The six stages of assistant professorship

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.

How I Am Spending My Sabbatical

The short answer for fall:
10-15 hours/week taking a graduate-level class in Human-Centered Computing
10-15 hours/week doing all the usual stuff (working with students, writing proposals)
10-15 hours/week on meetings, email, GT stuff besides students and proposals
10-15 hours/week more than usual on kids, home, hobbies, exercise, friendships

The longer answer:
I'm on sabbatical this academic year, my 20th as a computer science faculty member at Georgia Tech. Probably because it is a public university, there is no official sabbatical policy, and often other phrases are used to describe it such as "professional leave" or something similar that tries to make clear that the purpose is work-related development, not goofing off. As any academic with an externally funded research program and PhD students knows, there's little chance of goofing off and living to tell the tale. Students are mid-research, grants are mid-run, and new grant proposals must be written. So when I am asked how I am spending my sabbatical, one part of the answer is that I am doing some of the same work I have always done. On the proposal front, that has meant two large proposals ($25M to USAID and $1.5M to NSF) and one small, internal proposal ($25K) since July 2012.

I was determined to use the sabbatical time to do at least some substantially different things both at work and in life. For work, one of my goals was to develop a greater intellectual base for recent work I have been doing under the banner Computing for Good, that is using computing to help solve pressing social problems at home and abroad. Georgia Tech has a highly successful Human-Centered Computing PhD program run out of the School of Interactive Computing. My good friend and colleague Beki Grinter was scheduled to teach HCC1, the first course taken in the fall by the incoming HCC PhD students. She was kind enough to agree to let me participate, if the students ok'd it. They did, though I don't think they realized they were letting in one of those type A students who always wants to have the answer. (Old habits don't die, even when you are 47, apparently!) I am incredibly grateful to Beki and the HCC1 students for allowing me to be part of their community. I felt like I was getting a portion of the liberal arts education that my double engineering undergraduate majors (EE and CS) did not allow. I used what I learned to write that NSF proposal, and I look forward to using more of what I learned for research.

The most depressing part of this accounting is the 10-15 hours/week spent on email, meetings and other GT business. One component of this work involved shepherding an open access policy through faculty town halls and eventually a vote. I had worked on the policy over about two years, and I wasn't about to drop my involvement as we headed down the home stretch. Luckily the policy was approved in late November 2012 -- good for GT and good for my spring sabbatical time.

In a later post, I'll talk about the 10-15 additional hours I've spent on kids, home, hobbies, exercise and friendships.

Time to blog?

It has taken me a long time to decide to have a blog, but now seems like the time to start, and not coincidentally I have some time.

Why now? I am influenced by recent observations about the relative lack of representation of academic women in many of the "extra" activities of our profession, such as blogging or teaching MOOCs or starting companies. One reason for this is obvious: busy people don't have time for extras, and female professors with children are busy.  They aren't the only ones who are busy, of course, but they are busy, especially when their children are young. I know from experience --- my two daughters are now 11 and 14 years old. The decision not to take on extras is personal and makes complete sense as a personal decision. But it does leave an unfortunate void that means the wisdom, experiences, hard and soft knocks are not well communicated to those entering and in the field facing similar challenges and opportunities.

Why do I have time? I am spending the 2012-2013 year on sabbatical leave, the first in my 20 years as a professor. A few years ago I told an Italian professor that I had never taken a leave and he said "shame on you." I had many of the usual reasons -- two career couple and spouse can't leave town, children are happy in their schools and can't leave town, too involved in the university and can't leave my responsibilities to others. But last summer I stepped down after seven years as founding chair of the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech, and I decided that leaving town wasn't necessary for me to get value from a sabbatical. And that turned out to be right. Working from my deck may not be quite as good as working from a town in Italy, but it is still sufficiently different from my office as to let me think differently and spend my time differently. More on that in a later post.

So I will give blogging a try. Let's see how it fits.