Resources for New Faculty
New Faculty Tips | FAQs | New Faculty Advice
1. Tips for New Faculty:
The following are a few tips we thought might help you as you begin your career at the University of Florida. Enjoy!
- Review and Evaluation
- Mentoring
- Teaching and Students
- Research
- Service
- Resources
- Overall Advice
- Reference
1.1. Review and Evaluation:
- Think about annual review as you complete projects, submit grants and papers, plan new activities.
- Keep an up-to-date Vita and list of the year's activities.
- Create a template for your annual review early and add to it regularly.
- Use the mid-career review as a mock tenure review.
- Look at University, College, and Department Promotion and Tenure documents early. Make a folder for each section in "Criteria for Tenure, Permanent Status and Promotion" (University document, Faculty Handbook) and put items in these folders as you do your professional work.
- Understand your responsibilities and design your goals in scholarship, research, teaching, and service with those responsibilities in mind.
- Identify what kinds of publications are most valued in your department.
- Work towards a continuity in your research agenda.
- Don't let teaching evaluations terrorize you.
- Get peer reviews.
- Emphasize innovation as you document your work.
- Save documentation of your work, including acceptance letters, conference programs, cards and letters, commendatory e-mails.
- Set a timeline for submitting materials outside of the institution. Any external review is important feedback on your work.
1.2. Mentoring:
- Official mentors may not give you all you need. Be sure to seek out advice beyond your official mentor when necessary.
- Think about choosing a mentor from outside of your department.
1.3. Teaching and Students:
- Let students know what you are doing and they will communicate your work to others.
- Stop, in a timely fashion, both course preparations and in class teaching, before diminishing returns set in.
- Avoid over attachment and over reaction by assuming a playful and tentative stance . Seek out and learn from criticism while reacting less emotionally to it.
- Moderate Classroom incivilities--partly defined as students who arrive late, noisily, and persist in talking aloud when someone else has the floor-- with simple strategies of openness, pacing and patience. This exemplary move is important because classroom incivilities often start with teachers' own incivilities, however unconscious.
- Try to recruit grad students at conferences.
- Look for teaching grants.
- Don't change your course text too often.
- Remember: it usually takes teaching a course three times before it is perfected
- Try to contain your teaching to the proper percentage of your work time.
- Avoid summer teaching.
- Don't take on weak grad students. Be sure to ask graduate students "why" they want you on their committees and make sure it is a good expenditure of your time. Don't take on too many grad students.
1.4. Research:
- Do some of your writing with others as a way to hold yourself accountable.
- Get a co-PI on grants. Working with established researchers can help you obtain your first grants.
- Apply for University Research Grants (URG), since they are designed to support new faculty.
- Be accountable to someone for writing deadlines (use mentor or collaborators).
- Limit the number of your projects. It is easier to work on a series of related issues. Be strategic in your planning.
1.5. Service:
- Choose service commitments well.
- Be sure to do some department "grunt" work so that your colleagues will get to know you and feel that you are contributing.
- Talk to many of your colleagues about expectations for service and choose your commitments carefully.
1.6. Resources:
- Take advantage of the many on-campus development opportunities:
- Find what resources are available in various offices on campus.
1.7. Overall Advice:
- REMEMBER YOU ARE GREAT!! We hired you because we think so and you should too.
- Treat support staff well.
- Maintain a holistic vision of the world of academics, connecting teaching and research.
- Keep a notebook to jot down ideas, responses, goals, and frustrations--an academic journal of sorts.
- Find out what a "Land Grant" University is and work towards making your work fit with that paradigm.
- Create thinking time.
- Learn to say "NO".
- Don't be shy about promoting yourself. Determine why your work is necessary in an AAU, Land Grant University as UF. Make sure people know about your ongoing research projects and accomplishments.
- Remember you have a life outside of the University and nurture that too.
1.8. References:
- Boice, Robert. Advice for New Faculty Members. 2000. Needham Heights: MA, Allyn and Bacon.
- Carlson, Susan, "New Faculty Tips." October 21, 2001. Iowa State University .
- Rice, R.E., Sorcinelli, M.D. Austin A.E. 2000. Heeding New Voices: Academic Careers for a New Generation. Washington, D.C. American Association for Higher Education.
- Sorcinelli, M.D. 2000. Principles of Good Practice: Supporting Early Career Faculty. Washington, D.C. American Association of Higher Education.
