Emily

Upfront I’ll admit my ignorance about academic institutions and how they operate, so my comments are made through eyes of a private businessman.

In your comments above, you stated, “My tenure committee isn’t going to want to see me with only 5 studies I have presented twice and then published, they want to see me doing a multitude of studies presented and published.”

It seems to me that the issue may not really be about double-dipping, but may more about “performance requirements”, or expectations.

Would your “double-dipping” question still exist if the expectations were clearly defined as unwavering performance requirements which must be met or you wouldn’t either graduate or be tenured or have a job?

For example, let’s say the “requirement” was clearly defined as: Five unique studies (seems like a lot, but maybe that’s over a 2 year period) must be done and presented and published.

If that “requirement” were met, would the question about whether you went above and beyond that be an issue?

In private business the charge is to get the message out as many times through as many different forms of media to as many people as possible. If there’s overlap there’s even a justification for why that’s a good thing. Same message frequency increases the chance the person hearing it will actually remeber it and take action or put the message to good use.

In any case, keep up the good work!

Your days sound a lot like ours – work, work, work, and then remodeling the house, or running the weedeater, or cleaning out the garage, or any one of a million point three things I need to catch up on.

And yet, I’ve always found the desire to keep work from “defining” us fascinating. In my world of ag communication (to borrow a phrase), my work is my defining characteristic. There is very little I do that doesn’t in some way relate back to our business.

I think some folks struggle with that, particularly if they have a spouse who doesn’t in some way mirror that definition. What I mean to say is that I don’t think I would be as positive about the defining-ness of my profession if my wife weren’t my business partner.

In fact, we often hear friends say something like “I don’t know how you two work together without killing each other…” And boy there are days (when she wants to kill me).

But, all that is not to say that a committed professional cannot have a spouse in a different profession and maintain the appropriate balance of work and play, but that there is a tendency (in my observation), to feel a certain guilt about not having more “me time.”

Boy, I can’t wait until my new kitchen’s done… I’ll get a lot more work done then…

I joined them and made a search for ag related networks and found the one you started.

After reading some of your posts and finding your blog and specifically this article it really intrigued me.

I am in the private industry and I am experiencing the opposite of what you are……

Every year it seems that as the agricultural extension services in the US and in other countries losses funding or changes priorities we in the private sector are doing a lot more educating.

Maybe its the area in which we sell products. We sell micronutirents and other products to all crops all over the world. And every day I spend more and more time educating farmers about plant nutrition.

Its true that I want them to buy my products but we have taken the approach of teaching the farmers the importance of proper nutrition and then they will decide if they or they don’t buy or technologies.

Just wanted to share my experience … I have enjoyed your blog very much.

I remember telling my clients at ADM that if they really didn’t want to deal with me giving them bad advice they could always sign up for an e-adm account and get the information for themselves if they wanted to. But then again, much to my dismay, they would sign up for an account and still keep calling grumpy as ever! haha.

Very good blog Dr. Emily. Keep it up!

Johnny T