Advice I Wish I Could Have Given My New Faculty Self
Around the beginning of the fall semester, I often find myself remembering back to 2014 when I first started in a faculty position. I was excited and scared and overwhelmed. I was pretty sure that I had no power and that I was supposed to say yes to everything. I was convinced that I had to be amazing at teaching, research, and service, although I wasn’t totally sure what service was. Hell, I didn’t even know how the copier worked or that I needed a code to make it do so! I (finally) knew how to write a dissertation, but that wasn’t turning out to matter so much in this new context.
Since some of you may be in a similar position (though I hope you aren’t scared!), I’m going to share some advice I would give to this younger self if I could go back in time and talk to her. I hope that some of it is helpful to you. Note that I’m a cisgender straight white woman and that I was in a tenure-line faculty position at a small liberal arts college (I’ve since left academia for a variety of reasons, which you can read more about here). My background and my position on the tenure track colors the below advice, although I hope it is also useful for people who are more marginalized in the academy and for those starting non-tenure line positions.
So here goes.
Hey Katherine in 2014! You’re in your first year of a faculty position! Congratulations! Sorry to distress you, but the next couple of years may be pretty stressful and hard. Here’s some advice from yourself in 2023 that might make them a little easier.
Find a mentor. Don’t do this alone. Anytime you enter a new workplace it is good to identify people who can help guide you through it. Mentors can provide advice in terms of navigating the tenure clock and department politics. They can help you understand the broader institutional structure and the implications of administrative policy changes or financial woes (that many colleges are currently facing). They can help you figure out how to make this job work best for you and how to succeed in the areas that interest you.
So in your first year or two, keep your eyes open for prospective mentors. It would be nice to have a mentor in your department, but it’s also good to have a mentor or two elsewhere in the university since you may be able to speak freely with them in ways you are not with your department. Pay attention to people who seem thoughtful and who understand how things work at your university. It’s nice if they are a step ahead of you (say, associates if you are an assistant prof), but perhaps not so far ahead of you that the tenure process they experienced was different from the one you will. Ask potential mentors out for coffee and see how it goes. Building relationships like these can help improve your ability to navigate the university and lead to lasting friendships.
Set boundaries. This job can be exhausting and people—department members, students, administrators—will demand a lot of you. These people do not know what your limits are or that your limits may be very different from their own. They very likely will assume you have no limits! So set boundaries to help preserve your personal time and to make time for aspects of the job you care about. Perhaps you only respond to emails between 9 and 5 on weekdays. Perhaps you refuse to attend more than one evening university event every two weeks. Perhaps you use your Google calendar to block out a certain number of hours of writing time a week and then protect that time. Pay attention to what you need to stay centered and happy and find ways to get that. (And you don’t have to tell people your boundaries; you just have to honor them yourself.)
Go a little slowly. You will be tempted to dive right into your job and campus life. You will want to feel part of things and to convince your new colleagues to like you. You will want to be perceived as a good team player and department member. These aren’t bad aspirations, but try your best not to rush into things. Remember that when you did the Peace Corps, they instructed you to spend the first several months without starting any projects. Instead, you were supposed to get to know community members, make friends, talk to people, and learn about needs that your colleagues and neighbors identified that you could potentially help them meet. That same advice is useful when you are at a new institution. Get to know your colleagues before becoming friends with them (or you may end up with complicated professional relationships). Get a sense of what various service work entails before committing (or you may end up with service assignments that aren’t a good match). Get to know the place and the people so that you can make better-informed choices about what your future will look like there.
Figure out the tenure system at your institution. I know that tenure feels like it’s a long way off and you just want to settle in and figure out how to teach that composition course you were assigned. Do that, but also spend some time in your first year (or definitely the second) figuring out how tenure works at your institution. And I mean really figure it out. This includes getting a sense of what publishing requirements look like (your chair should be able to advise on that, but get perspectives from others as well), but you’re also going to have to put together a huge amount of documents beyond your publications. Find out what these are. You will also have to write a narrative (at your institution this is supposed to be 20 single-spaced pages!) and it’s possible that this narrative will have to speak to particular criteria. Find out what those are and address them in your annual reports or take notes on them as you go! That will make it much easier to build your case for tenure as it gets closer and will prevent you from forgetting important accomplishments. Talk to people about how much teaching and service matters to getting tenure and what matters about them. And, once you feel comfortable with some people who have recently received tenure, ask them if they would be willing to talk about the process and potentially share their narratives with you. Getting a sense of what this process looks like early on will make it feel more transparent, save time in the long run, and help you approach it more strategically.
Take time off. You will go to a workshop on work-life balance during your first year in a tenure-line position. You will be the only attendee. There will be two facilitators. The first will say that he didn’t know why he’d been asked to participate since he just works all the time (he still does!). The second will suggest that if you begin feeling overwhelmed or overworked that you should consider taking half a day off, maybe part of a Saturday or a Sunday. Do not follow this advice!
Take time off each week, preferably all of Saturday and Sunday. Try to set a time that you won’t work after on weekdays and stick to it. Working 70 hours a week risks leading to burnout and makes it difficult to make time for the rest of your life. Take care of yourself. And, if you find that your colleagues like to talk about how much they work on the weekends, don’t tell them that you don’t if that makes you feel uncomfortable. Or tell them that you don’t and maybe you can start some conversations about healthy work-life balance.
Things don’t have to be perfect. Like many PhDs, you are a bit of a perfectionist. Ok, maybe a lot of one. But being a perfectionist is difficult in this line of work where you are always balancing multiple roles—researcher, teacher, administrator. So if you want to take care of yourself and make time for your life, you’re going to have to let some of these perfectionist tendencies go. Maybe this means you don’t prep quite as much for some classes (but think about much another hour of prep will actually improve the class: often, not that much!). Maybe it means you don’t retool your classes every time you teach them (tweaking them and learning from what didn’t go well in the past may actually improve them more than a complete overhaul). Maybe you don’t say yes to everything you are asked to do (definitely do not say yes to everything you are asked to do!) or you write the committee report at 80 percent effort, rather than 100 percent (will anyone even notice this? probably not). Maybe you know you should incorporate some more sources into this article, but you decide to leave that for a later stage of the process, perhaps after the article is reviewed. You can’t do everything and to make time for the parts of your job (and life) that you really love, you’re going to have to say no to some things and do some things less well (Note, this paragraph was inspired by Oliver Burkeman’s 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals; blog post on this book coming soon!).
You do have some power. When you start this position, you’re going to feel like you basically have to do whatever more senior people tell you to do for the next six years until you get tenure (unless you don’t and then you will never have any power at this institution). You will be afraid to speak up at faculty governance meetings or to disagree with powerful people in your department. Go a little slowly with following this suggestion (see Peace Corps discussion above), but know that you are wrong. You do have some power. You’re on the tenure track, for one. And tenure doesn’t ride on someone not liking something you say in public. So get a sense of the institution and what’s going on and then start working with other faculty and staff and students to help build the institution you want. Maybe this means getting involved with committees that work on issues that you care about. Maybe this means volunteering for opportunities that support research or student work that you find valuable. Maybe this means identifying a gap in the institution and trying to fill it (for example, at your institution in a few years staff and faculty will come together to implement systems to better support undocumented students). Maybe this means supporting contingent initiatives to achieve improved pay or more job security. Keep your eyes open and don’t use not getting tenure as an excuse not to act.
Remember this is a J.O.B. This is absolutely the most important advice I can give you. Right now you don’t feel like it’s a job. You feel like it’s THE job. Both in that for all of your graduate school years you’ve been told that becoming a faculty member was manna from heaven and because it literally was the only job you got (not uncommon for academics these days). But you know what, Katherine, it’s a job, just like all those jobs you had before you were a faculty member. And maybe that’s a little depressing (who doesn’t want manna from the gods?), but really, truly believing in its job-status will help you maintain a much healthier perspective over the coming years. It will remind you that if you are deeply unhappy (which, sadly to say, you will be), that you can make a change. It will remind you that the institutional politics and in-fighting are annoying, but that you maybe don’t have to go home and obsess over them for hours. It will remind you that this is your current career path, but that maybe it isn’t your forever career path and that that’s ok. (In fact, you’ll be much happier in your next career as an academic developmental editor, something you’ve never even heard of it 2014). Keep the focus on you and how you feel about this job and know that quitting is always an option.
There are other pieces of advice I’d like to give (and maybe will in a future post), which include, say “no” more, stop comparing yourself to everyone, make time to write, trust that you really can succeed in this work, believe that for real you are not an imposter, and don’t agree to attend secret meetings in the library. But the above are a start. And I’ll end with one last one: enjoy this. Although academia won’t ultimately end up being where you stay for the rest of your career, the time you will spend engaging with excited young people, learning how to convey complicated concepts to students, having moments when your writing and research just click, holding a published article or book in your hands, finding like-minded colleagues to collaborate with will be really wonderful. So look forward to those things and work to shape your job to your needs along the way!
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