I recently participated in a panel for our new faculty at the University of Tulsa on what I wish I knew as I started my academic career here. This post gathers those learnings and bits of advice from my early tenure-track experience, and I hope it’s useful to others. As this post’s image captures, this stage in one’s career is a new beginning. It contains both triumphs and challenges, clear days and storms.

Research

• Protect research & “A” time, but find a new verb. We often talk about “protecting” our research time, which is undeniably important if we want, or need, to produce a significant amount of quality research. I agree with everyone who advises to put research and writing on your calendar just like you do the classes you teach, and to always show up. As often as possible, follow Joli Jensen’s advice to give your research and writing your “A time,” that is, your best and brightest brain energy and attention. While all of that is good advice, protection can be a problematic, and even destructive, framing, when it comes to research’s place within the rest of our careers and lives. Instead, I’d say: keep, nurture, and honor your research time.
• Reduce research at the start. All that said, it’s okay to temporarily reduce research at the start of your first semester teaching multiple courses. I did. (Read more on that in this post on how I wrote my first academic book from my dissertation.) Give yourself an “ignition date,” maybe 4-6 weeks into your first semester, to start creating the schedule and habits to ensure that writing and research become, and remain, routine.
• Seek out resources for writing and research. Don’t try to go it alone! Attend whatever workshops are offered at your university on research, writing, review processes, and tenure and promotion. Find and be part of a writing group for supportive accountability. If your library has a faculty resource center, visit it at regular intervals. Whenever I need a boost, I check out academic “self-help” books on writing, teaching, sustainable academic careers, and so on. Even if they don’t contain life-changing advice, just reading them often makes me feel better.
• Practice being a public scholar. Find opportunities to write for different types of audiences and in different voices. This helps your research make it out into the world where it can make a difference. It’ll also make you a better, more adaptive, and readable writer. It’s important for the academy and academics to be integrated into society. Be someone to think with.
• Celebrate every milestone and all the small wins. Higher ed increasingly crafts moments of celebration and joy for undergraduate students, but not always for faculty. Make sure you do this for yourself and and colleagues, along with your peers, friends, and family. Celebrate every submission, acceptance, publication, grant, review, and so on. We’ll be cheering you on.

Teaching

• Focus on relationships & content, care & challenge. Before you dive into the content of a course, get to know your students as people and learners, whether through intro surveys, intro letters, or similar assignments. I agree with William Deresiewicz’s summary that what resonates most with students is that they know we care about them as people and learners (and that we show it), and that we challenge them intellectually.
• Assign the right amount. When I was a new faculty member, I probably assigned too much work. Now I always think: what do I want my students to learn in the short term and what do I want them to take with them for the much longer term. Then I design assignments around that. And always include plenty of scaffolding, especially for more creative assignments.
• Do mid-term (or even earlier) evaluations. With this simple tool, students feel heard and respected for their role in the learning process, and engage more readily. And you receive valuable feedback to help you make revisions and/or a confidence boost; this is working! We’re okay! Depending upon the class (for example, if it’s a new course or the class vibe feels either off or difficult to parse), I sometimes do a feedback check as early as four weeks into the course.
• Ask, don’t assume. If something about a student’s performance isn’t meeting expectations, don’t assume you know why or what’s going on. Sometimes as professors, we take it personally and negatively when students are late to class, late to turn in assignments, or disengaged. Use this performance gap to start a conversation, not issue a reprimand. I follow Kevin Gannon’s thinking that a professors, we are facilitators of learning and growth, not cops.  

Service

• Seek out meaningful service. Rather than anxiously waiting for service requests to find (and overwhelm) you, seek out service that you genuinely enjoy and care about. That way, you’re making a contribution and have more agency to decline other asks, especially if you have an understanding chair and dean pre-tenure.
• Balance service to your institution and to the field. You’ll need both for tenure and the expectation to develop a national, and then international, scholarly reputation.

Community, Self & Life

• Find academic community for your research, teaching, and other mentorship needs. Don’t go it alone. This can be in person and locally on your campus, as well as online and via social media.
• Invest in friends. If the city and university are new to you, take time to make new friends, colleagues, and connections. They’ll help to sustain you! Make friends off campus who aren’t academics, if you can. (I admit this can be easier said than done.)
• Engage in your campus community. Attend talks and symposia, campus events, and so on. It can feel exhausting to do more, especially at the start of your academic journey, but digging deep into an intellectual and social community is part of what makes a faculty job an enjoyable profession.
• Find and nurture your hobbies and interests outside of work.
• Practice as many healthy habits as you can, especially sleep, move your body, eat a balanced diet, manage stress, and tend to your mental health. Make at least some of these habits non-negotiable and be kind to yourself when the others slide sometimes.
• Dedicate time to your partner or family, if you have them. This is a different type of time to “protect,” and just as important.
• Prioritize during seasons. That said, a mentor once told me there are seasons of your life and career when you can’t do everything well. Our commitments to our research, our students, our family and loved ones, our colleagues, and ourselves sometimes compete because there are only so many hours in the day. There may be moments when you let those you love down. (I feel like I did when I worked long and hard to revise my dissertation into a book.) Have a conversation about your seasons with your family and be open about your shorter-term needs, rather than letting it just happen and perhaps causing ill effects along the way.
• Know your mission. Write down for yourself what you aspire to contribute and do through your profession as an academic. Know why this is meaningful work. Know why it matters to you, so you can turn to this mission in moments of challenge.

For me as a professor, in the most basic terms, I create knowledge and thinkers. I create knowledge that interprets the culture of our everyday lives and explains how it shapes us, fostering for readers a critical understanding that makes our journeys through difficult times easier and more joyful. I create thinkers who are critical, creative, and powerfully communicative, ready to tackle our time’s most complex and seemingly intractable problems. Both threads of my academic work contribute to making justice and happiness for all closer to a reality. I believe in my bones that higher education can be transformative, a truly good and meaningful contribution to our society in both the present and for the future.

I hoped all of this at the start of my academic career. Now I know it.