First Person

The New Job and the Single Professor

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines First Person Half a Sabbatical Giving up a full year's leave to take only a semester off was a mistake but even a limited break has its benefits. The Fund Raiser Collateral Baggage Who, exactly, is the audience for a capital campaign once it goes public? The CV Doctor Does Your Vita Need Work? Submit your CV and it may be selected for an online critique by our Career Talk columnists. Career Talk Starting Fresh A primer for new professors on what to expect in the first year on the job. Resource Salaries: Faculty | Administrative Presidential pay: Private | Public Financial resources: Salary and cost-of-living calculators Career resources: Academic | Nonacademic Library: Previous articles by topic | by date | by column Career Talk, Ms. Mentor, and more... Landing your first job On the tenure track Mid-career and on Administrative careers Nonacademic careers for Ph.D.'s Talk about your career Blogs

By Mike Land

About five years ago, I set out on a month-long road trip with my dog, in hopes of turning the experience into my first travel memoir. As with trip sagas ranging from On the Road to Moby-Dick, my story began with its hero (uh, me) having his own "drizzly November of the soul." After two years in a tenure-track position in New England, I was feeling fed up with my failed attempts to build marriage, friendships, and a general sense of a balanced communal life. New England had put this Southerner on the road to warmer climes -- and his little dog, too!

Flash forward five years. I am still in New England. I spent part of my sabbatical last spring doing a second revision of my road-trip manuscript. For the sake of varying my writing locale, I sometimes would drag the chapters to a coffee shop, but I could never completely polish the portrait I had created of my dislocation and alienation -- if only because I kept being interrupted by all my New England friends.

What changed in those five years?

That was the question I asked myself recently, when I was invited to be part of a panel of professors speaking to our college's new faculty members about how to balance the professional and the personal. When I glanced at the lineup of panelists, my role became clear: I was the token single prof, the one who didn't have to worry about a spouse or kids, the one who never had to agonize about whether to end class a few minutes early to make his kid's soccer practice.

I was the one who, after the parents on the panel told stories of high-stress child-raising, would then have to articulate the problems associated with having all that time.

If, that is, I could come up with any problems.

But then I remembered my coffee-shop epiphany. How had I managed to integrate myself -- a single, Presbyterian Southerner -- into a mostly married, Roman Catholic patch of New England? Most important, how could I reduce that experience to three concise tips I could offer to my first-year counterparts? (They would want tips, wouldn't they? And at a Catholic college, there had better be three of them.) So I obliged:

Tip No. 1: If you, as a single academic in a strange place, find you have too much time on your hands, resist the temptation to fill those lonely hours with work. Sure, you may justify volunteering for every committee, or taking on an extra course, by telling yourself you have time that your colleagues do not.

But that quickly becomes an excuse to avoid the vital work of building a sense of belonging in the world beyond the campus. Community-building may not count toward tenure, but it could determine if tenure is worth having. Furthermore, if you don't reach out to the world, you may develop a growing sense of alienation and depression that actually makes you less effective in your work.

Tip No. 2: Once you have your extra time sealed off from teaching and service obligations, don't let your anxiety about your new job -- the desire to make a big impression early by publishing and conferencing as much as possible -- consume those hours of isolation.

In other words, do as I say, not as I do.

For years, whenever my father suggested that I should build a social life away from my campus by joining a church, my response was automatic: Sunday mornings were, by far, my most productive time for writing. That was rarely the case on Saturday mornings, when I was so tired from my weekly course load that I did not write particularly well. "If only," I lamented, "we were Jewish."

Even when I talked myself into church attendance, I rationalized it as part of a series of linked essays, tentatively called "Cruising for Faith," in which I would shop at seven Protestant churches of different denominations, coming to terms with what I wanted out of each. Then, in the second week of my experiment, I found a Unitarian church that was both big and intimate. I walked out knowing a dozen people by name; within a month, I was dating one of its members.

Yes, initially, my writing suffered. But knowing that half of Sunday was occupied, I treated my weekdays as a more conventional work week. In particular, I managed Friday afternoons more effectively, clearing out grading and other class prep work and creating some wide open space for writing on other afternoons.

Tip No. 3: Once you have established the boundaries separating your campus life from your personal and communal life, mix them all up again.

By that, I mean look for ways to integrate campus and community connections in ways that will benefit both. For instance, most colleges and universities now have programs that help professors use community service as part of the text in courses. Designing a service-learning (or civic-engagement, as some folks call it) course has payoffs all around: As a new faculty member, you're establishing yourself as an innovator who stops to consider the student as a whole person, and the college as a player in the community. You and your students make connections between the more conventional texts and the world beyond the campus; the community gets the benefit of your students' contributions.

And you -- the supposed single outsider to your new college and town -- are the nexus through which those connections run. Before long, you start to feel a personal investment in the welfare of your fellow citizens. In my case, I drive by a Habitat for Humanity house each day that my students helped build. I pass three or four charities at which my students have worked.

I also pass a rival college where a panel of my undergraduates shared their nature-writing about a hillside cleanup project -- all thanks to a friend from my church's environment committee, who sent me the invitation. My student panelists were comically impressed with meeting my church friend, who had become the subject of an inspirational story I tell in classes on the semester's final day. What story would I have told before? Something from my volunteer work a decade ago?

Those tips, in retrospect, seem obvious. Sometimes I wonder why I didn't execute them right away when I became an assistant professor. But then I remember the initial overwhelming anxiety I felt trying to keep up with my new responsibilities, and the subtle shyness of feeling out of place in a new part of the country. It was easier to just stay home.

So you can follow my simple tips. Or you can do what I did: Give up for a month, toss your dog and luggage in the car, and blow right past the neighborhoods you should have explored -- fleeing to a more familiar world when you could have been making your world more familiar.