Welcome to the Circus: Balancing the Workload and “Real Life” Throughout Your Career

Continuing an established tradition of organizing a professional interest panel at the annual meeting, the Graduate Student Issues Committee would like to propose a panel for the Tucson meeting on the topic of successfully negotiating those points at which the demands of the academic world intersect with a classicist’s personal life. Past panels have typically focused on more overtly academic issues such as publishing an article or handling the job interview process, but one area of great interest and importance that remains to be addressed is how best to handle those times when the pressing demands of the “Real World” force their way into one’s ongoing academic life. What really are the day-to-day differences between life in graduate school and life during that first year holding a real job? How do you balance the workload of the tenure process with the rest of your life? How do you build and maintain relationships with your colleagues, relationships that have the potential to be personal as well as professional? What about the difficulties posed by romantic relationships with others in the field, including looking for a spousal hire? What does it look like being both a dedicated Classicist as well as a dedicated parent?

These are all questions of obvious importance, yet they are ones that unfortunately are rarely addressed at any real depth. GSIC believes that posing these questions in this kind of professional setting will be of great value to all those who attend but especially to our target audience of graduate students still in this early phase of their careers. The various panel speakers will offer their insights to the questions posed above, sharing their own experiences in attempting to juggle the demands of their personal lives with those of academic life. Speaking from their own different experiences, each speaker will offer advice that can help others avoid potential pitfalls while maintaining a healthy overall perspective that keeps one’s personal and professional goals in view.