Josiah Hoi's Blog

I recently re-read Radhika Nagpal’s 2013 article in Scientific American, The Awesomest 7-Year Postdoc or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-Track Faculty Life. I read it a couple of years ago when I was just starting out CRNA school, and when a theology degree was just a far-out dream. But now that I’ve graduated from CRNA school, and am in the middle of a theology degree, I thought it would be worthwhile to re-visit Nagpal’s insights.

On the practical side, she offers several pieces of advices that I’ve tried to integrate over the past few years. I have a “feelgood” folder, where I keep things that make me feel good (emails of commendation, encouraging letters, awards, etc.). I also try to have fun now. When I was in CRNA school, I went on trips, took days off from studying, and did my best to come how every night to put Amos to sleep.

Nagpal also detailed three pieces of non-practical advice in this article that have resonated with me:

1. She played the tenure-track game on her own terms. Every day, she reframed her situation by writing down: “This is a 7-year postdoc”.
2. She decided to be a whole person. She set hard limits on her own work, and then worked backwards to figure out what was important in her career as a professor. Sure, she may not be the most well-known professor in computer science, but many of the most well-known people have family lives that suffer.

It’s the non-practical pieces of advice that really made me think. It’s easy for me to put pressure on myself to finish this degree faster, so that I can start the next degree sooner. But reframing the terms of what I’m doing – that I’m studying theology, on a voluntary basis (which will never pay as much as my day job), in order to glorify God and serve the church – reminds me that this is meant to be an enjoyable process.

Favorite Things

Notion – Just got into using Notion again, and I forgot how good it was at database management. I used Notion a good amount from 2019-2021. I picked it up again for vacation planning (going to London/Paris in April). For a while, I was really trying to use Microsoft Loop in order to plan our itinerary. But there are just so many things that Notion does better (databases, custom views, etc.) that makes vacation planning easier. Veronica complains that I make too many itineraries (this is my third, after Google Sheets, Microsoft Loop, and now Notion). I think of experimenting with productivity software and making itineraries as my toxic trait. I know that there are people out there (Reddit, YouTube) who make very pretty Notion pages and use it to organize their whole life. I think of Notion as being very good for certain tasks (vacation planning, project management). But there are other pieces of software that are so much better for things I do, like Microsoft Word (for writing papers) and Zotero (for reference and PDF management).

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