>>DR.
AMANDA SULLIVAN: Hi.
I’m Amanda Sullivan.
I am a fifth year assistant professor at the University of Minnesota.
I've been here for three years.
Prior to that I was at Arizona State University for two.
That’s also where I did my degree in School Psychology, and I’m a licensed psychologist.
I knew I wanted to go into academia probably my second or third year in graduate school.
I had entered my program intent on working in the field for a while, taking a position
in schools, doing some applied research.
But through my assistantships I had the opportunity to do a variety of different research projects
beyond just my thesis and association, and I also had the opportunity to teach some master’s
level courses.
And so in doing that, I started to think about how long I wanted to be away from academia
and what kind of impact I wanted to have on the field, and how I wanted to go about impacting
the lives of children.
So for me, the big decision came down to how I wanted my impact on the field and on schools
to be realized.
And so there was this tension between doing applied work and being able to work directly
with children and families, and have that direct impact on what’s going on with a
given child or in a given classroom or in a given setting versus working in research
and in training of future clinicians and having an impact that’s more diffuse.
So the primary impact would be via the readers and the users of my research, and via the
people I’m training who would then go into schools and work directly with students.
So over the third or fourth year, it really became apparent that I wanted to be able to
do research continually and as a primary activity.
I really wanted to be able to train future school psychologists, particularly doctoral
level psychologists who would be engaging in research as well.
So I made the decision to go straight from graduate school into a faculty position.
I've been really happy with this decision.
My typical day right now – I would say I don’t really have a typical day, which is
one of the things I really like.
Sometimes when I think about working in an office setting, or in a setting where I have
a standard 9-5 I can’t even imagine it, because right now a lot of the time I get
to do what I want to do.
I decide what I research, I decide what I teach, how I teach it, who I advise, how I
advise, which is really nice.
I am fortunate to be working from home a lot right now – I’m in my home office – because…just
given where I am in my research projects, I spend about 60% of my time writing and designing
studies.
Right now I have most of – I have several projects that are just in the writing phase
because the studies themselves are done.
Given technology, I can communicate with collaborators and my research assistants from home, which
means they can work from home which I think is great.
I only teach, right now, one to two classes a year.
I have a research seminar that is primarily my advisees, and then I teach a course on
ethics and law which I love.
On days when I teach, I go to campus.
I’ll have, typically, meetings with my advisees most of the time that I’m not teaching.
I've also got some committee work that I do for the university, so those meetings happen
conveniently on the days that my classes are also scheduled.
Again, one of the perks.
I suppose that might be some leeway that’s unique to my particular department, but I
have been fortunate enough to be able to align my teaching and meeting days, so I can allocate
my free days just for my research time.
So a typical campus day might be two to three hours of teaching in the morning followed
by two to four hours of committee meetings or meetings with students.
A day when I work from home, I might get up and do some work in the morning, go to the
gym for a while, come back, work a little bit more.
It’s very self-directed, which I love, because I get to choose what I work on, how I work
on it and that works really well for me.
Right now, I’m in my fifth year, as I said, so I’m actually going up for tenure right
now.
I haven’t really found the tenure process to be daunting because one thing I did from
the very start, and even before I came into academia, was I talked to people about what
the expectations would be.
I talked to them about how they structured their time.
That was something that was very useful to me, because I think that a lot of students
who are considering faculty careers are afraid of what it might mean for them because I think
there’s this myth of the miserable professor who works all the time.
And that’s not what I wanted to be whatsoever.
So when I talked to some of the people who became my colleagues at ASU, we did have pretty
candid conversations about how much they worked and what their typical days looked like, and
what their typical weeks looked like, how they fit in family time, how they fit in personal
time.
So I really appreciated having people talk to me very honestly about the fact that a
typical work week for them was probably 30 to 40 hours.
When grants were due, or when there were other deadlines it might be 50 to 60 but that was
just a few times a years.
These are people at R1, so I felt like if that’s what they’re saying and they have
very respectable professional records (their CVs are impressive) I felt like that was something
I could still do and still be happy and still have a personal life and still practice good
self-care.
There’s this idea of publish or perish, which I don’t necessarily think is as daunting
as it seems either.
I think, again, it’s taking advantage of that informal professional development or
the professional development that goes on through the professional organizations a lot
of the time around early career development, to learn about the editorial process that
happens with journals, to learn about – really to craft those writing skills and those stats
skills so that when those papers go out, it’s hopefully a revise and resubmit, maybe an
accepted but I think that’s pretty rare on a first go.
But I think focusing on developing those skills and thinking very carefully about the type
of work I want to do.
Paying attention to the outlets I’m looking at and looking at what they publish, how it’s
structured, how different researchers are presenting their arguments in their papers,
I think has been really helpful because then the publication process wasn't as miserable
because – I mean a rejection is just part of the game, and it is what it is.
But I think being informed and being a strong writer makes things a lot easier because then
it’s not just constant rejection over and over again.
One thing I liked to do when I was first starting out is I would send my papers to the highest
journal I could, or a journal where I knew just through talking to other scholars that
there were hypercritical scholars, and I’d let them shred the paper.
And then I would revise it and send it to the journal I really wanted it to go to, and
that worked out really well with a few papers for me.
Those reviewers also gave the most comprehensive reviews that I could possibly need.
So in the end I had a really strong product, and so it made the second time around go really
smoothly.
I also think that it’s good to email editors and ask about the fit because that gets around
a lot of the rejection that early career scholars experience, where they send their papers out
to four or five journals and they get rejected without review because it’s not a fit for
that particular journal.
I don’t hesitate to email journal editors and ask if it’s a good fit.
That saves 3 to 6 months off the time it takes to get a paper published because it doesn't
have to go out for review and be rejected, and sit in their queue to be rejected without
review.
Even that can take a few weeks.
It didn't ever get to that place of publish or perish.
I also made sure to talk to people at my institution about what the expectations were, educated
myself as well about the policy – what’s written about what needs to be done – but
at the same time understanding that the tenure decision doesn't rest with one individual,
so I tried to be very conscious about talking to as many people as I could.
Looking for themes across them because no one person is going to be able to speak to
exactly what will happen, because there’s no way to predict how all the different actors
will behave in the process necessarily.
But certain people have different idiosyncrasies and certain departments have developed a culture
within them about how they view scholarship or how they view teaching.
And so in talking to people who have been involved in the process and looking also at
the CVs of people who have recently been tenured in a given unit or a given institution was
really helpful, because I felt like I had a really good idea of what the expectations
were.
So I didn't have to worry about whether I was meeting the expectations at any given
time.
I was fortunate that my university had a really clear annual review process where there was
lots of detailed feedback given, which was a wonderful thing.
Even if somebody’s not at that place, I think having senior faculty look at your CV
and talk to you about how you’re doing and what you could improve on and what the pitfalls
are coming – moving forward – that’s also something I did even though the formal
review process was in there.
And making use of multiple mentors at any one time.
So I didn't rely on any one person to be my everything.
I kind of thought about what the strengths and weaknesses of different individuals were
and taken together, that made everything much more manageable.
If I could go back, and think about what I would have changed, I think I would have taken
more time in graduate school to get more research experience and to get more methodology and
stats classes in because I think it’s really nice to be independent, or as independent
as possible in that realm as an early career scholar so you’re not depending on people
with other degrees in stats or methods to assist you on projects because they’re in
such high demand and can be very expensive or not available and can’t necessarily give
the support that’s needed.
I think that can also help strengthen applications for research funding, and it can help so you’re
not necessarily relying on other people to build your studies.
One of the things I dealt with was working with collaborators can take a lot more time
than sometimes working by myself on a project, like a sole author or a lead author on a project.
So when I was able to take the reins of the design aspects of the project and not be relying
on someone else, things moved along much more smoothly, and those were the papers I could
get out there much more quickly while I waited for other things to move along.
Especially working with post-tenure faculty, their priorities aren't the same.
They’re not on a five or six year timeline to prove themselves.
They've already done it.
So it’s a different kind of reality for them.
So being mindful of that fact is just part of reality.
I also think if I could go back, keeping in mind how much of this is self-directed and
envisioning who you are, who you want to be as a scholar and how you want to conduct yourself,
what you want to be known for – I think it’s good to think about those things early
on.
How do you want to structure your professional activities?
How do you want to structure your research?
What do you want to be doing two years down the line?
Five years down the line?
I think long-term planning is key.
And thinking about how to self-monitor and self-direct day to day activities because
one of the benefits of this career is nobody tells you exactly what to do at any given
time.
Your projects are your own, like I said, a lot of what you teach is your own in most
places.
So being able to plan all that out for yourself and be the driver throughout the whole process
is really important because I think a lot of people who don’t necessarily have that
vision and that awareness and who don’t necessarily have the time management skills
or organizational skills – tenure track can be a really unpleasant experience.
And I never wanted it to be that way for me, so I took advantage of professional development
around that and self-study around those issues.
That made it enormously helpful.
But I do think there are other things I could've done to make it even smoother.
So that would be my primary recommendation to others.
Really take advantage of any professional development that goes on around future faculty
development, early career development, really thinking about structuring the process and
organizing yourself so that these are enjoyable times rather than six years of torture.
Which it shouldn't be!
Especially if it’s something you’re looking to do for the next – any number of years
or decades.
Because this is wonderful.
I can’t imagine doing anything else.
I think any of us who are faculty in psychology or in school psychology especially, there
are so many other things we could be doing.
If we wanted to be working in schools, or clinics, or hospitals, or private practice
we could be doing those things.
We all make the choice to do this.
And I really do think it is what we make it.