This blog post addresses the way that early-career academics feel encouraged to engage in public or interactive communication, yet find that the professional assessment of these activities is still fairly low – and that the professional “risk” isn’t the same for everyone.
On July 18 2013, this piece was re-posted on the LSE Impact Blog titled “More attention should be paid to the risks facing early career researchers in encouraging wider engagement”.
This was a follow-up post that I wrote (published on October 21, 2011) after a briefer article of mine on academic blogging was published in University Affairs. I wanted to get into some more of the reasons why blogging is still considered a lesser form of communication, and therefore isn’t something that usually contributes to building an academic career.
This series of posts was written as a response to – and a means of thinking through issues raised by – an e-course by Jo VanEvery and Julie Clarenbach called “Myths and Mismatches“. According to Jo and Julie, the “goal with this series is to help you understand your experience [in academe] as both personal and structural.” This was a helpful series for me, since I was in the process of thinking through the implications of seeking a tenure-track job (hence the in-depth blog responses).
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Time, place, and opportunity
Part 3: Assessing your qualifications
Part 4: Structural faults?
Part 5: The myth of academic meritocracy
Part 6: Getting priorities straight
Part 7: How to apply yourself
Part 8: Are you at home?
Part 9: Finding your place
Part 10: What it takes, for what it’s worth
Conclusion: Where from here?
I wrote these two posts back in 2010 not long after I started the first incarnation of Speculative Diction blog:
Decisions, decisions, part 1: What’s in store?
Decisions, decisions, part 2: Tenure and what else?
I started writing these because I’d started following the higher ed news more closely, and I was thinking through the process of the Ph.D. and what kind of paths we’re encouraged to take throughout that process. This has since become one of the threads in my dissertation, where I’ve interviewed doctoral students about the nature of “success” in their academic contexts.
Whiteboard Workout 