It's More Than a Job

Part Two of my series reflecting on my first year as tenure-track professor focuses on what has surprised me. I tried really hard to come up with three things because for some reason to put things in three makes it seem so balanced (thanks either to the trinity or the rhetorical triangle, not sure which really). But I could only think of two substantial things that surprised me.

The first has something to do with the location of my office. And no, its not the fact that I'm in one of the "least desirable" offices since its on the fourth floor and only has a skylight. I expected the new kid on the block to get the last choice of office (which, consequently, seems like a penthouse to me after either being in a room full of cubicles and sharing that cubicle with two other people, or being in an office the size of a closet that I shared with 3 other people).

My office is located across the hall from the room that houses all of the graduate student TA's. What surprised me about this was my reaction, which first entailed deep nostalgia for that time in my life, a community which I am only removed from by about a year and half but which I spent 5 years being part of. I love listening to their chatter, their rants, their drama. When I hear them sharing about their teaching ideas or their research ideas I long to run across the hallway and join them.

Connected to my surprise at how much I would long to be a graduate student again (if you are still a graduate student, please don't hate me at this point. I recognize this is nostalgia and often disappears around the first of every month when I get an actual paycheck), but connected to this desire is another source of surprise - that faculty do not share ideas and work in the same way. Sure, there are formal settings for it, but not those wonderful informal hallway/cubicle conversations. My guess is because while the institution gives lip service to teaching, its really the research they care about. This means, pre-tenure, its what we have to care about. So nobody has time to sit around and chat about their teaching. And I suppose we don't talk about our research informally as much because we don't share the common bond of being in a classroom setting together.

So I am surprised by how much I miss being a graduate student, which is connected to how much I miss informal conversations about teaching and research where people are truly engaged and willing to learn from one another.

The other thing I've been surprised by has nothing to do with the job, and this is why its surprising. How many years of my life have I devoted to this one pursuit - getting a tenure-track job? Especially those last 6 months. Literally every waking moment, and really every sleep(less) moment, was preoccupied with getting a job. How surprising, then, when I get out here to discover that what really matters is everything that is not the job. The place where that job takes you will really matter. The kind of people you find there will really matter. What the community has to offer will really matter.

I find it nearly pointless to say this, because the state of Academia right now funnels us into a cattle chute where we grab at the first real job that comes along and go wherever it takes us (for some this cattle chute leads to their dream jobs, others maybe not. its still a cattle chute. just go to MLA and you'll know what I mean). So to some degree all the context surrounding the job (I believe this is called "life") doesn't matter at all, because you'll take the job anyways.

But this post was about what has surprised me this year, and so I'm just telling you, this surprised me. We spend so much time consumed with getting the job, and so much time on the job, that's its easy to forget how much all the other stuff (I believe this is called "life") will matter. So part of what I've done this year is not only learn how to be a professor for the first time at a new school, I've also learned how to live in a new place and meet new people and find new favorite running trails and eating spots. And honestly, this part called "life" has been the hardest part of it all.

Baylor Bears Baseball

around Waco, on a run

Waco Downtown Farmers Market

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.

Graduation Day

Today I graduated. Well, okay, I *attended* graduation. Baylor University's graduation. As an assistant professor. 


I dug up this picture from my actual graduation, back in May of 2010, and I found it somewhat ironic since it shows me hugging my favorite tree on UNCG's campus, the very giant trees I miss so dearly here in central Texas. But the picture does afford me the nice moment, mixed with a sense of relief and deep satisfaction, to reflect that the tentative sense of hope I felt in that picture, hope that my hard work for the last 7 years in graduate school would amount to something, did. 


I still feel awfully close to the self in that picture, in full regalia with arms wrapped goofily around my sentimental attachment to the campus I called home for 7 years. Shouldn't I feel a greater sense of distance, a greater sense of difference? I have, by all accounts, achieved the first important measure of "success" in our field after graduating. I landed a tenure track job at a research university. 


But graduation day, of all days, asks us to reflect on this notion of "success." The next several posts begin a series on my reflections from this past year. In these posts I will engage with the notion of success, discuss what was surprising and not-so-surprising during my first year on the job, and mostly ask a bunch of questions that I hope will begin many interesting conversations. 

Forgiveness

I don't go to the movies very often, but I have seen two movies in the theatre recently. I am certain the proximity of these movie-going experiences led me to notice an insight I am about to share (lucky you).

Forgiveness is not something we often talk about in normal cultural circles, and it can be hard to think about forgiveness outside of a religion connotation. But I wonder if thinking about forgiveness as something particularly human and earthy, rather than something spiritual and celestial, might not be a way of understanding what is indeed divine about forgiveness.

In the movie version of Foer's novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a scene near the end of the move highlights one aspect of forgiveness. Oskar has been carrying around this incredible guilt about not picking up the phone when his dad called from the towers - what ended up being, in fact, his dad's last words. The weight of this guilt gave Oskar "heavy boots" and drove him to an obsessive search for a key that he felt sure his father had meant for him to find and would unlock a wonderful secret about his father.

In an anticlimactic moment, for Oskar and for moviegoers, we discover the key belongs to a stranger. But what happens when Oskar finds this stranger becomes a sort of "key" in itself. Oskar had told no one, not his grandmother, not his grandfather, not his mother, no one, about the betrayal of his father through his inability to pick up the phone. For some reason, Oskar decides to tell this complete stranger, and at the end of his story he begs the man to forgive him.

How odd, I thought, to ask forgiveness from someone who had nothing to do with what you felt you needed forgiving for. The stranger resisted telling Oskar "I forgive you," until Oskar's tears and adamant insistence finally led him to say "I forgive you." The relief Oskar immediately felt was telling - it pointed to some deep human need to have the words "I forgive you" verbally pronounced over us.

Second movie: The movie version of Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz. Also near the end of this flick in a rather comical mock confession-box moment on the campus of Reed College where Don, as the new "pope" for a year, prepares to hear his first set of confessions. He reverses the role of confessor and confessee and asks his predecessor to forgive him for representing, in that moment, the priests who had forever damaged his friend when he was younger. Again we have resistance to saying "I forgive you," but this time because the person saying "I forgive you" was having to let go of a great deal of hurt and anger. But like Oskar, the relief felt by saying the words "I forgive you" was quite evident.

I came away from these two movies thinking about the power of both saying and hearing the words "I forgive you," and then wondering why this powerful phrase does not figure into our cultural lexicon in a more substantial way. I am not done pondering this yet, but I feel strongly that thinking about forgiveness as a mark of our humanity, as a central human need, is an important concept that we've lost somewhere along the way.  

Dear Blog

Dear Blog,
I apologize for my absence and disloyalty. I know it's not your fault, but I just found myself more attracted to the new and glittery twitter, pininterest, instagram, and iPhone app form of Facebook. I'm not saying you need to be newer and more glittery, the fault is all mine. Besides, these things are no longer new nor are they glittery (the latter may be because I need to clean the surface of my phone, but that's beside the point).

Since it is the end of the semester I could pull out the usual excuses about being so busy with grading, etc.  but as you can see I am not doing that; I am being completely honest with you about my behavior.

Now I need you to be completely honest with me. What are you good for? I yelled this at Siri one time and she pulled up a list of everything she had been programmed to do, but that's not really the kind of answer I'm looking for here. I really want to know how my blog benefits something or someone. Lets say I devote an hour a week to a blog post, plus all the brain space that goes into thinking "is this blog worthy?" every time I experience something or read something or hear something (plus the brain space to keep straight what is appropriate material for Facebook vs. twitter vs blog).

This is not a break-up speech, please don't look at me like that. I'm just trying to have an honest, genuine conversation. A reassessment, time for reflection, kind of thing. So here are a few of my thoughts about why we are good together, and I'd love to hear yours of course:

Selfish reason #1: our culture is so busy, we leave little time for reflecting. Its hard to grow and learn without time for reflecting. The time I spend blogging is a form of reflection that will help me learn and grow.

Selfish reason #2: blogging can improve my writing because it's less restrictive than academic writing, encourages creativity, and at the same time its public nature holds me accountable to a higher quality of writing than would a private journal.

Selfish reason #3: supposedly blogging can be good for your career if you create enough traffic and create a niche for yourself. I'm still not sure that I want to turn this blog into a career pep rally for myself, but I gotta admit that reason lurks somewhere in the back of my mind.

Selfless reason #1: I'm going through a transition period that a lot of people go through (moving, starting a new job) and perhaps people can learn from my mistakes and not have to make those mistakes themselves.

Selfless reason #2: people enjoy being part of a community, and blogs can help people feel a sense of community. People who read my blog and are able to connect with something fundamental in it may feel a sense of belonging they need.

Selfless reason #3: I cannot think of another selfless reason, which points to my initial hunch - that this blog is more for me than for anyone else. I wonder if that matters or not?