06/03/2026
✅ Year 6 as a Professor. Tenured + promoted to Associate Professor 👨🏻🏫
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This one feels bigger than the usual year recap.
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Six years ago, I started at as a brand new assistant professor in the middle of 2020, which apparently meant teaching through masks, distance, uncertainty, and putting PPE on skeletons.
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This year, I was promoted to Associate Professor and granted tenure. Somewhere in the middle of that was a 647-page e-binder, a self-appraisal, years of course evaluations, research, service, mentoring, committee work, outreach, lab prep, lecture notes, practicals, exams, emails, and more emotional support cookies than I can count.
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But what I keep coming back to is that this job has never just been about the title. It has been about students finding confidence in a hard class. It has been about TAs becoming teachers, advisees becoming graduates, research students asking bigger questions, and colleagues making the hard weeks feel possible. It has been about building a classroom where anatomy is still hard, but feels a little more approachable, creative, and human.
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A small attempt at capturing six years in 20 photos (I ran out of tags!):
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1. Tenured + promoted 🥹
2. The official letter
3. First year at Linfield (Baby professor era, 2020 edition)
4. Advising + mentorship
5–7. Celebrating the only way I know how
8. A snapshot of my P&T file
9–11. Teaching so many brilliant students
12. Scholarship + student research
13. Service and outreach
14. So many colorful note templates to make anatomy fun…
15. Emotional support carbs for exam days
16. Course evaluations always have me sobbing 🥹
17. Letters from students always prove to me why it matters
18–19. Commencement
20. Student artwork…
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To every student, colleague, mentor, friend, and person who has been part of this chapter: thank you. Assistant Professor Zajic had a good run. Associate Professor Zajic is still bringing cookies.
Cheers! 🥂
❤️ Daniel
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