In this concise video, Professor Kevin Folta—an experienced molecular biologist, department chair, and faculty mentor—addresses how early‑career faculty can strategically present the effects of the COVID‑19 pandemic in their promotion and tenure dossiers. He observes that many applicants use the required COVID‑impact section to list grievances, which weakens their case. Folta argues that this section should instead showcase adaptability, resilience, and innovative responses to pandemic‑driven challenges. He suggests concrete ways to reframe the narrative: leveraging online teaching tools, initiating new collaborations, pivoting research questions, and turning field‑work constraints into novel hypotheses. By positioning the COVID‑impact paragraph as a compelling opening that highlights problem‑solving abilities rather than excuses, candidates can set a positive tone for the rest of their dossier. Folta’s advice emphasizes strength‑based storytelling, avoiding whiny language, and using the pandemic as evidence of one’s capacity to thrive under adversity.
Chapters
Hi, everybody. I'm Kevin Folta, and I'm a professor of molecular biology and genomics and also studied the nuances of strategic communication for decades. And I also served as a department chair at a major land-grant university for a long time. I sit on mentoring committees for faculty, many things like that. And one of my central roles has been career development and promotion of faculty. And faculty have to endure this extremely rigorous annual evaluation, and early-in-career faculty have to go through this process of promotion, sometimes with tenure, and this means producing this massive document of accomplishments. And what we can all learn from this are some ways to kind of flip the script in documents we prepare for promotion, whether you're in an academic setting or not. Now, the COVID-19 pandemic, it was a stick in the spokes of many people who did research for a living, but it did Not a lot of good things for most people. It changed the way that in universities that we delivered course material to students and affected our work in the field and our interactions across the state. It's because of this that the university provided all of us an opportunity to explain how COVID pandemic affected our academic programs, our teaching, and our research. And lately I've been reading a lot of these. And they're not terribly exciting. They all carry one commonality, and it's right here smack at the beginning of the document. They all are complaining. They're all whining about how the pandemic derailed their program. But could this be an opportunity? Could this be an opportunity to communicate strength and resilience? And instead of being a place for whiny excuses? You see, faculty use this section to describe all the way in which the pandemic hurt their progress, and I understand that. We all were affected. We didn't get as much done as we would have liked to accomplish, but that happened to everybody. And when I look at these applications for tenure and promotion, we really took— if we looked at some of the ones that I looked at, so I had a number of faculty who turned these things in, and if you take out the impacts of COVID-19 pandemic section, They still are pretty good. I work with a lot of really good people and high flyers. Everybody went through this. We know that our lives were changed. So how can we turn this negative time and this opportunity to populate this section of the document in a way that turns a negative into a positive? So rather than a list of complaints about the pandemic and how it wrecked your progress, and what if you use this opportunity to rethink the best way to deliver course material. You use the pandemic as a means to seize an opportunity to maybe take advantage of more computer-based solutions, to use this opportunity to engage other collaborators to write an important document, or maybe another way to come up with creative solutions in ways to answer research questions. What if you used this pandemic as a way to transition your work from the lab into the safety of the field to test a completely different hypothesis that may have been related to your core research area? You get the idea. It's how did we take a crisis and turn it into an opportunity? And this section of your dossier, of your CV, your resume, whatever you're preparing, this could communicate Strength. It might include reasons, but don't include excuses. It should communicate adaptability, resilience, the ability to generate clever solutions to problems. It shouldn't be a place for the whiny despair about why things are half done. I really think that this is a great opportunity. The impacts of the COVID section— this is normally right up at the beginning of the document, somewhere on the first page or 2. And use this to set the table, to kind of prime those who will be making decisions about your future and your career and show them that you're good at performing during a major public health pandemic, right? How will you seize this event to rethink and restructure rather than a disaster that derailed your progress? It just is another way that you can take a crisis And turn it into an opportunity to show the good things that you can do. So thanks. I'm Kevin Folta. This has been bothering me a lot lately, and I thought maybe I should put the short video together so that those of you who are in this situation may be able to leverage this opportunity to show how good you are rather than how bad a pandemic was.
