Advice for New Junior Faculty

Advice for New Junior Faculty

A reader emails me: 

I've read your "Advice for..." blog posts with interest. They're truly helpful. But now I've finished the job market and I have a tenure-track position at a research university. Can you post an "Advice for Junior Faculty" next?

Okay, here goes: 

• Your focus should be on getting papers published in refereed journals. Everything else is secondary.
• Do not be a perfectionist. It is tempting to keep revising your dissertation chapters until you are completely satisfied with them before sending them off to a journal. The problem is that you may never be completely satisfied. Meanwhile, the editorial review process is unconscionably long, and your tenure review is approaching. So don't delay. If you just got a job as an assistant professor at Bigshot University, aim to send your dissertation research to journals before you arrive at Bigshot to start teaching.
• It pays to be a good teacher and a good citizen in your department: Your senior colleagues will be more likely to want to keep you around. But don't deceive yourself into thinking that great teaching or citizenship will make up for a paucity of published research.
• For women and minorities: Be especially wary of invitations to sit on university committees. I have noticed that deans and other university administrators like to promote diversity on their committees. They never seem to figure out that, as a result of this "tax" on women and minorities, we white males are left alone with more time to pursue our research.
• Attend conferences and give seminars at schools to publicize your work and yourself. The people in the audience may one day be in a position to hire you or write letters of evaluation about you.
• Tenure review committees give a lot of attention to where papers are published (perhaps too much, in light of thiswork by Andrew Oswald). Give each of your papers a shot or two at the top journals, such as the AER, JPE, or QJE. Even if you are not confident in the paper, it is worth a try for two reasons. First, as author, you are not in the best position to judge its quality; some people are too fond of their own work, and some are too hard on it. Let the editors decide. Second, the editorial process is highly imperfect. (Again, see Oswald.) The bad news is that some of your best articles may end up getting rejected from the top journals. The good news that you may get lucky, and some of your so-so articles may end up published in top journals simply because they hit the editor's desk when he is in a good mood.
• Do not get discouraged by rejection. It is part of the process. Learn what you can from the editors and referees and then take your paper to another journal.
• Be on the lookout for good coauthors among your colleagues and students. See My Rules of Thumb for more discussion of this topic.
• Avoid activities that will distract you from research. Whatever you do, do not start a blog. That will only establish your lack of seriousness as a scholar.
• Remember that you got into academics in part for the intellectual freedom it allows. So pursue your passions. Do not be too strategic. Be wary of advice from old fogies like me.

Advice for new Assistant Professors 15 APR 2014

http://chrisblattman.com/2014/04/15/advice-new-assistant-professors/

Advice for new Assistant Professors

15APR2014

It’s a bit early for me to be giving advice (I’m only on the cusp of non-Assistant status), but I found myself asked for advice the other night by a table full of newly minted PhDs on to their first academic jobs. I also give advice, unasked, to my graduating students.

So, early or not, here’s what I passed on. Mainly of relevance, I suspect, to economists and political scientists.

1. Learn to say no to new projects. Opportunities will start crossing your desk faster than you expect. It’s tempting to take the first ones, even though they’re likely the worst. There’s a big opportunity cost here: every project you take on now crowds out a potentially better one in a year or two.
2. Have a higher bar for projects with big exit costs. It’s one thing to start a historical data collection project or a new theoretical model. You can always stick it in a file drawer if it goes poorly. But if you commit to a field experiment or a project with an eminent person, you are stuck with it to the bitter end. Make sure they are worth it.
3. Book chapters and reviews are a waste of time. David Romer told us this in my first macroeconomics class, and I have come to agree. Few people read these, especially when they are buried in a $200 book no library buys. Unless you’re invited to do a Handbook chapter or an especially high profile book, it’s almost always better to put your article in a field journal. If it doesn’t merit publication in a decent field journal, probably it’s crowding out something more important to you and the world.
4. Get your dissertation papers or book out. I see so many people too busy starting new projects to finish the old ones. This is the kiss of tenure death. Send menuscipts out soon after the job market, and make revisions your first priority when they come back.
5. Seek out mentorship. Ask your dissertation committee and colleagues in your new department to read your abstracts and introduction, and strategize about framing, titles, and generally how to sell your work to a general audience. This is an art that takes years to learn, and personal advice can make a big difference in where you publish your early work.

A word of caution: almost all professional advice is either “here’s the mistakes I made” or “how to be more like me” in disguise. In this instance, it’s more of the former than latter.

For someone with real experience, you should read Greg Mankiw’s advice. I agree with all, except for “do not start a blog”, as “that will only establish your lack of seriousness as a scholar”. This may have been good advice in 2007 (when I defied the advice to start this website). Maybe it is good advice still and I don’t realize it yet. But here’s my estimate of the impacts so far:

• Blogging has made me a better writer
• It has meant I and my papers are much better known and cited by colleagues than otherwise
• Opportunities cross my desk more often than otherwise
• And, maybe most of all, I hold this blog almost directly responsible for several million dollars in research and program funding so far (paying for a lot of serious scholarly stuff). This number is exaggerated by the fact that I typically need to raise large sums for interventions as well as the research, but the basic point holds–for me blogging has (unexpectedly) paid back a hundredfold in scholarly work.

Yes there are costs and risks, but I think social media is too important for young academics to ignore. Accordingly:

6. If you want to tweet or blog under your research name, be serious. Let your research interests influence your blogging. Become a professional resource for people in your subfield. Be constructive and thoughtful not critical, and never use social media to attack colleagues. This will be a public good that pays back privately.

Colleagues: please add your advice below.

How can I improve my focus?

Edit

I'm not looking for temporary hacks like "close all other applications other than the current one", but rather more permanent ones like (perhaps) meditation. There's a lot of advice on this topic but I want to hear about a small number of things that actually work.

See related question: What exercises can I do to increase my attention span?

I was able to convert to this habit during my later years in college (my first two years in college consisted of laziness, video games, girl-chasing, and not so much studying) and when I headed into my professional career.  I don't know if this works for everyone so feel free to ignore my advice or only use parts of it.  Oddly enough, I've never used meditation even though it's been made available to me.

The main idea is to build up a self-image of being someone with a lot of focus over a long period of time by using short-term hacks (like "close all other applications") over time until you have a track record of being someone with a lot of focus and you and everyone else believes you have a lot of focus.  This eventually becomes self-reinforcing because then you begin to naturally do things that stay on track rather than allowing yourself to become distracted.  Like Nietzsche said, "there are no actors, only actions."

1. So first, don't dismiss hacks like the one you describe above.  Keeping a small bag of these and employing them faithfully will keep you on track and help build the image of having focus.
2. Develop a habit of getting enough sleep each night.  Sacrifice other activities in order to go to bed on time and manage your daytime schedule so that you can sleep as much as you need.  8 hours is good.  Spend money on a high-quality mattress and very comfortable sheets.  This is a very worthwhile one-time capital investment because you spend 30% of your lifetime here.  Being sleepy makes you easily distracted and makes it more difficult to pay attention to topics for long periods of time (you may start to fall asleep and need to stimulate yourself awake by distracting yourself).
3. Only work on a couple big things in your life at once.  If you care about a lot of things, decide which 2 or 3 things you really really care about and then start ignoring the rest.  This may involve ignoring certain long-time hobbies or even relationships, though remember that you are making the choices yourself (I mention that so that you don't grieve for the loss of those things, and also remember that you can reverse those decisions).  Exceptional focus does not come without sacrifice.
4. Exceptional focus does not mean that you are able to work during all your waking hours.  During your "downtime" (time when you are not being productive but also not sleeping), don't try to work on lower-priority projects.  Instead, make sure you are goofing off.  The most focused people maintain focus over long periods of time (months, years) rather than working obsessively on something over entire days (which is likely to lead to burnout), so make sure your daily schedule involves breaks where you deliberately don't do anything productive.  The idea here is to not fatigue your mind with focus, but to continually "re-attract" it back to the thing you want to focus on.
5. Lastly, orient your thinking towards the notion of completion or goals.  Whenever you are embarking on something, make sure you have a notion of the end goal you are trying to achieve, and drive primarily towards achieving that goal.  Don't worry if the goals aren't exactly right; the idea is to reach them, and if they don't turn out to be exactly what you needed, you can just set new ones.  The reason here is that high focus without goals is just obsession, but if you drive towards specific goals with a lot of focus, you will get things done, which allows you to "let up" on focusing on that goal and refocus on the next one.  The ultimate effect is that you'll become a person who can focus steadily on achieving goal after goal without getting bored or distracted because you know that "soon" you'll reach your next goal and be able to work on the next thing (i.e. it's subverting your "distraction" tendency into being a "drive towards achievement" tendency).  From the outside (and thus, when you look back on your life), it will appear as though you have a lot of focus on one overarching meta-goal that you are able to continually sustain over months and years.  Only you will know that the secret is breaking it up into many little interesting and novel sub-goals!