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In our newest "how can we help you?" thread a reader asks:
I've seen many "What I wish I knew when I started grad school" threads. How about a thread entitled: "What I wish I knew when I started at my first TT job?"
This is a wonderful query. I'll probably weigh in down in the comments section, but I'd love to begin by just opening things up to readers.
What do you wish you knew when you started your first TT job?
So, I’m one year down in my tt job (at a non-fancy SLAC). While I’ve had wonderful colleagues help me settle in and get used to the place, here’s what surprised me, at least.
No one (besides your departmental colleagues, maybe) cares about where your PhD is from, how much you publish, where you publish, et cetera. At some SLACs, you might find yourself with older colleagues from bygone times. They may have published one article, 20 years ago. This makes for an interesting dynamic.
It is no one’s official job to help you get started/settled in. It is the unofficial job of your department chair. But you could find yourself in a situation where no one has told you how to submit grades, submit an official concern about a student, find your paystubs, et cetera.
Administration sees faculty as a problem to handle, not a partner in student and institutional success. If they could (and they’re trying to), admin would work faculty like CC profs (5/5 or 6/6) and pay us like adjuncts. You’ll come to find that faculty do, and are expected to do, a zillion things not included in any job description. These are things faculty should want to do. However, admin expects it of you, doesn’t pay or recognize you for it, and so on. Overall, I’d say, be ready for defending the value of faculty qua faculty, not qua employee. This isn’t unique to my institution, however.
This all sounds fairly negative, but this is the kind of stuff that caught me off guard (things I wish I knew…). But, I’ll say this too: the job is worth it!
I have a series of small “nuts and bolts” things that, singly, might seem insignificant but, taken together, have improved my quality of working life significantly. For context, I’m at a good SLAC, so mileage may vary.
1. If you’re at a school where students want to meet a lot, use an appointment scheduler. This eliminates ENTIRELY the email back-and-forths of the form “Hi! Can we meet to discuss X?” “Sure. When are you free? I have some time ABC” “I’m afraid I have lab then. How about DEF?” etc etc. Inbox: instantly less chaotic.
The knock-on effect of using a scheduler is that it forces you to work out your weekly schedule at the start of each term. Not just when you teach, but when you prep, when you exercise, when you just want to do nothing etc. “But I don’t know when I want to do those things! It changes weekly/daily!” This is my point: it will force you to figure it out. And that, for me at least, has been a boon.
Using a scheduler substantially improved my work life.
2. Now that you’re using a scheduler, mark every single Friday from now to eternity as “BUSY” so no one can book an appointment with you and colleagues — if they can access your Google Cal — will see that you’re occupied. You can schedule things. But it will be in YOUR hands and you can choose to focus on research or go on that bike ride or spend the day listening to the dulcet melodies of Zamfir or whatever.
3. Spend time over the summer actually doing the readings you might assign for classes in the coming academic year. And I mean: really reading them, not just reading the abstract and the first couple pages and being like “Yeah! This is good.” I’ve had too many times where I put something on a syllabus after merely skimming, only to return to it a day or two before teaching to discover that once you get past the set-up, it’s not a great paper to teach (too difficult, too inside baseball, too boring etc). Reading everything through in the summer means my syllabi are much less likely to have teaching duds.
Moreover, even if there are months between reading the paper and returning to it, returning to a marked-up paper a day before teaching is completely different then effectively coming to it for the first time the day before teaching.
Teaching has become less stressful (and better I think) since I started doing this.
4. Figure out ways to make grading as frictionless as possible. For me, this has meant returning to having students hand in paper copies and grading with a pen. Fussing with online systems and pdf annotators — having, for example, to click to access a paper or create a text box etc — created too much friction for me. There are downsides to not going digital: I don’t have copies of their graded work for future reference (eg. letters of rec). BUT two things: First, I have students submit a digital copy in addition to a hard copy. The former functions as both a back up and a time-stamped copy. Second, I tell students that it is on THEM to keep copies of their graded work. I think this is good for them! Grading is still grading. But I find it considerably more pleasant to have an actual stack of papers than a series of files.
5. Prep less, particularly in your first couple years. Everyone preps too much initially. I think it actually makes for a worse class: you’re stressed about getting through (too much) material and there’s not enough room for the class to “breathe”. One way to force yourself to prep less is — if possible — to limit your prep time to the same day that you teach (although I always reread the already-read paper the day before if it’s something I’m not very familiar with). If your schedule doesn’t allow this, block out no more than 1.5 hours the day before to prep for a class session the following day.
6. Remember that institutional life is not the entirety of your life. Let stuff go, even if its stuff you care about. The job can suck up as much of your time as you allow it to. And you can become personally very invested in institutional life. Investment is good: it’s part of what makes well-run institutions well-run. But: care about things outside of institutional life. Your institution is not your family or your friend or something you must be “loyal” to, no matter how kind and supportive it may be (this might seem like a no-brainer to people who work at giant institutions. But people at SLACs will know what I’m talking about I think).
Maybe this advice is more idiosyncratic than I realize. But perhaps it will work for some people.
I am curious if this is true for most places. I am working at a teaching-oriented R2 school. I was told that the percentage of your work (teaching vs. research vs. service) is mostly about the workloads rather than the weights. When you are evaluated/reviewed, research is always weighted more than other categories.
Back to the question, I wish I had spent less time in teaching and more in research, although this job is mostly about teaching according to my contract.
I’m recently tenured at a big, non-fancy R1. I think all of Daniel Groll’s advice is spot on. (I don’t use a scheduler, but I’m not at a school where students want to meet a lot.) And New Prof is spot on about admin’s dominant attitude.
The one thing I’d add is: I wish I had realized how important it would be to my own happiness to develop sustained relationships with undergrads. If you have some flexibility about what you teach, I suggest trying to regularly teach at least one intro-level course, as well as at least one course that lots of upper-level majors take. The thing that makes teaching feel most worthwhile (to me) is seeing students develop intellectually over a period of three or four years. There’s nothing quite like introducing a student to philosophy their freshman year, and then watching them flourish in an upper-division course a few years later. If you don’t teach intro courses, or if you just teach courses that are mostly populated by non-majors, you might largely miss out on this kind of diachronic relationship, and you might end up feeling disconnected from your classes as a result.
Find the annoyingly idiosyncratic CV template that your uni will force you to use for annual and major reviews on day 1 and fill it with your achievements as you go.
I teach at a non-fancy, now-struggling liberal arts college. A bunch of what New Prof said in the first comment above is spot-on. What I wished I knew (on top of some of those things they said) was that at smaller schools, they’ll screw you on not paying you adequately (imagine: less than new local elementary school teachers, some of whom are 24 year-olds who might’ve recently been one of your undergrads), because their idea of hitting their benchmarks for your compensation is to pay you 75-80% of what is standard nationwide for your field, at your rank. Then at their discretion, they’ll opt not to give cost-of-living increases annually, to help them manage their finances… and if (as we are) in an insanely expensive tech-hub city, your salary 8-10 years in (even after rank promotion and getting tenure) is less, in adjusted (real) dollars, than the inadequate salary you began with, because local inflation and housing prices are off the charts. I never expected I’d have to do all this side work just to help provide enough for my family. And it looks like I’m just stuck in this situation, because my university probably won’t improve our pay in significant ways.
This has been a wonderful thread to read. It reminds one (me, at least) of the complexities surrounding a new job in the academy. At my first TT job, I was assigned an office that was not even cleaned since the last occupant (yes, there was junk left behind, but also dust and dirt!). I also discovered that we had very small travel budgets (VERY SMALL), but these could be supplemented with extra funds from our union and other sources around campus (Look into this – including the office of international education, for international travel). You also walk into a campus culture that has been partly constructed by your senior colleagues. (My colleagues hated the people in the arts, people I wanted to connect with). At my second TT job (at a senior level), I was given NO orientation, despite the fact that it was a different country. The key is to quickly find the people who can help you – often your union representative (they do more than handle formal complaints).
Find the faculty lounge at your university and go there for lunch. Regularly. I can’t tell you how many times I went at my school and we had these round banquet tables and I sat with faculty from around campus and learned a ton. I once sat next to the previous chair of the tenure review committee in the college and asked her questions about what it was like through the whole lunch, and that helped when I came up. I’ve had lunches with deans and department chairs and learned a ton this way over the years.
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