I just started – a week before my official start date – as an assistant professor at Oregon State University in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. I feel very luck to be here, to have landed a job in a year when many of few job openings were rescinded because of the crumbling economy, let alone in an incredibly friendly department in a beautiful town near mountains and oceans.
I am alone as a TCS person in the department, and I’m sure I will feel some isolation as a result. I am really hoping that I will be able to work on some interesting problems with non-TCS people. My background, though, is in very traditional algorithmic work, so I am sure there will be growing pains. I’ll start with what will probably be the first of many requests for advice: any advice?
Enjoy the mountains and oceans. Dammit.
Scary timing! When I tell someone where I am, nearly everyone responds along the lines of “That used to be Cora’s office.” Today I decided to do some googling (“MC4008”, “Waterloo” are good keywords), wondered what happened to you, and a few hours later this blog turns up here!
Congratulations ! as another “only TCS person in dept”, I can feel your anxiety :).
I’m not qualified to offer advice, but here’s a suggestion. There are a bunch of problems in social network analysis that need a combination of theory and empirical analysis to be solved effectively. Kleinberg, for instance, has been very successful with this combined approach. Finding a collaborator in (say) data-mining would be very useful. I’m sure there are many other such “applied theory” niches.
Advice on the blog: Make it more obvious how to leave comments. Clicking on “newly minted” was the last thing
I tried (though of course, anything that worked would be the last thing I tried).
Advice on research (Disclaimer- I am also not qualified)
(1) Skim ALL of the abstracts of SODA and whatever other
conferences you goto and decide which ones to READ to keep
up with your field.
(2) See if your skill set can be used with someone in your dept to help them (e.g., graph theory and Networks).
(3) You are the only TCS person in your dept, BUT this is the modern age of workshops, conferences, email, websites, blogs, and twitter. Use these to stay connected to your field and expand your field.
(4) Time management skills: These vary from person to person too much, but since I already said I wasn’t qualified,
I will comment: Make To-Do lists of doable things TO-DO.
Keep meetings short and productive.
(5) Avoid massive admin stuff (e.g., hosting a conference)
until AFTER you get Tenure.
(6) Don’t write a book until AFTER you get Tenure.
(7) Apply for grants (duh).
bil g.
I think I’ve made the comments access more explicit – any more such suggestions are welcome.
Bill – I’ve heard the advice to not write a book from several people now. Unfortunately I don’t think Phil (my Ph.D. advisor) will be to happy to hear that.
If you want to write a book, I say go for it…
First: you’ve got to do what you want, not tailor your work (completely) toward the goal of getting tenure.
Second: realistically speaking, you’ll almost surely get tenure anyway.
Third: I think a book looks good, as long as you are continuing to do some research as well.
here’s some advice, based upon my experience as a relatively new assistant prof myself:
1. don’t rely on your students. do work yourself. especially true for a place that’s not in the top-20 universities.
2. talk to your colleagues and try to find a “buddy” among them. this “buddy” can be anyone, i.e., (s)he does not have to be another assistant professor, but can even be a full professor. point is — this “buddy” should be somebody that you can not only collaborate with, but also discuss other matters freely with, i.e., (s)he should be a true friend, and your frequencies should match. the moral support that you will get from this “buddy” will be invaluable, especially during times that things aren’t going so well (and there *will* be times when things aren’t going well).
3. don’t volunteer for departmental or university service. do no more than what you’re asked to do.
4. teach well, but don’t spend more than two hours preparing for a lecture (no more than an hour from your second semester onwards).
5. you will have to deal with a lot of meetings: meetings with your students, with colleagues, and many other pesky “administrative” meetings. skip as many unnecessary meetings as possible, and focus only on the ones that will get you somewhere in terms of your career goals.
6. keep on the lookout for innovative ideas (duh). pursue an idea doggedly even if you feel at times that your idea is no good. as billg says, write grant proposals. this is a good year to write a grant proposal to nsf, especially with all the stimulus money.
7. and finally, don’t worry about tenure. let it be at the back of your mind, but don’t keep thinking about the damn thing. just focus on your work and getting papers, and tenure will happen. have an attitude to the effect of, “if they don’t give me tenure, screw ’em”, and just focus on your work.
oh…here’s another piece of advice to add to what i already wrote: stop blogging and get to work!
I disagree with advice item 4, “don’t spend more than two hours preparing for a lecture”. I would replace it by: “Work on your teaching skills until you meet the median of your department”.
In fact, here is some meta-advice to use your time well from the perspective of optimizing your future tenure dossier: “Hit the median of your department in every dimension (junior faculty service, teaching, personality, number of grants if possible, number of publications, etc.), and focus on your research during your remaining time.”
To the many good pieces of advice, I will add a few of my own (maybe not so good):
– Learn to say “no” to unproductive drains on your time, but not too quickly 🙂
– Organize a junior faculty get-together from time to time where you can kvetch and/or band together to defeat the evil forces of whatever-sucks-in-your-department
– Regarding books: some junior people have done very well writing books. Jon Katz at UMD comes immediately to mind. So if you have a good book in you, go for it.
– Spend time talking to your colleagues to find out what they think is important in an assistant professor. You do NOT have to change your behavior, but it is good to know which expectations you are failing to meet. For example, many faculty define success in terms of numbers (of students, papers, grants). If so, now is the time to start talking to them about how you envision your future “lab” or group or whatever. Point out that many great theoreticians work with only one or two students at a time.
– (related to above): optimize your happiness, not that of your dean/chair/senior colleagues. That is, do what you consider to be a “good professor job”. If you are successful by your personal standards, then (a) chances are you will get tenure and (b) if you don’t get tenure, maybe you didn’t want it anyway…
– and remember: free advice is worth every cent you pay for it.
I’ll advocate for trying to get above the median in teaching in your department. Teaching well is one of the few ways of reliably getting satisfaction in this job. Research is important for your career, but only provides satisfaction around 1 in 100 days. But if you teach well, you make other people happy, and that tends to make you happy.
Some of my teaching recommendations are:
1. work out everything you are going to write on the board, on a piece of paper the same size as the board (I learned this from Charles Leiserson)
2. save those notes for next year.
3. after class, take a few minutes to write notes about what worked and what didn’t. Save this for next year. After a few years of this, you can get most of your lectures right.
4. occasionally, practice a lecture to an empty room.
5. if you school does it, get them to videotape you lecturing. But, don’t watch it until you are ready to be embarrassed by all of your strange mannerisms. (that’s a generic “you”, I’m not claiming you have any).
That’s such a nice suggestion by Dan, especially his first paragraph! My own opinion is that most CS departments are quite reasonable with tenure, and that it’s way too cynical to say things like “don’t care about teaching much”. Cora — I wish you a career that makes you happy and spreads such happiness around you. Hearty best wishes!
Claire writes: “Hit the median of your department in every dimension (junior faculty service, teaching, personality, number of grants if possible, number of publications, etc.), and focus on your research during your remaining time.”
I disagree. If you aim for the median, you’ll probably end up…somewhere near or below the median. In a crappy department (indeed, in any less-than-perfect department), that just reinforces the status quo. And if, as expected, you hit a little below the median, it helps fuel a race to the bottom. It’s your call, of course, but I wouldn’t sleep well if that were what my career amounted to.
I also think (having heard you give talks) that regarding teaching, you’re going to do fine. Know your stuff when you enter the classroom, keep the board organized so that the students’ notes are organized, and admit when you’re wrong or don’t know something. I also recommend starting each class with a bit of context-setting — either writing a few lines from the syllabus on the board to let students know where you are:
…
3. Greedy algorithms
A Greediness in graphs
i.
or simply saying “Today: DFS and BFS in graphs”. Students then know whether you’ve finished the material or not, etc.
Also: encourage participation. It saves you the trouble of trying to do mind-reading to figure out what students understand. It also, especially in undergrad data structs/algs courses, helps students understand that these ideas weren’t handed down from on high on graven tablets — they’re things that you can invent for yourself, as needed. That’s more valuable, in the long term, than any particular data structure or algorithm.