There are some important periods of the academic year to pay attention to when you work in higher ed. Everyone acknowledges that the busiest times…welcome week, exam week, and closing for the summer… can eat up your time and energy. But it’s equally important to pay attention to the times which are slower-moving, because they sometimes represent “the calm before the storm”
When I worked in Residence Life, I always had a mid-semester slog starting around October. People were settling into routines, events were happening here and there, and my calendar would feel pretty set, with regular committee meetings, 1-on-1 meetings with supervisees, and loads and loads of busy work. It was always around this time, too, when we’d start to see roommate and neighbor conflicts pick up, alcohol poisonings increase, and psychological issues rear their ugly head.
This period between early October and Thanksgiving always felt to me like wading through molasses. When this feeling hits you (and it will, sometime between now and Thanksgiving, I guarantee it!), you may do one of two things…bury yourself in work so that you feel busy and productive, or avoid work like the plague, put off unpleasant tasks as long as you can, and just hope to ride it out until break. Neither of these methods should be mistaken for work/life balance.
Times like these call on you to stop ad pay attention to how you are balancing your priorities. If you don’t, it can be like a slow, smoldering burn, ready to flash into a fireball at any moment, and leave you ashen, grey, or even burnt to a cinder.
So do yourself a favor: Pay attention to how you are spending your time, and find some time for yourself. If you don’t insist on work/life balance, you won’t have any!
What do you do to make it through your mid-semester slog? Share your ideas, questions and thoughts in the comments below.
Sean Cook, Certified Life Purpose & Career Coach
Sean Cook is a certified Life Purpose and Career Coach based in Athens, GA. Before completing his certification from the Life Purpose Institute, he earned his M.Ed. in Counseling and Guidance Services from Clemson University, and spent over 15 years various student affairs roles in higher education. He specializes in working with college students, recent graduates, and higher ed professionals, and acts as publisher for HigherEdCareerCoach.Com and HigherEdLifeCoach.Com. You can listen to his periodic podcast, the Higher Ed Life and Careers Show, at 11 a.m. Eastern on Fridays on BlogTalkRadio.com. Look for his upcoming contribution to SelfGrowth.Com’s new book “101 Great Ways to Enhance Your Career” later this Fall.
In the business world, people talk about leaders endowed with the “vision thing.” These are people who can envision the future for their industry and their company in concrete terms, and explain it in ways that encourage others to buy in to that vision, and focus their efforts around it as well.
Job seekers would do well to follow this example, and spend some time envisioning a clear picture of their career as it will be. With a clear endgame in mind, you can track backwards to those steps you should be taking now, and to recognize the logical next steps when they present themselves.
Do you have a vision for your career? Are you using it to inform your choices now? And will it stand up to the tests of time and experience?
If you don’t, spend some time with your future. Think it through. Let it be real for you, and you’ll see more clearly what you should be doing now, and where it might take you next.
I recently signed up for DimDim’s webinar service and will be offering periodic webinars for higher ed job seekers, college students and their parents. I’ll also be making custom presentations and meetings available to college departments, companies and other groups. A
My first DimDim webinar that is open to the public will be “Mastering the Job Interview” from 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm September 23 (Next Thursday). Tickets go “on sale” tomorrow, Friday September 17. The first 50 tickets will be free, and sales for free tickets will end at 11:55 pm this Sunday. On Monday, (or after the first 50 tickets go, whichever comes first) the remaining seats will go on sale for $10 each.
Please register for the webinar! I’m looking forward to doing it, and getting feedback from those who attend about what I can do to offer more webinars and workshops on topics of interest.
It’s easy these days to get overwhelmed by the continuous stream of information that comes at you through social media, and e-mail. A while back, I discovered a great tool to help cut through some of the noise. It’s called Gist, and it brings your contacts into one place to give you a full view of your network, making it easy to find anyone, anytime. You see email addresses, phone numbers, work details and more, all assembled and updated automatically. You can also directly ask your contacts to provide their latest information by requesting a profile update.
I’ve been using it to help kind of take the pulse of my inbox and social network each morning, so I can prioritize my follow-up. It’s also great for getting some background on people you are meeting with each day. And it can be used in GMail (including hosted Google Apps Mail), Outlook and Lotus Notes, and works on your iPhone or Android phone.
Check it out and you’ll probably agree that Gist helps you stay organized while monitoring your mail, your calendar, and your network.
The last few weeks have been interesting to me. With the exception of August 1999, when I was in-between jobs, I worked on college campuses during the busy back-to-school rush for all of my adult life. So it was weird to not be getting ready for new staff, RA training, and welcome week.
I expected this August to be different, in terms of how busy I would be, but that hasn’t been true. I’ve had a lot of client appointments lately, as some finally found themselves full-swing back into searches that had stalled for a while, and realizations that the grad school applications they’d been thinking about in theory need to find their way to paper (or electronic) form sooner than later. All the sudden, following up on a site redesign, some emerging partnerships, the development of some e-books, seminars and workshops moved from my “get to that soon” list to “Oh, crap, I really have to get in gear with that” list. And I realize that I wasn’t paying attention.
It reminded me a lot of my time on campus, and all that goes into getting ready for a successful year. I wonder now why I expected it to be different. There are so many things that pull at our attention and all too often, we drop the ball, and miss the important details of what is going on around us. Today, I was catching up on Twitter (something that often distracts me, but that oddly, during this time, I have been able to tune out) and I saw this tweet from my friend and coaching buddy Monica Moody.
The link she mentions in her tweet goes to a YouTube video of an interesting psychology experiment about attention. And a reminder that, as Linda Loman pleads in her famous monologue to son Biff in Death of a Salesman, “attention must be paid.” (Video embedded below.)
As you get into full swing of the back-to-college season, and all the stresses that come with it, how are you paying attention? What will you be missing? And how can you keep yourself from missing the “invisible gorilla?”
Please share your thoughts in the comment section.
As the academic year begins this August, approximately 2 million new students will flood campuses in the United States (according to the National Center for Education Statistics), representing about 68% of the nation’s recent high school graduates.
When you work in higher ed, you spend the summer getting ready for this great mass of humanity, their parents, and all their stuff. Each year, the next most-connected generation in history descends upon campus, ready for the mythical wonderland called college…full of challenging classes, enlightened professors, new friends, great parties, and steeped in fine traditions, pomp, circumstance, and loads of fun. The newest, most exciting “best days of their lives.” And they come with almost romanticized visions of college, so we spend our time and efforts on being ready, smoothing out the edges, and making that move-in and arrival period as painless as possible. We concentrate next on getting our student staff trained (whether they’re resident assistants and orientation leaders in brightly colored move-in shirts, or dining hall crew members, desk staff, or teaching assistants, etc.)
It’s easy during busy times like this to forget how important it is to make sure our new professional staff members make the adjustment to campus successfully, as well. We hope for it, and plan for it, but sometimes drop the ball in our planning, because of all the other priorities we’re juggling. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 124,600 postsecondary administrators in the country in 2008.Of course, most of these are not new staff. As experienced professionals, they know the drill, have the routine down pat, and motor along the path of same-old, same-old. Sometimes, right over the new staff, who are still looking for the bathrooms in the building, don’t know the code to the copier, and haven’t received a computer password, not to mention a paycheck yet. It can be a rough adjustment for these new staff, and retention of good staff is always an issue. Sometimes, we burn them out with training and teambuilding before the first student moves in, or the first class bell rings.
This month, we’ll spend some time on the topic of transitions, and to invite some guest bloggers to contribute their thoughts on how we prepare our new staff.
Some possible formats include:
Philosophical pieces (like “how to think about your job,” “what you need to think about,” and “what you need to understand about our organization, field, specialty, etc.”)
Practical Pieces: (give an example of a favorite training activity, a checklist for getting started in a new position, or steps toward creating a positive routine, etc.
Creative pieces (art, video, publications, poetry, readings, etc. What do you share and why do you share it?)
Some combination of the above
If you are interested, please contact me at sean@higheredcareercoach.com and let me know which of the following opportunities interests you, and join the conversation.Guest posters will also be invited to appear on the Higher Ed Life and Careers podcast on BlogTalkRadio.
Monday Morning Quarterback: Guest posts in this category will be “thought” pieces, leaning toward the idea of having a “gameplan” for your training and transition efforts. So I would love to have some philosophical or creative pieces here, but don’t be afraid to be practical.
Tuesday Time-Out: Like the title says, I’d like these to be brief, welcome breaks from the action. This would be a good place to share your ideas on how to welcome staff to the team, build rapport, inspire, and support them through the busy transitional period. This could also be a great place to share your favorite training activities, including icebreakers, teambuilders, or even outlines for your expectation-setting activities and first meetings with new employees.
So, whether you are a higher ed professional, or from some other category entirely, you’re invited to share your thoughts as a guest blogger. Please e-mail me at sean@higheredcareercoach.com this week if you are interested, and check back next week for our first guest column.
Work with Sean. I help higher ed professionals take control of their careers with tailored services including resume and CV development, LinkedIn profile optimization and networking strategy, interview coaching, and one-on-one career guidance.
