What’s Your Advice to New Faculty Members?

OK, folks: I’m asking for your help on behalf of all those new faculty members, the ones who are roaming the halls trying to look as if they know where they belong but who really haven’t a clue. I have several friends who started out this year. Some have taught for years but are starting in new venues while others are embarking on their first full-academic positions. What I’d like to hear from you is this: What are five things you know now that you wish you’d known then?

I’ll start, having looked at my notebooks from 1987; that’s when I first began teaching at UConn—straight from having taught the summer session at Queens College (I desperately needed the money, as everybody does when beginning a new job in a new place). I had a 10-day break between jobs. It was a hot summer. I was 30.

What I wish I could tell that young woman is the following:

1. Don’t worry—it won’t be this bad forever. You will get out of debt, although it’ll take a few years. You’ll have to live frugally for some time, but you won’t always live on leftovers and one day the screens in the windows won’t be ripped. Sure, you think you should be able to buy furniture from somewhere besides the Salvation Army but right now you should stop feeling sorry for yourself. Put the books on the shelves made from planks of wood and cinderblocks, use the spindle from the construction site as a coffee table, and be grateful for the card table under the single light fixture. That’s where you’ll write your first book.

2. Take responsibility for yourself even when it seems easier to rely on somebody else. Get your driver’s license (don’t wait until you get divorced). Fill out every piece of paperwork before it is due so that it doesn’t just sit in huge, unwieldy piles, forcing the Department’s otherwise kindly administrative assistants to become impatient and lose respect for you. Show up for every meeting even when you’re tired or when it seems inconvenient. This is your place now, in every sense of the term. Don’t turn away.

3. Introduce yourself to everybody. And when you meet a person again, reintroduce yourself. You might remember him or her, but it’s perhaps less likely that your name is coming immediately to mind. Make eye-contract, smile, and make conversation in the hall even with the people who intimidate you. Some of them will become your greatest allies and best friends, despite the fact that you might not be able to believe it when you first meet.

4. It’ll take you longer to feel at home than you’d like, despite everybody’s best efforts. You’ll think you should have taken other jobs, you’ll miss your old friends and old colleagues, and at the worst of times, you’ll think you chose the wrong profession. When you wake up in the middle of the night wondering whether you should have gone into publishing, reassure yourself that everybody you know in publishing will be waking up twenty-three years later wondering if they should have gone into academe.

5. Take better notes. These first days don’t come again, and some day you might want to look back on them. Make a better record of the details—the first impressions, the sense of place, the feel of the new environment, and the dreams from the first nights—so that you can help your friends and students when their time comes to start somewhere new.

Dear readers, what’s your advice to those starting a new academic job?