4.43 How I made an idiot of myself (circa 2011)

I was bored, feeling imperfect, and came up with the idea to share with you some of my idiocies from the depths of my academic career! I was very active on Facebook in the early to mid years of being an academic and apparently had no shame - in today’s episode, I share many statuses that will hopefully make you laugh AND remind you that you don’t need to be sensible or perfect to succeed in academia! 

If you liked this episode, you should check out the opposite end of the scale - how I finished my PhD in just over two years (and why I wouldn’t recommend it).

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I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. Please make sure you subscribe, and I would love it if you could find time to rate, review and tell your friends! You can send them this universal link that will work whatever the podcast app they use. http://pod.link/1650551306?i=1000695434464

I also host a free online community for academics at every level. You can sign up on my website, The PhD Life Coach. com - you'll receive regular emails with helpful tips and access to free online group coaching every single month! Come join and get the support you need.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the PhD Life Coach. And once again, I feel like I've done this a few times recently. Once again, I'm not gonna be talking about what I intended to be talking about. So I think I mentioned on the podcast last week that I've been on holiday. I'm recording this as I get back and I had very organizedly made a list of things that I could talk with you guys about. And for three reasons that I'm gonna tell you now, I've decided I'm not talking about those. I'm talking about something completely different. And those reasons are, number one I've been useless since I got back from holiday. I have been distracted. I have been tired. I have not been using many of the strategies that I talk with you guys about and things. I've been aware that I haven't, and kinda giving myself a little bit of slack, but I, to be honest with you, felt slightly hypocritical coming on here to talk to you in a kind of how to do whatever kind of a way because, frankly, I wasn't really doing it over the last couple of days.

So, that's reason one. Reason two, that that then made me go on and think about is it reminded me that a lot of my members particularly, and a lot of you listeners, tell me things like, "If I can't even get myself to do whatever, how will I ever get myself to do this bigger thing? If I can't even write this abstract, how will I ever finish my PhD? If I can't even get out of bed in the morning, how will I ever have an academic career?" All these things, right?

We have these stories, and I've seen online people talk about their, like, CV of fails where people who've been successful in academia, release lists of all the grants they didn't get, and all the papers that have been rejected, and all the awards they didn't win, and all of that.

And I think that's cool, right? I think it's good to share those sorts of things, but I think it doesn't quite get to that point of, "No, no, Vik, I'm actually an idiot. I actually do really stupid things. You have no idea quite what I waste my time on," that a lot of us have, right? We have this kind of like, "Okay, yeah, it's one thing to fail, but these are still serious hardworking academics."

And I wanted you guys to know that that bit's not necessarily true either. So my members often tell me that they love knowing that I'm sort of in the trenches with them working on some of the same things that they're working on, but they also like to hear occasional stories and whatever from back in the day when I was actually a full-time academic and some of the things that went wrong that you wouldn't necessarily expect of somebody who was at the end, at least, quite a senior academic.

Um, so that's my second reason. I want you guys to know that people who make it in academia, people who have these successful academic jobs, often have a whole load of chaos that you have no idea about. And even if I can't speak for other people, I can at least convince you that I made it to full professor and quite a successful career while having a ridiculous amount of stupidity also happening.

And the third reason is, frankly, I was bored and I thought it was funny. So what I am gonna be talking about today is otherwise known as a bunch of crap that I wrote on Facebook statuses in the years 2011 and 2012, when I think I was a senior lecturer. Not entirely sure. Uh, senior lecturer, certainly a lecturer, that kind of ballpark anyway. So reasonably senior academic.

And the reason I'm able to do this is 'cause I once paid to have these glorious My Social books made, which have all your, um, Facebook statuses in, and I used to be quite prolific 'cause, you know, early 2000s. And I'm gonna read a bunch of them to you with little or no context, and I hope you enjoy.

You can see my pieces of paper, so let's go. I'm going in no particular order at all. January 2011. Woke up ready for her first day back at work. Checked uni website. Noticed it's still official university closed day. Took this as a sign, went back to bed.

Sunday, the 9th of January 2011. Might put a footnote in the encyclopedia chapter that she's writing that if you drop a bottle of Coke in a cafe, don't worry about whether the bottle will break. It won't. Worry more about running away quickly when the fountain of Coke covers most of the people in the queue. I suspect this knowledge will be more useful than anything else I'm writing in this chapter.

February 2011. Changes in office to go training. Vikki returns to office before shower. Student comes into office to book meeting. Vikki books meeting. Student runs away rapidly looking sheepish. Vikki is confused. Vikki sees bra and knickers lying on chair. Vikki once again proves herself to be a disaster. 

Vikki thinks that a meeting with a third year is not a good time to realize that yesterday's knickers are stuck halfway up the leg of her jeans. Seriously, what is the matter with me?

March 2011. Vikki's not entirely sure why when she realized she was still in the office after the building shut, she thought that tiptoeing out of the building would stop the burglar alarm going off. On reflection, running to my car and zooming away before the security arrived was probably not my most mature response either

I'd like to point out that the reason I'm slightly sniggering in between is because I'm only reading you the work-related ones. The personal ones are a whole other level that maybe I should write a book about. Who knows?

Here we go. Another one. This is May 2011. "Vikki thinks that the best way to make a good impression on senior management is to stand outside the open window of their meeting room saying to an injured duck, 'Hello, Mrs. Duck. Have you hurt yourself, or are you feeling a bit sad and poorly?' in a slightly quacky voice. At least that's what I told myself when the operations manager came outside to tell me that they could hear every word I'm saying."

Vikki was right in the middle of the importance of concentration section of her Science of the Olympics lecture to year eight students when she noticed that one of the teachers in the audience was a past and unsuccessful match date. Honestly, I'm a disaster area

Vikki drove to the university occupational development unit this morning on her way to work, took a wrong turn, drove onto the athletics track. How is that even possible?

Ah, so many of these. So many. Uh, Vikki thinks that if you're going to get caught by a bunch of students singing loudly in your car when you wind down the window to swipe onto campus, then the, "I give so much more than I get" line of Michael Buble's classic is probably not the coolest choice on a number of levels

August 2011. Working from home, waiting for Tesco delivery, swearing about late Tesco delivery, realize never finalized Tesco delivery, swearing at myself, going to Tesco, laughing at the irony that we have just released a podcast of me talking about how to survive at university.

September 2011. Vikki's latest, greatest lesson: If you're going to send yourself an email reminding yourself to phone and nag someone in Central University repayments, send it to yourself and not to them.

I hope this is making you feel better about yourselves. I genuinely am

Vikki is stuffing herself with sweets, drinking cheap imitation Red Bull, and panicking wildly. "Term hasn't even fricking started yet. How the hell am I gonna get through till Christmas?"

Vikki remembered yesterday to buy the prize for the winning team of Speed PhD, which is an induction that we used to do. Have now eaten half the prize. Need to buy another prize before tomorrow.

Vikki needs to stop panicking about things I haven't done and spend that time doing some of the things I should have done. If only I'd had a PhD life coach at this stage.

The strap on my boot broke during my lecture today. I can honestly tell you there's nothing more disconcerting than being mid-sentence in front of 150 18-year-olds than suddenly thinking, "What the hell is that coming out of my trousers leg?"

My outreach and training activities have been pretty successful this week. Well, that's if you don't include the 11-year-old who threw up in her headscarf and had to leave my high school lecture, and the post-grad student who snored so loudly during my presentation on project management that I actually cried laughing and couldn't carry on. Other than that, they were great.

They're my selection for 2011. 2012, you'd hope things improved. Things did not improve.

Today has been special even by my standards. Walked into work this morning but realized I didn't have my office keys when I got there. This was made all the more perplexing by the fact that my office keys were attached to my house keys, and I therefore didn't have them either. Then suddenly remembered stopping briefly outside my front door to take my wet, stinky trainers out of the carrier bag that they'd been festering in since I dumped them there yesterday. Got a colleague to drive me back to mine, persuaded a neighbor to let me into the flats, found my keys on the floor outside my front door, and my door unlocked. Nice. To make it even better, on our return to university, my colleague made me a sticker saying, "Vikki, (Muppet.)" I put on the sticker, instantly forgot the sticker, until I was walking over for a meeting with the head of education for the college to discuss my new admin role. Thankfully, on the way, I bumped into another student who had provided the sticker, who said, "So you decided to keep the sticker on?" Yep, that's me, director of quality enhancement for the college and responsible for the educational development of the next generation

Vikki's definition of guilt. Receiving an email letting you know that your PhD student has just submitted a journal article with your name on it when all you've done all night is write drivel all over Facebook.

In other news, I've been weeing in the dark for over a week now because I keep forgetting to buy new bulbs for the bathroom. #Theytrustmewithyourkidseducation

Uh, October 2012. Awesome moment of the day, having to walk into a lecture full of students that I don't know in the theater I taught in yesterday to collect the teaching aid that I left there. Please could I have my shoulder back? I taught anatomy to first years. I haven't even found the post where I lost a skeleton foot in the snow. Thankfully, they weren't real skeletons, but even so, not ideal

Vikki's standing in front of my lecture wondering why the cursor on my PowerPoint isn't working. Realize my hand is on the whiteboard rubber. Marvelous

November 2012. That great feeling when you stay late on a Thursday to finish the really important thing you've been putting off doing. That horrible feeling when you realize on a Friday that you didn't save it properly and you are gonna have to do it again. #tearsintheoffice 

and I'm gonna finish up with one that is still probably something I do, which is, "Vikki thinks a really sensible way to be more efficient at work is to decide to clear out your office, empty all the drawers and shelves, turn your office into complete chaos, then sit around on the internet trying to find a nice small round table that will fit in your office rather than putting away all the piles of crap that are around you."

Now, I hope that, A, I have made you laugh on a Monday morning. I hope I've given you a reminder that you're not the only person that silly things happen to. In fact, I'm gonna take a bet that you probably don't have anywhere near as many silly things happen to you as me. And even if you do, in amongst all of this, I published a lot, I got a lot of grants, I got promoted, people didn't seem to think I was an idiot, or if they did think I was an idiot, it didn't seem to affect any of those things. Usually, the things that happen to us and the things that we maybe lie awake at night worrying about, thinking about whether, you know, we've made a fool of ourselves, people either thought were funny or weren't really thinking about at all, certainly not remembering them the way we do.

And none of them are a sign that you can't do this. So whatever you're feeling embarrassed about at the moment, if it's something comedy, I want you to message me and let me know, okay? If you're not on my newsletter, go to thephdlifecoach.com, click on the bit where it says sign up now.

You can sign up for my newsletter, reply to my email, tell me your stupid stories, if there's anything that's going on that you thought was the most embarrassing thing ever until you heard about me getting caught talking to a duck by my boss. Let me know your stories too, and I hope this just puts your mind to rest a little bit that you don't have to be perfect to be successful in academia.

I will be back to normal business soon. I've got some fun interviews that I'm planning at the moment. I am planning to do some more coaching sessions, so if any of you would like a free coaching session with me in exchange for agreeing for it to be on the podcast, then I would particularly love to hear from you, especially if you have something that you think is relevant to a bunch of students that, that you haven't really heard us talk about before. So do drop me an email if that's you.

I'm also hoping, I need to ask their permission, but I'm hoping to share some success stories from the membership for you as well, just so that you can see how much change is possible when you believe things can change. Thank you so much for listening. I hope I haven't gone too far down in your estimations. I love sharing silly stories. Thank you for listening, and I will see you next week