“Are you looking forward to being off for the summer?”

What faculty do during “breaks”

Photo of Mark VanLandingham

Mark J. VanLandingham, Ph.D.

Often my family and friends will ask me this time of year if I’m getting excited about the summer, since I will be “off.” Honestly, I do really look forward to the summers in New Orleans, but not for the reasons some people may think. Call me crazy, but I look forward to the weather (I love the heat!!  :- ) ), but mostly I look forward to the daily fire hose of incoming emails and meeting and lecture obligations coming to a halt, or at least slowing to a trickle. The reason why is that this allows me to turn to some of my most important work.

Much of my most important – and rewarding - work involves teaching and advising students. This is the principal reason why I work at a university and not in a research institute or in the private sector, and this is the reason why I and other faculty are willing to forego a substantially higher salary to do so. It is an honor and a privilege to train and mentor the next generation of public health practitioners and researchers, and I feel very lucky to have had the good fortune to spend most of my career pursuing this passion. Most of my faculty colleagues feel the same way.

But at a major research university like Tulane and a top school of public health like the SPHTM, another important set of tasks that faculty pursue involves research. Planning research activities, collecting data, analyzing these data, preparing and submitting scientific manuscripts, and competing for research grants all require large blocks of uninterrupted time, and such blocks become available principally during the summer and during other school “breaks”. Like many of the school’s students, many faculty will be jetting off to their research sites immediately after graduation to make good use of the several consecutive weeks of the summer intersession to move these research activities forward. Others of us will be hunkering down in a cool place to write. As for me, I have 3 manuscripts I’m itching to get back to and 3 grant proposals that beckon. Two major meetings will allow for a few days of vacation on either side of the work trip, both in places that I love to visit (the D.C. area and the Boston area). By the time Satchmo Fest rolls around (so awesome! So HOT!!!) faculty have begun drifting back in, are wrapping up their summer projects (“where did the summer go?”) and start getting ready to jump back into the other set of activities that make our jobs so rewarding: teaching, mentoring, and advising our students.

It made me smile the other day when one of my especially savvy students came up to me and asked, “whacha gonna be workin’ on this summer Dr. V?”

: )

Mark J. VanLandingham, Ph.D.
Thomas C. Keller Professor
Department of Global Community Health and Behavioral Sciences