I don't have that much experience in this career (I'm assistant professor since 2005 only), but my experience, June is the month where stuff get calmer and where you have the time to fight all that backlog that accumulated during the year. Then, July is the month where you launch new ideas, work on exciting because completely new ideas, the stuff that you will struggle continuing when the teaching year craziness starts again in September.

This year, it didn't went that well. I was still completely hectic in June, and even in July so far.

I just come back from more than 10 days of traveling. In this schizophrenic job, the Teacher I took a large part during that time since I spent more than one week in admission juries for my school. I interviewed almost 100 students (out of the +700 interviewed students in total) willing to integrate our school. My job was to detect the bad elements to make sure that they won't get in there, and also to detect the good elements and then try to convince them that our school, although not as famous as numerous other ones, is a very good choice for them. That's an exhausting job, with more than twelve 20-minutes-long interviews some days. I planed to fight the backlog on evenings, in particular some code around GRAS and a paper around JLM. But didn't manage to do anything useful on nights.

At least, the students were more numerous, seemed more interested in our school and were all in all better than last year. I think that our little school is rising, which is very appreciated. I'll now have to initiate them properly to the art of programming next year, so that my colleagues can indeed change them into IT engineers that can both have a manager or a technical role in the team, depending on the needs and their willings. More important to me, I hope that this recruitment will lead to much less students stuck by the end of the year because of failed exams. Student failures are teacher failures. Either at the recruitment step, or at any other teaching steps...

But the Researcher I also had his share during 2 days where I visited friends in Lyon. We discussed of the progress of our projects and how to move further, faster, larger and other Draft Punk-like adjectives. We also spend one day in CERN to visit potential SimGrid users to see what's missing in the tool to fit their needs. Unfortunately, all this is not advanced enough to allow me to speak about it on a public blog. Let's just say that it was very fruitful, and that in 48 hours of traveling and meetings, I earned about 6 months of TODO items.

On a logistical point of view, I established my settlings with a rather big packing in Paris suburb where the admission juries took place. From here, I toke a very small packing to go to Lyon. And from there, I left for the day to CERN in Swiss. It was a bit like these people trying to climb a mountain and establishing several settlements on the path to succeed. I admit, they don't do the last path in a luxurious car with air conditioner and everything. But they don't have several hours of intense meeting once they arrive either, do they?

So, this year, the academic July month lasted 2 days for me... But when will the June month happen? It's simply impossible that I jump in the September craziness with all that backlog if I want to survive. For example, I have about 10,000 mails in my inbox right now, amongst which one fourth is not read. I managed to kill a bit of that backlog during the train travels, in particular with regard to all that commits that land into the SimGrid svn these days. I reviewed a lot of them, but not all yet.

So, I'm in the process of pushing further my vacations this year too. I planned to leave on July 23, but it seems that Armelle and the kids will come back on August 5. even before I manage to leave.

I sometimes plainly hate that job.