I'm going to be a boss.

Not in the sense that the music will change when you get to me, and I'll take up a lot of the screen and move around in a predictable pattern, and there's probably a checkpoint right before me.

In the sense that Prof. J is planning on hiring one of the new Master's students, and I will be in charge of him/her.

I've long been of the opinion that management is not where I want to be - I want to be in the trenches, doing the actual work. And yet here I am.

Nah, not really. I doubt this will change my job significantly. I'm reminded of Russ, who worked at a company I interned at a few years ago. Russ was a programmer who was assigned to be my supervisor. It was pretty clear he wasn't into the management thing either, and he'd always try to give me enough work to do that I wouldn't have to come back and ask him what to do next, because you know, he had work to do.

Interns tend not to get the most difficult tasks, however, and I was coming off a previous internship where I had spent a solid two weeks web-surfing while my supervisor was on vacation. I felt kind of guilty about this, and I hadn't yet learned that a certain amount of slacking off is what keeps the world functioning, so I was pretty diligent about getting stuff done as quickly as possible - much to Russ's dismay.

Every time I approached Russ's desk, he would get this apprehensive look on his face.

"I'm done with all that stuff," I'd say.

"Damn!" he'd say.

One time, he actually told me, "Go surf the web."

I learned my lesson that summer: the faster you get stuff done, the more difficult you make your boss's job.