It’s been a productive summer for me and I am looking forward to the start of the new semester. Like every semester, it brings with it new opportunities, new challenges and, of course, new students. I’m raring to go and can’t wait to get things underway as CEFAM begins its Orientation program tomorrow and classes get going on Monday.

While this blog was on hiatus over the summer this should not suggest that the job of being a professor was also completely on hold. While I did enjoy a few weeks away from my desk, I also kept up with the steady stream of new work emerging in my field and managed to see a couple of publishing projects come to fruition.

The first major project that was green lit over the summer break was a peer reviewed article I had been working on since early in 2013. Though not an IR piece, the article (‘A Challenging Model: CEFAM’s Transatlantic BBA’) certainly spent time considering the impacts of a proposed free trade agreement between the US and the EU on higher education in France, specifically the model we employ here at CEFAM. After passing through various stages of review and resubmission, I was happy to learn that it will be published in the forthcoming issue of the Journal of International Education in Business.

The second major project is one that has been cooking for the last couple of years. A colleague of mine at the Goethe University, Sergiu Gherghina, had invited me to write a chapter on populism in Australian politics for a book he was compiling for the Romanian market. The book was published to good reviews and Sergiu found sufficient interest to justify an English language edition. That book was recently released as Contemporary Populism and we are hopeful that it will enjoy the same sort of success that it did in the original Romanian edition, if now appealing to a somewhat wider readership.

Outside of these two longer term projects, I also managed to get a few smaller pieces completed. I have a couple of book reviews in line to be published with my take on Asian Security and the Rise of China: International Relations in an Age of Volatility due soon in the Central European University Political Science Journal and my review of The Bush Leadership, the Power of Ideas, and the War on Terror due out in the Central European Journal of International and Security Studies. I also dashed off an e-Contribution to the CEJISS on Francois Hollande’s defence cuts here in France, something that, in my opinion, should have the locals more worried than they seem to be.

Yet for this flurry of publishing, it’s still been a pretty relaxing summer for me. Teaching, researching and administering at a university is a stressful job at the best of times so having a few weeks away from the computer, away from the students and away from the day to day stresses of an office has been wonderful. With my role at CEFAM evolving a little more in the coming academic year (more about this and its implications for teaching and learning next week) I’m determined to try and maintain this less stressful environment even after returning to work.

Here are a few things I have come up with so far to help me do that:

• No more answering work email from home. Sure: there is going to be the odd very important email to get to but most things can probably wait until 8am the next morning.
• Arriving and leaving work at reasonable times. The mornings of arriving at 6am or 7am and leaving at 8pm or later are done for now. Most people on campus are contracted for a 35 hour week so I am setting myself up to work no more than 40 hours so as to maintain a work life balance.
• Planning my grading well in advance. One thing that really eats up a professor’s time is grading and, more often than not, it is something put aside until after work. Those hours of grading each night are the sort of thing that eats into family and recreation time so, this year, I’ve blocked off regular grading time in my calendar to get it all done during the day.
• Making time for exercise. I’ve found over the last couple of years that the first thing that work squeezes out of my day is time to keep fit and enjoy some exercise. I’m hoping to make time to keep active and enjoy the outdoors this year.

Achieving and maintaining a work-life balance is as important for a professor as for any other worker. With the students arriving early tomorrow morning and classes set to go from Monday morning, I’ll be doing my best to keep things calm and stress under control as we move into the Fall.

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Read more from Dylan Kissane in his e-IR blog Political Business

Further Reading on E-International Relations

• Teaching and Publishing in Cambridge and Moscow
• Publishing from the PhD: Reflections on My First Experience of Peer Review
• The Namelessness of Lives: What’s Not in a Name?
• Opinion – Why COVID-19 Will Not Be ‘Good’ for the Environment
• Opinion – Denmark’s Procurement of Israeli Guns Has Not Been a Smooth Ride
• Buddhists Do Not Want Space Junk to Fall on Your Head