I’m down in Florida this week, first for my mom’s birthday (happy 2^6th!) and then for a talk at Georgia Tech. These are both things that I’m glad that academic life gives me the flexibility to do, but it got me to reflecting on the travel load of academia and I’d like to hear some stories from other folks.
For me, a more appropriate title for this post might be “On the road again…and again, and again”. I still remember Cliff Lampe telling me that GROUP was his 20th trip in 2007, and another professor recommended that being gone once a month was about the right balance–after having a baby.
I don’t travel much by nature, but last year I upped it to see how a bigger travel schedule would feel. It went something like this: Feb. iConference (Toronto), CSCW (Seattle); Mar. NSF (DC); May CHI (Austin); June SoCS Workshop (Ann Arbor); Aug. WikiSym (Linz); Sept. personal; Oct. CSCW PC meeting + Michigan talk (Ann Arbor), NSF (DC), GROUP (Sanibel); Nov. personal (Jacksonville); Dec. personal (Jacksonville, India).
In the end, most things got done well enough, and I liked the travel overall more than I expected. But I felt out of touch with my teaching, with my home, with my research, and with my department:
- I missed seven days of class, and though they were covered well, I always hated when professors went missing when I was a student. I also missed a major bit of grading because one of the trips was unexpected.
- My girlfriend wound up taking care of almost all of the chores and rituals of keeping the home going for 40 days.
- Paper editing and grant writing got wrapped around the travel in ways that made it feel like I wasn’t thinking hard enough, collaborating well enough, and taking good enough care of students.
- It was weird to realize that in 2012 I spent more time with Cliff (now at Michigan) than with Steve Jackson (from Michigan, now three doors down from me).
There are lots of good reasons to travel. It’s great to exchange ideas with people you respect and like, to get the word out about your and your collaborators’ stuff, to bring nectar back to the hive, to bring students to the dance, and to be a contributing member of your disciplinary community beyond one’s own papers. There are nice side benefits about being exposed to new situations and cool (or in the case of Ann Arbor, cold) places.
But the flip side is fear: fear that if you don’t travel you’ll fall behind the cutting edge and your peers; fear that you won’t be visible enough to {attract students|get tenure|find collaborators|be recognized}. Trip-taking can also feel calculated and gamelike, as with the idea of the “tenure tour” mentioned at http://academic-jungle.blogspot.com/2010/09/slightly-scary-tenure-stories.html–especially for someone who is not much of a self-promoter (says the person who just started a blog). And, there are the costs described above.
So at the end of the day, I’m trambivalent, and curious how other people feel about it. I’m also interested in hearing how people minimize the costs and maximize the benefits. I don’t have many strategies; the main one is that, as with this week, I try to multi-task (conference + talk, talk + social visit, conference + vacation day) in order to get more out of each physical trip. I also try to space them out so it doesn’t feel like I’m bungee-ing home. Finally, I try to remember that there are diminishing returns on the trips, and that I’m probably okay once I take a reasonable number–whatever that is.
Nice, thoughtful post. I’ve really cut down travel since the kid was born, and have been reflecting about how it’s different. By cut down, I mean I didn’t travel at all for about 6 months, which is the first time that’s happened in a long time.
I think 1-2 trips per month is about right, but I’ve gotten better at quick trips. The trade off with that is I often don’t get to see much of the places I go to, and they are often cool (it’s not that cold in Ann Arbor dang it) places. Good example is an event I went to a couple of weeks ago. It was in NYC, which is awesome, and I flew in late the night before, and left as soon as it was over.
A goal of mine is to slow that pace down some more, and spend some time enjoying places. I like the travel OK, even though I’m not a good travel size, but I really enjoy the face time with my invisible college and friends in different places. Missing class is tough, but I think the trade off is that the students get secondary access to my experiences and networks that result from that travel.
I think I’m the one who told you that I felt travelling no more than once a month was the right amount. I actually started doing this long before baby – after my first year or two as assistant prof I realized that if I did more than that it just didn’t feel good. Your work from home doesn’t go away, neither do your personal needs, but travel eats up a lot of time and attention. As with most things academia, there’s a balance to be struck between what might be optimal for your career and what makes you personally happy. Different people will find different things work for them – for some the excitement and novelty of travelling frequently may more than make up for the cost in terms of double work load. In general I think the academic life makes it structurally difficult to do a lot of the kind of thinking which is the reason we got into it – and that it is very worthwhile to resist those aspects.
I think about this a lot too. I didn’t travel for about 10 months after I had a baby but now (he’s 3.5) I try to keep it to 5 significant trips per year. It helps to live in Philly where NYC/DC are reasonable day trips.
I think the gut instinct is underrated. If I feel I need to go to an event and that feeling is stronger than the feeling that I need to be at home, I tend to go. Otherwise, I sit it out. That yields 3-4 trips per year, plus the one where I go and then regret it. 🙂 Of course, this month is crazed with data collection happening in three states plus CSCW, so don’t count February… aka, the diet starts tomorrow.
Boy, can I relate.
Add to the set of travel scenario the calculated “job market” tour. I find I must attend certain conferences (some of which are deadly dull) on my own dime because they don’t meet grant travel requirements, but are crucial for publication or the job search. It’s not something I can really afford; for example, the early bird registration for conference later this month was more than my house payment. I also have to forgo some of the conferences that are most exciting and relevant to my work due to expense. I’m seriously disappointed to miss out on WikiSym/OpenSym, but Hong Kong is completely out of the question.
As one of very few researchers in my area, I get several requests a month to serve as an expert for workshops, grant project advisory boards, panels, etc. If they fund the travel, I can consider it, but only if it coincides with my interests and job responsibilities. They often do; I traveled for 10 workshops and invited talks in the first 6 months of my postdoc.
This is all in pursuit of getting a faculty job and having a real-world impact with my research. It should serve those goals, but at no small cost. Generally speaking, I really enjoy traveling, but there’s also a guilt factor with abandoning my husband so often and the carbon footprint of so much travel.
My new rule is actually the one you mention – no more than one trip per month – and I already have half of that quota booked for 2013.
I sometimes think I should travel more, but I would estimate that I take about 5 work trips a year. I hate missing class, even if I could bring stories back, I don’t like to lose the momentum of the classroom and the opportunity to build those relationships. 16 weeks seems long until you use the time in class and outside it to try to forge relationships with your students. That takes time, and I really enjoy spending it in that way.
I’m lucky that on a number of trips my spouse also goes. It’s nice to have that time. And we can try to carve out some time to explore a place together. But we still need and want to spend time with our invisible college, so we’re still balancing work and personal time, just on the road. Do what makes you happy and productive seems like the best thing.
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