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[cranefly]

I've applied for tenure, and am told it's in the bag. I don't particularly like where I am, though. Although the university is a good school, geographically I'm desperate to move (seriously hate winter).  So I'd like to set myself a 5-year timeline to move to my ideal location, which would be an elite school in a sunny state.

• What  would you prioritize?
• How much emphasis would you place on teaching-related tasks like graduate supervision and new program development?
• What is most important for research (grant income vs. top pubs)?
• How important are tasks like guest lecturing--both in building visibility and as a service task?
• How much time should I really be spending on service--what's the right balance between not pissing off my colleagues but not wasting my time? Is it worth my time to be organizing conferences?

I have my own ideas about these things, of course, but I'm curious what others would prioritize in my situation. Knowing I'm not going for an entry position, what is really key at this stage in my career?

[hegemony]

What kind of field are you in, i.e. humanities, STEM, etc.?

[cranefly]

What kind of field are you in, i.e. humanities, STEM, etc.?

I knew someone would ask that... and I purposely didn't answer because I'm really interdisciplinary, and could fit easily into either Humanities or STEM field. I currently have appointments in both.

[hegemony]

Well, in STEM fields grants are going to get attention, but in humanities fields, less so.  From my experience, one thing SCs look for is evidence of administrative ability, e.g. "Would this person make a good department head?"  If so, that's definitely a feather in your cap.  Beyond that, evidence that they're hiring a Big Name in scholarship who will attract and work with legions of grad students.  (But Big Name-ness is the key thing; the number of grad students is merely an add-on.)

[oatmeal]

OP--I would suggest that the best plan would be to make sure that you have career tenure rather than institutional tenure. And, if you want to move within five years after tenure that you have a CV that is career full professor rather than institutional full professor, and this will vary according to field. If you have a career full professor CV you might move at that rank but more likely with tenure as an associate. This gives you a lot more opportunities. The other option is to go the chair of department route, which means having leadership experience along with the research/publication record.

[larryc]

I made the elusive mid-career humanities move a couple of years ago and posted about it here: http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php?topic=49772.10. However--at mid-career every move is different, so read it with a shaker of salt.

The one thing I would add is building up more a professional profile in your targeted region. I scraped my pennies together for years to go to the regional history conference in my desired are for a decade. I can't prove that this in anyway helped me land this job, but the contacts I built have certainly helped since.

Also--focus on being happy where you are, because the mid-career move may never happen. Go out this weekend and buy yourself a pair of skis. Seriously.

[totoro]

What do you mean by elite school in a sunny state? Pomona College or USC or Stanford (for example)? i.e. SLAC vs. R1 vs. elite R1. And what kind of school are you in now?

[cranefly]

Thanks, folks.
@Larry: I don't mind skiing, but the winters are way too long and I get seasonal affective disorder in a really bad way. Tried everything from light therapy to medication and it doesn't help... moving is about quality of life for me.
@totoro: elite R1, moving from an R1. 

[totoro]

Thanks, folks.
@Larry: I don't mind skiing, but the winters are way too long and I get seasonal affective disorder in a really bad way. Tried everything from light therapy to medication and it doesn't help... moving is about quality of life for me.
@totoro: elite R1, moving from an R1. 

OK, now I can give you some answers (I'm a full prof in social science at one of the top two universities in Australia and was an associate prof at a US R1. We're more in the league though of a typical US R1 as a result).

* How much emphasis would you place on teaching-related tasks like graduate supervision and new program development?

Not much. Getting good grad students who can publish papers with you in good journals is of course helpful.

* What is most important for research (grant income vs. top pubs)?

For my social science top pubs are most important. Showing you can get grants is nice but nowhere near as important. In hardcore STEM I'd say both are equally important.

* How important are tasks like guest lecturing--both in building visibility and as a service task?

Giving keynotes at conferences. Getting invited to workshops with bigshots would be good. Invitations to give seminars at top institutions. Getting in the media is also important in my field. Getting a strong online presence can't hurt.

* How much time should I really be spending on service--what's the right balance between not pissing off my colleagues but not wasting my time?

Unless you are going to be a Nobel prize winner, showing management capability is important. Don't sit on useless committees though and service to the discipline is more important than to your university. Managing a program or editing a journal for a couple of years could be a calculated sacrifice.

* Is it worth my time to be organizing conferences?

No, but more focused workshops and inviting big names would be good in getting visibility.

********

Bottom line is that when your application goes in, they have got to think this is one of the very top people in the world that we could hire who will do excellent research and mentor more junior faculty and enhance our profile.

[secretlistener]

@Larry: I don't mind skiing, but the winters are way too long and I get seasonal affective disorder in a really bad way. Tried everything from light therapy to medication and it doesn't help... moving is about quality of life for me.

Have you tried replacing the light bulbs in your office and at home by day-light light bulbs, preferably strong energy-saving ones ? You can buy mail-order ones at 100 W (equivalent of 500 W non-energy saving). This might work better than light medication because the effect of day-light only stays as long as the light actually gets into your eyes. You need to keep some of the usual "fire-place lighting" light bulbs in your bedroom though to be able to fall asleep easily.

[seething_sock]

Posting under a sock and bumping this thread.

Like Cranefly, it looks like tenure is mine. Like Cranefly, I am looking at a possible move, and I also have a 5 year time window. I'm in a huge engineering department at an R1, and the structure of the department seems to be very top-down from the dept. head. There is an inner circle of faculty who seem to be getting a disproportionate share of committee assignments. For some, that works fine since they're not research active, but others in the circle are indeed quite research active and have not been able to successfully leave the circle. Their research suffers as a result.

I appear to be undergoing grooming for The Circle. Every committee I'm on has something to do with the core teaching mission of the university, and our charge has the potential of upending much of the established order, which insures that there will be a lot of work involved in selling what we come up with to the faculty. Most members of The Circle have followed a similar path.

Additionally, due to poor leadership at the immediate-supervisor level, the number of new course preps I've had is double that of others in my cohort going up for tenure, a fact that really chaps my hide. Despite all that, I've managed to keep my research going and even thriving, with grad students getting graduated, grants coming in and papers going out the door. It, however, has taken a toll. I've only recently managed to cut way back on my alcohol intake. My marriage is suffering as well, and my family back home hasn't heard from me in ages. Were I to become part of this Circle, I can't see where I could fulfill all my duties and keep my research going without more damage. My colleagues at other universities alternately admire me for being able to do all this given the departmental and teaching load, and tell me I'm crazy for staying. It almost seems that the workload is designed to cripple one's research career so that mobility is eliminated.

I appreciate the advice I've read in this thread thus far and (not to hijack Cranefly's thread) would welcome other input. I can do my level best to try and minimize committee involvement, but the department has had some significant faculty loss lately and the dept. head is quite sensitive to indications that someone might leave. Being that concerted effort to escape some committee work is apparently such an indicator, and also being that I want to stick to this 5 year plan (for several reasons other than purely professional), I need to move stealthily.  

This is probably more vent than question...

[mleok]

If your aim is to move, I would either decline or blow off these onerous committee assignments, and concentrate your efforts on publications, transferrable grants, and seminar and conference presentations, while making it be known to your colleagues at other institutions that you're contemplating a move.

[msparticularity]

Seething_sock, if your tenure application has now moved beyond the departmental level, then I think you can probably afford to stop working so hard to please your chair--just as mleok suggests. You probably don't want to get right in his/her face, though, so you might want to plead other departmental obligations. If you can couch your refusals in terms of your current heavy load of obligations to your students (and it sounds as if this would be very believable), I wonder whether this would avoid looking like you're planning to get out.

[wellfleet]

>I appear to be undergoing grooming for The Circle.

I may have to borrow this name; seething_sock's story is ringing familiar in ways I don't like at all. 

[seething_sock]

Thanks for the replies.