It's A Job

I thought I would start this series reflecting on my first year as a tenure-track professor on what was not so surprising. This whole post could best be summed up as: What your advisors tell you really is true.

Maybe I just had great advisors, but it does seem most of what they told me, both the good and the bad, has come to pass. Since this post could go on forever, I'll list a few of the key highlights:

Protect your time early on
     Getting used to a new place (both new place to live and new place to work) can take a ton of energy and mind space. If you are at an institution that requires research, then your best bet for the first semester or two is to get some classes that resemble something you've taught before, don't do any committee work, and devote whatever energy you have to getting some articles out, attending conferences, and/or making progress on the book.
     My experience with this was extremely positive because my institution understands this principle and first year profs are not required to do any committee work. Even so, I started picking up some responsibilities in the spring semester and could not believe how quickly it ate into my time. I also taught a course of upper-level majors, a first time for me, and that also drained most of my time and energy. Both of these things, the service and the teaching, were rewarding beyond words. But it did show me how true it is that you've got to protect your time, especially early on. Let me put it like this: in the fall, I got two articles revised and sent out. This spring, I barely got one sent out by mid-May. The difference was committee work and class prep time.
     I will discuss at length in another post in the notions of success in our field how this balancing act can be fulfilling and frustrating, but the main point here is that when people say that you've got to protect your time pre-tenure they aren't kidding.

The job involves teaching and writing
     The good news? You know how to do this. This point could actually go in the "surprising" list because at first I was surprised by how the work felt just like what I did in graduate school. My days are filled with class prep, teaching, grading, meetings, library visits, reading, writing, database searches. This all sounds familiar, right?  The job, then, is not surprising because it follows the same rhythms I had in graduate school. I will discuss in the "surprising" post some of the additional pressures and sense of responsibility that comes with being a professor and not a student, but really it has been quite comforting to continue the good (not the bad) and comfortable habits I'd cultivated during my time as a graduate student.
     The bad news? If you kept saying "man I can't wait to graduate so I can be done with this shit!" Then you should immediately proceed to the "surprising" post. For me, as I imagine for most graduate students, we do love to research, write, and teach. But I also love the balancing act, the committee work, the ruthless  schedule that, yes, allows me an inordinate amount of freedom but that also keeps me tied to work 24/7 either literally or at least mentally. All of that seems the same to me. So if you felt that in graduate school, the tenure-track position will not surprise you.

People will be People
     Wherever more than 2 are gathered, there will be drama. Its funny to me that middle school drama is really just human drama. My advisors warned me about not getting involved in department politics, and sometimes the stories you hear make you think it couldn't possibly be that bad. Obviously this will vary widely from institution to institution, but I'm pretty sure in-fighting will exist wherever you go. I feel fortunate to be at a place where this is not an all-consuming issue, but it's there. But no surprise, right?

     What has worked best for me is to keep my head down and keep working. This is what I need to be doing anyways, so it doesn't require any extra effort. I've found it is more like having an extra awareness: join lunches and coffees and "water cooler" gatherings when the right mixture of people are there; don't initiate hot-button topics yourself and have enough confidence and enough good topics to redirect the conversation if you want to. Simple things like that.

The not-so-suprising aspects of the job have actually come as a huge relief to me. I felt prepared in ways that I did not realize I would, and the transition has been (nearly) seamless. In the next post I will talk about some things that did surprise me, but I would love to hear from other people about how their transition to tenure track has been? I would hate to have only my limited view point represented on the blog. Please comment with your thoughts and opinions about how the terms of a job as an academic changes from graduate student to professor.