The last few nights I've been waking up at 3 or 4 a.m. and then having a hard time going back to sleep because of tenure worries. Worries that have me literally breaking out into a cold sweat. Suddenly I'm worried that I won't have enough publications. At this point I'm writing what I'm writing, and I've got a game plan for what to put out when, and there isn't really time to make big adjustments to that plan. In other words, if my strategy all along has been flawed, it's getting to be a little too late in the game to correct it. All I can do is carry it out.
A word about my strategy. I have been writing big papers and publishing them in big outlets. By big I mean that my papers are literally long (lots of pages), and they reflect an enormous amount of data analysis. Sometimes a year or more of analysis. So it takes a long time to write papers. I have not been getting out "least publishable units", i.e. chopping up my studies into smaller papers to get more publications (but smaller ones) out the door. Instead, my strategy has been to try to publish good work in well-known outlets that will garner a fair amount of attention. There are strengths to this approach in a couple of ways. First, the quality of the work is strong. And second, the quality of the journals is high, which means you can make an argument for being a prominent person in the field.
There are drawbacks to this approach as well. The most obvious drawback is that the number of publications is lower than it might be under a different strategy. And so that number issue is what has started keeping me up at night. When you look at my CV, it looks like I've done a fair amount of stuff but then when I take a more critical eye to it, many of those things fall off the radar and cease to "count" towards tenure. For instance, book chapters don't really count. Books for practitioners don't count. Articles for practitioners don't count. And then the stuff that "counts" suddenly seems kinda small.
I know why I'm freaking out right now, it's because a colleague gave her "keep your job talk" last week to our department (we have to do this before we go up for tenure), and then had her publications up, and she has about a gazillion of them.
My mentor spent part of the morning talking me off the ledge. I can't even have a conversation about it without literally shaking, my hand trembling, the way I used to when I was in 8th grade and had to give a presentation to the class. He kept telling me that I have nothing to worry about. "I should make this into a podcast, and then when you wake up in the middle of the night you can just turn it on and hear, 'it's going to be okay, you're going to get tenure' over and over again," he said.
However, now? This afternoon? I am feeling sooooooo good right now. This is due to a little conversation I had today with the chair of the divisional committee (this is the committee that basically decides on our tenure once we make it past the dept. If they say yes on tenure, it's basically a done deal). Anyway, when he found out about my grant (which is called the NSF early career award), he stopped right away and he said "Whoa. When you have a career award, well, let's just say, it is impossible for the committee to ignore that." I said, "What does that mean, exactly?" and he said, "I mean, say there are some holes in a case. Not that there will be with yours necessarily, but say somebody fewer publications than we'd like to see, or maybe the teaching isn't so great, or whatever. If that person has a career award, then that's it. The other holes matter much less because it would be very hard to deny a person who has won a career award." So I'm all, "Holy crap, really?!?" and he says, "This is true across divisions. Physical sciences, biological sciences, it doesn't matter, if you have an early career award, that is huge. It will be much harder to not get tenure with a career award."
My mentor said, "See, now do you believe me? Coming from somebody like so-and-so, whose opinion has the weight of being chair of that committee? You must feel better now," and I had to admit, yes, today, I feel better.
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