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)