Biophysical Society Bulletin | April 2019

Career Development

The Future is Now Dear Molly Cule ,

tells your narrative. You need to communicate the impact of your work and the contributions it is making to your field and to science and/or medicine. Take advantage of your personal statement to explain in straightforward terms what you do, avoiding lingo and acronyms. You want to prepare a dossier that reflects your enthusiasm about your work and why you believe it is important and impactful. Have your colleagues read your dossier. Your senior col- leagues are excellent reviewers because they have gone through the process, and perhaps served on promotion and tenure committees. Colleagues outside of your field are also excellent reviewers because they can judge how well you communicate and explain your science to the non-cogno- scente. Don’t ignore your teaching. Work to improve it and foster interactions with students. Your abilities in the classroom and your teaching evaluations are important. If your depart- ment or school does not have a formal mechanism to obtain evaluations, make your own effort to have your students grade your teaching, including asking them for letters that you can include in your teaching portfolio. What happens outside of the classroom also counts. Keep track of student advising, thesis committees, research training, grand rounds, workshops, and teaching on all levels from undergraduate to faculty. Institutions expect their faculty to have reputations beyond their own ivy-covered walls. Everything you do outside of your institution contributes to developing your reputation. Get invited to serve on committees locally, regionally, and for national and international organizations such as the Biophys- ical Society. Review for journals, conference abstracts, and especially funding agencies. Your institution will be seeking evaluations of your work nationally and internationally and will request letters from “at-arm’s-length” scholars who may not know you. It behooves you to make yourself known to investigators in your field. Foster connections with potential referees by attending meetings and getting yourself invited for seminars and symposia talks. P&T reviews are prospective as much as retrospective, espe- cially for research positions. You should describe your plans for new projects, planned publications, and potential funding avenues. It is a good idea to keep a separate CV specifically for promo- tion and tenure. You can use it for your annual reviews and progress reports too. Make entries contemporaneously and keep it organized, neat and typo-free. Your CV represents you and a good one is worth the extra effort. Remember to tell your story! Molly

I just started my tenure-track faculty position. I have an empty lab and start- up money, but no grant. I don’t have to worry about assembling a promotion and tenure dossier for another five years but I know I should not ignore this task until the last minute. How should I prepare myself? — Junior Faculty

Dear Junior, Congratulations on landing your faculty position, but you are correct that you have to plan ahead to make sure that you qualify for tenure in six years. You may be thinking that “it’s a long way off. I have to get published and funded first.” While publishing papers and obtaining funding is a critical part of getting tenure, there are other aspects to gaining the approval of your institution. Although every school or college has their own criteria, review process, and timeline for promotion and tenure (P&T), there are many practices common to all aca- demic institutions. You should start the process when you sit down in your new office for the first time and to a certain degree even before you obtain your offer letter. Know the expectations and rules for P&T. This will help you to set your own goals. Criteria for tenure are often vague because they have to accommodate a wide range of faculty activities. Talk with your colleagues and especially your faculty mentor, chair, and the school officials in charge of faculty development about the expectations. You should have a strategy for developing your research program and obtaining external funding (these issues are discussed in other arti- cles and are not addressed here). In addition, it takes time to develop your teaching portfolio and a reputation in your field. Your P&T review will concentrate on what you have accom- plished since your faculty appointment. These important parts of your job cannot be done in a year and you don’t want to find out just before your dossier is due that you are missing critical achievements, information, or documentation. Many of us will base our promotion on independent research, but your institution probably recognizes team collaborative science as well. If your research is inherently collaborative, such as the statistician, it is still important to develop your distinct expertise and reputation as a major contributor to your specialty. You may always be the middle author and the co-investigator on grants, but you are still making critical con- tributions to the research. Your job is to create a dossier that

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