Those End of Summer Blues

By Peter Yu, SIOP Blogger

Hopefully everyone has had a fun, productive, and meaningful summer – emphasis on hopefully. Looking back, it’s hard to not wonder about the opportunities we’ve missed during this short respite from the academic year (or Qs 1, 3, and 4 for you applied folk). Summer is ideally a time to break away from our work and focus on play, sprinkled with promises to ourselves that we’ll start revising those drafts, coding those data, and getting back to those e-mails the next chance we get. Unfortunately for me, and I’m sure many others, many of those things haven’t gotten done just quite yet.

As a result of our complacency, these last few weeks of summer are sure to send us into a tailspin to get things done. Remember those syllabi you needed to prepare for your fall classes? That book chapter you were supposed to author? Those article reviews you’re responsible for? And let’s not forget the most menacing tasks of all. You guess it – those SIOP submissions that have deadlines that creep up much more quickly than expected.

In some ways, the tasks that amass during these last weeks of summer are a daunting reminder of how we should buckle down and be a bit more diligent, and hopefully none of us have let anything slip through the cracks or shirked any major responsibilities. However, I implore everyone to take a step back and reflect on what you’ve accomplished this summer – the memories you’ve made and the experiences you’ve had – even if they weren’t so academically or professionally relevant. Importantly, these memories and experiences have influenced us in one way or another, shaping us into the I-O scientists and practitioners we are today, and perhaps we can find ways to incorporate them into our work. 

            Now that the time to reminisce is over – get back to those SIOP submissions!