Shit. I bought some today. I’ll cheers in a minute!
Congrats! My sister is an Associate Prof and had a huge struggle making that step up from Assistant Prof and getting tenure. As Wookie says the academic environment can be a massive nightmare of toxic politics. Hope you’re having a better experience and that you are happy where you are!
Congrats Spider!
Looks like I’ll be picking up every single one of these. Lemondrop hops are one of my favorites.
I wouldn’t say I’ve experienced toxic politics. That could mean that I haven’t been in toxic places, I’m blissfully unaware of toxic politics, or it could also mean that I’ve been the unknowing beneficiary of those politics.
The business PhD market is one of the better job markets out there, so I haven’t faced the pressure that a lot of other social science PhDs have on the job market. For example, I got a tenure track job immediately out of grad school - not because I was particularly exceptional, but because basically everyone coming out of a good program got a tenure track job. That market has gotten much tougher over the last 15-20 years, but it’s still pretty decent (outside COVID times; this year is a disastrous job market).
Getting from untenured assistant professor to associate professor was definitely the biggest deal in the world. But the one nice thing about that process was that it’s very well defined. You get hired as an assistant professor and you know that your contract is temporary. When your penultimate year comes up, you go up for tenure and you’re either promoted or you’re fired. Going from tenured associate to tenured full is much more opaque. There’s no defined timeline and the expectations for what you need are much more ambiguous than they are for the promotion to associate. I kind of had my own internal criteria and when those criteria were met, I basically went to my chair and said, “I think I’m ready to go up for full.” And he was like, “Let me canvas the other full professors to see what they think.” Very, very strange process.
And ultimately, even though I was very concerned and sometimes stressed about it going through, the promotion means very very little. I already had tenure, so that doesn’t change. I already had a bunch of service obligations, so that doesn’t change. I get a very small bump in pay, which is nice. I’m also eligible to be department chair now, which is absolutely terrible and something I don’t want at all. The real benefit is psychological - I finally get to feel like I’m a real boy.
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I was commenting about the toxicity of the job market, not internal politics once hired to a tenure track position. There’s such a glut of PhDs, certainly in the biological sciences but also in other fields where I have less experience, that most job openings are for non-tenure-track, and of those, most people in those roles are on some sort of public assistance. And these are our best and brightest people! It’s incredibly difficult to get a decent academic job in the first place, and grad students don’t really hear enough about how great industry can be for a PhD and thus consider it what you do after failing rather than what you planned to do in the first place.
Epic Brewing makes Big Bad Baptist, which I’ve historically viewed as an excellent, widely-available, and inexpensive barrel-aged coffee stout. Now comes in cans!
But they’ve also, in the last few years, started pumping out a bunch of adjunct-laden versions. I am induced every year to buy one or more, and I’m almost universally disappointed. This one is too thin, doesn’t have that awesome cinnamon flavor that the original had, and kind of tastes like a dirty ashtray:
Fix this shit, Epic
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Never cheered this. Hold up. I was beyond wanting a heavy beer by the time it got around to opening it.
I love it when I see a hazy with that color and lack of clarity.
An old co-worker of mine called me today and we were reminiscing about how we had a kegarator in our office with rotating hazys from local SD breweries, and then the bar across the street, the bartender would basically take requests from us and put a new hazy on tap every other week. And then comp most of our bill. That was 2 years ago. Felt like forever though.
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That is the absolute perfect looking beer to me. A beautiful haze without the murk.
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Absolutely insane you were pouring BCBS at the end of a work day lol.
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The boss of my boss flew in from corporate to visit. And he knew we had a kegarator and didn’t care because our office was killing it and outselling every other office in the company. We put a new keg in on Monday. Big boss shows up on Wednesday. My boss picks him up from the airport, arrives at the office and since it’s 3pm it’s beer time, ofc. We’re like, we just got a new keg a couple of days ago! We’ll pour you one. Half way through pouring the first glass, the keg was killed. He’s like, I thought you said you just got the keg. Ummmmmmm, maybe we got it last week, it’s been busy, time flys. Let’s go to the bar across the street.
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The AOC - a spicy mocha stout in honor of her Twitter dunks
The Biden - a light beer that really sucks after you see all the other options, but is a lot better than the shitty alternative you’ve had for the past 4 years
The Democratic Legislation - It could have been good, but everyone just kept insisting on watering it down
The About Unstuck - Bitter as fuck and just about everyone hates it, but fpr some reason it’s really popular with a small segment of the population who won’t shut up about it
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I love Dogfish 60 but Dogfish 90 tastes like crap
Why did you ever leave this job?
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Not that your post has all that much to do with it, but this story did make me think of my wedding, where we did a lot of DIY on the booze. My brother brewed the beer, an IPA, and what he called a “tripel-dubbel,” a Belgian-inspired brew that he first made in advance of March Maddness. What your post reminded me of was the contraption he borrowed for the IPA, which has a name I don’t recall, but that is basically a pool filter stuffed with fresh hops in the middle of the line en route to the tap so that the beer gets bathed in fresh hops on the way to your glass. Lower tech, but I would argue more delicious.
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But just think about how high their STONKS could have gone if you stayed!
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