Knowing when to slow down
As a new faculty member on the tenure track, I don’t have the luxury of saying no very often. It’s not that I can’t say no at all, but rather, I’m worried that if I don’t say yes, it will be misconstrued that I don’t play well with others. That could potentially damage my case for tenure when that comes up or make it more difficult to work with certain folks because I will seen as being in the camp of one faculty faction instead of another. A lot of the advice you read on the interwebs about this topic is that you should say no as often as possible because you need as much time to advance your research as possible. When offered other committee positions or responsibilities (journal editor, conference organizer, etc), you’re supposed to avoid those like the plague for as long as possible. I can totally…
ZOMG! I Haz Survived!
If you can’t tell from the title or the picture, the semester is over! I’ve made it through a 4-month whirlwind of activity, craziness, anxiety, and, not to toot my own horn, success. Going into this semester, I thought I had a good idea of what it took to be tenure track material (I mean, I got the job didn’t I?!?). That last month though, was a little rough at times. All in all, I think everything went about as well as it could go for my first semester teaching. I’ve read some of the comments from my class survey (I’ll discuss more in a later post) and many were of the flavor, “I was a little apprehensive about this class with a new prof and given that this was his first time teaching, it was a lot better than expected and things went well.” That’s encouraging for the future. While…
Blogging is hard…
…when you have a lot of other stuff to do. It’s not that blogging is difficult, although I think I’m running low on relevant topics. Rather, it’s more of a time crunch that’s killing me. I started blogging last February over at GEARS (not that I’m trying to self promote…) thinking that 30 minutes per day writing about some of my experiences with the tenure track process will be good for me. I’ll be able to clear my head, vent occasionally, maybe get good advice from more senior readers, and possible help someone else that’s in my shoes. Plus, blogging makes me keep up with other bloggers. I particularly like following Dr. Becca (@doc_becca, Fumbling Towards Tenure Track Tenure) even though she’s a scientist because we’re both at the same stage in the game. When she posted about being paraded around like a new puppy, I totally understand what it means to go…