John Colton's blog

I haven't written anything on the blog for a while, but I'm still alive! A week ago I had a deadline for my "promotion folder". I'm going up for promotion from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor. As part of that, I have had to create a folder that demonstrates my excellence in all aspects of professorship: teaching, research and service. That includes the various awards I've won, papers I've written, samples of student work, thank you cards, and so forth. Took a lot of work, but I met the deadline.

Since then, I've been catching up on things that didn't get top priority while I was working on the promotion folder. This week I've also got a conference in Madison on Friday, as part of the "Wisconsin Teaching Fellows" program, and a talk that I'm giving for their solid state physics group as long as I'm in town. So there's preparation for that as well. To top things off, I finally heard back the the reviewers on a paper I submitted for publication a couple of months ago in Physical Review B. The reviews were mixed-- one reviewer thought it should be accepted, and one thought it shouldn't because it wasn't "novel enough results" for that journal. So, in my "copious spare time", I've got to write a response to the reviewers' comments and try to convince the second reviewer and/or the editor that it really does contain especially novel results.

So, those are the work-related things I've been working on!