Tenured Faculty Advice

Tenured Faculty Advice

Congratulations! You made it! You got tenure! This is huge. Some of you will feel liberated and proud. Others will feel stressed, bitter, and even depressed. However you may feel right now, getting tenure is a cause for celebration. And, after a while, once the feeling of relief or novelty wears off, you will start to contemplate a life ahead that will not be that different in the end: more proposals, more papers, more teaching. As a friend once told me: “Tenure is like a pie-eating contest where the winning prize is more pie.” That is when it’s time to pause, reflect, and embark on a new professional journey. Keep reading if this applies to you. Like our list of advice for early career faculty, we divided our list of advice to tenured faculty into two main categories: strategies to adopt and hierarchy of responsibilities.

# Embrace Your Lifestyle: The tenure process is so stressful that it can be traumatic. Despite the relief of getting tenure, you may feel disgusted and depressed as you contemplate a life full of the same things you did during your tenure. First, you must realize that the life of a faculty is exceptional. We are paid to think of research questions that we find interesting and work toward solving them. This is a privilege. Most people work for a company and devote their effort to the best of the company. We set our own priorities. We work on what we believe in. Being a faculty is like being an entrepreneur without the fear of not getting paid at the end of the month (and also without the yearend bonus when the company does well). The life of a faculty possesses all the ingredients for professional satisfaction. It is hard work. There are ups and downs. But we must realize our lifestyle is amazing, and we should take time to embrace it.

# From Sprinting to Running a Marathon:  Getting through tenure feels like a sprint. From day one, the days are counted. That’s why we call it a tenure clock. The first semesters as a faculty member tend to be devoted to learning how to teach and developing class material. You send a few proposals, but getting them funded is not critical. By the end of year 2, the pressure builds up.  You need to pay your students. By year 3, you realize you need to publish more papers, and your students are too slow. Getting tenure seems impossible. The natural response is to work harder, to accelerate. That’s what you do in years 4 and 5. Getting tenure starts to seem possible. The finish line is in sight, and once you go through the finish line, you see people keep running, and you realize it’s not a sprint in the end but a marathon. The transition from sprinting to running a marathon is not easy. The first step is to take time off and resource yourself (next strategy).

# Take Time Off (Sabbatical) and Resource Yourself: Resourcing yourself as a faculty is not trivial. On the one hand, the stress from the tenure process is alive and doing well, and dealing with it does not happen overnight. Plus, you might be finally comfortable writing grants and aspire to lead larger efforts. On the other hand, from caring for children to caring for elderly parents, you may not have time to resource yourself. Yet, taking time off and resourcing yourself is critical. Here, we are not talking about taking some “me” time (e.g., playing sports, meditating, taking a hobby). We are talking about something more profound. Like taking time off at the end of the semester is important to rest and refresh to be ready for the next semester, taking time off at the end of tenure is important to refresh and generate new research ideas. This is well known. This is why most universities have sabbaticals. Take it! But beware. Sabbaticals are precious, and it can be very easy to overload oneself. Sabbaticals just mean you don’t teach, but everything else in your life remains the same. Don’t focus on productivity; that’s a recipe for doing more of the same but a bit more efficiently. Focus on creativity. That’s why spending time at another university is a good idea. New environments foster creativity. But you cannot be creative if you are constantly pulled in all directions. Do not overload yourself with new commitments. Be selfish.

# From Researcher to Project Manager: In many disciplines – especially in engineering and science – the life of a faculty involves more project management than research. Whether that makes you happy or not, the metamorphosis is inevitable and even desirable. You have gained a lot of knowledge, and your time is better spent having ideas and managing students who do the research than you doing the research yourself. That’s why your pay is higher than a student’s. Here’s the problem. You were never trained to be a project manager. Depending on your academic style and what you did during your tenure track, it may be time to crack open a project management or time management book. Be selective. Not all the lessons from project management books apply to academia, but there might be a thing or two that you will learn. One strategy is to dedicate whole or half days to deep work when you don’t schedule any meetings and maybe work from home. Juggling responsibilities that require deep or shallow focus (e.g., writing a proposal vs. answering emails) is a skill that can be learned. Everybody is different. Read books, ask colleagues, and find the strategies that work best for you.

# Increase Service Activities in Professional Societies and Your University: Tenure is also synonymous with increasing your service activity load. Someone must do service, and it makes sense for the load to be heavier for tenured faculty. There’s no way around it. Gradually, your service load will likely increase from taking about ten percent of your time to twenty-five, thirty, or even fifty percent of your time. On the one hand, you should embrace it, but on the other, you should be careful not to squeeze too little time for proposals and student advising. Balancing your service activities is another skill to learn. While it will be up to you to decide whether you predominantly want to get involved in activities inside your university or with professional societies, you should pursue a bit of both. In particular, it will be important to take some leadership role in professional societies to boost your international profile. This is important for your next promotion to full (if this applies to you) but also to increase your visibility and to promote your research and ideas. Become a journal editor (email the editor-in-chief). Chair a committee. Organize sessions and a workshop.

# Keep It Fun and Make Time for Work Activities You Enjoy: The life of a tenured faculty does not have to be all project management and service. Carve time to do what you enjoy. That could be doing some of the research yourself (coding can be soothing), becoming the president of a professional society, getting involved with education research, visiting high schools to promote your field and passion to students, or writing books (CSUN Director Sybil Derrible’s favorite fun work activity). Whatever it is, carve time for it. That’s one of the best ways to remain intellectually stimulated and to feel satisfied with your work. And what is fun will evolve over the years. Embrace the change but remain stimulated.

# Keep the Promotion to Full in Sight (if this applies to you): If you just received tenure and became Associate Professor, now is not the time to think of your promotion to full. Don’t read this. Take time off and resource yourself. As you settle into your life as Associate Professor, the idea of going up for full will creep in. That’s when you should look at the criteria set by your university. Promotion to full often requires demonstrating national and international recognition. That’s often best achieved by collaborating with other teams, by securing larger proposals, or by being committee chair for a society or editor for a journal. Your journal publication count will also need to increase significantly. During tenure, you struggled to publish ten to fifteen papers in five/six years. Now you contemplate publishing forty, fifty, or even more to be able to go for full in five/seven years while doing more service. That’s why becoming a project manager is important. That’s why focusing on creativity is important. That’s also why keeping it fun is important. And remember that the life of a faculty is exceptional. Make the journey your own.

Although it may come as a surprise, the hierarchy of responsibilities of a tenured professor is not that different from the one of early career faculty. After all, we still have the same job with the same overall responsibilities. Yet, there are important differences. In particular, getting involved with service activities will become much more important.

1. Serve as a Reference / Recommendation: Serving as a reference remains the easiest and most impactful way to change someone’s life. While writing references can be tedious, do it. Soon enough, you will also be asked to require promotion letters for faculty seeking tenure. These letters are time-consuming, but again, they change a person’s life. Do it.

2. Advise and Support Graduate Students: While you have matured and your expectations from students may have evolved, a first-year graduate student remains a first-year graduate student. Take time to advise and support them. Also, remember that their well-being is tied to your promotion to full professor (and your publication count needs to increase). Plus, with the tenure pressure off, it should be easier not to convey your stress to your students.

3. Write Grant Proposals: There is no way around it. Those students need to be paid to conduct research and produce papers. You need to bring in research funding, which means you need to keep writing grant proposals. However you choose to do it (write yourself or include students and post-docs), you must keep submitting proposals. Everyone has their preference. Keep at it. And embrace the fact that writing proposals to solve a research question that you find pertinent is pretty great.

4. Teach: While you may have your teaching on cruise control now, teaching remains one of the most important responsibilities of a faculty. Like writing proposals, if you do not enjoy teaching, change something, try new strategies, and enjoy it because teaching is pretty great too. If you enjoy teaching, that’s even better. You may even consider becoming your department’s Director of Undergraduate Studies or at least serving on your department’s undergraduate curriculum committee.

5. Get Involved with Service Activities: Whether it is within your department or within a professional society (ideally a bit of both), get involved. Increase your service load. That can mean chairing a department committee or even becoming the Director of Undergraduate Studies or Director of Graduate Studies. It can also mean chairing a committee in a professional society. At the very least, you should become an associate editor in a journal (email the editor-in-chief). Much of the time you gained by becoming more productive during tenure will now be dedicated to service, as mentioned in the strategies to adopt above. You can either be told how to get involved (e.g., from your department head) or choose how to get involved. Prefer the latter. And remember that these service activities will be important when you consider going up for full professor.

6. Pursue Work Activities You Enjoy: We discussed this above in the strategies to adopt section. Find a work activity you enjoy and carve time for it. The first five responsibilities above are not all that fun. This one ensures you remain intellectually stimulated and are satisfied with your career choice, which is one of the best strategies to enjoy the marathon you have embarked on. In the strategies to adopt for early career faculty, we argued that doing research was important. It is not the case anymore as a tenured faculty unless that’s your fun work activity.

7. Review Grant Proposals and Academic Publications: These two are at the bottom now. You have learned the trade. Reviewing proposals (to learn how to write one) and reviewing academic publications are not as important. They remain a central responsibility of a faculty, but they’re just not as important as the other responsibilities listed above.