In an earlier post, about time management for graduate students, I mentioned that there is a limit as to how much a person can write in a day. I also think that a lot of people get burned out working day after day on the same topic, and, if they don’t get burned out, they lose their ability to think critically about what they’re writing. Some people manage that second problem by working on multiple projects at the same time. When they just can’t work on, they work on that for the next three weeks or so, and then come back. I can’t do that.
In many fields, a graduate student teaches one class (perhaps two), is on very few committees, and has one or two major scholarly obligations (finishing the dissertation and trying to get something published). The kinds of classes that graduate students teach often have fairly established syllabi (or, at least, course requirements).
There’s a post here where I talk some about the challenges. The time management challenges for assistant professors are, I think (and I was an assistant professor for a long time—at three different institutions), very different from either graduate student or full professor, but they are much like the issues for associates (with a big exception I’ll mention).
These challenges are: much more open-ended teaching opportunities, the vagaries of establishing a professional identity, service requirements, multiple scholarly obligations, and (if it wasn’t already a challenge in graduate school) often a family or just very different sorts of living conditions.
Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, one of the challenges of being an assistant professor is the freedom regarding teaching. Often, departments rely on new hires to create new courses, modify curriculum, or in other ways be the innovators. There are good reasons for that reliance—assistant professors are likely to be trained in ways that are very different from the older faculty, simply because they were recently at a very different program. It can be tempting to create too many new courses—a strategic choice is to spend the first year creating a repertoire of courses, and then tinkering with them for a while. It can be intoxicating to teach entirely new ones, to have the chances to work in programs (such as honors or mentoring programs) that are often overload.
There’s a similar problem with service—assistant professors want to make themselves central to the department, and want to be liked. It’s important to make strategic choices about obligations. And, it’s also important to keep in mind that women and POC get a lot more pressure to take on service-heavy responsibilities, for both good (representation) and bad (tokenism) reasons. Learning to say, “I’d love to do that after I have finished my book” (or “enough for tenure” or “have tenure”) in a genuinely enthusiastic way can be very useful.
It’s important to go to conferences, since it’s good to network (find other scholars working on similar projects, find out who might be a good co-panelist, co-author, co-editor of a collection), and also good to get a sense of who people are citing a lot, where the field appears to be going.
But it’s often hard to figure out which conferences, how many, and it isn’t a good idea to spend a lot of time writing paper conferences that aren’t candidates for articles or chapters. Conferences used to be good for chatting with editors (to try to figure out if a project has a market), but presses are attending fewer conferences, so it’s hard to say.
Many students (especially ones who took some time between grad and undergrad) have children in graduate school; many don’t until they’re assistant professors. Some people get tired of crappy student apartments and really want a house. Those kinds of choices have some odd consequences—I became much more productive when I reduced my commute, something I hadn’t expected. So, choices to live far from campus (because it’s more affordable, schools are better, or other reasons) can introduce variables.
In short, being an assistant professor is a challenge in terms of time management because, even more than as a graduate student, it involves making decisions without enough information to make good ones.
Being an assistant professor is a challenge in terms of time management because, even more than as a graduate student, it involves making choices without knowing what all the options really are, the relative advantages and disadvantages, the potential consequences. It’s just as much uncertainty as a graduate student, but with more choices.
The most obvious course of action is to get good mentoring, but even that is choosing among several paths in a forest of unknowns. While I feel comfortable giving advice in the abstract, I don’t think I know enough about conditions now for junior scholars to make a lot of specific recommendations. I think it’s useful to have several mentors—someone just one rank above at a different institution, someone high up at your institution, someone just one rank above at your institution.
Because I am none of those things, the advice I’m about to give should be taken with a grain of salt (or more). Regardless of the publication standards for tenure at your institution, publish. I know that isn’t easy, but publication is the scholarly equivalent of “fuck you” money. It gives you the ability to move (which, paradoxically, makes it easier to stay). If you’re at an institution that requires a book for tenure, you have to have a manuscript ready to submit to a publisher by your third year.
A lot of graduate students spend the year or two (or three) that they’re writing their dissertation in a white-hot panic, they develop back problems, they sleep badly. Sometimes there is a six-month period when they are basically alternating between terror and panic. That happens because very few programs prepare students well for that last marathon of dissertation-writing (and an unhappy number of faculty believe that their job is to make sure that last stretch is boot-camp).
As I’ve tried to write about elsewhere, the unfortunate consequence is that people come to rely on a writing process that is driven by panic. That is not sustainable as an assistant professor. But, for some people, that’s the only way they know to write—they only know how to run sprints, and so they spend some amount of time (perhaps the last two years, when it’s publish or get fired) in that same white-hot panic, making everyone around them miserable, but most of all themselves.
That’s an emergency, not a career. The goal during graduate school should be to find a work process that is sustainable for life. But there really isn’t a lot of incentive to do that. Graduate courses inevitably reward treating paper writing as a sprint, and, despite the best efforts of the best advisors, so many documents leading up to the dissertation are written out of panic—because of fear of failure, imposter syndrome, panic-driven writing processes, decisional ambiguity. Good writers, and anyone who gets into graduate school is a good writer, are people accustomed to sit down and produce a product. That they might have to revise, draft, and cut can feel like a failure. Graduate students spend a lot of time trying to reproduce the writing processes that got them into graduate school, even though those processes are no longer working. This problem of remaining committed to panic-driven writing processes isn’t helped by the unpleasant fact that there are advisors who actively work to keep students sprinting (they deliberately work their advisees into panics, they delay reading material, they believe their job is to “toughen up” students, they have panic-driven writing processes and can’t imagine any other).
Since it is so very possible to write a dissertation in a year of sheer panic, as a series of exhausting sprints, a lot of assistant professors treat trying to publish enough to get tenure as the same world of panic and sprinting that got them to finish their dissertation. That is a very bad decision.
Here’s what I wish someone had told me when I got my first job: create the work life you want to have for your entire career; stop treating your work responsibilities as a series of crises.