Posts by Tags

being Canadian in America

“Geez, moving to the States must be hard”

3 minute read

Published:

This is a follow-up from my first post on how I got my teaching-focused job, where I said I’d make a part two on moving to the US as a Canadian… well, after a long while, I finally fleshed out a bit of the stuff!

job market

“How did you get here?”

20 minute read

Published:

This is a post that has been long in the wings: my list of what the heck I did to get to the job I am at now. I’m mostly writing it to keep this perspective fresh in my mind, so that I don’t lose it now that I’m over a year out of that experience. But in case that it hasn’t been impressed upon you from any other post or talk you’ve heard about the job market, dear reader, this is entirely my personal experience and dependent on a fair dose of things completely outside of my own control. So don’t take this as a ‘do this and you’ll get your dream job’, but more as a set of suggestions that worked in one circumstance that you may wish to try.

reflection

Risk in the Classroom

4 minute read

Published:

I wrote this at the end of last semester and forgot to put it up, but I found so much of this still applies (minus the grading, I’m very behind now!). So here it is.

reflections

Document, document, document

3 minute read

Published:

The single most helpful piece of advice I have gotten from the internet has been to document everything that you ever do for your work.

Remote-ness

4 minute read

Published:

I meant to be more frequent with my postings, and… well, that didn’t happen. But I find myself with a fair amount of time while being mostly confined at home, waiting to hear whether the sore throat and sniffles I had were either COVID, strep, or just the common cold (it’s luckily just the cold, what a phrase I never thought I’d be saying). So, a brief reflection on my last couple of days.

Foreign (but not too foreign)

8 minute read

Published:

Despite my being a first-generation immigrant from Asia to North America with my family, I think I have only felt the weight of being a visible minority twice in my life.

First semester reflections

8 minute read

Published:

One thing that I have found about my experience of this pandemic that perhaps isn’t as commonly discussed is the relative discomfort we can have in silence. Perhaps it’s just me (although I don’t think I’m alone in this), but the time I spent with friends, doing extracurriculars, and doing ‘busy work’ on top of doing actual work kept me from actually reflecting on my experience of life. When the pandemic came and took away a lot of those things I would do to fill an empty space, I didn’t want to be in silence. I do think this is just an exaggeration of what I’ve known about myself for a long time: I listen to music when working or commuting because I don’t like sitting quietly. And part of it is that I don’t want to spend time facing things I did not-so-well (or heck, even things I think I did well, because then I notice all the parts that weren’t so good).

teaching

Risk in the Classroom

4 minute read

Published:

I wrote this at the end of last semester and forgot to put it up, but I found so much of this still applies (minus the grading, I’m very behind now!). So here it is.

Document, document, document

3 minute read

Published:

The single most helpful piece of advice I have gotten from the internet has been to document everything that you ever do for your work.

“How did you get here?”

20 minute read

Published:

This is a post that has been long in the wings: my list of what the heck I did to get to the job I am at now. I’m mostly writing it to keep this perspective fresh in my mind, so that I don’t lose it now that I’m over a year out of that experience. But in case that it hasn’t been impressed upon you from any other post or talk you’ve heard about the job market, dear reader, this is entirely my personal experience and dependent on a fair dose of things completely outside of my own control. So don’t take this as a ‘do this and you’ll get your dream job’, but more as a set of suggestions that worked in one circumstance that you may wish to try.