I’ve been back to work, after taking last week off, although I haven’t yet returned to the office.
Yesterday, I was back in the city, but I spent the day downtown, meeting with instructors (and the bookstore, and a librarian) at Pace University. It went okay, and if nothing else I feel like I’m back in the swing of things asking these kinds of questions. I still don’t love it, particularly walking in somewhere I don’t have an earlier appointment (like the bookstore) and trying to explain the research I’m doing and convincing them to help me with it, but I’m not as nervous about the whole thing as I was at the start of this semester.
I may be again in the spring, or next fall, when I’ve had another several months off from it. But for now, I don’t mind.
Talking with the librarian was interesting, partly because she’s the first who has agreed to meet with me at any school. (It’s often hard just to find the person in charge of a school’s digital collections, which is who we’ve been asked to talk with.) And I had a really constructive meeting with an author who’s book I’m technically not working on anymore, but for whom I did a good chunk of market research.
Today, I was back on Long Island, but out at Dowling College, in Oakdale. It’s maybe not the prettiest campus — not that Pace, necessarily, is either — but it’s right on the Connetquot River and built on the site of one of the Vanderbilts’ former estates. I had some good meetings — they were particularly friendly at the bookstore and in psychology — and while lunch was perfectly terrible and a couple of instructors stood me up, it was not an unproductive day.
I have several more phone calls lined up, including some tomorrow, and I’m still hoping to connect with some of the people who weren’t where they said they’d be today. (Honestly, I understand the people who say no, and the ones who never respond, but the ones who say yes, they’d be happy to meet and then never respond to your follow-ups? What’s that about?)