Clash with reality after first months as a faculty

[marwyn]

I got a pretty secure research/teaching position at a university in the UK. With a rather short period after my Ph.D. I felt quite successful and lucky about this job. However, I come from a very different environment, and I spent my time as a student and researcher at several different institutions in mainland Europe. Even though everyone is nice and welcoming, I actually feel quite frustrated after the first several months... not mentioning the uncertainty related to Brexit, which will certainly affect my family and hinder access to good EU students and postdocs. Moreover I sometimes find it tough to get into the British community at the department.

I was told there would be reduced teaching load, and there is. However, there's a good deal of additional work and spoon-feeding of students which I haven't experienced anywhere else. Finding my way in this system consumes a lot of time but even more experienced faculty members seem confused about the local disorder in teaching.

While my appointment assumes at least 50% of research (yeah, I know it's on paper...), I have basically had no time to do any research at all. I cannot employ any Ph.D. students yet, since I was told that I should rather do it in the fall next year. So, all of my collaborations are on hiatus. Well eventually the teaching commitments will become easier, because I'll gain some experience, but there will be much more of it soon and I'll also get an admin role. I'm not the only one who sees the problem with time, and because of family I can't really work too much over time.

I never smelled anything of this during my interview. It all seemed beautiful and easy...

There are days that I just want to run to the hills. I don't know if this is normal, but I'm considering applying elsewhere. However, does it make any sense to do it after just several months in this position? What will I say at an interview... that I don't like the damp weather? Well, maybe some of you have some experiences or thoughts.

[craftyprof]

Try to hang in there.  The teaching and spoon feeding gets easier with time.  Try to keep your research moving forward - you may have to downshift, but try to avoid a full hiatus.

Moving to a new place would most likely mean spending another year in adjustment before you find your groove.

[Puget]

I suspect you are just experiencing the normal shock of transitioning from postdoc (or similar) to faculty, and another position is going to be very similar in this regard. Unless there is more to this that is not in your post, I would not jump ship expecting the grass to be greener elsewhere.

I'm afraid you may have had rather unrealistic expectations about what being a faculty member is like. Sorry to say, but you will never again have the unlimited, largely unstructured, time for research you had as a postdoc. Being a faculty member means learning to juggle multiple responsibilities at once, across research, teaching and service. The trick is to learn to balance these appropriately by protecting time for research since if you let them teaching and service tasks will take all available time.

The teaching will get easier once you have fewer new preps and are more experienced, but you also have to work to not let it take over-- e.g., resist the urge to fiddle endlessly with your classes, over-prep lectures, or create assignments that take forever to grade.

Same with service-- you need to do a good enough job and be a good department citizen, but also learn to say no to things.

Here's a system for research productivity that works for many faculty members-- Make a term plan for your research (semester or whatever interval makes sense for you), setting deadlines for things that don't have external deadlines then planning backward from them to schedule specific intermediate steps (e.g., draft intro)-- be realistic about this plan, and update as needed. Then, sit down at the beginning of every week, check your plan for the week, and further break these down into subtasks and schedule them on your calendar. Protect this time as if it was a scheduled meeting.

If you're in a lab science (which it sounds like you might be), how you spend your research time will also shift dramatically as you build up your lab group. You will be spending your time writing grants, mentoring your lab members (this takes up an extraordinary amount of time if you do it right), and guiding manuscript writing as the senior author rather than doing much hands-on research and first-author writing.

However, you should not be "on pause" until you get to that point-- surely you have things from your previous position and collaborations you can be writing up? You need to keep your publication pipeline full while you get up and running at your new place.

Nothing about being a faculty member is "beautiful and easy"--It can be a great job, but it's a job, and a hard job. I love much of what I do, other parts not so much, but they are all necessary parts of the job.

[the-tenure-track-prof]

I can relate to what you just described from "spoon-feeding" to students to having no time for research.
I am also a new tenure track assistant professor in the U.S. I dont know if your position is permanent or not at the university that you are at but it sounds to me that you are going through the same experiences that I`ve gone through this semester.
I was shocked to see graduate students who require instruction for every single step and sentence that they write in a paper and everything that they do outside of the classroom. It took me some time also to realize that the reading load was way more than what they can handle. From my perspective, I gave them 1/3 of what I think they should be reading and still it was too much for them to keep up with.
Another source of frustration for me is finding no time for research which is my life. I beat up my self and get angry on myself every day because I am not able to progress with even one single manuscript that I planned to do this semester. What I`ve done to deal with this frustration is talking to senior faculty members, not necessarily from the school and get their insight on the situation. I came to realize that first semester and even first year, a new faculty is just learning and adjusting to the new university and population of students and not to beat myself up for not publishing during the first semester or even the first year because it is normal.
What you`ve described is very similar to my situation. You are learning a lot of new information within a short period of time and you are also required to perform well and provide service to your students and meet employer expectations. This is a lot to deal with and I am in this similar situation. I am still frustrated sometimes but I am working on making changes in my own expectations and teaching methods to meet students where they are at.
I look at it as a task that is way easier than what I thought because they don't need all the material that I wanted to teach them but they need more one-on-one attention and this is completely different from the research-driven demanding competitive atmosphere at the university that I graduated from. Don't look for another job yet and give it at least a full year and then see to what extent does this university meets your expectations and career aspirations.

I got a pretty secure research/teaching position at a university in the UK. With a rather short period after my Ph.D. I felt quite successful and lucky about this job. However, I come from a very different environment, and I spent my time as a student and researcher at several different institutions in mainland Europe. Even though everyone is nice and welcoming, I actually feel quite frustrated after the first several months... not mentioning the uncertainty related to Brexit, which will certainly affect my family and hinder access to good EU students and postdocs. Moreover I sometimes find it tough to get into the British community at the department.

I was told there would be reduced teaching load, and there is. However, there's a good deal of additional work and spoon-feeding of students which I haven't experienced anywhere else. Finding my way in this system consumes a lot of time but even more experienced faculty members seem confused about the local disorder in teaching.

While my appointment assumes at least 50% of research (yeah, I know it's on paper...), I have basically had no time to do any research at all. I cannot employ any Ph.D. students yet, since I was told that I should rather do it in the fall next year. So, all of my collaborations are on hiatus. Well eventually the teaching commitments will become easier, because I'll gain some experience, but there will be much more of it soon and I'll also get an admin role. I'm not the only one who sees the problem with time, and because of family I can't really work too much over time.

I never smelled anything of this during my interview. It all seemed beautiful and easy...

There are days that I just want to run to the hills. I don't know if this is normal, but I'm considering applying elsewhere. However, does it make any sense to do it after just several months in this position? What will I say at an interview... that I don't like the damp weather? Well, maybe some of you have some experiences or thoughts.

[marwyn]

Thank you craftyprof and Puget for all your thoughts. It's actually a very good point that optimizing time management can be very useful in finding proper balance. Thanks the-tenure-track-prof for sharing your experiences - mine are quite similar.

Well I've got many results from my collaborations which I should write up. However, I simply haven't had enough time even to properly sit down to it. I hope it gets better soon.

When it comes to how teaching is organised, that's quite a new thing to me. For example, I need to prepare 3 sets of exam questions for one subject every year. All of those are subject to very rigid rules (format, language etc.) and several stages of internal and external review. Unfortunately, there's no document clearly describing how these questions should be prepared, so you get to know only during internal review what should be corrected. It took me 2 full days to go through this and reach the expectations. Now, when you take into account that there are more similar problems, all of this becomes quite overwhelming, because trial and error is often the only way. You can ask someone for advice, but most people don't know the answers as every set of courses is organised differently.

Spoon-feeding of undergrads is just odd to me. I find it sad that we prepare official mock exams and only 50% of the students show up. Then we basically mark these exams in front of the class so that they exactly know what is sufficient to pass, which again takes time (not mentioning that I'm actually questioning if this is the right approach...). None of the universities, I was at before, had this policy.

These are some examples, but it's all time consuming for a newcomer to adapt. At the same time I don't complain about it at the department, since it's my probationary period.

[Puget]

Well I've got many results from my collaborations which I should write up. However, I simply haven't had enough time even to properly sit down to it. I hope it gets better soon.

Waiting for a big block of time you hope will come along soon is a recipe for continued lack of research productivity. You have to make the time-- at least 30 min per day-- block it off, protect it, don't let teaching expand to fill it. Learn to work in short bursts in between other things. This works, but only if you have a plan in advance for what you are working on in each slot (see my previous post). Use your first slots to make that plan.

Every new faculty member goes through this-- you have to get out of postdoc mode and into faculty mode starting now-- it means working in a different way, because that magical future when you have more time for writing is never coming. There will always be urgent tasks that take the place of today's urgent tasks, so you have to carve out time for the important-but-not-urgent tasks or they will never get done.

[Kron3007]

Teaching definitely becomes less laborious over time.  Once you have taught a course a couple times it is much, much easier and less time consuming.  What is your teaching load? 

In the research side, it is important to recognize and make the adjustment to the fact that you need to shift from researcher to administrator/manager (at least in lab based STEM).  I did a bit of lab work at your stage but spend almost no time in the lab anymore (5 years in).  Research will now mean recruiting, finding, and supervising others doing research.

[Kron3007]

I would also mention that on the teaching side, I was my own worst enemy at first.  Make sure to design assignments and exams to make your life easier.  At first, I designed assignments and exams that were horrible to grade and took forever.  I have now shifted to assignments that are much quicker to grade, and I also think this makes the grading more fair.

[polly_mer]

As someone who left academia in part because I disliked the realities mentioned here, I will point out that, in some fields, one can leave academia and have a pretty decent research job in which one can spend large chunks of every day doing the research oneself, although mentoring postdocs and students is encouraged.

I have different bureaucratic impositions on my time and it's still not all roses.  However, spending about 50% of my work-time most weeks on research and the activities to support that research (proposals, presentations to funders, reports to funders, external and internal publications, prepping for conference attendance and presentation) is pretty good.  This is especially true when I compare even a "non-productive" week here to the huge frustrations in trying to spoon-feed people who didn't want to learn and resented all efforts at helping them learn.

Don't leave immediately in your first year.  However, as you do time/effort optimization, consider how much of your weekly schedule is what you want to do (including family time and hobbies) or need to do to do what you want to do.  If a large fraction of your time is trying to keep a job that is much less desirable than other jobs you can realistically get, then the time has come to apply for jobs you'd rather have while ensuring you aren't fired from the job currently paying the bills.

[marwyn]

OK, so if truth be told, when I looked at the way some of my academic mentors worked in other places, I had hopes that I would have enough time to do a bit of scouting research work and focus on supervision and management. Well, maybe it was an unrealistic assumption, but let's see how things develop during the first year. Still, I see that some people can do it, but maybe their positions or institutions are a bit more flexible, or they just spend more time at work?

Let me add, that I really like the students that I teach. Well, most of them prefer to be spoon-fed and I find the system annoying, but I found some exceptional students anyway (or rather they found me). A small group of students came to me asking for a possibility of doing a summer internship, and after 2 meetings I see that these are very motivated guys, who try to search independently for interesting directions. I really like interacting with them.

However, if life forces me to choose between teaching (which I like) and research (which is my life), I'm incredibly frustrated.

Thanks polly_mer for your thoughts. It's actually a great plan. If I don't find good balance here within a year or two, what you say could be a good direction. I have in mind one purely research based institution in mainland Europe that has new openings every year.

[Kron3007]

The first year or two are hard, but I would definitely hold on for a while. Once things stabilize, the balance is much different, or at least that was my experience.

Research positions outside of academia also have their downside.  While I don't get to focus 100% on research, I can choose the direction of my agenda, which is often not the case in gevernment or private research positions.  I also keep ownership of IP, which is generally not the case outside of academia (and not universal within).  I'm not saying that is a bad direction and many people enjoy it, but I would think carefully and consider whether the grass is really greener.

[polly_mer]

they just spend more time at work?

Some people definitely spend a lot of time doing work and do even more work for their first few years to get their research group off the ground.  The folks I know who spend their most of their time on management of the group and scoping research are well past their first year.  They usually spent several years building up a very purposeful pyramid structure so that most of the "training" is done by postdocs and more experienced grad students.  The people I know who are very well established and have very productive groups often usually have co-PIs and technicians on soft money who do day-to-day lab/computational/field work with the postdocs and students while the PI focuses on vision and funding.

[Kron3007]

they just spend more time at work?

Some people definitely spend a lot of time doing work and do even more work for their first few years to get their research group off the ground.  The folks I know who spend their most of their time on management of the group and scoping research are well past their first year.  They usually spent several years building up a very purposeful pyramid structure so that most of the "training" is done by postdocs and more experienced grad students.  The people I know who are very well established and have very productive groups often usually have co-PIs and technicians on soft money who do day-to-day lab/computational/field work with the postdocs and students while the PI focuses on vision and funding.

In my hallway there are two senior professors that have both had very productive careers.  One works all the time, it is unusual to come in on the weekend and not see him in his office.  He micro-manages his students and is heavily involved in all aspects of his lab.  He has never had huge amounts of funding but has been quite productive none the less.

The other has a much larger lab group and better funding history.  I never see him here on weekends, and not that often during the week for that matter.  He is very much the opposite of a micromanager and relies heavily on postdocs etc to train and oversee graduate students and lab operations.

My point is that there are many paths to success.  My goal is to be somewhere between these two, where I dont have to work endless hours but am still involved in the lab activities. 

[marwyn]

My point is that there are many paths to success.  My goal is to be somewhere between these two, where I dont have to work endless hours but am still involved in the lab activities.

Oh, yeah... that's my goal too.

So finding good balance is one thing. I've been thinking about the possible ways to optimize my work schedule since I got all of these nice answers.

Being a group-less group leader for the next 8 or 9 months is still quite overwhelming. I've seen some departments which allow the newly appointed colleague to recruit their group members right away, or even before they start. Considering all the uncertainty related to my grant applications and little knowledge about how the whole system and my department work, I feel helpless.

I feel like I need a good mentor who will help me understand how to find a way through all of the intricacies of the UK system. I just don't think that I've devoloped a good enough relationship to openly speak about it. Well, anyway... everyone is so busy, that it's hard to even go for lunch and casually chat about things like this.

[marwyn]

Good thing is, that Christmas break gives me some time to catch up with research and do something that I'm excited about!