Hey Professors,
As you are now heading back to work, I wanted to pose this question to you: “What lights you up as a professor?”
Does the answer come easily to you?
If so, I would love to hear from you and learn what some of you are animated and energized by.
And if you need to think a little bit longer about your response to this question, I invite you to linger a bit here. Because I think it’s important for you to have some clarity on this as you move forward in your academic career—whether you’re just starting out as a new professor or you’re well beyond tenure.
Many of you are returning to campus, with a fair amount (or a whole lot) of trepidation about what comes next, especially in the United States. If the disruptions of the past academic year are any indication of how things might be this coming year, then it makes sense to me that you are bracing for what will come next.
In this 43rd episode of the Rise with Clarity Podcast, I want to reflect on how being a bit strategic and intentional about how you approach your faculty duties can be beneficial for you, especially when faculty are being stretched thin in a time of retrenchment. But first, it’s important to identify what really lights you up.
So, we’re going to dig into this.
Which Faculty Hats Suit You Best?
One of my very first podcast episodes—Which Faculty Hats Suit You Best? (Episode 4)—focused on the topic of the multitude of professorial roles that you often have to take on when you step into a faculty position. I encourage you to listen to that one since it connects to a lot of what I’m going to say today. In that episode, I spoke about how there’s so many different facets to being a professor and how some roles or let’s say: “hats” may seem ill-fitting, while others may be tailor made for you.
Let’s think through this for a moment. Say you are an early career faculty member, in year 3 on the tenure track. You’ve had to develop and teach undergraduate and graduate courses, conduct your research and work on your publications, apply for grants, and serve on 2 to 3 departmental committees. By now in year 3, you’ve mostly acclimated to your university culture, and you have a sense of the general expectations for the mid-career review and the tenure review later on.
You start to realize that there are certain aspects of your job that come naturally to you, and that you genuinely enjoy.
You’ve realized that this is related to conducting your groundbreaking research and sharing it with different audiences. You are an effective communicator, and you love to be in conversation with other scholars in your discipline.
Some of this comes through in the classroom—when you are able to lecture on your area of expertise. Other times, this comes through when you are invited to give keynote talks and participate in symposia. You thrive when thinking through hard things and big ideas, and your students and your peers look up to you.
On the flip side, you are less enthralled with the kind of work that requires a lot of back-end, tedious paperwork. In fact, you’ve been known to drop the ball on this occasionally…which others have noticed and which you don’t feel so great about.
By now in year 3 on the tenure track, you’ve learned a bit how your university ecosystem works. You know you’re evaluated on three big categories of: research, teaching, and service. While you’re doing fine on the research and teaching end of things, you are a bit concerned about how your service is going to be evaluated. And you know that you can’t shirk your service obligations.
But maybe, you can be more strategic or intentional about the kinds of service opportunities that you agree to. And if there’s a way to somehow align your service better with what does light you up, then this can be a way to build on what’s working for you and could even lead to interesting pathways or pivots in the future.
So, what can this look like? Here are a couple possibilities:
- Serving on a task force committee related to maintaining research standards in the midst of increasing usage of AI.
- Getting involved in a speaker’s series in your department or your College, and helping to select some of the speakers.
- Spearheading your own special lecture series that could be run on Zoom on a topic related to your research area.
- Serving as an advisor for undergraduate students who are working on senior theses or senior capstone projects.
- Serving on grant review panels in your discipline or on your campus.
- Organizing a research project that is close to your heart and that involves your local community in some form.
- Being involved in one of your campus’s Humanities Centers or Interdisciplinary Centers for Research.
Those are just a couple of ideas for you, and a starting point. To further this line of inquiry…
I’d like to encourage you to think creatively about how to better align your service obligations with what really energizes you.
And out of all of your faculty duties, can you be honest about what is a “hat”or a role that actually doesn’t fit you so well?
And translation: this could mean: something that drains you, does not interest you, or even fills you with a sense of dread.
Now if there is a hat that is more suited for you, can you advocate for a different type of service role? Or integrate more of an alignment with your research into your courses that you’re teaching?
How can you do this in a way that will make this coming academic year more sustainable for you?
How I Utilized My Arts Management Background in My Faculty Position
I want to pause for a moment here and share a little bit from my own experiences in the academy. I’ve mentioned before on this podcast that prior to starting my PhD, I worked in arts management in South Korea in the early 2000s. I was able to integrate my background in event planning as well as my experiences working with international musicians into the work that I did as a professor.
For five years I organized and hosted a lecture series at my first job. I also curated concerts, workshops, and hosted a 2-day conference that culminated in a performance featuring international musicians at my second job. And throughout the 11 years, I often invited local musicians into my courses on Musics of the World or Musics of East Asia.
In contrast to the long timeline involved in the writing and publication process, event planning to me—seemed more immediate and invigorating. And for those of you who have planned symposia or conferences yourselves, you know that there are a lot of behind-the-scenes details that go into curating a successful event.
And not everybody enjoys doing this kind of work.
In all honesty, I can’t say that I loved all of the paperwork and bureaucracy that went into hosting scholars and musicians and curating events, but I was pretty good at it.
From my background in arts administration, I also knew what went into creating a successful event: thinking about the space, the set-up, the content, the speakers, the artists, the attendees, and often the meal that follows. When you think about it, there’s a lot of moving parts to just one event!
What I really enjoyed was conceptualizing the event, seeing it come together, and featuring an inspiring scholar or phenomenal musicians. And I liked to bring people together through this event.
I’m sharing this because “event planning” may not be on your radar of what counts in terms of the different faculty “hats” that one can wear. We tend to think in terms of the categories in which we are evaluated for promotion: Research, Teaching, and Service. And the roles that correlate to those categories, which would be: Scholar, Teacher, and Member of a committee.
But even within the niche world of “academic event planning,” there are different roles that one can inhabit as a professor. You could be: the curator, the director, serve as the emcee, be the liaison between the artists, the scholars, and the local community, participate as a fundraiser, or be the keynote speaker yourself.
Most of what I’ve described just now could be claimed as a kind of departmental service, if the event was hosted by your department. In some cases, where there’s buy-in from other institutes or other departments, then a larger event could be recognized as contributing to the intellectual life at your university.
Doing this might not earn you service credits in the same way a campus-wide committee would, but it could yield other practical benefits down the road: like having an opportunity to form connections and getting to know faculty from other parts of the campus.
In a university system where faculty serve on tenure and promotion committees, it can be advantageous to get to know faculty from other wings, other departments at your university.
So, I want to return now to the question that kicked off this episode: What really lights you up as a professor?
I invite you to think creatively about how you can mobilize this in your different professorial roles this year.
I did want to say before signing off, there’s a lot of advice out there that’s freely given to early career faculty that basically says: “Say NO to all service requests pre-tenure.” But the truth is: you can’t avoid not doing any service. That’s unrealistic advice. Because you know that this would negatively impact you when it comes around to the time when you are evaluated by your colleagues.
So there may be some semesters when you are taking on service obligations or teaching general courses that are largely for the sake of your department. But maybe in another semester you can advocate for a different kind of service commitment that would be more gratifying and aligned for you.
Who knows, by taking on a particular kind of role that is more your jam, you could gain valuable insights from that experience that could lead to a career pivot within or beyond the academy.
When at all possible, try to lead with what lights you up, what makes you shine, and what gives you a deep sense of gratification.
Wishing you all resilience and lots of light in this coming year.