Dr. Steve Tippins shares seven moves for new academics to avoid early career damage. Negotiate salary, research funding, and travel before accepting the job. Master your university's learning management system, befriend the department admin, and publish early to show productivity to leadership.
I'm Dr. Steve Tippins, Ph.D. I've worked at a number of different universities, been tenured twice, and in addition served on the promotion and tenure committees several times. I've helped hundreds of academic scholars achieve their goals within academia. In this video, I'm going to walk through 7 things you should be aware of and be prepared to do when you start a new academic job. The first thing I want to talk about is prior to the job and during negotiations. You want to negotiate for as much as possible when you start your job, and that means be aware that most universities have separate budget lines for different things. For example, they may have a salary budget line with a pretty tight range, and you negotiate your salary. But then there may be another budget category for travel or for research or for summer teaching. These all come from different areas, so you want to ask about all of the things you need because you may just say, "I'm going to negotiate a salary and that's X," and you think you've done a good job, but you may have left a number of things on the table. For example, it could be 3 years of summer research funding., or a guaranteed 3 years of summer teaching, which can add 20 or 30% to your salary, or how about support for travel or support for other research? So you want to ask about every single budget line that is available to you before you get there, because it's incredibly hard to negotiate for these benefits, this extra income, after you've accepted. The second point, and this was told to me when I was leaving graduate school, and it has a lot of credibility, and that's don't make friends with anybody on the faculty for the first year. Now, I'm not saying just hide or, you know, be brusque with everybody, but don't get yourself tied in with anybody or any group of faculty until you understand the lay of the land, because you becoming friends with faculty members J and K might make you identified by faculty members M, N, O, and P that they aren't going to like you because you— they don't like J and K. So understand who the people are, understand the politics, understand who likes or doesn't like each other before you get allied with any of them can save you a lot of headaches moving forward. For example, I once heard someone say in a meeting, "Well, I'm going to go on the promotion and tenure committee this year because I'm not going to vote for him. He never should get tenure." Even though they hadn't even seen their material, they just didn't like them. I didn't like that, so I also ran for the promotion and tenure committee, and I won from the department. They chose me, and therefore I was able to review his material without a bias ahead of time. I just don't Didn't think that was fair. Third, plan on being overwhelmed. It's all new. Like, where do I park? Where do I get a key? Where do I go to get an ID? Who knows how I get this? My office isn't set up. Where do I get my laptop? Or what laptop do I get? When will it show up? All of those things. When is health insurance going to start? When is the first paycheck? For example, the first job I took, I showed up in mid-August. They told me I was paid monthly, which was great. I assumed I was going to get paid September 1st. No, it was a month delay. So my first paycheck wasn't until October 1st. Think of coming out of graduate school, being a graduate assistant with very little income, having to move, rent a new apartment, show up and not being paid for 6 weeks. The last couple of weeks were pretty full of peanut butter. So, you know, understand things like that. The fourth point I want to make is there are going to be places and people on campus that are willing to provide support. Find out who they are. Take advantage of it. Make friends with them because you might need them. Maybe not now, but maybe in the future, or maybe you're going to find out about a technical system they have, but you aren't ready for it yet. Find out about it. Make a contact with them so that when it has to happen, you're ready and you have the backup to do that. Now the fifth point is kind of a corollary to this one, but your university in all likelihood is going to use an LMS, learning management system. Figure it out early. Find out who can help you. Play with the information as quickly as you can. Set up your classes as quickly as you can because your students are going to be expecting you to use that and use it fully to its full capacity because they expect that now. And if you don't use that, they're going to be asking you a lot for it, and they're also going to evaluate you at the end of the term based on that. So your evaluations are going to look a lot better if you spend the time at the beginning to use it. And if they use the same LMS that you used in your graduate institution, great, but still look at it, see if it's used exactly the same way. The sixth point is there is someone in your department— administrative assistant, whatever they want to call that person— if you're going to make friends with anybody, that's the person to make friends with. They can make your life a heck of a lot easier because they know where to go, who to contact. If your room isn't working well for you, for example, they put you in a room with 30 chairs and they've assigned 40 people to the class. Your administrative assistant can tell you who to go to to get that corrected. Your administrative assistant can help you figure out how to get reimbursed for travel, do all kinds of things. This is a person you really want to get to know and be nice to. And the final point, you're going to be really swamped, but most schools really like publications. So publish early, publish often. Start working on it before you show up. Take anything you got. Especially items in the pipeline, and this can really make you look good if you have submitted things ahead of showing up. You can change your university designation on your submission to your new university, and you can show up with either material in the pipeline and/or, oh, I just got an article or two accepted. Department chairs, deans, administrators love things like that. Finally, read everything, understand everything, so that you can get the most out of what your institution is making available to you. And if there's any way we can help along the way on this journey, just click the link below and join our free Scholar Career Network. And good luck.
