Navigating Your Career

1
Navigating Your Career

• Carol Colatrella
• Literature, Communication, and Culture, Ivan
  Allen College
• Georgia Tech Center for the Study of Women,
  Science, and Technology

2
Research Setting Terms

• Maximize the impact of research
• Focus on independent traditional research,
  while remaining open to appropriate collaboration
• Set goals and track progress
• Pursue funding opportunities

3
Research Managing Time

• Work out standard, feasible weekly schedule
  construct according to requirements and personal
  preferences
• Establish timeline for research goals and
  regularly track your progress
• Share timeline with your team, setting goals,
  deadlines, outcomes for students

4
More on Managing Time

• Fit emerging needs (meetings, events, travel)
  into a weekly schedule preserve research time
• Communicate your office/lab hours to unit, on
  listserv/web, on office door, during class
• Maintain times during the work day to think,
  organize, write, and network
• Reserve free time every day away from work

5
Teaching before the term

• Build course in advance share map of where it
  will go with students
• Synchronize course with research as much as
  possible
• Communicate goals, assignments, methods, and
  expectations to students in syllabus, on website,
  and via listserv

6
Teaching during the term

• Respond to student concerns--in class or in
  office hours--but remember you are the authority
• Clarify changes to students multiple times
• Ask for a midterm evaluation from students and
  respond to it

7
Service

• Link to research and/or personal interests
• Limit to fulfill research goals
• Ask for appropriate supports if tapped for
  service
• Understand you can do service later

8
Personal Well-Being

• Enjoy job, and enjoy getting away from it
• Construct a healthy routine for each day and for
  the long-term take weekend breaks, vacations
• Understand what you need in your life for inner
  peace
• Resist paranoia the natural condition for
  assistant professors

9
To foster sense of well-being. . .

• Check in regularly (but not obsessively) with
  administrators, colleagues, peers
• Strategize to meet challenges avoid whining and
  propose solutions
• Meet with helpful colleagues of all ranks, peers
  elsewhere, and regular people to find mentors and
  establish networks

10
GT Conditions of Life

• Entrepreneurial, ambitious culture
• Busy faculty anxious about resources
• Cultural transformations occur over time it
  wont always be this way
• Different units have different styles,
  expectations, and procedures know yours