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Thinking about tenure

As an assistant professor entering the summer before my sixth year, I’m spending non-trivial effort on putting together my tenure package. For those who haven’t had this experience, it involves a number of things. One is a full-on assault on my CV: papers published, talks given, awards garnered, funding gotten and sought, and service rendered to the department, university, and broader academic community.

Another is a “research statement” that tells stories about what I’ve done, how it fits together, why it’s important, and how it’s affected the world [1]. Along with this, you send in a list of names of potential “letter writers”, who testify to how you’ve influenced the research community [2].

A third part is a “teaching statement” about my philosophy of teaching and the results I’ve gotten [3]. This pairs nicely with an “advising statement” that talks about how I work with PhD students and undergrads, both on research and in more general career (and occasionally, life [4]) advice.

There are probably other parts that I’ll find out about along the way, but these are the main ones you hear about. And it’s daunting, for a number of reasons. First is the uncertainty, about the process, the criteria, and the outcome [5]. I feel fortunate to be at Cornell, because even if I don’t get tenure I expect to have options [6]–but I’d still rather get it! Cornell has done a fair amount of work to make the process and criteria transparent, but it’s still a little nervous-making.

Second is that it forces you to confront the question of whether you’re doing good and valuable work. You’re reflecting on your career as a whole, which is much different than the more situated way I suspect most of us approach the work [7]. Who have you helped? Hurt? What does it mean? What’s next? It’s good to face these questions every so often–but they can still be scary.

Third is that you are working with incomplete information. Some of this is because much of the power rests in other people, and you only sort of know how others see you [8]. More practically, you probably didn’t record everything along the way, either about the activities or why you did them, so you’ll be spending some time grinding through email, filesystems, and neurons trying to dredge it back out [9].

There’s lots more to say about this, and I plan to come back to the blog as I do some of these activities to talk about them in ways that hopefully help other folks down the road. But for now let’s leave it here, while I go off and ponder my teaching statement some more.

 

[1] Someday we’ll have a nice blog post about reasons to do research even though most of it does not have such impact.

[2] Or, call bullshit on your research statement. Or just decline to write a letter, which is apparently not a good sign if too many people do so.

[3] Technically, I should be writing this right now; this  post is total procrastination.

[4] Though it’s not obvious that I’m qualified for this.

[5] Tenure is always uncertain, and everyone needs a backup plan. Cliff Lampe’s plan was goat farming, but he recently got tenure (which means, I guess, he could just do it anyways). Following in my parents’ footsteps, mine is to be a truck driver. I like driving, I like trucks, and I like stuff. It’s perfect.

[6] My original PhD plan was to teach at a liberal arts school; I still have my statement of purpose for PhD apps floating around. It’s a little cringeworthy, which means that I’m sure to post it someday.

[7] Frantic CSCW submitters from yesterday, I salute you.

[8]  A common piece of tenure advice is to clarify this through giving talks at other schools and asking either indirectly or explicitly about tenure and letter-writing. This is sometimes called the “tenure tour”.

[9] Though, this has been surprisingly rewarding as a way of reminiscing about people and events.

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13 Comments

  1. This all sounds very familiar indeed… Year 5 FTW.

    An interesting challenge for the research statement is that it should at once (and in 3-4 pages) communicate your contributions to both letter writers (mostly experts in your field) and the A&P committee (who are likely to not to have the slightest idea about your field).

  2. Yeah, I had a nice chat with Francois Guimbretiere about this the other day, the many-faceted nature of the research statement.

    One thing I’ve been told, at least at Cornell, is that at the higher levels they look less at specific documents and more at others’ summaries/evaluations of them: letter writers, department head summary, stuff like that.

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