ABSTRACT
A career in academia is like a road trip. Graduate school marks the beginning of your journey and retirement the end, with countless stops along the way. We all hope that our journey is smooth and we reach our destination unharmed, but without careful planning and some good advice, you might find yourself taking far too many detours. The purpose of this book is to help you navigate around those detours. Throughout your career you will face multiple rites of passage, each of which are represented by a chapter in this book. The genesis for this book owes primarily to the Division on Women and
Crime (DWC) of the American Society of Criminology (ASC). Some of us began, years ago, conducting workshops on the types of concerns found in these chapters, and they have been continuing for years, e.g., the workshop on securing tenure has been mounted at the ASC and sponsored by the DWC for well over a decade now. These kinds of workshops have proliferated over the years from within not only the DWC but more recently from the Division on People of Color and Crime of the ASC and have come to grow as well in other professional associations, such as the Society for the Study of Social Problems. The DWC expressed interest a few years ago in collecting and publishing some of the tips and advice the various workshops proffered over these different venues and conferences. Here we draw together articles penned by a number of the workshop leaders as we somewhat artificially craft the series of strategies/ workshops on an academic career into the flowing ‘journey’ we posit to characterize the road to scholarly success. The first step on this journey is surviving graduate school, and it is a serious
rite of passage as the gateway to an academic profession. It will always be challenging and, at times, rewarding. It feels like a never-ending journey, with speed bumps, hairpin turns, and obstacles the whole way. A centerpiece of this experience is the relationships you have with faculty, fellow graduate students and, importantly, friends and loved ones. Strengthening these relationships will help you survive the rites of passage that all graduate students
must face – classes, seminars, research, comprehensive exams, and theses/ dissertations. Chapter 1, “Surviving graduate school,” discusses the importance of these relationships as well as how to maintain and build them. Strategies for successfully passing the comprehensive exams and timely completion of theses/ dissertations are offered. The next rite of passage is beginning the “career itself,” stepping into the job
market. Chapter 2, “Strategies for success on the job market,” will help you prepare for living your life as a job candidate. Although it seems a long way off during your first year of graduate school, preparing yourself for the job hunt begins immediately. This chapter provides advice so you know what you should be doing (and collecting) in graduate school to be a success on the job market. The chapter delineates how to search for open positions and goes forward to walk you through the process, such as what types of materials it is advantageous to include in your application package. This chapter will also help you to prepare for the interview process as well as to find the way to best distinguish yourself in the sea of applicants. Once you have interviewed and secured a job offer you’ll be ready to hit the
ground running, right? Not so fast. An important step, and one that can have a significant impact on your salary for the rest of your life, is negotiating the job contract and, importantly, your salary. The negotiation process can be intimidating, especially because you are relieved just to have found a job. Chapter 3, “Money matters,” addresses the need for developing strategies to negotiate your first academic job contract. Particular attention is paid to gender differences in negotiations and why it is so important for you to become knowledgeable early on. Now that you have secured the job offer and negotiated your job contract,
the next step in your journey is navigating being a new faculty member. As recent graduates, many new faculty experience new issues emanating from this move, some of which are specific to women. Every university and department has its own history and politics to navigate, which can be troubling waters for someone new to them. Chapter 4, “Being a new faculty,” discusses ways to adapt to this change in status and provides advice on balancing teaching, research and service, as well as developing a professional-personal balance. As is true in all stages of your career, being in the know and knowing the right people can be a significant advantage to any new faculty member. For some women pursuing an academic career, teaching can be the most
enjoyable and rewarding part of the job. However, teaching experience during graduate school can be incredibly varied, from being a teaching assistant working with a professor to an instructor with your own course. Regardless of the graduate experience, we all can benefit from learning more about teaching and pedagogy. Chapter 5, “Teaching with intention,” discusses teaching techniques for creating an active and engaging classroom. In addition, it offers tips for continuing to develop yourself as a dynamic and innovative teacher. Many academics are familiar with the phrase “publish or perish.” Certainly
publishing is a significant rite of passage in every academic’s career, as it is a
requirement for tenure and promotion in most (if not all) colleges and universities. Chapter 6, “A brief guide to academic publishing,” provides stepby-step advice on different avenues of publishing. Publishing in a journal requires preparation and the ability to handle rejection; both of these concerns are addressed in this chapter. Publishing or editing a book has its own challenges, so it is important to be informed about the process early on. As you continue to navigate the rites of passage in your career you may find
the desire to embark on new research projects that “make a difference” and to conduct research which requires data to which you may not have immediate access. Chapter 7, “Collaborating with practitioners,” addresses the benefits of collaborative research, as well as providing advice that academic researchers and practitioners can utilize to complete successful collaborative research projects. Navigating the many passages of an academic career culminates in going up
for and (hopefully) getting tenure. Chapter 8, “Getting tenure and redressing denial,” provides advice on the tenure process, including what you should be doing in the years leading up to your tenure review. Knowing what to do when problems arise during the tenure process is often difficult to navigate, and this chapter discusses the options you have. Of course, there are also specific problems that can arise for women during tenure review, which are considered separately here. Chapter 9, “Retirement,” covers the final topic, but retirement is by no
means the end of the journey. Discussions of retirement frequently focus in on financial planning, but this chapter goes further to discuss the emotional process of retirement. Acknowledging what you will be giving up following your academic career and finding ways to replace and refill your life are important things to think about when approaching retirement. Reflection on, and the pursuit of, hobbies, interests, and volunteer opportunities is one way to address retirement. Yet, as with the other steps of this journey, no advice is one-size-fits-all. However, this chapter traces pathways for each of us to think about while continuing the journey in various alternative directions once we retire from our academic careers. It is probably tempting to read only the chapters of this book that sound like
they apply to your position in this journey, but we encourage you to take a few steps back and start at the beginning. What we hope will become clear is that, no matter where you are on this long road trip, mentoring is key to your success and the success of others. The original purpose of the book, of course, was to provide sound advice to help you navigate through your own career. The purpose that has become more salient through its writing, however, is for you to be equipped to help others navigate their careers as well. You begin this book as a mere tourist, but our goal is to make you a tour guide. As one of us has always said in opening one of these workshops, your first
job is to get and keep your job! To do that you need to map out your career goals and means of achieving them, i.e., to chart your plan for securing, keeping, and growing in, your career. Most of us will take the time to plan just about everything but that; we organize, gain knowledge, muster resources,
draft, revise, edit, and set aside blocks of time for a research project, a term paper, a conference presentation, a publication, our service/engagement with various communities, time/dates with family and friends, and on and on. Yet few of us even contemplate what/where we want be when we “grow up,” how we want to be known, what we want to be known for, and/or what a successful career, one juxtaposed with a full life, would look like. Ironically, it is precisely this that should be done first (and regularly revisited) in order to ensure the greatest odds for the best successes. It is to this task that we now turn. Bon voyage!
