FamiLee Life

Academic Beginnings and Lessons Learned

1997 @ UT 2005 @ UMN

Boy! A lot sure has changed since 1997 when I accepted my first faculty position at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Educational Psychology. I am now entering my 9th year teaching (my 6th year at Minnesota) and it's funny to see me then and now. I hope I look better today (or at least more my age). I had just turned 28 years old when I started at Texas and I was very green behind the ears (as well as skinnier than I am now). I suppose I am no longer the "young whipper snapper" as one UT dept administrative staff person described me back then. I've learned a lot about myself and about academic life in these intervening years. Things definitely not taught in school and things that have made academic life the good life.

Sidebar - Isn't it funny how before and after photographs always show the "before" picture with pallor skin color, poor dress, bad haircut, etc. and the "after" picture is always a dramatic improvement. In this case, I swear my UT faculty photo was in black-white and (sadly) that is how I looked.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I was surprised when several junior faculty approached me to ask about career advice at this year's annual American Psychological Association convention. I say surprised because I find it hard to believe that people (most of whom are smarter than me) are wanting answers from me and I sometimes wonder myself how I got to where I am.

Well, this experience and similar others got me thinking about academic beginnings and what lessons have I learned (so to speak). And as some of my current crop of grad students prepare to start their professional lives, I thought this might be an opportune time to openly wonder...in no particular order:

1) In choosing a job, remember to consider quality of life in and out of the university. Right after graduation, I chose a post-doc position over a teaching position at a small university in a small podunk town because I could not see myself happy in such an environment, especially as an Asian American with interests in conducting research on Asian Americans. The following year, I chose UT over other schools because I felt the school was a good match and I felt Austin was a great city (and it is a great city, despite what MTV Real World might portray).

2) Similar to the first point, decide early on how to balance quality of life with professional ambitions. I have always made it a rule to only work in the office from M-F, rarely on weekends, and almost never at home. I check email from home, but little else. Does this mean that I work 9-5 MF? No, I tend to work long weekdays (10+ hrs/day) but cherish the free time on the weekends.

3) Try to capture what you research and its importance in one sentence only. This advice was given to me via a fellow junior colleague who had gotten it from a senior mentor. It's good advice because, as a new academician, there is a tendency to be all over the place in interests and a tendency to not see the forest from the trees. To put it another way, can you explain what you exactly study to your grandmother? If she can't understand it, you need to work on this one.

4) Be prepared to abandon some research projects that are either too trivial in worth, too slow in progress, and not directly enough related to your main research objectives/goals. These projects will simply slow you down and distract you from bigger, more ambitious, more meaningful projects.

5) Identify a number of colleagues in and out of your department/university with whom you can commiserate (i.e., other jr faculty) and with whom you can be mentored by (i.e., sr. faculty). These peers and mentors should be people you not only admire but also with whom you get along. They should be able to push the right buttons in you and challenge you to do better work. It's fine to seek out friends for mutual admiration but they won't advance your career. Also, be prepared to give something back to these peers and mentors because mentorship (lateral and vertical) is a two-way street.

6) Continue your relationship with your advisor but stop doing research with your advisor! I was fortunate to get this advice from my advisor (thanks, Steve!), but know of many other people who allow their advisors to ride their coattails for too long. In the end, when tenure review comes along, it bites you in the arse because it appears you have not done independent research. In other words, it looks like you are riding your advisor's coattails.

7) Think beyond your substantive area of research. For example, if you are a counseling psychologist by training (which I am), look toward related substantive areas, such as developmental, social, personality, and toward less related areas, such as behavior genetics, social cognition, neuroscience. It is important, now more than ever before, to be interdisciplinary within psychology. It also is important to look outside psychology for inspiration, whether from ethnic studies or history or political science.

8) Take a photo of yourself then and now to see how much you have aged and wisened over the years (just kidding...sort of).

9) Become a voracious reader in and out of the psychology literature. With the advent of online PsychInfo, it is very easy to peruse current issues of most relevant psychology journals, download pdf articles, and keep up to date on the field. It's equally important, I think, to read non-psychology items, such as fiction, non-fiction, newspapers (NY Times), magazines (New Yorker). Reading not only increases comprehension and vocabulary skills, it also improves your writing skills.

10) Get involved with your local communities. Most research is at heart community-based research. Whether you study college students or school children, it's critical to to understand the ins and outs of this community and to be known by this community. Too often, we approach psychology research as outsiders who have no vested interest in the population of study. Although common to our field, this type of hit and run research is poor research, in my humble opinion.

11) Challenge yourself to become more rigorous and more ambitious in your research conceptualization and methodology. The tendency is to do what you do best and, as a junior faculty, it is good advice when the pressure is on to publish. However, as you progress through the years, it's equally important to push yourself to do better. If you typically do self-report survey research, think about multi-informant research. If you do cross-sectional research, think longitudinal.

12) Obviously, it is critical to publish, publish, publish. The adage "publish or perish" is very true but it's also true to publish is respectable journals. If you compare a person with 20 publications but few (if any) in top tiered journals with someone with 10 publications but most (or all) in top tiered journals, whom is likely the better researcher? On a related note, learn how to write well. Check your grammar and paragraph transitions. Remember to have a narrative thread running throughout your paper. Read the APA Publication Manual which actually has great advice/tips on writing. Also, read books like Bird by Bird by Anne Lamont to get inspired about writing.

13) Learn to be your own advocate. As one of the only faculty in my department to conduct ethnic minority research, my colleagues don't necessarily know what it takes to do such research. As such, I've had to take micro-moments to inform, educate, make aware the challenges of doing such research and bring to light the relevance of such research. This may entail talking with your promotion/tenure committee members or Dean to make sure they understand the salience of your work.

14) Start to apply for grants early on. Start small with inhouse grants and gradually work your way up the food chain. Ask colleagues who have successful grant records for copies of their grants. Even if they study something completely unrelated to your work, you can learn from how they phrase things, address problems, present their past research, develop research ideas, etc.

Well, I feel like I am starting to ramble, so I will close with one last thing I've learned in academia.

15) Be humble, self-critical, and try to grasp the true meaning of your work. Is your current effort really adding to our knowledge base? Is there a guiding and coherent theory behind your work or are you just mixing and matching different ideas together? Does your work really make a difference in everyday people's lives? If you can see the significance of your work, it brings about so much greater pleasure and joy to the work place.

So, if others have other tidbits of wisdom on academic life, I'd love to hear them. I will likely add to this list in the coming weeks, months, years...

Posted by richlee at September 1, 2005 09:32 AM