It is a week out from my birthday, and I’m feeling a bit reflective. It has been quite the year. For me, a year of personal, professional, and numerological milestones and achievements. For the world, a year of tragedy, fear, social isolation, and a host of adjustments to new ways of working, teaching, learning, and living.

At the end of March I received the news that, effective September 1, I would be promoted from Associate Professor to Professor. So, for the last few days, I have officially been a full Professor, the highest “normal” rank for a faculty career.¹ In a very real sense, this is all I have ever wanted to achieve professionally for the past 20 years or so, when I started to get the idea that college professor was a job one could have, focused mainly on thinking, reading, writing, and teaching. And I did it at 39 years old.

This year is my 10th as director of the Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology. It was an exciting if terrifying duty to take on as a pre-tenure Assistant Professor, with a steep learning curve. I think in 10 years I have been able to use this opportunity to make some small, positive impact on the field of philosophy of science (and some adjacent fields), on some members of the local community, and on the education of our students. It literally occupied my entire 30s. There are still always new challenges.

Originally, I had hoped my book would come out before my birthday, but some understandable delays make it look more like late October. Still, my first book is an exciting accomplishment from my perspective, and not one that is just a matter of course for someone in my field (plenty of philosophers of science write only articles). I hope it will have an impact, and I am glad that I was able to find a source of funding that would make it Open Access.

In addition, I have for the last year (and will for the next two) been Program Head / Program Coordinator for History and Philosophy (sort of Department Chair Lite). I feel like I’ve done some good work here as well, helping reform our graduate curriculum, winning greater autonomy for our programs from a previously very top-down system of governance, improving the sense of faculty ownership of the program, replacing our just-in-time scheduling model with one of (more but not perfectly) fair and balanced rotations of duties and better choices for students. I’ve helped build a Philosophy B.A. program from scratch and expand the HIST and PHIL offerings in the gen-ed core curriculum. That said, there have been growing pains, and some disorganization and mistakes on my part, but I am lucky to work for a really great faculty who have stepped up to work hard on this stuff. I’ve also been lucky to follow the good work of the person who had this job before me and to have great people as heads of other programs in the School to work with. The pandemic situation has added a lot to the job that I did not expect. I will be relieved to pass the torch when my turn is done.

Of course, most of the major achievements of this year have been somewhat anticlimactic. I wasn’t really able to celebrate my promotion, and I won’t be able to have much of a party for my 40th next week. Many of the Center’s and the History/Philosophy Program’s major events were cancelled, and it is not clear when we’ll be able to have a live lecture or a conference again. Teaching is both harder and less satisfying than ever. And so for all that it has been a big year, it has also been a melancholy one. (That said, though I’ve taken some knocks from 2020, I know I’ve also been very lucky.)

The big questions are: where to go from here? Having achieved everything I had wanted professionally by 40, where will I set my sights next? That’s something that I’ll definitely be thinking over in this month of reflection.