Journal
Note #155: A semester of firsts (2025.6.10)
We’re not quite done with the semester yet—my last class will be this Thursday afternoon, and then of course I will have grading to do—but we’re close enough that I can start looking back on what has been a very hectic few months. It hasn’t been a bad semester by any stretch of the imagination, but it has been very taxing and draining, and I will not be sad to see the back of it.
Things didn’t start off too auspiciously, what with being hit by a car on campus in late February, just about two weeks before the beginning of the semester. This was a first for me, and hopefully it will also be the last time. There’s no need to go into that in any detail here, as I’ve already done that. I will say that I have been fully recovered for some time now, though, to the point that sometimes I forget that this happened only a few months ago. Occasionally I will see someone for the first time in a while and they will ask me how I’m doing, and it takes me a moment to realize they are asking about the accident. I always assure them that I am doing fine. Between you and me, though, I did get out of the habit of doing my morning stretches and exercises because I was physically unable to do them for some time, but even after I recovered I found it difficult to get back into the habit. My morning stretching/exercise routine is something that I know is good for me, but it is not something I look forward to doing when I wake up. It’s too easy to sleep just a little longer or tell myself that I will exercise tomorrow. I have only recently gotten back into the habit, and it’s going to be a little while before I am back to my old self.
There were other firsts this semester, though, that were a little more positive. In mid-May, I invited a speaker from the US to give a talk to our students. I’ve invited speakers to give talks before, but only from within Korea, which is significantly less complicated. I had no idea how complicated it would be to invite someone from overseas until I got stuck into it. In addition to all the paperwork (and there was a lot of paperwork), I also needed to consider how to advertise the talk, how to organize the talk itself, how to organize other related events, etc. In the end, things went off without a hitch, but I learned a lot in the process that I will be able to apply the next time I do this—and, yes, now that I have done it once, I would like to invite other colleagues from the US to give talks in the future. In fact, Korea is quite popular these days, and I’ve had colleagues ask me when I am going to invite them to give a talk.
Speaking of organizing things, I also helped organize an international conference held at our school just last week. I say “helped” because I wasn’t the only person involved, but as far as interfacing with the association and making sure everything was going smoothly, I took the lead. I’ve been to many international conferences, of course—on four different continents, in fact—but I’d never organized one. It’s amazing how much you take for granted until you’re in charge of things. This was another learning experience, and it would probably have been a disaster without the help of a particularly diligent graduate student, but together we managed to pull it off. To be honest, I’m not in a terrible hurry to do this again anytime soon, but when the time does come, I will have a much better idea of what I am doing.
There were other things I did or experienced for the first time this semester, but that’s enough to go on for now. As stressful as new things can sometimes be, it’s good that my job still involves new experiences; whatever else this semester might have been, it certainly hasn’t been boring. And I would like to think that the job will remain interesting and challenging for as long as I decide to do it. That might sound a little weird, especially since most of us don’t like challenges while we are going through them, but I would hate for things to become routine and boring. That is easier to say now that I am on the other side of most of this semester’s challenges, of course, but I’ve been in jobs where things ended up being routine, and it can be soul-crushing. The body and mind can recover fairly quickly from the stress of challenges; it takes quite a bit longer for the soul to bounce back from being crushed. So I’ll be thankful for the challenges now—and I’ll try to remember this the next time a challenge rolls around.