Professors look forward to summer too! While many faculty don’t take much time off from teaching or research, there is still time to take for a bit of fun. Dwayne Benjamin shared his nostalgia-based summer playlist with the Economics community.

Each year summer vacation can’t come soon enough! It’s start is delineated for me by the Canada Day long weekend and the end of the regular school year. The ebbs and flows of the academic schedule are etched into my mental chronometer (no matter what changes we make to sessional dates).

While it’s been a busy year for all of us, and a restorative summer break is surely deserved, for those of us living in a “four season” country like Canada, summer is intrinsically special and tied to— almost assuredly — idealized childhood memories.

I spent the formative years of my childhood in rural Nova Scotia, with old-school family picnics, trips to the beach, and summer day camps punctuating what was otherwise unstructured and seemingly endless play time with either small groups of friends (bikes and fishing rods), or bigger groups in the neighbourhood (achieving quorum for the larger scale games, e.g. Red Rover). With the idleness and leisure, boredom followed, but it was combined with summer-specific fun which served to restore and recharge me for the school year that followed. [Read more…]