Life-Love #2: Tea on my porch at dawn

This morning I woke up very early and made myself a green tea. I stepped outside and sat on a wooden garden bench that I keep on my little porch facing a wooded ravine conservation area. The world was quiet except for the odd passing early-morning commuter rumbling by. I could hear nature awakening around …

Life-Love #1: Guinness and a BLT at the Phoenix

There is nothing quite like the quiet pleasure of a pint of Guinness and a BLT at the Phoenix Grad Pub at McMaster University. I particularly like going there, after a long evening of work, deliciously exhausted, and settle into an hour of the fragrant caramels of the Dublin brew accompanied by the tasty crunch …

How I became an academic: from tenure until the present

During the last month, I have been recounting the story of how I became an academic. In this, the final blog entry in this series, I discuss what it was like settling into the reality of becoming a middle-career academic and learning to savour life a little. During the last two years before tenure, I …

How I became an academic: Building the communication studies program & getting tenure 2001-2006

In this seventh post about how I became an academic I’ll describe how the pre-tenure experience was for me and how I had an unusual time as a young professor, co-founding a brand new program in communication studies. It was quite a ride for young professor in his late twenties and early thirties! The tenure …

How I became an academic: my first day of teaching & September 11, 2001

In the last six posts, I have described, in a somewhat impressionistic fashion my journey from elementary school through to getting hired as an assistant professor at McMaster University. In today’s post I describe my first teaching experiences and how September 11 marked them. The story starts on September 11, 2001, really, but first a …

How I became an academic: Getting hired into the tenure-track at McMaster

In the last five blog posts, I described to you my journey from elementary school to the end of my postdoctoral fellowship among the Mìgmaq and how it all led to me becoming an academic. In this blog post, I will describe how I was hired at McMaster. I got a phone call from my …