Millennial Professor is a blog about acting like an expert while still figuring it out.
I’m a professor by job title, training, and email signature. I conduct research, teach courses, advise students, write papers, review other people’s papers, sit in meetings, and say things with just enough confidence that no one interrupts. From the outside, this can look like certainty.
From the inside, it often feels like improvisation.
This blog is a space for reflections on academic life as it’s actually lived: teaching that doesn’t go as planned, research that moves in fits and starts, careers shaped as much by timing and institutions as by merit, and the strange experience of being treated as an authority while still learning in public.
I (would like to) write about:
- Teaching and learning (on both sides of the podium)
- Research, publishing, and the hidden curriculum of academia
- Impostor syndrome, confidence, and professional identity
- The gap between how academia is described and how it feels
- Being a millennial navigating a profession built by earlier generations
This is not a how-to guide, a productivity blog, or a collection of hot takes. It’s closer to a notebook: essays, observations, and questions that don’t always resolve cleanly.
If anything connects these posts, it’s the idea that expertise is not a fixed state, but an ongoing process—one that involves uncertainty, revision, and a fair amount of pretending you know what you’re doing until, slowly, sometimes, you do.
I write because thinking out loud helps. If it also helps you feel a little less alone in academia, that’s a bonus.
Oh, and in case it matters to your sense of ethical superiority, I use ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other AI tools to hide the fact that English is not my first language. Any coherence should be credited to them. At least the thoughts are my own. Any remaining confusion is also mine.