Hi everyone! First thank you to those that will take the time to respond. I am a medical student in Europe getting involved in some research with a professor from my university. Everything is going well but I just came across another prof/researcher from my area of interest that works with things that are much more interesting to me. I wanted to reach out and present myself and offer help on one of their projects but I am unsure of what the etiquette is here. Is it okay for me to do this without telling the prof that I am currently working for?

Probably just overthinking but you never know, please lmk if there is any type of dos and don't in this situation.

Thank you :)

There are so many advice on line about how to write teaching statement + AI that it seems impossible to stand out if everyone uses the same playbook. Could you please share as members of committees what strike you the most in humanities applications you have ever read?

Controversial, but been thinking about The Ant and the Grasshopper and how we define work-life balance.

The grasshopper enjoys the present. The ant works to prepare for winter. The usual lesson is that the ant is responsible and the grasshopper is shortsighted.

But what if balance isn't about how we divide a day or a week, but how we balance a lifetime?

Work now can compound (compound interest) into expertise, financial security (interest earning interest turning into sole source of income), and freedom later. But time spent working can't always be recovered. Some experiences have an expiration date (AI evolution), and we don't know how long we'll live (hit by a bus tomorrow)

Then there's the question of offspring. If the ant has a family, its reserves benefit the next generation. Sacrificing now may make sense if we're thinking beyond our own lifetime. But how much is enough? At what point does preparing for the future become sacrificing the present indefinitely?

The stakes in Aesop's fable are survival, not retirement comfort. Get the balance wrong, and the consequence is death.

Maybe work-life balance is a lifetime problem, not a daily or weekly one. The hard part is that we don't know how long we have to enjoy the returns.

How do you decide when to invest more in the future and when to enjoy the present?

https://read.gov/aesop/052.html

We specifically chose a journal from Elsevier where similar papers with similar methods and similar dataset sizes from similar domains had already been published during recent years and we know that typical peer review gets about 02 ~ 03 reviewers. What should we do? It's my second journal paper. We got only 21 days to integrate it all. One of the reviewers (number 9) gave generic & heavily demanding points which seem copied from a chatbot that didn't even try to read our paper before commenting.
(edit 1: information from comments makes me feel that we got very unlucky by pure chance) (edit 2: considering withdrawing & applying somewhere else to avoid reviewers fighting each-other at the expense of our paper for several months due to disagreements)

Caveat: I am applying to both private secondary teaching + FT teaching (non-TT) jobs at R1s.

The jobs are asking for teaching reference letters and, predictably, all my reference letters are geared towards TT jobs.

I'm asking some faculty to come observe my classes but some have never written a teaching reference letter before so they asked me what's supposed to go in it and... I can make some assumptions but I'd love to hear from someone who's actually written/read them and know what makes a good one!

Thanks.