Now You’re an Associate Professor - What’s Next?
From Anita Borg Institute Wiki
Now You're an Associate Professor - What's Next?
Presenters: Tracy Camp, Colorado School of Mines Joan Francioni, Winona State University Mary Lou Soffa, Unviersity of Virgina Mary-Jane Irwin, Penn State
**Slides for this presentation are avaliable on Tracy Camp's Website
Acitivities towards promotions Attend the CRA CAP workshop built for helping associate professors move to a professor position. All members strongly recommended this.
Talking about climbing the academic ladder. How to move from associate professor to professor. At teaching institutions, teaching is very important. Research and scholarship is still very important and the most important at research universities. Service and leadership is important at both and in particular, to become full professor you must show more leadership. Moving up requires more of everything but now you can take more risks and responsibilities without worrying about losing your job.
When you are promoted to associate/given tenure it's based on having a significant record of accomplishment and on the basis that you show promise of continued professional growth and recognition. To be promoted to full you should be recognized and show leadership. You should mature into the potential they saw in you.
Is there a time line? There is a common "six year clock." Less than four years would be fast, and taking more than eight years would be a little slow. Some data shows that women take longer. Most important is to ensure you don't just sit around and wait for someone to tell you that you should try and get full professor. If someone hasn't recommended it to you, talk to someone about the possibility of moving up.
Make sure your research has an impact. Visibility and credibility are paramount. Being published in the best conferences and being recognized is important. You want to show you have research maturity and leadership by being a conference chair, program chair, or sitting on editorial boards. Try and become known so that your name pops up when people talk about your area of interest.
Develop your own research team, with undergraduates and perhaps even junior faculty in the same roll as someone would have mentored you. You need to show you can obtain and sustain funding. You want to ensure that you are helping to develope strong grad and, also very important, phD students.
Try take a range of classes (in size and scope and level of material). Try and create and update courses and be diligent in continuing to improve your teaching skills.
Letters are important. Make sure you network with important field with people in your research and Promote your research, definitely talk up your work. Try and get the big names on your list of letters. You want all senior ranking letter writers, with a mix of international, industrial and academic backgrounds. The credentials of the people writing your letters are more important than for associate professor.
You have to be more involved in service, being chair of important committees such as space,finance, nomination comittes in universities and external services such as NSF panels, conferences and journals. Don't sit on committees that don't have power or impact. Don't sit on committees just because they need a woman to satisfy a quota. Ensure it's a position where you can make an impact.
Visit departments and give talks. Invite visible colleagues as speakers. Stay in touch with the leaders in your area to broaden your own knowledge and increase your possible letter writers. Be sure to accept these responsibilities wisely, do not take something you can't do. A bad or poorly planned job can reflect poorly on you. Do not say yes to all committees. Use your time wisely. Lastly, have a mentor and BE a mentor to someone else.
Continue to ask to teach courses that enhance your research and take on more difficult courses. Do not go overboard on service. Make sure your service is meaningful and manageable.
Things to avoid: Switching research areas and then going up for promotion will be very difficult. You won't have the contacts and networking established to do so very successfully easily. Do not spend too much time on only teaching/research. Ask for advice: if people don't think you're ready hold off for a bit until you feel comfortable.
If you fail: try try again. Try and get constructive feedback from department chairs and senor faculty and try and handle the disappointment constructively. Don't be discouraged or withdraw from the department, try and change yourself in a positive way to make yourself a better candidate. Try and over come your negative emotions and do not let them damage your future career.
Differences between Undergraduate and Research Institute promotions
For Research institutions you want to be recognized as an authority (leader) in fields of specialization by professional peers and you should try and gain national and an international reputation. Undergraduate institutions: recognized for excellence in teaching and creative scholarly activity and you want to exhibit leadership beyond your department.
Similarities: Make sure your accomplishments are visible and are still of interest to you. Collect evidence of the effectiveness of your projects/initiatives. In undergrad institutions, where there aren't journals etc. it is a little harder keeping track of your own successes. Your successes should extend beyond "attending class and getting through the curriculum". It should be about affecting students.
Promotions are based on merit and are not automatic, they reflect cumulative past performance and steady continuous growth.
Excellence in teaching and creative scholarly activity rank highest among the criteria for promotion in Education institutes. Ensure you document achievements in both. One nice thing is the definition of scholarly activity can extend beyond the realm of tradition "research".
Sometimes it is very difficult to maintain strong student evaluations and to try to constantly improve your teaching skills. Sometimes students are strongly opposed to new innovative techniques and so sometimes you can experience negative feedback for your changes. Try to document your changes and record your reasons and support for making these changes. You can take these risks now that you have tenure so don't be afraid to try new things. This risk taking can reflect well on you. You should get some peer review and administrative evaluations as well ask around for performace of your students in subsequent classes to also evauate how well your new techniques are working.
For Service, try and be involved in student advising and activities on a departamental, university wide and professional level. Community service will have higher weight at undergraduate universities where community extends to location. "Engaged" learning is becoming more important and can involve the community in obtaining more meaningful projects and experiences for students.
Promote yourself by talking up your research and your scholarly activities. Make sure your website is up to date so people can look you up after meeting you! this is important!
Challenges: Maintaining a balance is important. Don't rush or drag out the process. Be sure to avoid misunderstanding and misinterpretations of expectations. Don't loose perspective and lose yourself in the work.
Remember that you can do this! You've already been promoted to associate professor. Make sure to reflect if this is right for you and be aware of why you're a strong candidate for professor.
Achieving Leadership
Caveat: the following section is more American and Research University specific
"Leadership style proposals" are important. These proposals require team building, great research agendas and strong outreach eg: NSF's IGERT, Expeditions, CDI. You can increase your profile by creating tools/systems for people in your area of research.
Ask the department head to let you attend the CRA Snowbird Conference. This is a biannual meeting of department heads from North America (and elsewhere) and other folks. Sessions are on a wide variety of topics of interest to department heads and it's a great way to meet a lot of influential people. Department heads are encouraged to bring a junior faculty member to this conference so it is not unreasonable for you to be there.
Through NSF try to serve on proposal review panels, participate in topical focused workshops, and serve on the NSF/CISE advisory board. The best way to get known at NSF is to spend a year (or two, they prefer two) as an NSF rotator.
You can achieve leadership nationally by trying to get on boards and be involved with CRA, NRC, and CSTB. These positions are competitive and a quite a process for being accepted.
In the best of worlds, if you do good work people will recognize with you. However in the real world you have to be proactive, Let people know about your successes, contributions and accomplishments. Be positive, and appear confident and make sure you have your "elevator talk" ready for any moment when you could meet someone to talk to about your research. Be careful to not be too big of a bragger.
MAKE SURE YOUR WEBSITE IS UP TO DATE AND LOOKS PROFESSIONAL AND COMPLETE. Your web presence will be the first impression many people get of you and you have no idea who's looking, or when theyr'e doing it. Apply now for ACM and/or IEEE senior member.
Biggest Challenges:
Stay focused on your goals and do not let yourself get distracted by the small every day tasks. Have the right web page content, tone and keep it up to date. Work on creating a brief description of what your research interest are and WHy they're important and people should care. Make sure you have a life outside of your work and keep up with emails.
Pay it forward: Help others on their way up once you've arived at the top.
QUESTIONS, COMMENTS, and ANSWERS:
Many people work in joint works. Make sure to be explicit on what you have contributed to these projects is extremely important. There is an unfortunate assumption that male members of these works were the driving force. Ensure you receive credit where credit is due.
What should people with a not-just-computing background do when applying to a computing science program for professorship or associate professorship: Ensure your contributions are recognized in group works and try and highlight the computer science contributions are to these works. It will be difficult to get letters for the appropriate fields and ensure you choose your letter writers who hold the most clout in the field you're applying to.
You mentioned not to over serve on committees like "picnic planning" etc so that you don't hurt yourself in the long run: All you do is say "no thank you." Hopefully you've served at least once, so if you've already served you can play the card of "oh well I've already served I thin kit's important for everyone to have a chance. you should let someone else try". Don't let yourself feel guilty you don't have to say yes. You can also mention that you're already serving on other committees. You can also say "I think it would be much more useful to be on committee X" so that they understand that you are taking your work seriously. YOu can always say "Thank you very much for thinking of me. I am fairly busy right now so let me think about it and I'll get back to you by the end of the week". This way you can do things without having to be face to face and you have time to formulate your response in a politic manner. If you can suggest someone else it may be easier to say no. Also dont' just wait to be asked to be on a committee. Put your name out there for committees you want to be on.
I will have to move soon after receiving tenure. What can I do to help myself be in a position to get a professorship at a new university? Ensure you go to a university which is equivalent to the university you're at. If you go to a better school you may have to move down. There is nothing wrong with this so long as you recognize the risks.