Since getting through one of the gates towards defending my dissertation proposal I came up against one of the most grueling and inhumane tasks any student can possibly encounter in their time at an academic institution: scheduling. Sure, sure, you say, there are all sorts of programs to take care of those concerns for you. How hard can it really be? People aren’t THAT busy, are they? I’m sorry to say that scheduling really is a huge problem. People ARE that busy. Not everyone uses magical technology programs to schedule their lives (some people do use paper).
While technology can certainly change things (my thesis defense was partially over the phone) many things really do stay firmly in the physical realm. Part of my task is to find a time when five busy professors are able to meet in the same room, at the same time, for a ninety minute period to evaluate me and my work. They come from three different departments operating on three different internal schedules. This is complex stuff. Lots of things can get lost while trying to decipher whether the times provided are NOT going to work or ARE going to work (and sometimes the same day may use both parameters to describe the time provided). What to turn to?
I had to turn to five highlighters of a different color and a printed out calendar to figure it out. In three weeks of searching we’ve been able to find a single two hour window within which the event can be scheduled. I’m not going to count up how many possible hours that would be (five hundred and four) but that’s a very small window in a relatively large period of time. Even the “easy” stuff can be hard if you don’t think about it. My focus was on the work I needed to do, not the scheduling I needed to set up before the semester ended. What are the time-sensitive, non-obvious things you need to be working on to make sure that your presentation or paper or speech is going to work properly by the end of the semester. Start now! The future you will be grateful.