Research, Teaching & Service: Let's talk research

Research is not a series of step by step activities, but a meandering slow and fast, exciting and dull, frustrating and rewarding process over time and mostly in collaboration with colleagues. Research has interlocking elements of publications, student completion rates and funding. High quality and quantity of your publications is evidence of your ability to contribute to your selected discipline. Your student completion rate can be an indication of your social good contribution by shepherding undergraduates and graduate students to degree completion with good quality research experience. Your acquisition of funding dollars shows your ability to financially support yourself, your research and your student researchers. All three are tangible metrics to evaluate your “success” as an academic. Quite honestly, it also serves as your professional currency and your value add to an organization.

Publishing takes a lot of time and resources from idea germination to *hopefully* the published paper, article, chapter and/or book. To create, implement and evaluate an idea worthy of novel contribution to your selected discipline takes effective thought, planning and execution strategies. You should be mindful of the publication venue. The acceptance rate of the publication venue implies scholarly quality to some, if not most, promotion and tenure committees. The lower the acceptance rate, the more valuable your research appears to researchers unfamiliar with the specific discipline.For computing in general, conference papers are the common and recognized mode of publication. However, when it comes to promotion and tenure (beyond the departmental level), conference papers do not tend to hold as much value as refereed journal articles. I’m emphasizing this rule because I completely missed this nugget of advice.

When you are a faculty member, your daily tasks are divided between research, teaching and service. One commodity at your disposal is your department, institution and external colleagues, e.g., former graduate studies classmates, academic colleagues at other institutions, government and industry collaborators. Depending on potential collaborators’ career path and aspirations, a research partnership could be a win-win situation by sharing resources and responsibilities toward a common goal.

Another commodity you must learn to leverage is the (undergraduate and/or graduate) student researcher. Publication production can be aided by having students perform some research-related tasks, e.g., prior works’ paper summaries, software coding, tables, graphs and figures. More students doesn’t necessarily mean that more of your research will be completed. You will need to manage each student’s progress, which may take more time initially than you just doing the work yourself. It is important to expect some trial and error since each student’s personality requires you to impart some of your finesse to meet their needs.

Suppose the research is ready for a conference paper submission in 6-8 months. The time lapse for a top-tier conference paper (submission to conference event) is 6 months. By now, you are already 1 year invested. Undergraduate and graduate students may or may not be still working with you due to course load conflicts, changing interests and/or graduation. Graduate students are a bit more pressed for a submitted publication since it may be a condition of their graduation. You have trained some students, but most likely you will have to train a new group of new researchers each year. Now, assume your conference paper is accepted. (Note: if you are a graduate student reading this post, conference paper acceptance is not guaranteed. You will likely receive more rejections than accepts). The peer-reviewed remarks are returned and the camera-ready/final version of the paper must be submitted.

Is that it?
Nope.

To ensure the conference proceedings include your paper, at least one author must register and deliver the oral presentation at the conference. The cost of attending a conference can be expensive including conference registration, travel expenses (airfare or mileage, ground transportation to/from airport), hotel accommodations and food per diem.

Who is going to pay for you and/or your student to deliver the research presentation?

Now we come to the real matter: funding streams. Your funding may come from your department by asking your department administrators, your startup funds, internal awards sponsored through other academic units at your institution and external awards through corporate sponsorships or gifts and/or government agencies. You should only serve as principal investigator (PI) or co-principal investigator (coPI), which indicates you are a member of the research project leadership team. Even though Internal grants can be less competitive, external awarded grants have greater value and impact on your academic currency since the research problem, proposed solution and implementation plan has the peer-review/SME approval. In year 1 & 2 of a tenure-track faculty position, your startup funds  and requesting departmental funds can support your research activities. From year 3 and thereafter, other internals and external funding streams are expected to supplement your scholarly endeavors.

Q. What do you need?
A. Money.
Q. How much do you need?
A. As much as possible. Enough to pay for your annual summer salary (10 weeks), conference travel expenses, journal article publication fees, computing equipment, graduate students (tuition, fringe benefits and stipend), etc.
Q. When do you need it?
A. Now.

Translation: to increase your likelihood of getting a grant awarded, you must be regularly writing and submitting internal and external grant proposals. Consider your institution’s perspective: How many times has Faculty A asked for financial support? Sooner rather than later, Faculty A should be able to support herself and her research through other means.

For more information:

1. Robert Boice. (2000). Advice for New Faculty Members. Pearson Publishing.
2. Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey Laszloffy. (2008). The Black Academic's Guide to Winning Tenure--Without Losing Your Soul. Lynne Rienner Publishing.