oh, and some fucking douchenozzle interrupted my meeting with my boss in our cube farm asking us to talk elsewhere WHEN WE WERE DISCUSSING SCIENCE AND NOT EVEN TERRIBLY LOUDLY..  jesus fuck i tolerate when all the other jerks in here have tons of conversations about their shit that i don't care about.....just stick in my headphones.

would KILL for some professional development opportunities....grant writing, CV polishing, ANYTHING.  but alas.....the university i'm affiliated with is thousands of miles away in AK, and MBARI wouldn't know professional development if it kicked it in the ass.  not that i would ever be notified of anything here anyways since i'm not an employee....just a "collaborator."  getting ZERO mentoring right now and i'm super fucking mad about it.  i can see why the attrition rate is high between postdocs and faculty positions....

submission for the conference in satan's anus (aka sacramento in june) approved, for a talk thankfully.  it's expensive as fuck, though.  ($590 for registration and the hotel rates are shitty)  bye bye postdoc travel money (i have $2500 i can spend on conference travel or whatever).

was told to apply for the l'oreal-sponsored women in STEM postdoc thing...application is longer than it really needs to be for 1 year of funding.  looking at the women who've received it....i wonder if you have to provide a photo?  any of the awardees could be models...then there's tweed suitcoat and jeans lil ole me.  i can't wear heels and a labcoat on the job....i get steel toed boots and carhartt's and a leatherman.  i'm just wondering if it's even worth it since they're clearly looking for pretty women who do biomedical research (ALL of last year's awardees were in that field).

in which

i put my foot in my mouth in front of the colleague who just reviewed my draft article

i make an ass of myself during my elevator talk roleplay

i am way too fucking loud and boisterous for these folks

basically i am a giant fucking disaster area.  

you find out that some dumbass THREW OUT some samples being kept in their freezer even though said samples DID NOT BELONG TO THEM

the only existing samples from the same site do not span the period of time you need

basically your whole side project is fucked.

um.

i think i'm being courted for a job.  without actually applying for a job.

this is kind of terrifying and exhilarating at the same time.

but mostly now i'm shitting my pants about my talk tomorrow.

i'm aware of a few academics/faculty that follow me, so here goes.

I'm a postdoctoral fellow.  Unfortunately, I'm stationed at an institution that doesn't offer any kind of courses, so I'm limited when it comes to in-house teaching experience that the average postdoc at a university would have access to.  So, I've been checking out the local community college scene (there are MANY near Monterey) for part time adjunct positions in my field (geology/oceanography).

I was a teaching assistant MANY times....and not just the kind the graded papers.  I used to teach the lab section material and then guide the students through it (for the intro courses).  For the upper level labs I taught, I made up my own lab syllabus and lab exercises based on what was necessary for understanding the lecture material.  Two years ago I helped team-teach a mineralogy course and worked a bit on the course syllabus.  However, I've never built an entire course syllabus myself.

So here's my big questions:

How do you make the jump from TA-ing a lab to teaching a full-on syllabus driven course multiple days each week?  If you're coming in as a part-time adjunct for an existing course, does the department usually have something already somewhat put together for a syllabus/course material, or do you have to create this from scratch?

I'm kind of crapping my pants because I really don't have time on top of my research and getting renewed and published to build a syllabus from SCRATCH.  But I know I need more teaching on my CV for future hiring purposes....so it's a bit of a catch 22....