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.