Ms. Mentor

It's My First Job and I'll Rail if I Want To

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Question (from "Edgar"): Three years after getting my Ph.D. in a scientific field, I finally landed a tenure-track assistant professorship at Big National U. The problem is that it stinks here. The facilities are poor (which I knew going in, but can't change). The graduate students are mediocre to uninspired (although I haven't any of my own, anyway). The faculty in my area ignore me when they aren't asking me to deliver guest lectures in their classes (I've never been to any of their homes). I'm on my third secretary, and this one isn't any good, either.

But that's not the bad part -- which is that I'm buried in paperwork, an endless stream of forms for purchases, travel, time sheets, recruiting and outreach expenses, office furniture. Often I have to complete the same form two or three times because it routinely is misplaced by the business office or the dean's office or Lord knows where they go.

I can't get any face time with the department chairman (he says to talk to the senior colleagues). I'm so miserable and pessimistic that I can't bring myself to write what really counts: my research papers. Am I crazy for hating Big National U. and wanting to leave?

Answer: Ms. Mentor, who likes to find a flower in every sludge pot, gamely congratulates you on your health. Unlike most wildly overworked first-year faculty members, you haven't gotten pneumonia or a killer flu. But you do have quite a dose of other maladies peculiar to new tenure trackers -- including melancholy, fury, hatred of those above, and loathing of those below. No doubt you also have murderous impulses and you want to weep and you're always tired.

In short, you're mostly normal.

It's rather like a postpartum depression, except that the baby (your career) has already been gestating for some 20 or 30 years, ever since the day you first fell in love with sea slugs or meteors or tungsten. Rodents, gels, and cyclotrons have been the playmates of your youth. You have loved them well and yearned to spend your life with them, and it took you years of mingled hope and despair to get this far. You've no doubt sacrificed a traditional personal life, accepted a smaller salary than you're worth, and now . . . .

No wonder it's a bit of a letdown.

Scientists like to think of themselves as hardheaded realists. Their training encourages objectivity, an emphasis on researchable facts, and a disdain for popular talk about emotions. Many an "Edgar" won't watch Oprah, because "I'm too busy for touchy-feely fluff."

Some scientists, secure and very skilled at step-by-step linear work, look down on those humanities types who "get all emotional" in academic settings -- like the worried job seekers who cry in the bathroom at the Modern Language Association meeting.

Scientists are encouraged to see the surface, or what's findable with instruments, as the only reality that matters. Unlike literary scholars who revel in irony, hidden meanings, and scandalous story patterns ("Dentist Fills Wrong Cavity"), scientists are trained to ignore grief and anger and never admit to schadenfreude (pleasure in the misfortunes of others). Emotions are taboo.

And so scientists can be thoroughly unprepared for the blues that come when they should be singing odes of joy.

Ms. Mentor does not know what uprootings and sacrifices you've endured for this job at Big National U. But you're probably in a different part of the country, away from the community you've known, where they've put up with your snarling and maybe even found it endearing. You may be in an alien culture with people who don't behave like those you've known before: easygoing Californians, taciturn Midwesterners, gossipy Southerners full of raunchy wit. Certainly you don't know the culture of your own university and the social and logistical expectations.

Ms. Mentor knows that, because you seem to have made some big mistakes.

You haven't been, perhaps, as egregious as the cocky young man who, at his first faculty meeting, asked the lovely colleague next to him about the senior professor orating at the front of the room, "Who's the old goat?"

"My husband," she replied.

But you do seem to have packed a negative attitude, a black cloud that's been hovering since the moment you arrived. Big National's facilities, as you expected, are inadequate. You know the students are dolts even though you don't have any. Your rude colleagues shun you except when they need a professional service that only you can give. Your boss doesn't want to see you. Paperwork disappears and secretaries flee -- yet you don't see the common story pattern, boiling and burbling behind it all.

Well, it could all be a monstrous conspiracy or a nightmare from which you'll awaken soon. But Ms. Mentor thinks it more likely that you've made enemies by -- alas -- being yourself.

Consider a typical day on the job. Do you scowl at the first friendly "How are you?" and go on to describe your mound of boring paperwork, your insomnia, your intestinal malfunctions? Do you greet everyone you see in the halls outside your lab -- or do you stride by with furrowed brow, lab coat flapping, in deep thoughts that you cannot possibly interrupt for social froth?

Are you friendly and smiling with secretaries and maintenance workers -- or do you bark orders at them while not bothering to learn their names? (This is not uncommon in academe, and it makes Ms. Mentor furious.) Do you have coffee or lunch with colleagues, telling them entertaining stories while asking for advice and department lore? Or do you lock your office door and brown bag it alone? Do you ask your colleagues to read over grant proposals and thank them warmly for suggestions? Or do you argue with them over every criticism until you've worn them down? Do you make eye contact and listen intently to others? Do you remember what they said and follow up later ("How'd the game go?")

Besides your research, can you talk about many other things -- or just sports? Do you imagine other people's points of view? (If you can't decode the meanings ["stories"] of others, Ms. Mentor recommends Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most, by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen. Many a scenario will be familiar.)

But most important, Are you consistently upbeat, especially on gray and wintry days? No one wants to be around a constant carper. Smiling makes your face happier. Bring cookies. Read a novel once a month.

You need to schmooze. You need to be liked. And, yes, good manners and professional smarts do often require that we forgive others' mistakes, and have contingency plans. You should make second copies of everything, swallow your doubts, and trust secretaries to handle your papers. Impatience with others' "incompetence" makes you seem sour and difficult, and encourages your underlings to "forget" and "lose" things. You must cherish secretaries and let them mentor you, for they know how bureaucracies work. They also know the secretaries in other offices, and together they can make your paperwork an easy ride -- unless you irritate or patronize them. Then your paperwork empire will turn into a living hell.

You will be gnashing your teeth instead of publishing. Finally, if no one seems to like you, you're unlikely to get tenure. Such decisions do involve "collegiality" -- whether your colleagues want you around for another 30 years or more.

Right now you may believe that A Bigger Better School will give you perfect facilities, brilliant students, appreciative colleagues, a supportive boss, and a smooth and invisible bureaucracy. You may want to test the hiring waters again. But Ms. Mentor knows that the only behavior you can change is your own.

As you start your second year at Big National U., you may feel that looking on the bright side is a sappy sellout, and you'd rather "be me." Charm is for sissies. But charm is also rare and therefore exceptionally winning in the halls of academe. If you cannot sincerely be interested in the lives, health, or feelings of others -- then fake it. The job you save, and the psyche you improve, will be your own.

Question: I'm a young single woman, a recent Ph.D. and new to the small community where I'll be teaching. I'd like to post an online personal ad, but would it be awkward if my students answered?

Answer: Um. . . .

SAGE READERS: Ms.Mentor invites contributions for a column on how academe has changed -- or not -- since 1998, when she first took up her mouse as an advice columnist. Has the climate improved for older job candidates, lesbians and gay men, and people with disabilities? She especially welcomes correspondence from those whose problems she's addressed in the past. Ms. Mentor also invites queries, gossip, and rants: she'd like to know a little bit about you for her files. Anonymity is guaranteed.

Ms. Mentor scrambles identifying details, recommends subject headings, regrets that she can rarely answer mail outside her columns, and encourages readers to consult her archive and other columnists on The Chronicle's Careers site. Cheery news does exist.