17 Telltale Sign You're an Academic Who Needs to Go on Summer Break

by Serafine Dinkel 

1. You’ve started to just close the 40 tabs you always keep open, imagining you will remember them if it’s important. You really won’t. They’re in a better place now, and you’ll never find them again.
2. You look at all the ‘summer reading lists’ your peers put together. Oh, it’ll be great to read them when you don’t have any tasks in the summer. Similarly to other tabs, they exist in your consciousness only for the brief moment you click on the link your colleague shared on Bluesky, that you clicked on while you were scrolling, as you distracted yourself from all the tasks you for some reason thought you’d do in the summer.
3. Foolishly, you’ve sent an official an email. It immediately bounces back informing you they will be back in mid-September.
4. Your preferred working temperature is 21 degrees Celsius, slightly cloudy. There’s a heatwave, and no aircon in sight (that’ll be fun at the conference in Greece. In August.)
5. Your department is handing out ice lollies as part of its cooldown plan. You have three in a row. You’re still really hot, but at least now you’re sweating with a sugar rush.
6. You have considered whether a day trip to the pond in Bois de la Cambre will satisfy that same itch as a southern European beach vacation. You’re reminded that your only option is to risk getting run over by a four-wheeled bicycle in Ostende.
7. Over a (too) long lunch break, a colleague whose partner is a biologist tells you enzymes move faster in the heat. You are not an enzyme.
8. You’ve rearranged your spice cabinet/ bibliography/ post-its from the past three years.
9. You spend a day obsessing over a new strand of research that could be super relevant to you until you realise you’ve already quoted it. Zotero’s memory painfully reminds you the flaws of your own.
10. You have an epiphany. You write it down. You realise you’ve had the same epiphany three months ago, and it’s also really not that relevant.
11. You switch from endnotes to footnotes just to see how long your paper would look in a journal and maybe feel something. The operation crashes Word, and you take it as a sign to vacuum your doormat. 
12. Your mum calls, and you’re seriously considering joining this years’ edition of your hometown’s gardening competition (you’ve kept ONE plant alive on average out of TEN).
13. An unknown number calls, and you pick up. It’s your phone provider. You stay on the call.
14. You’ve thought about retiring from academia (Remember you haven’t even finished your PhD though?) to become a gardener. See point 13.
15. You’re briefly convinced that correlation does, in fact, prove causality. 
16. You ask ChatGPT your research question. Satisfied AI cannot yet take your job, you go for a stroll.

The author thanks two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this list. She is indebted to the ULB for the provision of three ice popicles as part of the plan canicule. No further conflicts of interest were reported by the author.

Have a good summer, and see you à la rentrée!