2020-1

I wanted to start sharing my yearly academic summary for a long time. This is obviously an overdue blog post as we are already in the third month of the new year, but I wanted to start this tradition and continue in the following years. This past year will be a good base comparison point for me moving forward. I have to mention that I got this idea following Aaron Clauset’s blog. In fact, I am using some of his items directly but created different grouping and added some work/life balance measures.

1. Publications

  • Peer-reviewed papers published: 4
  • Co-authored w/ students: 1 (high school)
  • Book chapters (published or accepted): 0
  • Other publications: 3
  • Papers currently under review: 2
  • Papers near completion: 4
  • Rejections: 0
  • New citations: 103

2. Projects and grant proposals

  • Oldest project I still intend to finish: from 2018
  • Oldest project completed this year: from 2014
  • Fields covered: Modeling and Simulation, Data Science, Computational Social Science
  • Number of new collaborators: 7
  • Oldest collaborator: from 2011
  • External grant proposals submitted (as PI, co-PI, or senior personnel): 6 (totaling $3,296,258)
  • Number on which I was PI: 2
  • Proposals rejected: 2
  • New grants funded: 1
  • Proposals pending: 3
  • New proposals in the works: 2
  • Internal grants received (as PI or co-PI): 1 ($45,000)

3. Service

  • Conferences/workshops (co-)organized: 2
  • Conferences/workshops attended: 2
  • Conference/workshop program committees: 2 new, 6 continuing
  • Journals reviewed first time: 4
  • Total papers reviewed: 4 for journals, 9 for conferences
  • Number of GMU’s graduate program applications reviewed: 92
  • Referee requests declined: don’t know maybe 10
  • Number of grant review panels I sat on: 0
  • Awards received: 1 here

4. Advising

  • Students advised: (6 Ph.D., 0 MS, 2 BS, 4 HS)
  • Students graduated: 2 Ph.D.
  • Thesis/dissertation committees: 6
  • Number of recommendation letters written: 13

5. Teaching

  • Number of courses taught: (1 new, 2 existing)
  • Students enrolled in said courses: 54
  • Average teaching evaluation score: 4.92 / 5

6. Communication
Email

  • Sent: 10 (≈ 13 / day)
  • Received: 12,076 ( ≈ 33 / day)
  • Unread emails now: 7

Slack

  • Workspaces: 4
  • Messages sent: 8844 Homepage
  • Unique visitors: 761 for 6 months
  • Page hits overall: 7970 for 6 months

Twitter

  • Number of accounts: 1
  • Total followers: 312
  • Total following: 253
  • Number of original tweets: 40
  • Number of retweets: 64
  • Number of likes: 900+ based on a sample
  • Most popular tweet: 6 retweets, 17 likes here

7. How I spent my time (ranking from highest to lowest)

  • Teaching (mainly content development)
  • Meetings of all kinds
  • Writing (mainly proposal and paper)
  • Communication (mainly email responses)
  • Content reviewing of all kinds
  • Housekeeping (planning, logging what I did)
  • Brainstorming
  • Technical stuff (coding etc.)

8. Work/life balance (based on Fitbit and Toggl data)

  • Number of weeks that I worked over 40 hours (excluding coffee breaks etc): 9
  • Number of weekends I worked: 45
  • Family travel: 2 (COVID hit us)
  • Number of weeks that I exercised at least 4 days: 26 (mainly walking)
  • Average daily sleep: 5 hours 48 minutes
  • Daily sleep records: 2 hours 1 minute (lowest) - 8 hours 40 minutes (highest)
  • Fraction of times slept after midnight: 0.91
  • Fraction of times slept over 8 hours/day: 0.02 (only 7 days)
  • Month that I slept least on average: January (5 hours 26 minutes/day)
  • Month that I slept most: November (6 hours 11 minutes/day)
  • Number of movies watched: ≈20
  • Number of TV shows watched: 1
  • Non-technical books read: 1
  • Steps this year: 2,812,108 (≈ 7,683/day)
  • Total step distance: 2018.81 miles (average of 5.5/day)