Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Why I Should Have Become a Sociologist Rather Than an Economist. . .

It is NEVER the girls that get crushes on me. . .

I just got this email today:

Hey [Blogauthor] ( I hope its alright if I call you [Blogauthor]), or Dr. [Blogauthor's Last Name],
as you can see, this is (Insert smart but awkward student's name) from your 2:15, T,H, class. I was wondering what you are doing with your spare time this afternoon. If your not busy and would like to hang out, I just have a few questions that need clarification. Ive never asked a Professor to do this before, but I enjoy your company regardless. Im also not sure what professors do with their sparetime (busy?,not busy?) well I hope you get this within the next 4 hours and hit me back
thanx

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh, there are probably plenty of girls who have crushes on you. They are just a) not ready to admit to themselves that they can have those feelings for the same gender or, b) too intimidated by you to suggest "hanging out" or, c) oblivious to the fact that professors have lives outside of the classroom.

giddings said...

Thanks Thistles!
Let me clarify to those people who might misconstrue the post. I mainly thought that becoming a professor would allow me to (also) become a mentor to young women -- professionally and personally -- much like a few professors were to me (a shout out to Barbara DiBernard here!). Weirdly, women RARELY make it into my office for ANY reason. I've always assumed it had something to do with the discipline. Or the fact that we're housed in the business college.

Alas.

Anonymous said...

What a weird email. As a female grad student, I rarely ask my female professors to "hang out" because I figure they have more important things to do, like publish lest they perish, or something. Hanging out with me probably isn't as fun as the other things really important professors get to do. Also in our male-dominated field I figure they are already swamped with mentoring requests because there are so few of them relative to the number of female students.

If you want to hang out, you could go pretend to study somewhere public. Then you're obviously not doing anything super-important and people feel like they can approach. That's what I do for the undergrads I teach.

giddings said...

I am mostly just kidding, and don't really want to 'hang out'. . . Although if I had grad students with interesting projects about which we could talk, well that would be a different story altogether!

As an aside, I found out that this particular student also 'asked out' another lesbian professor--one housed in a female-dominated discipline. . .