Kathryn B. H. Clancy, PhD

Monday, October 26th 2015

Things that happen in the years before you go up for tenure

1. You learn how to make goals for your year and your semester.
2. You learn to turn those goals into actionable steps.
3. You create weekly plans in order to move through these steps in a timely manner.
4. You keep your office door shut a lot more.
5. You go out for coffee or lunch less often because “you’ve already allocated that time to write the discussion section of your revise & resubmit.”
6. You rebudget your time to prioritize you – er, your research and publications – in alignment with your third year review. This is undoubtedly why you are making positive progress in your quest for tenure and was good advice.
7. You focus your creative energies on writing papers for your peers, most of whom won’t read them.
8. You miss your blog, but the goal setting is going well and the advice was certainly right when it comes to doing what you need to do to achieve tenure.
9. You miss the long posts that sent you on wild goose chases about topics just enough outside of your expertise that by the end, you felt the thrill of having learned something new.
10. You miss the short posts that sometimes got more hits than the long ones.
11. You listen to podcasts, and read fiction, and feel a strong urge to create something interesting.
12. You remember that statistical methods section that reviewer 1 didn’t like and begin to revise technical language into even more technical language.
13. You miss the community of people – readers and writers – who you felt mattered, and made you feel you matter, too.
14. You look at the time, and realize you’re just about to hit the time you allocated to finish up that table summarizing the leptin literature.
15. You didn’t need to write this post in list format, but if you hadn’t it might never have been written.

1 Comment

1. Cecilia Leal said:

   Brilliant. Add this: you inspire and motivate younger assistant professors to push through and stop thinking about quiting.