Managing Your Research Career

The academic life is pretty good. It looks almost decadent to those outside of academe.

Your hours are flexible. You have a lot of autonomy over the content of your work. And you are doing work that you love.

On top of that, you will be rewarded for the thing you most want to do.

The thing that drew you into an academic career is research. You are passionate about certain research questions. You can’t imagine an office without bookshelves. You are inspired by ideas.

And research is central to being hired, to getting tenure, and to being promoted.

Unfortunately, on a day to day basis, many academics don’t feel like they have autonomy and flexibility, nor that they are doing work they love. It can even feel like the system of reward is out of line with the work they do most of.

You have the most autonomy and flexibility in your research

But the downside to having so much autonomy in this central area of our work is that there is very little structure provided. No one else schedules time for research into our days. And we have few occasions to report on our progress or our plans.

If you didn’t do any research this week, no one noticed. Except you.

There are no clear performance targets for tenure or promotion, either. That is usually seen as one of the good things about academic life. But it also means that you are aiming for a goal that is vague at best. How do you know if you have done enough? Or if what you have done is good enough?

If you have perfectionist tendencies the vague nature of the goals combined with the lack of external structure can be paralyzing.

Other parts of your academic life have more structure.

Teaching is scheduled. You have to show up at specified times and deliver a class. You can turn up unprepared but people would notice. And you would feel bad that you had performed so badly in public.

You also get direct feedback from students in the form of a range of classroom behaviour, compliments, and complaints. There are formal evaluations.

Administrative responsibilities also have scheduled meetings, deadlines for submitting paperwork, etc. Those deadlines and the fact that someone else is going to see and use your work often act as incentives to getting things done even when they are difficult or distasteful.

If you are any good at the administrative stuff, you tend to get compliments. And asked to do more. Clear, immediate rewards.

Your work gets out of balance

Because teaching and administrative work have more imposed structure and more immediate rewards, your workload can get out of balance. During term time, research can get squeezed out of your flexible schedule.

That can make you question why you became an academic in the first place. Or it can make you resentful of a formal reward structure that values research so much.

Managing Your Research Career

The thing about autonomy is that you have to provide your own structure.

An academic job is much more flexible than most others. You have very few hours in your week that are scheduled by someone else. And there are big swathes of the year with no scheduled time at all.

The lack of clear performance targets means that you have to judge your discipline’s standards, set your own goals, and work to achieve them.

This isn’t easy.

Are you coming to Congress?

I’m giving a presentation about these issues as part of the Career Corner series at Congress.

I talk about planning a long term program of research that includes a series of projects with differing resource needs. I clarify the various research activities you need to be engaged in. And I provide some ideas for finding time for research.

Reducing your stress will improve your performance in all areas. Research and teaching are not in competition with one another. They are both important parts of an academic career.

Come and hear my ideas and then ask your own questions. I want you to acheive your research goals. And I want you to love your academic job.

Come here me speak

Managing Your Research Career

University Centre, Room 279

Monday, May 25, 3 p.m.

Friday, May 29, 10 a.m.

Update: For those who attended Monday’s presentation, I’m sorry about the technical hiccups. You can view the slides here.