How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-track-faculty Life
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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-track-faculty Life
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Re: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-track-faculty Life
#2I think the key to nailing this her way is to become a time management nazi and to be profoundly efficient and productive in every category. And that is where most of us fail unfortunately.
Re: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-track-faculty Life
#3This strategy would quickly lose its merit outside of Harvard. Failing to gain tenure at Harvard is the expected outcome, so a) the sense of rejection is less, and b) your remaining job prospects are good because this is generally recognized (and it's Harvard).
Asking somebody at a high-tenure-rate, second-tier school to treat their tenure track position as an extended post-doc is essentially asking them to have a failed career, on the other hand.
(it's worth noting that Harvard has actually changed tack recently, such that they're increasingly promoting junior faculty...the above is still true regardless, at least for the time being)
Re: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-track-faculty Life
#4On a side note, I hear suicide is legal in japan.
Re: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-track-faculty Life
#5The author of this article is a friend and former colleague (I had the office next door to hers at Harvard, when I was on the faculty there). Many of the reasons she cites for being "miserable" as a faculty member reflect why I left a tenured faculty job for industry. Nearly all junior faculty I know describe it as a survival process. Given this I fail to understand why being a professor remains such an attractive career path.
Re: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-track-faculty Life
#6This strategy would quickly lose its merit outside of Harvard. Failing to gain tenure at Harvard is the expected outcome, so a) the sense of rejection is less, and b) your remaining job prospects are good because this is generally recognized (and it's Harvard). Asking somebody at a high-tenure-rate, second-tier school to treat their tenure track position as an extended post-doc is essentially asking them to have a fa…
Agreed - would love to see this coming from a second-tier grad school faculty.
Re: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-track-faculty Life
#7This strategy would quickly lose its merit outside of Harvard. Failing to gain tenure at Harvard is the expected outcome, so a) the sense of rejection is less, and b) your remaining job prospects are good because this is generally recognized (and it's Harvard). Asking somebody at a high-tenure-rate, second-tier school to treat their tenure track position as an extended post-doc is essentially asking them to have a fa…
This isn't true in computer science at Harvard - I speak from experience, having gone through the tenure process there myself. Being denied tenure in CS at Harvard is about as bad as being denied tenure anywhere else; people don't usually end up in very good jobs afterwards. In my 8 years at Harvard, we awarded tenure to 5 junior faculty, and denied tenure to two.
Re: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-track-faculty Life
#8This strategy would quickly lose its merit outside of Harvard. Failing to gain tenure at Harvard is the expected outcome, so a) the sense of rejection is less, and b) your remaining job prospects are good because this is generally recognized (and it's Harvard). Asking somebody at a high-tenure-rate, second-tier school to treat their tenure track position as an extended post-doc is essentially asking them to have a fa…
This isn't true in computer science at Harvard - I speak from experience, having gone through the tenure process there myself. Being denied tenure in CS at Harvard is about as bad as being denied tenure anywhere else; people don't usually end up in very good jobs afterwards. In my 8 years at Harvard, we awarded tenure to 5 junior faculty, and denied tenure to two.
By good, do you mean faculty positions elsewhere or is it hard in general to even get say senior jobs in the industry after being denied tenure?
Re: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-track-faculty Life
#9At Harvard it really is easy to stop worrying, if you have an open mind.
As a mathematician, I know excellent academics who narrowly missed getting tenured at MIT and Princeton. They were highly in demand, and are now happily working at other top-20 universities.
(ed: I am in math, and described what I observed. I see elsewhere in the thread that mdwelsh observed the opposite.)
Re: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-track-faculty Life
#10Awesome.
On the "stop taking advice" idea: when I was a grad student (and postdoc), I kept notes in a personal wiki. I had a page entitled "Things Other People Have Suggested I Do". I didn't do most of them. Even more so, it was such a liberating feeling to look at it and tell myself, "I don't have to do any of that crap, I have my own research plan."