By most methods of accounting, I've had a pretty successful academic career. I took a straight and narrow path to and through graduate school, starting directly after undergrad and finishing my D.Sc. when I was 27. I started my first (and only!) faculty job immediately thereafter at Georgia Tech in the College of Computing. I was tenured and promoted to associate professor on schedule and to full professor about four years after that. I am a Fellow of the IEEE though not yet an ACM Fellow.
I say all this as preface to sharing the broad outlines of my pre-tenure experience, which I think have some commonality even for those who are quite successful. Here is the short version:
Year 1: I don't belong in this job
Year 2: I don't want this job
Year 3: Maybe I can do this job
Year 4: I can do this job
Year 5: If they don't tenure me its their problem
Year 6: There are other important things in life
And here is the longer version:
Year 1. Like many new faculty members, I was completely overwhelmed by the requirements of the job. The first class I taught was senior-level computer architecture, an area that shares some conceptual content with my area of computer networking, but isn't all that close. I was briefly threatened with video taping for distribution to students somewhere else (not sure where), but fortunately that did not materialize. I alternated between nightmares that I made the exams too easy and nightmares that I made the exams too hard. (Mostly I made them too hard and sometimes ambiguous.) I frequently felt that "they" would figure out they should not have hired me. This is classic imposter syndrome, well known to befell underrepresented minorities. It led me not to want a mentor. (You want to identify someone for me to tell all about my struggles? No way.) One of the very hardest things about Year 1 is that everything you are asked to do, you are doing for the first time, and it seems so important to do it all well since they are watching. Actually nobody is watching very carefully, but it takes awhile to figure that out.
Year 2. Things were marginally easier, in no small part because almost everything was being done for the second time not the first. I started some tentative local collaborations and had a few students starting to work on projects. I did all the other usual professor things -- wrote proposals, had a part in a big cross-campus proposal, taught, served on internal committees. I found that peers could serve a mentoring role, especially when we co-advised students. I worked many hours and thought about work nearly all the time when I wasn't actually doing it. During this year my primary thought was that if this was the job, I wasn't sure I wanted it. Working all the time under lots of stress? Hmm.
Years 3 and 4. By Year 3 more projects and students had traction. I heard a talk on an out-of-the-box idea in computer networking called active networking, and I got pretty excited about it. A close collaborator and a fantastic student started working on it. We got DARPA funding which put us into a community of many senior researchers who were great fun to interact with. The job was still a lot of work, but it was more energizing and fun.
Year 5: By this year I realized that I was doing the job as well as I possibly could (and putting in as much time as I possibly could) and if that wasn't enough to get tenure, it was the university's loss. I wasn't as cocky as this sounds, instead it was more that I concluded there was something wrong with a system if you can work this hard and lose your job. Of course that can and does happen in the tenure and other systems.
Year 6: I started as an assistant professor early, and I put off considering having kids until well into the pre-tenure time period. I just could not imagine adding a baby to the crazy mix. I became pregnant with my first child during the year before I put in my tenure materials. She was due in late August, and I co-taught that summer with my graduate student to "earn" the right to be off from teaching in the fall. (Family friendly policies were mostly non-existent at that time.) I turned in the final version of my tenure materials on a Friday, and I went into labor on Saturday morning. Coincidence? I doubt it. I graded final exams and turned in grades with a week old baby.
Being mostly home that fall while my tenure case was under consideration in the department turned out to have advantages. I was overwhelmed and overcommitted to something else for a change. I returned full time in the spring and received word of tenure and promotion not long after that. I distinctly remember how nice it was to focus on work at work and home at home. As anyone with small children knows, that isn't a choice, exactly, but it was good and full.
I say all this as preface to sharing the broad outlines of my pre-tenure experience, which I think have some commonality even for those who are quite successful. Here is the short version:
Year 1: I don't belong in this job
Year 2: I don't want this job
Year 3: Maybe I can do this job
Year 4: I can do this job
Year 5: If they don't tenure me its their problem
Year 6: There are other important things in life
And here is the longer version:
Year 1. Like many new faculty members, I was completely overwhelmed by the requirements of the job. The first class I taught was senior-level computer architecture, an area that shares some conceptual content with my area of computer networking, but isn't all that close. I was briefly threatened with video taping for distribution to students somewhere else (not sure where), but fortunately that did not materialize. I alternated between nightmares that I made the exams too easy and nightmares that I made the exams too hard. (Mostly I made them too hard and sometimes ambiguous.) I frequently felt that "they" would figure out they should not have hired me. This is classic imposter syndrome, well known to befell underrepresented minorities. It led me not to want a mentor. (You want to identify someone for me to tell all about my struggles? No way.) One of the very hardest things about Year 1 is that everything you are asked to do, you are doing for the first time, and it seems so important to do it all well since they are watching. Actually nobody is watching very carefully, but it takes awhile to figure that out.
Year 2. Things were marginally easier, in no small part because almost everything was being done for the second time not the first. I started some tentative local collaborations and had a few students starting to work on projects. I did all the other usual professor things -- wrote proposals, had a part in a big cross-campus proposal, taught, served on internal committees. I found that peers could serve a mentoring role, especially when we co-advised students. I worked many hours and thought about work nearly all the time when I wasn't actually doing it. During this year my primary thought was that if this was the job, I wasn't sure I wanted it. Working all the time under lots of stress? Hmm.
Years 3 and 4. By Year 3 more projects and students had traction. I heard a talk on an out-of-the-box idea in computer networking called active networking, and I got pretty excited about it. A close collaborator and a fantastic student started working on it. We got DARPA funding which put us into a community of many senior researchers who were great fun to interact with. The job was still a lot of work, but it was more energizing and fun.
Year 5: By this year I realized that I was doing the job as well as I possibly could (and putting in as much time as I possibly could) and if that wasn't enough to get tenure, it was the university's loss. I wasn't as cocky as this sounds, instead it was more that I concluded there was something wrong with a system if you can work this hard and lose your job. Of course that can and does happen in the tenure and other systems.
Year 6: I started as an assistant professor early, and I put off considering having kids until well into the pre-tenure time period. I just could not imagine adding a baby to the crazy mix. I became pregnant with my first child during the year before I put in my tenure materials. She was due in late August, and I co-taught that summer with my graduate student to "earn" the right to be off from teaching in the fall. (Family friendly policies were mostly non-existent at that time.) I turned in the final version of my tenure materials on a Friday, and I went into labor on Saturday morning. Coincidence? I doubt it. I graded final exams and turned in grades with a week old baby.
Being mostly home that fall while my tenure case was under consideration in the department turned out to have advantages. I was overwhelmed and overcommitted to something else for a change. I returned full time in the spring and received word of tenure and promotion not long after that. I distinctly remember how nice it was to focus on work at work and home at home. As anyone with small children knows, that isn't a choice, exactly, but it was good and full.
I remember that fall well. And the first few weeks of you returning to work! Seems like a lifetime ago!
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