Professor for one year (week 25): Dress properly

When you look for advice on how to dress professionally, you always hear: "Dress appropriately," and "You should feel comfortable with what you wear."  OK, the second part is easy: It depends on the season how many pieces you wear, and maybe after Christmas-New-Year-holidays you'll have to adjust your clothes a bit.  But "appropriately"?

When you have a job interview, this is a critical question.  For people in medicine or law it's easy, you wear a suit as a man and a pantsuit or deux-pièces (skirt suit) as a woman.  You want to look like "one of them," you want to look like the other professors.  So what do professors in Computational Linguistics look like?

The old men wearing three-piece suits are retiring these days.

When do you see professors wearing formal clothes?  Maybe on conferences.  Only a few men wear suits regularly, most wear pants and coats, some even wear jeans and pullovers or fleece jackets.  Women wear pants and coats, some even wear jeans and fleece jackets (oh, no gender difference?  OK, some women also wear skirts or dresses, but I'm not into skirts.)  So maybe for very official occasions, I get a bit more formal with pants and a blazer.

But what do you wear on a day-to-day basis?  You won't look overdressed and feel comfortable at the same time, so jeans and fleece jacket would be OK?  But then you make experiences like I did on my first days in Konstanz, people treat you like another student.

How could I show that I'm a bit more mature than my students?  Maybe getting grey hair would help.  But that's not the best option, you simply feel old -- not mature or professional -- discovering the first grey hair in the mirror.  As a man, I could grow a full beard.  But wait, I already had bachelor students with full beard -- so no significant difference again.

I guess I'll have to live with being mistaken for a student from time to time, a deux-pièces simply doesn't go with my EDC -- Kitchensink and Motörizers.

Professor for one year (week 4): Talking to myself via e-mail

Did you ever receive e-mail messages where the sender included themselves in the CC?  Sometimes this address is exactly the same as the sender address (and you are wondering if their mail program would not be able to store sent messages), sometimes it's another address of the sender -- for example someone is writing you from a personal account and set his university account in the CC.

A small-scale non-representative empirical study revealed that most of the people cc-ing a message to themselves are professors.

When I was assigned a university mail account, I added this to my mail reader.  I use Ma Gnus v0.6  in Emacs 24.2.  I received the first messages and answered some.  When I looked at my inbox again, I discovered that I had sent myself some messages!

I tested a bit and it turned out that when answering messages to my university account, a CC to myself was added automatically.  When I answered messages to my private account, no CC to myself was added.  Magical!  My Gnus could distinguish my private from my professorial self.

The solution then was easy: I always use "S W" (wide reply and yank) and then maybe exclude addressees.  It's less error prone than deciding whether to use "R" (reply) or "S W" for every answer and then in most of the cases where you should have pressed the "reply to all"-button will send it to one addressee only.

But then you have to include something like this in your .gnus to prevent talking to yourself:

(setq message-dont-reply-to-names
      (mapconcat 'regexp-quote '("cerstin@mahlow.ch"
                 "cerstin.mahlow@uni-konstanz.de") "\\|"))

Professor for one year (week 3): To make a busy impression

Remember when you were a student and went into your professor's office hour?  He always seemed to be very busy, hardly had time to set down, and your conversation was always interrupted by the phone ringing?  You probably felt uneasy and thought your minor problems would disturbe some very important things going on, if your professor even had to answer calls during dedicated time slots for students.

I have a phone in my office.  Nobody ever calls me. 

I hold office hours once a week, it's a two-hour slot.  Two weeks ago, no student came.  No phone call.

Last week a student came to discuss an idea for his PhD project.  He was in my office for maybe 10 minutes and the phone rang twice.  One call was from a technician asking if this office was indeed my office.  The second call was from the secretary, asking if I was still in my office.  So, nothing really important, but the student started to feel uneasy.  When he left, no other student was waiting and nobody else called me that day or the day after.

So getting phone calls during meetings seems to automatically come with being a professor.  Maybe the calls my professors got when I attend their office hours were similarly important.  And there may be more things coming automatically with being a professor contributing to the "professorial aura."

For students: please don't think you would disturb your professor when you make use of dedicated office hours, he or she reserved that time for you.