An Upside to Everything

From May 1 until today, I've been working half-time at Queen's University and half-time at the Royal Military College. Today marks the last day of my employment at Queen's. This fall, or rather next Tuesday (which still seems a season away), I will be full-time at RMC. My duties at RMC are changing from strictly research to research and teaching, and this addition requires a new application process. While I was filling the first forms, the department head said to me, "You're not an employee until you've filled out your bodyweight in forms." That was a couple months ago. He appears to be right. There have been three occasions since then, including today, where I've had to fill out even more forms (and one more before then if you count the electronic submission of my CV and other documents). The process involved traipsing around to at least 5 different locations on the RMC campus, and in some cases more than once. I'm still not done. When I was waiting at security the second time (after seeing the secretary of the math department for the second time), I thought about the stereotypical government [1] inefficiency which was being confirmed before my very eyes, and about the ways in which the process could be made at least marginally more efficient [2].

Moments ago, I turned on my browser, and, courtesy of the Quote of the Day Google Gadget, I read the following quote from Harry Truman

"Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship."

So I guess I should be grateful.

[1] RMC is part of the Department of National Defence, which in turn is, of course, part of the government. It seems to be tied more closely with the federal government than Queen's is to the provincial government.

[2] To be fair to RMC, they've improved things somewhat since I worked there a couple years ago. That time, there were 6 locations that I had to go to instead of 5, and they're closer together now than they were before. Baby steps.

Questions answered, unanswered

I was discussing publishing papers with my supervisor today. There are at least two papers, though he has reservations about both. This prompted a question from me. Part of my reluctance to commit to the world of academics is the worry that I won't be able to come up with anything publication worthy. I know that I'm not alone in this. How will I know when something I've done is ready for publication? How will I even know whether my questions are interesting enough that they would even be worth trying to answer them? On this second question, I feel somewhat validated that papers on ideas and questions that I've come up with on my own have already appeared in the literature. The first question I am less certain about, and this is what I ask my supervisor. It's subjective, he responded.

After his response, I added that it depends on whether my goal is just to get a certain number of papers in print, or whether I could actually be proud to associate myself with the papers that bear my name. This reminded me of a former graduate student from Queen's who had published a large number of papers, about 10 times as many as I have had published or accepted. He gave a presentation on some of the material from these papers at a seminar once. The results weren't very interesting. I said as much to my supervisor, and this was enough for him to be able to identify the student that I was talking about. His opinion was about the same as mine.

He then told me that this student tried to insist that the department hire him for a faculty position straight out of the Ph.D. program. He didn't get hired. In fact, no Queen's Ph.D. graduate, no matter how well qualified, would ever get hired by the department for a full time faculty position without having gone somewhere else first for. It sounds like even a post-doc somewhere else is not enough. This answers another question that a number of people have asked me. Do you think Queen's would hire you? Maybe 10 or 20 years down the road, they would, but the question is clearly being asked about the present. In that case the answer is no (though a number of students have done short post-docs, or limited term teaching positions, but in most cases I don't think this is what the questioners have in mind either).

Cleared for Takeoff

The RMC math department secretary has told me to contact the instructor of the other section of the course that I had been asked to teach earlier. I assume this means I have passed the security clearance.

Job Prospects (short term) (Update)

I spoke with the department head of RMC this morning. He told me that he would hire me to teach the course that I mentioned a couple days ago, pending a security clearance.

Job Prospects (short term)

I spoke with the head of the math department today. It seems very likely that I will be teaching a differential equations and introductory analysis course at RMC in the winter term.