summer work

Instead of teaching this summer, I’ll be pulling project management duties for the smoking cessation grant I’ve been consulting on over in our Medical School. (Haven’t mentioned it explicitly until now because I wanted to make sure things were rolling along nicely before I did.) Our study examines the efficacy of one-to-one mentoring via email in smoking cessation. As the resident digital texts consultant, I’ve been helping the team think about the ways we might present the identities of the mentors, working on the rhetorical construction of various communication templates, and helping decide which technologies will best facilitate virtual intervention. The PI and PM are both smart and fun to work with, and the project is pleasantly challenging. I’m about as much a fan of meetings as the next academic, but I actually look forward to meetings with these folks.
The Project Manager will be on maternity leave for much of the summer, so they’ve asked me to serve in the interim. The duties are similar to the work I did previously in industry: project logistics and data wrangling, with a side of personnel management. It’s been four years now since I needed to show up at an office every day, which means four years since I swore I’d never do it again. But now I find myself intrigued by the whole gig: it’s very different from coursework, and that’ll be a welcome change. I like my colleagues, and there are no shareholders. (Plus, it turns out that the idea of office life is much more palatable when there’s a defined period of employment.)
So that’s 20 hours of my weeks this summer, and the rest goes to exam prep. We’ll be going south in May, and the Farmer’s Market will be in full swing when we get back. We’ll do some research in Madison at some point, and hope for afternoon road trips once in awhile. If the informal acceptance is accurate, then I’ll give a conference paper in July. (More on that when I get an actual letter in my hands.) I’m thinking all of that should be more than enough to keep me out of trouble.