Renewal Trauma

That's a lot of printing. Today I went through an entire ream of paper. I got a warning on both the color and black ink cartridges (and the black was new yesterday). What am I doing? I am preparing to submit my case for review. This review is for promotion from assistant to associate. Seems kind of weird to be head of my option for more than three years now while remaining junior faculty, but I guess that's how it works sometimes.

So, for the last two weeks I've been assembling potential reviewers. I have to give them contact information for 20 Professional or Academic reviewers, 20 current or former students, plus some people from "other units" at the university. Are you out there and I've forgotten you? Send me an email. It turns out to be quite a few names.

On top of that I've been gathering the syllabi and assignments from every class I've ever done. Its interesting to see which classes have changed and which haven't, and its fun to watch as the format of the document changes over time. I feel like they're pretty tight now. I wonder what they will look like if I do this for another six years - or more. Most interesting from my classes is probably Technical Design. It appears to get easier every year at yet still remain too difficult in whatever its new configuration is. The first year I think I did something like 8 projects and 6 homeworks. This year I am down to 4 and 4. Project #3 appears to be cursed, as over the years I have had more different project threes than any other number.

Today I went through my hard drive looking for school service and professional items. I appear to be something of a hard drive packrat, and a well organized one at that. Pages and pages of forms, schedules, drawings, and reports. Printing and printing and printing.

The saddest part about the output is that in the end it will be submitted electronically. So everything I printed today I will have to .pdf sometime in the next 2 weeks. But I need the paper output so I can see the thing to make decisions. In front of me there's quite a bit of .pdf publishing and CD burning. Maybe I'll do an autorun menu for the disk, and labels. It wouldn't be my project unless I were making it bigger.

Next I have to confirm reviewers and figure out to do with the contents of my portfolio. I don't think I want to submit the full sized items this time. But that means scanning a bunch of photos and drawings (and just figuring out what to do with c-sheet and d-sheet drawings). I still have a CV to revise and a personal statement to craft. Yes, there's quite a bit to do.

Kinda fun though.