How I Am Spending My Sabbatical

The short answer for fall:
10-15 hours/week taking a graduate-level class in Human-Centered Computing
10-15 hours/week doing all the usual stuff (working with students, writing proposals)
10-15 hours/week on meetings, email, GT stuff besides students and proposals
10-15 hours/week more than usual on kids, home, hobbies, exercise, friendships

The longer answer:
I'm on sabbatical this academic year, my 20th as a computer science faculty member at Georgia Tech. Probably because it is a public university, there is no official sabbatical policy, and often other phrases are used to describe it such as "professional leave" or something similar that tries to make clear that the purpose is work-related development, not goofing off. As any academic with an externally funded research program and PhD students knows, there's little chance of goofing off and living to tell the tale. Students are mid-research, grants are mid-run, and new grant proposals must be written. So when I am asked how I am spending my sabbatical, one part of the answer is that I am doing some of the same work I have always done. On the proposal front, that has meant two large proposals ($25M to USAID and $1.5M to NSF) and one small, internal proposal ($25K) since July 2012.

I was determined to use the sabbatical time to do at least some substantially different things both at work and in life. For work, one of my goals was to develop a greater intellectual base for recent work I have been doing under the banner Computing for Good, that is using computing to help solve pressing social problems at home and abroad. Georgia Tech has a highly successful Human-Centered Computing PhD program run out of the School of Interactive Computing. My good friend and colleague Beki Grinter was scheduled to teach HCC1, the first course taken in the fall by the incoming HCC PhD students. She was kind enough to agree to let me participate, if the students ok'd it. They did, though I don't think they realized they were letting in one of those type A students who always wants to have the answer. (Old habits don't die, even when you are 47, apparently!) I am incredibly grateful to Beki and the HCC1 students for allowing me to be part of their community. I felt like I was getting a portion of the liberal arts education that my double engineering undergraduate majors (EE and CS) did not allow. I used what I learned to write that NSF proposal, and I look forward to using more of what I learned for research.

The most depressing part of this accounting is the 10-15 hours/week spent on email, meetings and other GT business. One component of this work involved shepherding an open access policy through faculty town halls and eventually a vote. I had worked on the policy over about two years, and I wasn't about to drop my involvement as we headed down the home stretch. Luckily the policy was approved in late November 2012 -- good for GT and good for my spring sabbatical time.

In a later post, I'll talk about the 10-15 additional hours I've spent on kids, home, hobbies, exercise and friendships.

Time to blog?

It has taken me a long time to decide to have a blog, but now seems like the time to start, and not coincidentally I have some time.

Why now? I am influenced by recent observations about the relative lack of representation of academic women in many of the "extra" activities of our profession, such as blogging or teaching MOOCs or starting companies. One reason for this is obvious: busy people don't have time for extras, and female professors with children are busy.  They aren't the only ones who are busy, of course, but they are busy, especially when their children are young. I know from experience --- my two daughters are now 11 and 14 years old. The decision not to take on extras is personal and makes complete sense as a personal decision. But it does leave an unfortunate void that means the wisdom, experiences, hard and soft knocks are not well communicated to those entering and in the field facing similar challenges and opportunities.

Why do I have time? I am spending the 2012-2013 year on sabbatical leave, the first in my 20 years as a professor. A few years ago I told an Italian professor that I had never taken a leave and he said "shame on you." I had many of the usual reasons -- two career couple and spouse can't leave town, children are happy in their schools and can't leave town, too involved in the university and can't leave my responsibilities to others. But last summer I stepped down after seven years as founding chair of the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech, and I decided that leaving town wasn't necessary for me to get value from a sabbatical. And that turned out to be right. Working from my deck may not be quite as good as working from a town in Italy, but it is still sufficiently different from my office as to let me think differently and spend my time differently. More on that in a later post.

So I will give blogging a try. Let's see how it fits.