Career Development for Tenure Track Assistant Professors

• Capitalize on the first year after your PhD to publish papers from the dissertation
• Schedule methodologic research time
• Consider partnering with colleagues in the department to generate co-authorships and assist each other
• Have each methodologic paper reviewed by two department faculty members of your choosing before submission to a journal
• Get opinions from your colleagues regarding best journals to which to submit a specific manuscript
• Obtain opionions from other faculty regarding which small national and international meetings are best to attend
  • Sometimes small meetings can be more productive, and give you a chance to better get to know other statisticians
• Choose helpful short courses to attend at national meetings, including short courses about career development and publication
• Participate in inviting national experts to present a seminar in our series, and meet with them to help with your research
• Develop contacts outside of VU for potential letters of recommendation for promotion and tenure
  • Serving on national committees is one approach
  • Independent letters regarding work you have done since your PhD are most important
  • Keep a file of "kind words" you have received from faculty outside VU to use as potential references
  • You will need a minimum of 3 letters from the outside, and a minimum of about 9 letters in all
• Consider asking collaborators to write short letters for your file right after a project is finished
  • If you later ask them to write a letter of recommendation, giving them the original letter will make their job easy
• If you teach, keep all evaluations. If you teach a course in which all instructors are traditionally rated low, keep background information about this to include with summaries of evaluations.
• Accepting offers to write book chapters seldom has significant payoff
• Get involved in refereeing for methodologic journals but to a limited extent before promotion
• If you have a choice between writing an abstract for a contributed talk at a national meeting vs. staying home and writing a manuscript, choose the latter
  • Listing abstracts in your CV is not very helpful; however do list presentations you make
• Envision what you want in your promotion portfolio and start filling it
• Document in detail your role as a co-author on each publication using the Critical Reference Form

• Material from Junior Researcher Workshop | 2010