Are you a new professor who is beginning your first year on the tenure track? If so, then this episode is just for you! First of all, congratulations on landing a position in a very competitive job market and a period of great uncertainty for higher education. And second, congratulations on this important milestone of your professional journey.
Some of you may have faculty appointments that began this summer, which means that you’ve probably started to begin some of the onboarding processes. This could involve administrative “pre-boarding steps” like filling out necessary paperwork, getting your university e-mail address, and getting all squared away for payroll. For this, you might be corresponding with someone in HR or a department administrator.
Sometimes, the onboarding process can begin by taking the form of a long and detailed checklist. It’ll take you step by step through what you need to prepare for as an incoming faculty member.
Even if you are fairly diligent about working through these kinds of checklists and you block out the time in the summer to work on these administrative tasks, it’s likely that you are still going to feel a bit stumped or even overwhelmed at times. Because most likely than not, this onboarding process is also part of a larger life transition for you.
This could entail moving to a different city and finding a place to live or even buying a home, figuring out what schools your children can attend, determining what health care plans are best for you and your family, and preparing course syllabi for classes that you’ve never taught before. So let me just say this: this is a lot to accomplish in just a few months!
In this 41st episode of the Rise with Clarity Podcast, I’d like to spend some time reflecting on this onboarding process for new faculty, and offer you 5 tips on how to manage some of the overwhelm that may come with this big transition.
What is Onboarding?
OK, so what do I mean by onboarding? At its most basic level, onboarding refers to the process of orienting and training a new employee. In the higher ed context, institutional onboarding for faculty is the process by which the university orients, welcomes, prepares, and supports incoming faculty.
Onboarding has some technical or logistical elements, like filling out paperwork, getting your faculty ID, obtaining your parking permit, and receiving an academic personnel manual, or a link to one. For international faculty, this additionally means applying for VISAs for you and possibly your dependents. And in the United States right now, this is going to be a more complicated and anxiety-filled process.
Beyond some of those logistical elements, however, onboarding also involves learning about your university’s culture, campus resources, compliance and ethics training, guidelines for teaching, and expectations for the tenure and promotion process. It encompasses the process by which you become acclimated to your new work environment.
A critical part of the onboarding process is usually the New Faculty Orientation, where you will be welcomed to campus and you’ll be introduced to a whole lot of things all at once: important resources for you, important people for you to know, offices on campus, and other aspects related to your job.
You’ll also meet peer colleagues who will be starting employment at the university at the same time as you.
Intentional onboarding will often extend beyond the New Faculty Orientation, however. There may be programs in place like a faculty mentoring program, professional development workshops, welcome receptions, social events, and further types of training. The objective behind intentional onboarding is to ultimately help set up new faculty with the resources and support for success as well as cultivating relationships in the campus community.
When done effectively, intentional onboarding can help new faculty to feel equipped and to feel a sense of belonging at their new institution.
It can also assist with retention rates later on down the road.
Keep in mind that onboarding isn’t just confined to one week at the beginning of the academic year. It usually carries on throughout your first year, especially if your institution has mapped out an onboarding journey for its new faculty.
You may find yourself super excited but also a little nervous with all that you feel that you need to do before starting your new faculty position. And if you’ve just recently finished your PhD, then this transition from PhD student to new faculty (or professor) is probably going to feel unfamiliar and unsettling at times and rather overwhelming.
Because there are going to be things that you are preparing for in terms of your new faculty position (say, related to teaching and research), but also decisions that you need to make about your health care, retirement options, and where you will live. It’s a lot.
So here are 5 tips that may help you to manage some of the overwhelm that you may be starting to encounter, as it relates to the onboarding process.
5 Tips to Help You Manage Overwhelm with the Onboarding Process this Summer
One
Try to build in rest and some vacation time in these remaining weeks. If you are leaving the place where you did your PhD and you’ve moving to a new location for your job, then try and visit some of those places that you always meant to, but did not because you were so busy during your doctoral program. Plan some day trips or just relax and chill out.
This advice may seem counterintuitive. But once things rev up in the fall, (and especially if you are teaching that first semester), I guarantee that your time will fill up faster than you can ever anticipate. Give yourself the permission right now to rest a little before this big life transition.
Two
Take in the onboarding information as you can and develop your own system to prioritize certain tasks. Many universities will provide you with a checklist of sorts that you can work through. The checklist may specify what actions you need to take and when.
Some tasks will need to be attended to immediately after your appointment begins, and other ones can be handled once you have settled down in your new location.
You don’t have to do everything all at once!
You can use a prioritization framework like the Eisenhower Matrix. And this is where you assess your tasks in terms of 4 different categories:
The first category would be:
1) What is urgent and important and needs to get done (I would include setting up your payroll and getting your university e-mail address in this category, or a VISA)
Second category is:
2) What is important but not urgent to get done (so this could include reading about workplace retirement plans and making some decisions.) For this one, by the way, have a listen to Inga Timmerman and Neeka Miremadi’s podcast Academics and Their Money.
They have 2 recent episodes (Part 1; Part 2) on the topic of starting a new academic job and understanding your retirement plan choices. I’ll go ahead and put the link to that in the written transcript for this episode.
Ok. Going back to the third category of the Eisenhower Matrix.
3) What is urgent but not so important to get done (this may be responding to time-sensitive e-mails about signing up for workshops.)
And the last category is:
4) What is not urgent and not important (this could include reviewing what’s on the onboarding checklist and seeing what isn’t relevant for you and what can therefore be eliminated.)
Ok, Third tip for you.
Three
Figure out what your needs are and keep a running list. There are things that may be specific to your situation that are not addressed in the onboarding checklist or materials. And they may not be apparent on the university’s website for faculty.
Part of this transition to a new university campus will entail learning who are the go-to individuals that you can seek help from. This could be an administrator, a mentor, a senior colleague, your chair, or a peer colleague.
Or there could be a certain subsection of the university’s website that you don’t yet know about, but that provides a lot of helpful information and answers a lot of frequently asked questions.
If you find that you have needs or concerns that are not addressed in the onboarding process, then it is kind of on you to bring this up with your chair, with HR, or with an administrator.
Fourth tip is:
Four
Ask your chair if you can be put in touch with a 2nd or 3rd year Assistant Professor in your department or a related one. Some questions that you have may be best answered by newer faculty who have more recently gone through the onboarding process.
Also, you will probably meet other incoming faculty at the Orientation. You can form connections there and also stay in touch, compare notes, ask questions, and support one another in the coming year.
And the fifth and last tip:
Five
Along those same lines, be proactive about developing some systems of support for you. My last podcast episode (Episode 40: Identify Your Support Systems In and Beyond Higher Ed) is precisely on this topic—so please have a listen to that.
If your campus offers a faculty mentoring program, take advantage of this. Mentor faculty will hold institutional knowledge, deep expertise, and be able to offer guidance on departmental practices and expectations.
Some of what you will glean about departmental culture probably won’t ever appear in written onboarding materials. It will be part of that oral tradition that you’ll have to learn about during your time on the tenure track.
And lastly, invest the time in building new relationships in your new location. You don’t necessarily need to have a huge group, but maybe 2-3 peer colleagues or allies that you can really lean on and trust is going to be invaluable.
And in this current climate, honestly, I think that investing in building relationships and community is going to be incredibly important—not just for new faculty, but also mid-career and senior faculty as well.
So these are 5 tips for those of you who are just starting out with the onboarding process at your university. Remember that you don’t have to have this all figured out in the first 1-2 months before the academic year starts. This is an ongoing process, and it takes time.
If any of this resonates with you, or if you’ve been through this process in the distant past and would like to offer additional tips and resources, do feel free to get in touch with me. I always welcome feedback, and I often include additional resources in the written transcript for the podcast episodes.
For instance, I’m going to include links to my previous episodes on: Planning a Syllabus for Your First Time (Episode 24); Leading Graduate Seminars for Your First Time (Episode 14); and Managing Your First Semester as a WOC Faculty (Episode 26).
Alright, congratulations to those of you who are just starting out on your first faculty positions. Best of luck on your transition, and make sure to take good care of yourself, too!