The first days as an Assistant Professor is filled with adrenaline-laced excitement. The anxiousness and eagerness to get to work has you bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. New faculty orientation consumes the first days while you are mentally creating prioritizing your checklist: obtaining your institution login information, your new email address, signing up for your parking pass, meeting with your Department Chair and checking out your new office. Your faculty identification card, office layout, computer setup and business card ordering will happen in a few days. The focus is settling into this career path — making that context switch from your previous status as a graduate student, postdoc or other technical professional to an academic.
The first days as an Associate Professor at a new institution is a seemingly echo of your first days as an Assistant Professor. The adrenaline excitement is replaced with an excited calm. Prior academic work experience makes that aforementioned checklist unnecessary. The systems integration of your credentials and generation of your new affiliation occurs at the pace of the institution. Your inaugural year teaching, research and service expectations are far more reasonable. The academic life can be summed up by solving the Tower of Hanoi puzzle.
Towers of Hanoi Description
The puzzle traditionally has 3 pegs: starting peg, spare peg and destination peg. The starting peg has a user-specified number of disks with the disks stacked from smallest to largest (largest disk at the base of the peg). The object of the puzzle is to systematically move all the disks from the starting peg to the destination peg, but a larger disk can not be placed on top of a smaller disk. The key to solving this puzzle is understanding that the functionality of the pegs alters as you are moving the disks, e.g., when moving a disk, the starting peg operates as the spare peg, the spare peg operates as the destination peg and destination peg operates as the starting peg.
But here's the rub for any new faculty hire:
1. You don't know the number of disks
2. You don't know the number of pegs
3. You don't know which is the starting peg, spare peg and destination peg.
Initially, you can safely assume there are 3 pegs and 9 disks. For the purposes of this example, the disks are stacked service activities at the top, then teaching and lastly research activities at the bottom.
Disk 1: Institution Collegiality
Disk 2: External Collegiality
Disk 3: Course Preparation
Disk 4: Course Modification and Development
Disk 5: Research Team Building
Disk 6: Publications
Disk 7: Conference Attendance
Disk 8: External Grant Writing
Disk 9: Funded Award Management
Disk 1 &2: Institution and external collegiality — The variety and plethora of academic service-related activities has the potential to consume your days (and nights). Be purposeful of which departmental, college-wide and technical program committees you are a member.
Disk 3: Course Preparation — A class lecture is like Showtime at the Apollo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Showtime_at_the_Apollo). Depending on your temperament and talent, you select how you will engage students in the course material via a series of slide decks, problem-based learning techniques, flipped classroom or another method altogether. Each class, you are on stage and the students tell you by their (lack of) questions, body language, (lack of) enthusiasm, etc if your teaching approach has resonated. If you instruct a course that tends to interest students, kudos -- course prep becomes a bit easier. Otherwise, I suggest you invest quality time to determine how to relate the material to your student body. Any course can be exciting when the proper care is given to the learning experience. A teacher's excitement about the materials helps fuel a student's deeper curiosity about the course content.
Disk 4: Course Modification and Development — Course material can become stale and outdated. The fundamental course topics can be presented in new ways, new assessment mechanisms can be devised, your prior experience with the course could render you to change the order of course topics. Course evolution through revision or developing a new course is a necessary activity of any faculty member. By evolving your course, you increase your likelihood of students’ remaining engaged in your courses year after year.
Disk 5: Research Team Building — The talent and aptitude to mentor students in research activity is the hallmark of a great research advisor. Honestly, experience is the best teacher. You have to learn the balance of motivation and criticism, students' temperament and abilities, work effort and work product. I suggest The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth and Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath as good starting points.
Disk 6: Publications — The frequency and quality of your conference papers, journal articles, book chapters and books are common academic metric in assessing a faculty member's national and international influence. The summer months are a great opportunity to complete scholarly work due to the lack of a required teaching responsibility. The co-authorship with fellow colleagues and students is strongly encouraged, in some academic environments, a necessity.
Disk 7: Conference Attendance — Conference registration, attendance and paper presentation are required for publication. The conference talks help keep you current in your field's advances. While the time and cost of conferences can be expensive (see previous post), it is a cornerstone of your branding activities. The reputation for contributing good work to the field and presenting it well will only help in bringing opportunities knocking.
Disk 8: External Grant Writing — When responding to a grant proposal solicitation, the act of actually writing the project objectives, anticipated outcomes, evaluation and assessment plan is a time-intensive, idea-articulation scholarly exercise. The proposal operations can be an added stressor that consists of working with your institution's office of sponsored programs for internal grant submission approval. The coordination of the proposal document, supplemental materials, and colleague collaborations. Grant writing and proposal submission has a high work-effort yielding a low conversion to a funded award, but if awarded, external awards are highly valued in the academic realm.
Disk 9: Funded Award Management — Do your work and do it well.
With great power come great responsibility. ~Voltaire
A funded grant gives the awardees a newfound elevated social currency (aka power) amongst his/her colleagues. The spotlight turns in your direction to revel in your successes and witness any mishaps. Don't let the award excitement overshadow the necessary work in properly accomplishing the project outcomes.
