To be more clear: I received my contract from the local (i.e. in the US) portion of the University in Qatar for which I shall be working, and I signed the papers. The whole process has been remarkably painless, and for that I am very thankful to both the US and Doha staff of the University. For now, all I have to deal with is paperwork, but the whole process will most certainly get more strenuous as the date of leaving gets closer.
It's really cool to sign the papers. I can actually remember both the moment that I decided I was going to get a PhD1 and the moment I decided I wanted to be a professor,2 and now I'm a college professor. It's a remarkably satisfying situation.
Since I am a professor, I think I am going to have to buy a pipe. I found this one on a website you can find from the preceding link. It is made by Dunhill, which makes what are allegedly the highest-end pipes on earth, and the series it is from is called "Dress." This pipe cracks me up because it looks like it is wearing a tuxedo. It is made out of ebony and sterling silver, and costs $600, which is quite a lot for a stick you chew on and use to burn leaves.
Memory 1: I was sitting at the kitchen table at my parent's house, and my dad was home from work for lunch. (This implies that I either had the day off, or I was waiting to go to afternoon kindergarten, but I was first-half-of-elementary-school young.) The subject of college degrees came up, and my Mom mentioned she had a Masters degree. I was trying to get the whole thing straight in my mind, and I asked what a Masters degree was. Mom said first there was bachelors, masters, and PhDs. I asked what came after PhD, and my Dad said, "There are some post-doctoral things, but PhD is as far as you can go in school." The moment he finished saying this, I knew I was going to get a PhD. It was like something mechanical clicked into place; I mean I literally knew at that instant that a PhD was part of my non-negotiable to-do list.
Memory 2: I was in the basement of the science building at RIT talking to some people about industrial research projects during my freshman year. Several of the people I spoke to had co-operative educational experience at local drug companies or Kodak or Xerox, and they were talking about how project X was selected because of market share Y and compentency Z, but no one was talking about whether the science was, well, interesting. During a lull in the conversation, I asked how academics selected their projects, and someone said (sort of dismissively) "Oh, they just work on whatever they think is interesting." I knew I wanted to be a professor. Also, it would take me several years to learn the "whatever they think is interesting" is not in any way correct.
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