Hello darlings!
Knock knock - we are baaaaaccck! Is everyone ready to kick January’s ass? Let’s get to it!
I hope y'all had a fucking fantastic holiday, you ate and drank deliciously-decedent stuff, and your enemies spent their breaks sad, alone, and thinking about how much better than them you are.
As a special treat for everyone, I made a fucking buzzfeed quiz for you(!): What is your #MHAWS workstyle animal mascot?
This is all inspired by a trip I took to see Emily Farris and her family over the break and my love for the meerkats at the Fort Worth Zoo.
Here’s the quiz! Once you have discovered your true inner workstyle animal, come back and read below for what it means for your academic behavior!
Note: information on animals is accurate and from Wikipedia and National Geographic and World Wildlife Fund and shit like that. Information on academic behavior is 100% made up by me and you are fucking welcome.
XOXOXO
Mirya
PS: I got some fucking stickers for y’all. If you see me, ask for one so I don’t look like a fool for ordering so many of them!
PPS: I am taking a break from Twitter for January (at least!) so I can't tell people about this super cool (bahaha) quiz. If you want to tweet about it, that would be super cool.
Animal Mascots and What They Mean:
You are a meerkat!
Meerkats are highly energetic, quick moving, and often have limited attention spans. A group of meerkats is called a mob and meerkats are happiest when they are surrounded by others in their community. They are highly gregarious animals who like to be the center of attention!
Learning: Meerkats learn by following an older member of their mob around. This older meerkat tutors the pup on how to burrow, forge for food, and chase down insects. For example, the mentor meerkat will show their pupil how to eat a venomous scorpion (what the fuck?) and will guard their mentee from danger. You learn by watching others. Mentors are very important to you and you should try to find mentors (at your level or above) whose behavior you wish to immolate. Older meerkats do well with protegees and should seek out people to mentor and help.
Community: Meerkats are naturally social animals that are deeply unhappy living alone. They groom each other, babysit each other’s young, and stand watch for the group. Mobs are also fiercely defensive of each other and will protect each other against any threat. You are a more productive scholar when you regularly work and interact with others. Co-authorship makes you happy, while working alone makes you sad. If you have to work alone (hello dissertations and tenure and all that shit), you should find wants to work socially in writing groups, with friends, or with accountability partners. You are defensive of your mob, sometimes overly so.
Communication: Meerkats are vocal animals that trill, growl, bark, and chirrup (did you know that’s how you spell chirrup? I had no fucking clue) and have up to six different alarms that they use to communicate to their mob. You will be happier and more content with projects and work when you regularly communicate with your coauthors and colleagues. Even if that communication is just an email to say, “I completed that task I said I would do today,” meerkats need to regularly share updates. Clear expectations about communications in your professional relationships will make you a happy little meerkat.
Work style: Meerkats have limited attention spans and need to keep moving. They alternate tasks in their group, sometimes digging burrows, sometimes, foraging for food, and sometimes standing as a sentinel. You will be better off if you regularly move from task to task and don’t spend too much time on any one project. Consider how you can shift what you do – reading, data analysis, writing, editing – over the course of the day so you can keep your attention up!
You are an otter!
Otters are playful, social, and very adept at using tools. While otters spend time alone to forage for food, they rest in groups (their raft) and support a wide set of social relationships. Female otters are exceptionally good parents that take care of feeding and grooming their young. They are sometimes shy and sometimes social creatures!
Learning: Otters are very playful and curious animals that love to find and use tools. They use rocks to crack open clams and mussels and sometimes wrap their sleeping babies in kelp while they go find food! Otters spend a long time with their young, teaching them how to feed and survive. You are always into the newest tech, methods, and gadgets. You like to learn how to use tools and then to apply them carefully, but you can get frustrated and move on to a new project if you can’t crack that clam open (i.e., figure out how to do something using your tools). You can be a good mentor, but generally should only take on one mentee at a time.
Community: Otters can be both social and solitary, although they live much longer lives when in the company of their peers. Otters sleep holding hands with their “raft”, which helps stabilize the group and protects them from ocean tides and predators. You are a a social scholar who does better when you work with others, even if other people largely provide emotional support. more productive scholar when you regularly work and interact with others. You do better when you can find your raft of bitches!
Communication: Otters communicate with sounds (often a high-pitches squeak when they want attention) and by scent markings. They are chatty creatures – when they are in a group, they are often all yelling at once; it is unclear the degree to which otters actually communicate via chatting or it is a social ritual. You like to talk to people about your work and like to be in the middle of the fray, but you can also get distracted! Sometimes you just want people to be around while you screech!
Work style: Otters like to solve puzzles and use tools and mark their territory with their own scent. You like to learn how to do new things! When working with coauthors, you may be better off dividing up the work so you can work just on your section
You are a sloth!
Sloths are languid, nurturing, and (shocker) slow moving creatures. They are generally solitary animals that like to spend their days munching (slowly) on leaves. Sloths spend most of their time in tree canopies, but they are also surprisingly good swimmers and can hold their breath underwater for up to 40 minutes! Sloths generally don’t give AF about what’s going on around them.
Learning: Sloths don’t give a fuck. You just do your own thing, learning as you go, and working the bare minimum to get by.You sleep a lot.
Community: Sloths are largely solo animals, except for mothers who nurture their young for more than a year. Sloths hair has a unique groove that grows symbiotic algae – the algae turns the sloth’s hair green to facilitate camouflage in the tree canopy and can even guard the sloth against parasites! You are a scholar who is happy cruising along by yourself, even if it means that you go slowly. Indeed, you get anxious or mad when people try to hurry you up. You are a good mentor, but only to a select group of people. But you will be helped by building some kind of symbiotic community of people who can protect you from the assholes of the world.
Communication: Sloths communicate… kinda. Babies meep and screech when upset. But generally, sloths just do their own thing and don’t need to communicate with others regularly. You will be just fine if you don’t regularly communicate with your colleagues and coauthors.
Work style: Sloths are slow-moving animals with a very low metabolic rate – food that would take other animals just hours to process takes sloths days and days. This is made more difficult for sloths because they don’t have any teeth and have to use their gums to nibble at leaves. While we think of sloths as always slow, they can actually swim quickly, particularly if threatened. You might take a lot longer to do things that other people can do quickly. This doesn’t mean you are doing NOTHING – you are just working slowly and steadily on your projects. However, if you are gravely threatened (i.e., tenure is coming), you can get your ass in gear and really kick it up a notch. But as soon as the threat is gone, you will go back to your normal slow pace of things.
You are a giraffe!
Giraffes are informal, hardworking, and non-competitive creatures. They often form durable peer groups, but spend a lot of their day solo, foraging for food. Giraffes have few natural enemies, engage in very little competition in their groups, and have exceptionally strong legs that allow them to have a wide natural range. Giraffes are generally good natured and quiet, with a long life span.
Learning: Giraffes are born knowing how to do a lot of what they need to do; by two months old, giraffes are eating on their own, and by six months old, they are self-sufficient. However, only one in four giraffes survives infancy. Adulthood for giraffes is pretty mellow, with few predators and a lot of time spent looking for food. You don’t feel a drive like others to always improve your skills because you are comfortable in the set of skills that you have! You figured stuff out early on in school and people generally leave you alone and let you do your own thing!
Community: Giraffes generally live in herds and female giraffes often form durable peer groups. At the same time, however, these herds are very informal, and giraffes are welcome to come and go in the group. Giraffes spend most of their time solo – an exception among herd animals – because they are picky eaters who need to spend a lot of time foraging for food. You like having people around sometimes and you will probably form stronger relationships with a small group of your peers; this might develop in graduate school or early in your careers. You would be fine hanging out mostly with those people, but having a larger set of colleagues that you interact with is the norm for you. You are totally fine spending most of your time solo.
Communication: Giraffes are NOT big communicators! They do not generally talk to each other or communicate. The exceptions are that males bellow when fighting each other, calves bleat, and mothers will call to their young. You are quiet and don’t spend a lot of time talking to other people, except when learning from your mentors or training others. Your colleagues and peers don’t expect to hear much from you.
Work style: Giraffes work… a lot. The average giraffe sleeps 5 to 30 minutes a day! (fucking exhausting). Giraffes have two speeds: walking (the left legs move together and the right legs move together) and galloping (front legs together and back legs together) and they regularly use both of them. You are hardworking and spend a LOT of time working. You don’t really have an ‘off-switch’ and generally just want to either amble along or go full speed ahead. Other people have a hard time keeping up with you!