yourself during that summer.
If you haven't listened to the podcast about how to do role-based time blocking, that would be another one to have a listen to because we are going to look at a kind of macro version of that over the summer so that we can really create some distinct phases and give ourselves all the benefits that that brings.
So I hope you found today useful. We're going to be thinking about summers for at least another week. Let's start planning them now so that we can get closer to having the summers that we want. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next week.