I was asked to speak on a professional development panel as a part of Cornell’s Future Professor’s Institute (totally recommend this program!) and was given some potential topics that I should speak to; one of which is inspiring this post: “Resources or other assets that can be leveraged to move your scholarship and research agenda forward as an early career faculty member”. I have unknowingly put together a suite of documents that I feel represent the starting trajectory of my faculty experience of which I have 3 years and 4 months to draw from so why not put them all in one place? Here’s my trail of documentation with screenshots for convenience and hyperlinks so you can directly download and manipulate documents as you please: Responsibilities, Lab Handbook, Proposal Writing Strategy, Conferences, Student Recruitment and Retention, and Research Logs.
A summary of all my responsibilities as of September 14, 2021
My Responsibilities
A summary of all my responsibilities as of September 15, 2022
Let’s start up on high, at the macro level of all the categories of faculty function. I’ve created these colorful network diagrams to visualize the rough categories of where I spend my time, which include: Proposals (in red), Service (in orange), Email, Logistics, Budgets, and Management (in yellow), Research (Green), Projects (Blue), Teaching (Purple), Advising (Pink), and Papers (black). The only categories that may be confusing are Projects and Research, which I define differently by specifying if the work focuses more on engineering problems (Project) vs. research problems or whether the work is publishable (Research) or not (Project).
A summary of all my responsibilities as of January 18, 2023
I’ve attached the evolution of my responsibilities in four diagrams. I use these diagrams to keep track of my time allocation and evaluate whether my time allocation aligns with my values. At the beginning (2021), you’ll notice more emphasis on proposals because I was trying to start up my lab. I was very passionate about diversity equity and inclusion and starting an aerospace community on campus. I also directly interacted with all of my graduate students at the time.
By the same time next year (2022), I had started labeling time commitments within an average work week to these broad categories and noticed that I was putting a large amount of time into service, advising, and administrative work. While I love service, service is not as valued at tenure evaluation so I needed to scale back. I didn’t feel a need to decrease my advising commitment because I love love love advising and advising will eventually lead to more publications. I did feel like I was spending too much time managing projects and lab logistics, which told me I shouldn’t bring in more grants. I also felt like I wasn’t putting enough time into my own research, which I missed so I wanted to re-emphasize in my workflow.
My projected responsibilities anticipated in September 2023
This spring (2023), I was able to reduce my proposal efforts and service but had to add back in my 4-credit teaching load and the creation of a new business. My advising load was heavier than ever, when at times I felt like I was missing meetings or arriving late to too many meetings. I was barely able to do my own research. These symptoms told me that this level of advising was unsustainable and I need to make my team smaller. With several students graduating, I’ll have less of an advising load, at a more comfortable level I know I can sustain, and I’m going to plan to spend more time in finishing up those papers for submission!
To conclude on the utility of these responsibility diagrams, I think your success as a faculty member lies in the way you spend your time, especially given the various categories of functions you must juggle as a faculty member. My best advice is to keep track of your time and ensure that your time reflects your values. Use the time tracking and your feelings about what you’ve accomplished to be brutally honest about what you can support in a usual workweek. So many faculty tell me that saying no is the hardest thing but this diagram could help you say no to the next thing, which will save you heartache later on.
Lab Handbook
The concept of a lab handbook was really popular on Twitter about the time I finished my PhD and before I started my faculty position in January 2020. The idea of a lab handbook for your lab is to set expectations and act as a reference to onboard new members to the lab. I’ve taken a template from one of the public handbooks online and started filling the sections out for my lab, the RoSE Lab, which I’ve attached a screenshot of.
A couple of things you might notice if you click on the hyperlink attached to the section heading that goes to the google doc: i) my lab handbook is a living document. I’ve been working on it since August 2019 and I’m still trying to fill it out! ii) The handbook outline contains way more sections than I actually have expectations and definitions for. I don’t yet have text for Conferences, Money, Offboarding, Mentorship and Development, Resources for Help, and a Reading List, although I most certainly have thoughts on these topics. iii) The reason why I’m not yet finished writing this handbook is that writing the whole handbook is, as the name implies, writing a book. The document is 30 pages and growing.
I actually update and refer people to this document quite often. At the beginning of the semester, I share this document with the dozens of undergraduate students who work on my project team and who I must give grades to at the end of the semester. I send this document to prospective students so they get a feel of the expectations and culture of the lab. Whenever students ask me a question that applies to other students, I write a response to that student and then find a place to paste that response in the handbook because someone else will inevitably have a similar question.
Proposal Writing Strategy
To start a research lab beyond what your startup funds can afford, new faculty need to write proposals. I’ve written a blog post on how I approach how many proposals to write, which proposals to pursue, and when to stop writing proposals (hyperlinked in this section’s header) so please head there for a more in-depth explanation! Here’s the spreadsheet I use to keep track of my proposal efforts and success (Repository of Proposals) and for your convenience, I’ve attached a screenshot of the tab that tracks my hit rate:
Selected proposals: for dossier purposes
Being three years in, I can see a trend in the way I apply for proposals and the likelihood of my success. In year 1, I applied for the most solicitations and was the least successful. I also spent a lot more time to write these proposals. These solicitations were generally bigger and I was predominantly the Principal Investigator. As I got more grants in, I was more selective in which grants I wrote; I only went for opportunities that I was absolutely thrilled about despite the odds and opportunities that I was pretty confident that we would get. That led to a higher success rate in year 2. In year 3, my most recent year, I heavily throttled the opportunities I went for; only going for sure bets and smaller awards, and contributing to grants in the capacity of a co-Investigator. Let’s talk again in 2 years when a couple of my larger grants expire.
Conferences and Networking on Campus
I used to think as a graduate student that the only reason or justification to go to a conference was to present my paper. That was when my travel was throttled by my advisor (even though he never said I couldn’t go to other conferences!). There are so many other reasons to go to conferences as a principal investigator that I didn’t fully appreciate until the pandemic happened and I couldn’t go to conferences.
Not that you need my permission but yes, you should totally go to that meeting, conference, or event with your startup money. I think a big part of success in academia is having name recognition, which can come from having truly good work and/or putting yourself out there. Presenting at conferences and giving invited talks are definitely ways to build name recognition, but also being a tourist at a conference (no obligation attendance), catching up with friends, and making friends of friends is a worthy way of spending your project money. Another way I cultivate name recognition without having to present a paper is to organize a conference session, conference track, or the whole dang conference! I go to I have a spreadsheet of possible conferences (linked to the section header) that are relevant to a researcher with my background so I hope to see you there!
I arrived on campus January of 2020, two months before COVID, so I fully felt the impact of personal and professional isolation. Before lockdown, I was making it a point to always have lunch with someone, as a way to network and decompress during the halfway point of my workday. As we've been transitioning back to normalcy, I've been very intentional in bringing this habit back. I've emailed random faculty across campus, set up recurring lunch dates with my closest collaborators, and scheduled mentoring lunch meetings with my students. These lunches have allowed me the space to cultivate deep meaningful relationships, to cultivate a lab culture where students find me approachable, and to make connections in matching student interests with open opportunities in my labs. I've come up with proposal ideas with collaborators and drafted syllabi for classes I co-taught with my buddies. I've made a point to always hold this lunch hour free and this well-known fact has allowed people to reach me easily. Without being too woo-woo, these lunch hours are a way for me to open myself up to the opportunities of the universe and to go after low-commitment ideas with low expectations.
I'm a rather extroverted individual and I don't find these lunches emotionally draining. If this strategy doesn't work for you, no shame! I hope to tell those that are open to trying this out that faculty on campus are typically more than willing to meet for lunch if you reach out. I've gotten extremely positive responses and these lunches have born out many awesome opportunities. You want people to know you and think of you when they learn of exciting opportunities.
Student Recruitment and Retention
Depending on how you structure your responsibilities, your dependence on students resides on a spectrum from a lot to none at all. I know faculty who have no students, put their noses down to do research and publish a lot (maybe four papers a year?). These faculty are typically of the old guard where they have tenure and no teaching responsibility in their contract. These positions are few and far between. I reside on the other extreme of being extremely dependent on students. I advise and mentor a full-time engineer, a postdoctoral scholar, 2 Ph.D. students, 7 Master's students, 8 undergraduates directly, and between 30-40 undergraduates indirectly. I have very little time to conduct my own research unfortunately or fortunately, but at least I have learned immensely in this journey as to how to recruit and retain fantastic students who can embody my research vision.
Website traffic as of January 2022
Website
A common theme throughout this article is the concept of making yourself known to others. One way to do this is to have and maintain an informative website. Looking through my website's traffic data from January 2018 to December 2021, I had a noticeable uptick in attention when I started my job in January 2020. In the year 2021, I got 3,500 unique visitors and about 900 repeat visitors. Each person visits about 2.5 pages. On a weekly basis, the end of April and the end of August hit peaks of interest. Out of the pages of my website, the “about” page of course has the most views (3000 views); it’s the landing page. What’s interesting to me is that the blog post “strict 9-hour workday” is the runner-up to most visited, at a whopping 1000 views or about 1/3 of the views from the “about” page. What’s not surprising is the next few highest view-count pages are directly accessible through the navigation bar at the top of the website: student opportunities (800 views), blog (600 views), projects (500 views), my students (400 views), adventure (300 views).
Having a website acts as a curated advertisement of myself, an advertisement of student opportunities, and a controlled platform for me to show who I am to interested parties. From my traffic analysis, I believe my website caters mostly to potential students and less so for potential collaborators but can't hurt, right? A student once explicitly told me that he chose to work with me between two choices (my competition was my buddy) and by browsing my website, this student believed that they would enjoy working with me more <3.
Seminars
At the beginning of my position, no one really knew me and they didn't have a way of getting to know me. I couldn't get lunch with everyone individually so I elected to give seminars in the Earth Science, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Information and Computer Science departments, which also helped me in getting graduate cooperating faculty status to advise their students. I prepared one general talk for all department seminars and got my name out there! Students reached out afterward to work with me; colleagues reached out to collaborate or at least chat about some ideas. I met two of my star students (Baylor and Michael) from one of these seminars and these two students truly changed the trajectory of my lab. They helped me start my lab by clearing out the lab space, coming up with a list of equipment necessary to stock the lab, proposing to start an undergraduate project team to enter the University Rover Challenge, and recruiting over 40 students over the years to work on this project team.
Undergraduate Project Teams
Michael and Baylor became the program manager and systems engineer of the largest undergraduate project team on campus, which also tauted higher diversity than the general College of Engineering demographics. They came up with the idea to offer use this project team for course credit as a formalized senior design project in the mechanical engineering senior design capstone course and as technical elective credits in electrical engineering and information and computer science. For the most part, the student leads managed the huge undergraduate team and I set up the logistics to give them course credits and grades. By the end of the first semester, I started to notice some stars on the team, the cream of the crop. I asked these individual star students to consider working on research with me for pay or for research credit. By the time I started to directly mentor these students, they were already trained in basic engineering skills, accustomed to my lab culture, and familiar with my lab space. Plus! By the end of the second year of this project team, we have a teleoperable rover that my research lab can upload algorithms on!
Many professors will also tell you to recruit students from classes that you teach so make sure to teach courses that are relevant to your research. You'll be able to simultaneously train students the way you want and identify students who would excel in your research lab.
Landing page for the End of Semester Interview
Outside of course evaluations, students don't have much of an opportunity to give feeback to their professors. I constantly give feedback to students during our research meetings, during paper reviews, and during practice presentations. The idea is to have students grow into professionals but how about my growth as an advisor? Rarely do students have the bravery to give feedback to their professors unsolicited, so I solicit feedback at the end of every semester in either a google form survey or 15 minute in-person interview. I've been able to gain critical insight as to the dysfunction of some teams, collaborate on constructive paths forward to rectify dysfunction, brainstorm ideas to make meetings more efficient, and hear how my mentorship could be lacking in time or process. This feedback from students has been critical in making our research process better while also offering honest conversations about career progress and aspirations. These end of semester interviews are typically very time consuming and if the multitude of interviews gets too overwhelming, that's an indicative symptom that my lab is getting too large for me to sufficiently mentor everyone directly. I need to either delegate or graduate more folks before I bring on anyone else.
Research Logs and the Dossier Folder
For the purpose of tenure, I keep a research log (hyperlinked in the section header) as a way to record my activities on a weekly basis. I find the log helpful in multiple ways:
When I feel like I’m not making progress, I open these babies up and scroll 6 months or 1 year back and look at where I was, at how far I’ve come. That gives me a motivation boost and a kick out of my emotional rut.
I can generally see what weeks during the year are heavy on meetings, teaching, people, and research. I can see how my time is generally spent week to week.
I use my log to keep track of activities I need to mention in my dossier. Below is an example of a week that is pretty heavy in teaching and people-oriented tasks because it’s the end of the spring semester. I underlined the duties that I need to document in my tenure dossier that go toward university service (search committee and mentoring undergraduates), international/national service (journal paper reviews), and teaching (establishing a new course). On a different week of the year, I may have a proposal submission or paper publication that I need to highlight in the tenure dossier.
4.24.2023 – 4.30.2023
Meetings: Hawaii Space Flight Lab, Sapphira, EPET/ME400, Amber, Hans, Artemis, Hao, Mechanical Engineering candidate interviews, Billy, Luke Flynn, Robotic Space Exploration Lab, Mahina Aerospace, Krystal, Hao, Deb, Computer Vision Ladies, Society of Women Engineers Pau Hana
Research: aerospace journal paper review, convergence calculations in AL, running AL on MANA
People: NSF Catalyst STEM designation survey, NSF AI Institute PI Progress Report, reviewed Josh Rico and Ian Eshelman’s ICS 496 slides/poster, UROP mentor profile submission
Teaching: grade CDH requirements, diagrams, and data budget, establishing ME 696 Machine Learning for Dynamic Systems seminar, PDR rubric and external reviewer arrangement
My tenure dossier folder directory
Then, every month, I scroll through the research log and drop dossier products into my dossier folder directory. Data products like photos of my at events, final proposals that I submitted, final paper manuscripts, emails of people saying they like my stuff, course evaluations. You name it. That way, when time comes that I have to put the tenure dossier together, I can not only have a chronological log of my accomplishments, I also have a directory where I can easily find these tenure dossier-related files to upload into the digital dossier platform.