The College Schedule and Working Vacations

One of my favorite things about being a more or less permanent college student is the schedule.  While the rest of my 'real world' friends are counting vacation days and stuck in their offices on a rigid 8-5 schedule, I choose my work days and hours.  I go to work when I want, leave when I want, and if I want to, take a weekday off to do something fun.  I can go on vacation when I want for more or less as long as I feel like it.  It doesn't matter where or when I do my work, just that is gets done by the time it should be done.

Of course, the downside to this schedule is that while I have no set 'days on', I also don't have set 'days off'.  During Christmas break, every weekend, every evening, every vacation, it is necessary to continue making due progress on my research less I appear unproductive.  My laptop comes with me for on almost every trip I take, and I find time to squeeze is progress: a paper read on the airplane here, labs graded in the hotel there.  Just like you need to find the time to have fun, you have to find time to do work while you're having fun.

This can all get stressful, constantly trying to make progress, knowing that you could/should be working during every possible downtime.  I know grad students who work every weekend and every evening.  It makes it hard to relax sometimes knowing that I'm being outworked, knowing that it will still take those students 5 years to graduate, and wondering if that means it'll take me 6, or even 7.  Monotonous days can also get stressful and the Arizona summer heat doesn't help.  It's depressing, 95 degrees already biking in to work at 9am, still 105 out at 7pm biking home.

My office for a week

Hence, the glorious solution that is the working vacation.  I got the idea from my advisor, who peaces out to Italy for a couple months each summer to write grants and papers.
It sounds like a lot of work and she's incredibly busy when she's over there, but if it's work that has to be done, I'm sure I'd rather be in Tuscany than Phoenix too.  Again, for grad students and even professors in the summer, as long as the work gets finished, it doesn't matter where it's done.

So that reason is why a couple weeks ago I spent a week in Vail, Colorado.  While there I prepared two posters for a conference and advanced my research quite a bit.  In the afternoons I'd watch the daily thunderstorm roll through and then I'd go running in the 60 degree temps that followed.  Sure beat the hell out of Phoenix.  I think next summer I'm going back for multiple weeks.

Hike up to here in the morning, read some papers in the afternoon