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    Navigating Tenure and Beyond: A Guide for Early Career Faculty
    Navigating Tenure and Beyond: A Guide for Early Career Faculty
    Navigating Tenure and Beyond: A Guide for Early Career Faculty
    Ebook225 pages3 hours

    Navigating Tenure and Beyond: A Guide for Early Career Faculty

    By Sundar A. Christopher

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    About this ebook

    This guide covers how to reach tenure through service, research, and teaching while empowering your graduate students and maintaining balance between your career and personal life. Sundar A. Christopher uses his own experience and hypothetical situations to illustrate best practices in goal setting, developing leadership amid institutional politics, and ways to benefit those you mentor. With a strong focus on research and tenure application and an inclusive point of view, this guide will be a key companion in many a professors’ development.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAmerican Meteorological Society
    Release dateFeb 15, 2019
    ISBN9781944970444
    Navigating Tenure and Beyond: A Guide for Early Career Faculty

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      Book preview

      Navigating Tenure and Beyond - Sundar A. Christopher

      Christopher

      1

      MANAGING YOUR BUSINESS AND REACHING TENURE

      MANAGING YOUR PERSONAL LIFE

      I am sure that when this book comes out I will hear from some reviewer or reader that I am beginning to sound like a life coach in this chapter. But I don’t know how else to write this section. I am fully convinced that how well you manage your personal life will also determine how well you manage your career as an early-career professor.

      The first problematic issue is deciding whether to put career before family. It is up to you if you want to handle life that way, as in the following case. A young professor was married and had a young child. He and his spouse had good jobs on the East Coast. When he interviewed for a job in the Midwest to become an assistant professor, I am sure he felt pure adrenaline. He landed the job and moved there without his spouse and child, and his personal life and career were thus in direct conflict. This professor repeatedly indicated to me that he could not deal with the long-distance relationship, and his lack of personal life made him that much less productive. After a few years of struggling with maintaining a family long distance, they resolved to be in one place. The entire family is now in the Midwest.

      Since I am on the subject of spouses, I’ve been asked how I would handle things if I were working for my spouse or vice versa. I couldn’t handle it. And I probably would not put myself in that situation. The person who asked me that question went on to explain the stress of his spouse working on his team. Dinner conversations were strained, and the pressures of work easily spilled into the home life. My suggestion, since he was the team lead, was to place his spouse in another team. He agreed. The change has since been made and seems to be working!

      I hope these examples help you realize that there are many things going on in your career. Therefore, it is important to put your house in order. This book is not written as a fairy tale. I know that there are real threats out there—illness, deaths, accidents, etc. I am not talking about these issues. As I’ve said in my previous book, when serious issues like these happen, you have to reassess everything—and I mean everything—in your life and figure out what works best for you. For those issues that are merely frustrating but not life changing, however, you have to decide how to quickly address them and maintain stability.

      THE TRIPARTITE

      I wish someone had given me this piece of advice when I started my career: take care of your body. One of the biggest pieces of advice that I can pass along is to set up a physical exercise regimen early in your career. It is no secret that vigorous physical exercise is exceedingly beneficial for keeping yourself fit. No one ever tells you that professorship is like a marathon. If you do not have good habits set up before your tenure decision year, what makes you think that things will change with time? It is important to clearly mark your calendar each day or several times a week to leave your office to get some exercise. I know of a successful researcher who swims every day during the lunch hour. No appointments are ever made during that time. This keeps him focused and prepared for the long run. I know of another who runs several times a week in the afternoons after he gets home. Rain or shine, the running appointment is kept. I guard my racquetball appointments jealously. Exercise is just one part of the equation.

      The other part of this equation is good eating habits. As a young professor, it becomes really important to be more mindful of what you eat. You have to leave behind the three-hamburgers-for-one-dollar days and enter the oatmeal, vegetable, and fruit zone. While I am at it, let me mention water intake as well. Trust me. Keeping a good, consistent, exercise regimen and good eating and hydrating habits will pay off in the long run. I know of some of my colleagues, even while on travel, who lace up their shoes and go running. That’s some type of commitment!

      The final part is rest and relaxation. Type A personalities and overachievers forget to take a break, rest, and rejuvenate. While I do not consider myself to be either type A or an overachiever, I am guilty of not resting enough or resting well. Resting appropriately is rejuvenating and fires up the research ideas and productivity. Rigorously manage your calendar. You need to be thinking about your summer break during the winter holidays. Write ideas down and take your vacation. You don’t have to go on expensive trips; simply finding ways to unwind for a period away from the daily work is important. It takes a few days to even realize that you are on vacation. After that realization, then the vacation actually starts. So, make sure that you carve out adequate time to decompress, and then enjoy the time off. This does not mean that you have to agonize about not answering your emails or checking in. The once-in-a-while check-in is OK. For some of you, being out of touch will drive you crazy. If you need to check in for thirty minutes once a day for your own sanity, do so. But if you do it excessively, it is not a vacation at all! Give yourself an opportunity to take a break and relax. Unplugging every now and then is healthy (and that means turning off your smartphone). You will come back with more enthusiasm for the job.

      THE SABBATICAL

      As an aside, let me talk a little bit about the sabbatical. Most, if not all, universities offer their faculty members an opportunity to take a sabbatical for an entire year (or part of the year). Surprisingly, most faculty members do not take a sabbatical. A sabbatical for a productive researcher does not have to be a nonproductive time. It can be a time to learn new things in a new environment and come back with fresh ideas, networks, and a brand-new perspective. What exactly is a sabbatical? You are given a year with no teaching responsibilities, and most universities give you half of the pay or some portion of the regular pay. You are expected to supplement the remainder with research funding or with fellowships from the place where you spend the sabbatical. You can pretty much go anywhere in the world, but you must tell the university how it will benefit both you and the university in the long run. If you have been collaborating with teams around the world, here is your chance to pack your bags and leave for a year to work together in person.

      The worst thing to do is stay in your office on a sabbatical. You gain nothing—not even rest—by simply not teaching but keeping everything else the same. For some professors, this is their reality. Another issue is that, if your spouse is working, you cannot just ask your spouse to take off for a year. If you have children, then this complicates matters as well. But there are creative ways to navigate family issues. Consider using the sabbatical year to homeschool your child in another country. Use the world as a learning place. Get imaginative. I strongly suggest that you leave the country, live abroad, network with researchers, and build collaborations. It’s just a year, and it’s a fabulous opportunity! You’ll thank me for this advice. If you cannot leave the country for whatever reason, at least travel within your current country. Get into a new schedule, learn how others manage research and time, and do some creative research that cannot be done while you are juggling responsibilities at your home institution. This allows you to rest, rejuvenate, work at a different pace and on a different schedule, and do some excellent work. Note that the sabbatical is not a vacation but a time to think outside the box.

      I’ve been asked if I have practiced what I’ve preached. Always (OK, almost always). I took my one-year sabbatical to Australia. My wife and I sold our home in Alabama, took our three kids (ages 2, 4, and 7), and headed off to Australia. It was daunting in the beginning. But, as always, things work out. We found a good place to live; I walked to work every day, learned how to drive on the other side of the road, bought and sold a car, made some wonderful friends, and even spoke some Aussie. I watched cricket, ate some fantastic ethnic food, traveled quite a bit, and came back home richer for the experience. I wrote some good research papers while I was in Australia, networked well, gave several presentations, and picked some new lines of research work. And, of course, the beaches of Australia were a huge bonus,

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