Lessons learned from a sabbatical

The third time was the charm.

Lessons learned from a sabbatical The third time was the charm. By Terry McGlynn • 2 Sept 2025 View in browser View in browser

Sabbatical is over. A year ago, I shared that I was heading out on sabbatical. Now I'm back, and I'd like to share some things I learned with you. I'm back deep in the thick of university stuff. My schedule is the most dense and rigid than I've had in a while. This academic year I'm serving as the chair of my university's Academic Senate, which is not a small thing. (Depending on how you count, it's 75% of my workload, and there are a lot of meetings, and believe it or not, these meetings actually are useful and things happen). Because we're at an institutional moment somewhere between instability and crisis, as budgets are a bigger problem than usual and our administrative turnstile is back to its default rotational state. I say this because it's rather head-spinning to jump into this after having a whole year to focus on my own professional development. The whiplash make it clear how fricking good my sabbatical was. What made it so good is that my research is able to advance even as I'm neck deep in the other stuff. This was my third sabbatical, and I think I've finally figured out how to do it right. My first sabbatical was at my first tenure-track job. I had big plans that involved living in Western Australia for the whole time, and learning how to do some new cool science. But instead, I used that sabbatical to move to a new position. The most difficult thing I accomplished in my first sabbatical was finding a good daycare/preschool for my toddler on short notice! My second sabbatical, which was eight years ago, was about me doing some retooling to avoid becoming a fossil. I put in time to learn basic competency in R, to get a book contract and write a book that I'd long been thinking the world needed, and get a backlog of pubs off of my laptop and into the literature. It all kinda sorta happened but the real success of my sabbatical was accomplishing the more vague goal of discovering a new purpose and trajectory for my work. That definitely happened. (In the coming months I'll revisit the R training I gave myself back then.) This time around, notwithstanding a list of things I wanted to do, there was One Thing at the center: I was going to retrain myself and rebuild my laboratory to do entirely new and different science than I was doing before. I had found a thing that I was excited and passionate about, that I think has real consequences for biodiversity, climate resilience, people, and use-inspired design, and I wanted to shift everything around so I could do that thing. And you know what? I have!! It worked! I first got excited about this field of research when I read a paper about it that kinda blew my mind. This work was well out of my skill set and I had no idea where to start. I contacted a few people, read a few more things, but it was just something in the back of my head while I was trying to get everything else done. Then a few years later, while visiting another university, I was introduced to a lab who was doing very similar work and they wanted to meet me because of my expertise in ants. I got excited! I was ready to pursue collaboration! But I never committed enough to even take one real step, because I was doing so many things. A few years passed, and I had the epiphany that if I was going to accomplish everything in the next year that I was hoping or planning to, it would require maybe 10 copies of me, maybe more. So I got drastic and I cut out most things, a lot of which was choosing to not let them occupy my mind. I decided that narrowly focusing on something for a while was the way to go. At the same time, I had the extraordinary fortune of recruiting a postdoc in my lab who had a dissertation chapter involving the very specific thing that I was excited about working on. We build a project together in this direction. By the time she moved on to further her own career, my lab was well positioned for me to head in this new direction on my own. But I needed more instrumentation, more understanding how to use that instrumentation, better understanding of theory, get my head around the new vocabulary, learn how to train others in this work, and get projects rolling. It was like going to grad school all over again in a new subfield. My sabbatical was all about putting myself in the learner's seat, accepting my ignorance, working with the best collaborators who had the patience to help me grow. My sabbatical is over, and wow, I feel like I've genuinely fledged. I haven't told you what this new thing is because, for the purpose of my message here, it doesn't really matter. It could be about me doing anything new. But of course I'll let you in on it. I'm now working on the ecology, evolution, and function of infrared reflectivity of animal surfaces. When animals are exposed to the sun, about half of the heat arrives in near-infrared wavelengths. Some creatures are masters at bouncing away that radiation to prevent from heating up, and some absorb a lot of it and heat up as a result. We still are very much in the discovery phase of this phenomenon. There are a few other folks working in this area (some of whom have welcomed me heartily and been more generous than I could ever have expected), and they're doing exciting work, and there's for us to learn by asking different kinds of questions about this phenomenon. I'm looking at this from the perspective of macroecology, climate resilience, functional morphology, and more. I could go on and on, but I'll spare you. My point is that I started my sabbatical as a person interested in this stuff starting out on some collaborations, but I've emerged from my sabbatical with a suite of the best collaborators, a small lab with talented students working on this stuff, fully instrumented to do this work, and with the capacity to grow further and make a bunch of discoveries. We'll have papers coming out soon enough. My sabbatical wasn't about publishing, it was about building the capacity to get the work done. And I feel capacitated! If you look around on the internets about how other academics handle their sabbaticals, you'll find a bunch of reflections. A lot of them sound like when I was writing about my earlier sabbaticals. They were good, I was refreshed, I got stuff done, etc., but also with an amorphous lamenting that it could have been better, that somehow it wasn't everything it could have been. I'm finding that this is not how I feel this time at all – and I think it's because I wasn't trying to use my sabbatical to extend what I was doing. I was in training to do something entirely new to me. I feel like I just did a whole graduate program in this area. I don't know how my experience may or may not be applicable to the experience of others. I do suspect, just a little bit, that you might find your sabbatical to be more fruitful or productive if you make a point to dive into something entirely new. Let go of the guilt of using sabbatical to try to accomplish all the stuff that you normally don't have the time or energy for. Being able to sleep in or travel or pick up your kids from school everyday or setting your auto-reply to "See you in a 15 months" isn't necessarily a recipe for thriving. It's a pleasure and a privilege to be able to do this, of course. But also, just maybe, if you plan on doing something radically new and different that you're excited about, you're less likely to have that vague feeling of a sabbatical that was mildly squandered? Comment Thanks for being a subscriber of Science for Everyone! Science For Everyone © 2025 – Unsubscribe

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	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more A Guide To Autism And Psychosis Is On Offer! Grab it on kindle for 0.99! David Gray-Hammond Sep 2   READ IN APP   Throughout September, Amazon have made the Kindle edition of A Guide to Autism and Psychosis available for just £0.99. This is an invitation. An invitation to rethink old assumptions. An invitation to hear a story rarely told. If you’ve ever wondered how autism and psychosis intersect, whether because of your own life, the life of someone you love, or the work you do, this book is for you. Get your copy here for £0.99/on Kindle throughout September A Final Thought We live in a world that still treats both autism and psychosis as pathologies to be cured, rather than ways of being that deserve understanding and respect. Every time one of us tells our story, we chip away at that narrative. This book is one such story. I hope you’ll read it, not just for me, but for the many Autistic people whose experiences of psychosis remain invisible. Click Here To Pick up A Guide to Autism and Psychosis on Kindle for £0.99 this September This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Upgrade to paid Buy David A Coffee Invite your friends and earn rewards If you enjoy David Gray-Hammond, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. Invite Friends   Like Comment Restack   © 2025 David Gray-Hammond Unsubscribe

Gaza reimagined as a fantasy beach resort

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	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Trump and Netanyahu - nasty peas in a nasty pod Gaza reimagined as a fantasy beach resort Mark Buckley Sep 2   READ IN APP   So just when we thought Israel's genocide was the final straw in Palestine's tragic story, Donald Trump again exposes his own, and Netanyahu's, degeneracy. Just take a moment to consider the fever dream of these two pathetic, old, unrepentant war criminals, and weep. They want to follow through with their obscene plan to turn Gaza into a beachside resort. They want Palestinians to 'voluntarily' and 'temporarily' re-locate, when of course their choices range from being shot to being starved if they don't agree. There is no place to go. How many more would die on the trip to where? Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria? Mass deportation, and should they own land now, they would be permitted to return to a piece of land of 30 square metres, which is the size of a small bedroom. One small comfort is that it will probably never be done, because it is simply too difficult, and too unpalatable for the rest of the world to tolerate. The plan has been described as insane, and a smokescreen for ethnic cleansing, which is of course another crime against humanity. Like the Nakba, but even bigger. Two million people made homeless, to add to their misery. They have a marketing name for the new territory: "GREAT"; the initials of Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust. Very grandiose, just like the two old sociopaths. Talking about sociopaths, "the proposal was reportedly developed by some of the same Israelis who created and set in motion the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation with financial planning contributed by Boston Consulting Group." The Guardian The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is the outfit which has recently been handling food distribution in Gaza. Their work has led to the deaths of hundreds of men women and children, whose only crime was to queue for food, at a food distribution centre. It is hard not to blame the Americans en masse, for their stupidity and their negligence, in voting for a man without morals, or intelligence, or even common decency. He has the power to stop this immediately, and yet he blithely continues to arm the Israelis, who continue to kill women and children, without a backward glance. The Americans are paying for this humanitarian catastrophe with their taxes. Israel will be shunned for centuries Even without looking at the individuals' personal suffering, the damage to families and communities, to neighbourhoods, to schoolyards, to friendship groups, is beyond comprehension. There is no coming back from this. The damage already inflicted on the entire culture of a people will not wash away. Israel will never be trusted again, while there is a single person on earth who remembers this carnage, this wanton punishment. Israel will never be respected again either, not if it produces hundreds of humanitarian heroes, not if it wakes up and becomes a 'penitent nation'. It has inflicted too much needless pain, and worst of all, it has seemingly enjoyed inflicting it. Even we in Australia, so far away, can see the cruelty and the self-justification. It drips with hypocrisy. This goes beyond punishment, it goes beyond retribution. It is not revenge, it is naked savagery. It is racist, and cowardly. As if the Palestinians are an army. And to suggest that one of the best educated nations on earth (Israel) is prepared to look the other way, shows you how far they have travelled down the road to barbarism. And to add insult to injury, now they want to make money from 'the venture'. What an abomination. This so-called 'war', being waged against civilians, and now the obscene pictures they post of a post-apocalyptic fantasy beach resort. It is extraordinary that Trump, who is desperate to escape the odium of being a pedophile, associated with Jeffrey Epstein, is seemingly content with being associated with, and equally guilty of, the mass murder of children, committed by Netanyahu. There must come a time when these awful men meet their deserved fate, and are held accountable for their monstrous crimes. Ask Bucko’s Substack is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Ask Bucko’s Substack that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments. Pledge your support   Like Comment Restack   © 2025 Mark Buckley 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 Unsubscribe