Hi friends,
Here I am, I did it! I am done year 1 of the tenure track. It’s honestly been a great year with minimal catastrophes and only a moderate amount of late nights working. As summer settles in, I figured I would take a moment to exhale and think of advice to share for managing that first year.
Find Your People
Navigating a brand new university is a huge undertaking. You’ll need both junior and senior level colleagues, admins, and friends to help you figure it all out. Find the people you go to for advice, to rant, to rave, to celebrate, and to ask all your questions. Also, given the past year and the ways resistance to the genocide of the Palestinian people has come to college campuses, it’s also important to find people who are organizing on campus and that you can work in solidarity with. As we’ve learned from Mariame Kaba, everything worthwhile is done with other people. The kind of academic success I’m after is not and never will be a solo endeavor.
Minimize Distractions and Get Organized
The time to focus is now. Year 1 is a time to figure out what kind of scholar you want to be and how to get to tenure. I see the first year as really a grounding period to set up for the years to come. So that means getting clear on tenure requirements. It means focusing on having strong course preps that will improve from minimal to moderate tweaking in the coming years. You should also solidify what articles need to be sent out and when. And most importantly, you have to get good at managing: classes, graduate students, research funds, receipts, etc. Project management is a core part of being an academic— it’s how we turn big ideas into digestible and doable tasks. Staying organized and keeping a precise schedule will help you prioritize what needs to be done when.
Plan Ahead
Before starting my job, I created a list of everything I wanted to accomplish over the year. It’s so much easier to know how to organize your time if you keep a running list of major goals and due by dates.1 Those goals for my first year included paper submissions for journals and conferences, data gathering, self nominations, teaching plans, etc. This running list will also help you structure a narrative of your year for performance reviews.
Prioritize Time
I was lucky enough to receive an external grant this year and the bulk of those funds will be used for a course release. I have learned that great writing takes time— time to draft, time to read, time to share and present work. Whenever you can, do what you can to give yourself more time up front to focus on producing research so you’ll have work published and in the pipeline in a timely manner.
And that’s that for my run of the mill, very simple, straightforward academic advice. No bells and whistles here: you get it done by doing it. If you have any additional ideas or comments, feel free to sound off in the comments.
I, of course, use Notion to keep track of both big and small goals. I’ve mentioned Notion before. I love Notion.
Great advice! I’ve worked only at small teaching focused schools, so some advice or point of view does differ. One thing I heard too late in my career relates to goals but also time, balance, and self-preservation. Commit to a maximum number of things in any job category, basically, based on personal needs, goals, etc. Illustration: do you get requests to do keynotes or conferences that involve travel, money, etc? How many of these will you do in any 12-month period? The person who offered this example said she commits to two a year because otherwise, she’s away from young kids when she doesn’t want to be. The first two good such offers get her “yes,” and the rest get her “what about for next year…?” This also soothes decision fatigue, endless cost/benefit analyses, and overload. She’s able to commit to X number of whatever in any given 12-month period and that’s what she does. “Time budgeting” based in clear priorities, needs, etc. For me, this approach also soothes the ego/fear — what if no one ever asks me again…? — that always created overcommitted stress, anxiety, racing for little pots of funding ($200 for an $1800 trip), etc.
I’ve also taught a tonnnn of courses. New preps annually, or overloads, or all-college new courses. Advice about NOT doing this is helpful for this who teach a lot, have large enrollments, etc. Finally: choose 1 or 2 goals for teaching each year, minor tweaks. Example: one August I decided I wanted to eradicate “you guys” in my speech. So that was a big goal. Accomplishing it was good and didn’t make me feel like I was coasting in my teaching. It was enough.
Great advice, and congrats on reaching this amazing milestone!