Take Ownership and Build Your Tribe: Overcoming the Myth of Guaranteed Acceptance in your Career Path

thejuniorprofLeave a comment

“Some days, doing ‘the best we can’ may still fall short of what we would like to be able to do, but life isn’t perfect on any front and doing what we can with what we have is the most we should expect of ourselves or anyone else.” – Fred Rogers

Since I can remember, I have been surrounded by people who encouraged my academic and career pursuits. Often, encouragement came in the form of well wishes that offered hope without any true knowledge of what lay ahead. Being the child of immigrant parents and one of the first in my family to pursue graduate degrees, my family knew enough to say “you’ve got this, keep going” and “the world is yours, follow your dreams.” However, when it came to giving advice on career choices, pushing through barriers, and building my network – that was a different story. Continue reading →

Advertisement

Stress Management During Application Season

thejuniorprofLeave a comment

(Originally published here on Inside Higher Ed.)

It is no secret that both the academic job search and the process of submitting grant proposals are grueling and challenging to manage emotionally. At this point in my career, I am no expert in getting jobs or securing grants. But the number of applications I’ve submitted is in the hundreds, and I have navigated the stress they produce recently and frequently. I’ve developed a few strategies for making the process a bit more bearable and outlined them below. Continue reading →

Life as a Postdoc: Avoiding Invisibility in a Liminal Position

thejuniorprof1 Comment

As a graduate student, I wasn’t initially sure that a postdoc would be the right decision for me.  I had entered my program 10 years after completing my undergraduate degree and was pursuing a second career, moving from evaluation research to academia.  It seemed more appropriate to dive right into the road to tenure at my age given that the Assistant Professors in my department were younger than I was. When I told my mentor this, she nipped that thought in the bud with something to the effect of “why wouldn’t you take time off the clock to push forward your research?”  (For the record, she was right.) So during my year on the job market, I applied to 12 postdocs and got lucky enough to land one, a diversity postdoc at New York University, along with a tenure-track position. I negotiated a delayed start with my job (yes, this is possible) and in August of 2018, I filed my dissertation at UC Berkeley, moved my family across the country, and started as a postdoctoral fellow for the year.  But what I experienced as a postdoc was not at all like my past as a grad student nor my future as an Assistant Professor. Being a postdoc was isolating, as the position itself is liminal by definition. As I describe below, it took effort on my part to feel a sense of integration and belonging.   Continue reading →

Asking the Editors: Part 3

thejuniorprof1 Comment

(Originally published here on Inside Higher Ed.)

This essay is the third in a three-part series dedicated to answering the question “What do university press editors have to say about the mystery surrounding first-time book authorship?” In this series, I’ve shared information and insights from two seasoned book editors, Elizabeth Ault, editor at Duke University Press, and Jim Burr, senior editor at the University of Texas Press.

In the first piece, the editors and I went over what you should know and do leading up to your book’s submission. In the second one, we talked specifically about networking and meeting with editors. This final article is dedicated to the tough stuff. It highlights the role of social media in book publishing, the fears that faculty members often have when it comes to institutional prestige and their ability to secure a contract, and how to avoid being dropped by a press once you’ve agreed to work together. Continue reading →

Asking the Editors: Part 2

thejuniorprof2 Comments

(Originally published here on Inside Higher Ed.)

Last week, I wrote about an interview I recently conducted with two university press editors — Elizabeth Ault, an editor at Duke University Press, and Jim Burr, senior editor at the University of Texas Press — about first-time book authorship. They shared with me what you should do to prepare your book for submission, including how to know when you are ready to start searching for an editor. In this second essay in a three-part series, I’ll provide Elizabeth and Jim’s perspective on networking and meeting with editors. Continue reading →

Asking the Editors: Part 1

thejuniorprof3 Comments

(Originally published here on Inside Higher Ed.)

About 18 months ago, I defended my humanities dissertation and took a tenure-track job. Since then, I’ve done a fair amount of soul-searching about my first book project and have also spent a lot of time talking with other junior faculty about publishing.

For almost every one of us, the formula for successfully drafting and editing a book, and then landing a contract, is mysterious. That’s perhaps due to a variety of factors, including the general irrelevance of the advice of our well-established grad school advisers — who already seem to have many relationships in publishing — and the general lack of attention to this concern until after landing a job.

So I set out to find out if there is a formula for publishing one’s first academic book in the humanities. The simple answer seems to be no. Yet two university press editors — Elizabeth Ault, editor at Duke University Press, and Jim Burr, senior editor at the University of Texas Press — whom I interviewed on their experiences working with first-time book authors helped me develop a longer, more comprehensive and insightful answer that I’d like to share. Continue reading →

Too Many Courses, Too Few Friends: Thriving as First-Year Faculty in a New Environment

thejuniorprof1 Comment

A year ago I was wrestling with a large roll of orange bubble wrap and a faulty tape dispenser as my partner and I prepared to relocate from Connecticut to Nebraska. We had been living in our quiet corner of New England long enough to gain a large circle of friends but we knew absolutely no one in the Midwest. I was also wrestling with syllabi, assignment prompts, and textbook orders as I braced myself for the teaching load at my new institution. The scale of my professional life was about to shift drastically as I transitioned from teaching a few sections of composition as a graduate student at a large public university to developing three different literature courses per semester as an assistant professor at a small liberal arts college. Many of us will meet similar professional and personal challenges as junior faculty: as I reflect on my experiences, I hope that some of the strategies I have relied on will also prove useful to you. Specifically, this post will suggest possible approaches to handling course preparation as a new faculty member and re-building your social life in an unfamiliar environment. Continue reading →

Help Your New Hires

thejuniorprofLeave a comment

(Originally published here on Inside Higher Ed.)

Dear department chairs and college deans,

Will new faculty members join your institution this fall? If so, you can do a handful of things that will help them transition. Much of the burden of figuring it out will fall squarely on them, but an accommodating and hospitable environment will not only help new faculty slide into their jobs effectively but will also ultimately better serve everyone. This is especially true if those individuals are first-time faculty members. Continue reading →

Writing Lessons: Practicing What We Preach

thejuniorprofLeave a comment

(Originally published here on Inside Higher Ed.)

As educators, we often lament the quality of our students’ writing and ponder how we might support their writing development. To that end, I recently attended an interdisciplinary pedagogical conference themed around improving student writing. One of the conference’s main objectives was to remind all of us, regardless of field, that students need our help with their writing and that we cannot burden English departments with the sole responsibility for shaping it.

The research and presentations were geared toward student writing, but I started to ask myself why I couldn’t also heed some of those lessons and be my own writing coach. Why had I failed to see that so many of the tools I use as an educator could transfer neatly to my own writing? Continue reading →