Academia

I am a co-founder of the Strategic Preparation for Academic Resilience and Know-how (SPARK) program, which is an initiative to prepare STEM graduate students who identify as women for faculty careers. We are creating resources and workshops to fill a gap in preparation that isn’t readily available as part of many graduate programs or targeted for an audience of women.

Our primary focus is to help women graduate students strategically plan for their first academic job search.  We have created an 11-week workshop series that provides background about the faculty and post-doc job search process.  Each participant will create a draft of major statements required to apply for most academic jobs.  Then participants will work in small groups with a mentor to peer review and refine each statement.

At WE20, Yanfen Li, Nicole Jackson, and I created an on-demand session with answers to frequent questions about an academic job search.  We weren't able to cover all aspects of the job search in detail during the 30 minutes.  However, the slides are provided below and we will be hosting a follow-up Q&A on November 19 on Zoom.  If you are interested in joining this call (and possibly future calls), please complete this sign-up form.  You may also join the SWE WIA Slack and ask questions on the academic job search panel.  There are lots of SWE members who have experience with the academic job search process who are active on Slack.

At WE19 I collaborated with Yanfen Li and Nicole Jackson to facilitate a flipped session on applying for academic jobs.  The slides and additional details from the session are provided here for reference during and after the session.

Four years ago, I committed to several writing goals for November also known as academic writing month (#AcWriMo). That was one of my most productive months of writing. I wrote over 13,000 words and had over 60 hours of productive time collecting or analyzing data.

This year, I also have a lot to write including two conference papers, a grant proposal, a journal paper to polish, and new blogs for my website. So, I’m once again committing to academic writing month. My daily writing and research goals for 2018 are:

• Write at least 500 words,
• Read at least one source for a literature review, and
• Complete at least one hour of additional productive research time (e.g. data processing, planning, training, project organization).

I have one additional month-long goal this year; to figure out how to sustain the above research productivity beyond November. The daily goals meet the criteria for S.M.A.R.T. goals.  They are all specific and measurable. Once a day makes them time-bound and they are relevant given the writing projects I have for this month. All three goals are likely achievable because the first and last goals are the same as 2014 and the second goal is a required part of the writing projects. The additional month-long goal is specific, measurable, and time-bound. I know it is relevant to completing my research goals to earn promotion and tenure. However, I also know it is a stretch goal which means achievable is not going to be an easy task. Given it is relevant to achieving my research goals and being a successful academic, I am committed to trying.

As I did in 2014, I am going to track and share my progress on my daily goals. This year I will be adding a reflection and adaptation step to help work toward the sustainable daily research and writing goal.

On October 16, I presented a webinar branding and social media for academics.  The webinar was sponsored by the Women in Academia Committee of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE).  It included tips on branding yourself as an academic and sharing information about your work on social media.

At the 2017 SWE Annual Conference (WE17), I presented a session that included strategies for using technology to organize your artifacts for promotion and tenure.  My presentation was based on data collected in a survey of other faculty members and my own experience. 

At the 2017 American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference, I published a tips and tricks paper about collecting and organizing documents for promotion and tenure electronically.  In this paper, I summarized resources I found useful during my first year on the tenure-track, some advice I was given, and a survey of other tenure-track faculty.  The full paper can be accessed from the ASEE website.

So today I happened across #AcWriMo (Academic Writing Month), which is a writing challenge for academics to write every day in November. This intrigued me for two main reasons: 1. I have a lot to write in November anyway and 2. I need to develop better habits for writing.