Upcoming challenges for my Fall 2026 semester

The fall semester is almost here again, which means that I am getting ready to go back to teaching. My fall semesters tend to be my heavier teaching semesters, and this year will be no exception. I will be teaching one course at USFQ, my course at TU Delft, and I will also give a guest lecture in another course at TU Delft. Teaching always takes more time and energy than what appears on the schedule: there is preparation, grading, answering questions, meetings, and all the small tasks surrounding the actual hours spent in the classroom.

At the same time, this semester will come with a fair amount of travel. I have a conference in South Korea, a PhD defense in the Netherlands, and a national keynote in another city. On top of that, I just received funding for a two-week research trip. All of these are exciting opportunities, and I am very grateful for them, but they also mean that the semester will be fragmented by travel, preparation, catching up, and figuring out how to move my class forward while I am away.

Looking ahead, these are the main challenges I see for the coming semester:

• Managing a heavy teaching load. With several teaching commitments, I will need to be careful about protecting enough time for research and writing. Teaching can easily expand to fill all available time.
• Working around a lot of travel. Conferences, defenses, keynotes, and research visits all have value, but travel comes with hidden costs. There is the preparation beforehand, the disruption of routines, and the catch-up afterwards. I will need to avoid pretending that a travel week is a normal workweek.
• Continuing to grow into my position. I am not sure whether I can still call the position new, but there are still many aspects of it that I am learning. There are responsibilities, expectations, meetings, administrative tasks, and strategic decisions that I did not have to deal with in the same way before.
• Keeping ongoing projects moving. There is, as always, a large amount of work already in progress: papers to finish, collaborations to maintain, students to supervise, analyses to complete, and ideas that need attention. The challenge will be to keep these projects moving instead of allowing the most urgent task of the day to take over everything.
• Starting three newly funded projects. For a long time, I submitted proposals and saw many of them fail. Now, suddenly, three major projects have been approved in one stretch. Of course, this is excellent news. It is also a reminder that winning funding means winning the opportunity to do a considerable amount of work. These projects will require planning, coordination, deliverables, administration, and actual research.
• Avoiding overcommitment. Perhaps this is the challenge underlying all the others. Many of the things on my calendar are good things: funded research, invited talks, teaching, travel, collaborations. The difficulty is that good opportunities still require time and energy. I will need to make conscious choices about what I can realistically take on.
• Protecting time for focused work and recovery. With a fragmented semester, uninterrupted blocks of time may become rare. I will need to deliberately reserve time for writing, thinking, and deep work, while also making sure that travel and teaching do not consume all the time I would normally use to rest and recharge.

So, my challenge for Fall 2026 will not be a lack of interesting work. If anything, it will be the opposite. The semester looks full of opportunities, responsibilities, and projects that I am excited about. The main task will be to find a way to do this work without constantly feeling that I am falling behind somewhere else.

I have learned over the years that a busy semester cannot be managed simply by trying to work harder. It requires making choices, setting priorities, planning around the realities of travel and teaching, and accepting that not everything can move forward at the same speed. That will probably be the theme of this semester: figuring out what deserves my attention now, what can wait, and how to keep enough space in my schedule to actually enjoy the opportunities that have come my way.

How do you navigate a challenging semester?