Prof. Kristin Stephens-Martinez

When I became an associate professor of the practice, I said yes to almost everything because I thought that was what I was supposed to do. That led to an unsustainable workload that I wrote about here . [ Also posted on Medium. ] In this post, I share a framework I’m developing to help me decide whether to say “yes” to a service request, with the goal of thinking more strategically rather than reactively. I’m writing this for anyone who feels like they are spending too much time on service or feeling overwhelmed by it all. I’m also writing it for current and future me as I navigate these requests. Understand why you have too much service Before using a strategy to better handle service requests, we must know thyself! Use the Five Whys to dig deeper In some ways, the answer to this question seems obvious, because you keep saying “yes.” But we need to dig deeper by using the Five Whys from design thinking. The Five Whys is an iterative process for exploring the causes and effects...

I became an Associate Professor of the Practice in January 2024. This means academic year (AY) 24–25 was the first time I had to negotiate the service requests and demands of an associate professor. Now that the academic year is over and I spent the last semester digesting the repercussions of those negotiations, I thought I’d write a blog post about it. My hope is that this blog post can serve as a case study on how workload changes when you become an associate. [ Also posted on Medium. ] First, my experience may not be yours, but I think sharing it would be useful to others. It gives you, my reader, a visceral sense of what could happen. Moreover, this blog post is a way for me to better process what happened. It also provides future me with a snapshot of what that first year was like and helps me better imagine the trade-offs and repercussions of my decisions. So this blog post is unlikely to be for everyone, dear reader. But for some of you, let me provide a bit more of a vivid vis...