Launching Your Academic Career at Mines
Are you as assistant professor looking to get a strong start on promotion and/or tenure? Are you a postdoc thinking about faculty positions? Join these lunch workshops!
The “Launching Your Academic Career” faculty workshops run every fall. Workshops are open to any early-career faculty member on the tenure-, teaching- or research lines as well as postdocs and senior faculty coming from industry or other non-academic spaces to Mines.
Come to whichever meetings are of interest, arrive late or leave early, and attend even if you have attended the same workshop(s) in the past! Lunch will be provided, and each week is somewhat independent such that folks can attend as they are able. Dates will be posted in the Blast and sent through departments in the fall, or contact me at any time for more info.
Workshop 1: Expectations for Promotion and/or Tenure: Publishing Your Research
- Research expectations at Mines for teaching and tenure lines
- Data on what makes a “quick starter”
- Tips for writing
- Writing for the right audience
Workshop 2: Setting Up Your Research Group & Developing Its Brand
- Developing a “powerful group”: mentoring and advising students
- Tips for working with graduate students: what is/is not your job
- Setting guidelines for students
- Working on an a national/international reputation and a “brand identity”
- Representing yourself outward: web presence and the good, bad and ugly of social media
Workshop 3: Grant Writing Tips and University Finances for Faculty
- Setting research objectives and writing compelling proposals
- Tips for getting federal and industry funding
- Should you meet your program officer?
- The Mines budget: where does money come from and go to?
- Types of university funds
- What are indirect costs and how they are used at universities
Workshop 4: The Sustainable Professor
- Service work — how it helps and how it fits into your effort
- Time management and saying no gracefully
- The Want-To-Do, Need-To-Do Conundrum
- Realistic goal setting
- Finding time for yourself by establishing your absence
- Thinking of yourself in multidimensional space
Workshop 5: Networking, Finding Mentors, and Managing Personalities
- How to identify (multiple) mentors
- Figuring out expectations of others
- Managing up
- The principles of shared governance
- Effective listening and communication
- Dealing with bullies or difficult colleagues
- People you need to know: the Board of Trustees; the President and Provost; Faculty Senate
Workshop 6: Working on Your Dossier (Start Now!)
- The tenure and/or promotion process timeline
- What goes into your dossier
- How to write your statements
- Promotion letters — how they are selected, how to cultivate writers, what to avoid
- Intangibles
- Promotion myths and FAQs
Learning objectives
Overall course goal: Increase retention rates and promotion and/or tenure success rates for new faculty at Mines.
This will be accomplished by working with faculty to:
1. Develop a strong promotion packages
- explain Handbook/Procedures manuals
- identify characteristics of successful candidates
- summarize characteristics of good external letter writers
- start working on dossier materials
2. Enhance research, teaching and professional productivity
- develop a professional growth plan
- schedule time to write
- identify growth areas for your teaching
- describe what gets grants funded
- develop an elevator pitch for your research
- identify service expectations
- develop a mechanism for saying ‘no’ that resonates
- set guidelines for working with students
- develop tools to more effectively with others
- find ways to build support networks/cohorts
3. Identify procedures, supports, and structures at Mines that can help advance your career
- identify campus resources & where to go for help
- identify characteristics of mentors that might work for you
- identify who makes decisions on campus
- describe the basics of money at a university
- “demystify” academia
- put a value on your personal time