Last week, I was invited to attend an Early Career Faculty workshop at the Association for the Study of Higher Education. We heard from panels of faculty who were recently tenured and from faculty who had been Full Professors for awhile. Here were some of the key points that I took away.
Tenure for the world
Certainly, if you're in a tenure track position, knowing your department's criteria for getting tenure and focusing on that is essential. You should know how your department views collaborations, particularly those that go outside your discipline. But besides knowing these criteria well and having a plan to meet them, have you thought about how your tenure might translate? If you don't plan to stay at your tenure-granting institution forever and especially if you're hoping to move to a more research-intensive institution in the future, senior scholars suggest that you not only hit the tenure criteria at your current institution, but go beyond it. Find out what tenure criteria looks like at aspirational institutions to make sure you get "tenure for the world," and have the flexibility that you may need/want in the future.
Have a writing strategy
When do you write best? Do you write every day? How do you get past writer's block? These are the questions that early career faculty often wrestle with. In the workshop, one senior scholar urged us to write every day - even if sometimes it's just 15 minutes - you should touch your work every day. He also suggested that to leave yourself crumbs for the next day. If you're in the flow, don't finalize the section you're working on, but set yourself up to finalize it the next time you write. This can get you into the groove faster when you pick back up. These are just some tidbits, but the point is, you want to make sure that you have a writing strategy for yourself to make sure you can stay productive!
Your relationship with your Chair is key
Your departmental Chair is very important for you and your career. They are the person who have a say in your teaching load, they can help protect you and your time from folks who are looking for volunteers, they can also be a great resource as you navigate your new institution. Take care to develop a good relationship with your Chair and seek their advice on things early and often!
Be thoughtful about service commitments
Many scholars suggest that the key to managing service commitments and requests is to learn to say "no." However, particularly if you're in a department with not many faculty or if your department is heavy on junior faculty, you'll realize that you can't say no to everything. Instead, be thoughtful about your service commitments. Choose service activities that are aligned with your research or with your teaching. This can allow you to double up on the outcomes of that service work.
Find colleagues to partner with
A couple of full professors at different institutions discussed the way that they leaned on each other as research partners as they went through the tenure process. Both had families with children and talked about how depending on what was going on in the other's life, they might take more of their workload for a season and then shift to the other person the next. They co-authored several pieces together and had an understanding about order of authors and were very transparent about their partnership to make sure that it was supportive and fair.
Resources:
From PhD to Professor - The Muse
The Professor is in: 4 Steps to a Strong Tenure File - Chronicle of Higher Ed
Friday, November 22, 2019
Thursday, November 7, 2019
Resubmitting Your Proposal
At most agencies, resubmitted grants have a higher success rate than first-time grant submissions. For instance, the NIH reported that in 2015, their first-time submissions had a success rate around 13% and their resubmissions was closer to 33%! Yet many researchers are deterred from resubmitting when reviewer comments and critique are difficult to swallow. The most successfully funded researchers have usually received as many no's as they have yes's and often more. However, when you receive a "no," you have a decision to make. If you decide to resubmit, you want to move as quickly as you can to revise and resubmit.
As you consider resubmitting and what you might do in your resubmission to enhance your chances of success, consider the following questions and suggestions:
What level are the suggested changes?
Getting comments from reviewers that suggest you clarify a section of your grant or make minor changes to your methods are very different from comments that suggest a flawed hypothesis or a poor fit between your research goals with the agency's funding priorities. Determining if reviewers are excited about your project and whether changes you make can move you from a not funded to funded in the next iteration is key to deciding if you should revise and resubmit to the same agency.
Is there a better agency fit?
Sometimes in reading reviewer comments, you may get a sense that there is a fundamental disconnect between your project and the agency's mission or goals. If this is the case, you may want to begin to search for agencies whose mission might better align with your work.
Which comments hold water?
One of the most frustrating aspects of reviewer comments is when you get contradicting opinions or comments that seem out of left field. Despite initial reactions to comments, after you've taken a couple of days to mull them over, go back to your proposal and honestly weigh which comments can make your project better and which can't and why they can't. For those that can help you improve, be grateful for them and begin incorporating them. For those that are not helpful, see if there are ways you can improve your proposal to make your decisions and line of thinking more clear. Perhaps a reviewer misunderstood aspects of your proposal, which led to their questionable comment. Are there ways you can revise to avoid such confusion by future reviewers?
Must you respond to all comments?
Of course some of your reviewer comments will be good to respond to or incorporate into your grant resubmission, but the question of whether you need to respond to all comments depends on whether the agency to which you're submitting allows a response statement in your resubmission. Agencies such as the NIH require an introduction to the grant that outlines your responses to your summary statement. In cases where you must respond directly, it's wise to respond to all of the comments, especially when you will have the same reviewers for your resubmission. If, like at the NSF, all grants are considered new even if they are resubmissions, you needn't respond to each and every comment in your grant if it does not make sense to do so.
Should you talk with your Program Officer?
The answer to this question is almost always - Yes! But, with resubmissions, make sure that you're not angry or trying to defend yourself before you pick up the phone. Once you're ready to have the conversation, do call/email your Program Officer. Oftentimes, your Program Officer was in the room during the review of your grant and they can offer you some clarification, advise you on changes you're considering making, and even help you make the decision as to whether you should resubmit.
Don't forget, if you've done your homework and made sure your project is a good fit for the program you're applying to, you should likely resubmit with revisions. Bear in mind, the most successfully funded researchers have also received the most rejections!
Resources
Are you on the fence about whether to resubmit? - Michael Lauer, NIH
Resubmission of the Grant Proposal - Chapter from Writing Dissertation and Grant Proposals (Chasan-Taber, 2014)
As you consider resubmitting and what you might do in your resubmission to enhance your chances of success, consider the following questions and suggestions:
What level are the suggested changes?
Getting comments from reviewers that suggest you clarify a section of your grant or make minor changes to your methods are very different from comments that suggest a flawed hypothesis or a poor fit between your research goals with the agency's funding priorities. Determining if reviewers are excited about your project and whether changes you make can move you from a not funded to funded in the next iteration is key to deciding if you should revise and resubmit to the same agency.
Is there a better agency fit?
Sometimes in reading reviewer comments, you may get a sense that there is a fundamental disconnect between your project and the agency's mission or goals. If this is the case, you may want to begin to search for agencies whose mission might better align with your work.
Which comments hold water?
One of the most frustrating aspects of reviewer comments is when you get contradicting opinions or comments that seem out of left field. Despite initial reactions to comments, after you've taken a couple of days to mull them over, go back to your proposal and honestly weigh which comments can make your project better and which can't and why they can't. For those that can help you improve, be grateful for them and begin incorporating them. For those that are not helpful, see if there are ways you can improve your proposal to make your decisions and line of thinking more clear. Perhaps a reviewer misunderstood aspects of your proposal, which led to their questionable comment. Are there ways you can revise to avoid such confusion by future reviewers?
Must you respond to all comments?
Of course some of your reviewer comments will be good to respond to or incorporate into your grant resubmission, but the question of whether you need to respond to all comments depends on whether the agency to which you're submitting allows a response statement in your resubmission. Agencies such as the NIH require an introduction to the grant that outlines your responses to your summary statement. In cases where you must respond directly, it's wise to respond to all of the comments, especially when you will have the same reviewers for your resubmission. If, like at the NSF, all grants are considered new even if they are resubmissions, you needn't respond to each and every comment in your grant if it does not make sense to do so.
Should you talk with your Program Officer?
The answer to this question is almost always - Yes! But, with resubmissions, make sure that you're not angry or trying to defend yourself before you pick up the phone. Once you're ready to have the conversation, do call/email your Program Officer. Oftentimes, your Program Officer was in the room during the review of your grant and they can offer you some clarification, advise you on changes you're considering making, and even help you make the decision as to whether you should resubmit.
Don't forget, if you've done your homework and made sure your project is a good fit for the program you're applying to, you should likely resubmit with revisions. Bear in mind, the most successfully funded researchers have also received the most rejections!
Resources
Are you on the fence about whether to resubmit? - Michael Lauer, NIH
Resubmission of the Grant Proposal - Chapter from Writing Dissertation and Grant Proposals (Chasan-Taber, 2014)
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