Research, Teaching & Service: Let's talk service

The three initiatives of a higher education faculty member are research (r), teaching(t) and service (s). Each institution has a particular weighed value structure assigned to each initiative, w1, w2, w3 respectively. It's best to consider it a simple linear combination:  

         S = w1*r+w2*t+w3*s where w1+w2+w3 = 1 s.t. wi > 0 and r+t+s = 1 s.t. r > 0, t>0, s>0

This post and next two posts will be dedicated diving deeper into a faculty's research, learning and service initiatives. Most institutions value research, then teaching, and lastly service. But, I'll discuss service first since it results in the most direct impact on an individual faculty member, and thus a cascading positive impact on your home institution.

External service, sometimes called engagement or outreach, is serving as an subject-matter expert (SME) reviewer for technical journals, conferences, workshops and industry/government funding agencies. To offer your expertise in reviewing papers and/or proposals is a great opportunity to keep up-to-date on the technical advances within your specific field. It is a donation of your time and expertise. It's also a bit of flattery for you to be asked to serve in this reviewer capacity. External service can be a distraction from promotion & tenure (P&T) focused activities, e.g., research. But, this is part of a time-intensive multi-year effort to carve your research niche, to academically brand yourself and to show consistent evidence of your good stewardship.  

What's your "reward" for this time and expertise donation? (1) you can providing tangible evidence of societal impact of your research and teaching efforts and (2) you have access discipline-specific colleagues e.g., research collaborators, P&T external letter writers, position reference letters and career opportunities. Essentially, the benefits are building your technical reputation and growing your professional network which outweighs the time spent reading and writing your reviews. SME reviewing is a byproduct of submitting grant proposals, publishing journal articles/conference papers and attending technical and professional development conferences.  As your good reputation grows, you will become the chair of workshops, conference and/or serving as a journal editor. 

Naturally, you may wonder how do you become a reviewer? (1) you must do good work, (2) you should publish it in a well-respected technical venue and (3) you should have at least one influential member within your field to introduce and advocate for you. To do good work, you must know the related literature, articulate your problem's scope, significance and motivation. Then, you must formulate a novel solution and conduct experiments that show the intellectual merit of your solution. A peer-reviewed, high-quality and preferably low-acceptance rate publishing venue is optimal for your research work. Your instructor or MS/PhD advisor suggest the publication avenue initially. If the research is accepted for publication and you are presenting the work, a seasoned member of the community, e.g., your instructor, MS/PhD advisor or co-author, can be a great gateway to meet others and could lead to more opportunities.  

For us #dataheads, data-centric publication venues and meetings are plentiful so I won't be providing a comprehensive list here. In fact, I'll direct you to the KDNuggets monthly list: http://www.kdnuggets.com/meetings/. As for me, I will be reviewing conference and workshop papers by serving on 4 Program Committees this summer:

• International Workshop on Big Data Security and Privacy 2014 
• International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics 2014 
• IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia 2014 
• IEEE International Conference on Data Mining 2014 

Internal service, sometimes called committee activities, is serving in your capacity as a member of your institution's faculty. The colleagues at your institution want to be confident that you care about and willing to contribute to your home department and affiliated academic units. Faculty committee work is a necessary extra responsibility. It show your level of collegiality. There is always a long list of committees from the department, school/division and university/college. Committee work offers you an opportunity to be an active faculty participant in shared governance. 

The advice typically given to new faculty is don’t say ‘yes’  or ‘no’ right away. You can say you have to review your schedule or you may decide ask follow up questions as to the amount of time and/or responsibility affiliated with the committee. Then you can make a better informed decision. The impact of accepting too much or less-beneficial-to-your-academic-career committee work may cause havoc to fulfilling your research agenda. 
 
I rank committee work impact and its time commitment (from most desirable to least desirable) for any faculty member as follows.

• high impact, minimal time, e.g., graduate applicant selection committee
• low impact, minimal time, e.g., e.g., faculty grievance committee,  
• low impact, exponential time e.g., faculty search committee,
• high impact, exponential time, e.g., departmental accreditation committee, curriculum committee, faculty senate/university senate (typically an appointed tenured faculty member)

Stay tuned...next week, it's all about teaching!