Biscotti recently commented that she feels senioritis creeping in as she nears her fourth year of graduate school. For me, that familiar feeling returned when I had signed the contract for my first academic job.
Graduate school is about a lot of things, and one of them is surely pleasing others. On the job market, you hope that your efforts in this area pay off in the form of good letters of recommendation (yet another mystery of the market). Apparently, my efforts in previous years warranted letters good enough to get me a job. With that job comes the realization that the length of time it takes me to proofread a paper, run an analysis, or revise a draft for a professor will not affect my future placement.
There are a lot of things that I have to do before next fall, and the completion of my dissertation certainly looms large. I have a feeling, though, that taking a week to proofread a paper, run an analysis, or revise a draft for a professor will not prevent my successful completion. To some, these increasing turnaround times might look like senioritis. To me, they feel like freedom.
Memoirs of a SLACer 