Tomorrow's Professor Blog

Folks:

The posting below offers guidelines on preparing a book prospectus to a potential publisher. It is from Chapter, Chapter 2: Interest a Publisher in Your Manuscript, in Writing and Developing Your College Textbook, by Mary Ellen Lepionka. Atlantic Path Publishing. copyright © 2003 by Mary Ellen Lepionka. All rights reserved. [www.atlanticpathpublishing.com] ISBN 0-9728164-0-2 Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Declining by Degrees

Tomorrow’s Academic Careers

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INTEREST A PUBLISHER IN YOUR MANUSCRIPT

Your Prospectus

Each company has its own requirements for a prospectus and might send you guidelines or a preprinted form. Typically the prospectus is a two- or three-page explanation of what you are doing, for whom you are doing it, and why. That is, the prospectus states your topic, scope and sequence, and theme; identifies your market and audience; and sets forth your rationale or main goal. This is the “story” of your book.

In commercial publishing a book’s story is critically important. Editors usually are teamed with marketing and advertising managers, who use the story (1) to determine if the company thinks it can sell your book profitably, (2) to identify specific potential customers, (3) to launch marketing and advertising campaigns, and (4) to educate and win the commitment of the sales force. The story also guides the book designer and others whose job it is to make sure your book looks right for what it is trying to do.

Telling the Story. Because your book is one of dozens or even hundreds presented by editorial teams to the publisher and ultimately to the sales force, its story should be stated briefly. The brief statement is like an abstract containing a working title and the key words that define and sell the book idea. The prospectus should start with this story abstract and then go on to elaborate. Examples of book stories follow:

SOCIAL WORK will be introductory text for entry-level courses in programs leading to licensure in social work and will integrate theory and practice using a problem-solving casebook approach.

TECHNOLOGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT is a thematic, multidisciplinary treatment of the global impacts of technology on human environments from prehistoric times to the present and supports courses in earth science and cultural ecology.

PRINCIPLES OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH will be a comprehensive general-purpose handbook with guidelines for observing, measuring, describing, and reporting research in the physical and social sciences.

HISTORY THEN AND NOW is a topical survey of the history of history for graduate students taking Historiography I and Historiography II, with an emphasis on the role of culture in the selection and interpretation of evidence.

IN THE FIRST INSTANCE will reexamine theories of the origins of the universe in light of new discoveries from radiotelemetry and particle physics, and will complement general introductory textbooks in physics.

INTRODUCTION TO TECHNICAL WRITING surveys all aspects of professional practice in the field and features authentic models of excellent writing for future technical writers in both technological and nontechnological fields.

BIOLOGY AND THE LIFE SCIENCES: An introduction is an introductory text for undergraduate survey courses in biology or the life sciences. DNA and the human genome project is the unifying central theme of the book, and a whole chapter is devoted to the implications of recombinant DNA, reproductive technologies, and gene therapies in the treatment of disease.

EDUCATION AND DIVERSITY will focus on the social foundations of education in the U.S. with an emphasis on the social contexts of issues concerning multicultural education, bilingual education, and inclusion.

Planned Contents. The prospectus next walks the editor through the nuts and bolts of the books by describing the organization of it and the elements and features that will be in it-its apparatus and pedagogy, the subjects of later chapters of this book. How will chapters open and close, for example, and what regular features will appear in each chapter? Will there be figures and tables? Photos? How many of each? Will there be a glossary? An instructor’s manual? And so on.

Markets. The prospectus should go on to identify the likely primary and secondary markets for the book. Who will buy it? Who will read it? Your primary market is where you expect to sell the most copies, while the secondary market includes others who might be interested in using your textbook. For instance, the primary market for this book is prospective textbook authors, the people for whom I have written it. Secondary markets might include institutions of higher education and college textbook publishers or editors.

Competition. Your prospectus should include your competition analysis. Briefly list and evaluate each competing text you have identified, explaining how your book will be similar to and different from it in goals, structure, and content. This discussion should lead to an explanation of what you believe is outstanding or unique about your book. Also report if your book idea or chapters have been field tested in your own or others’ courses. A sample prospectus-the one for this book, which was accepted for signing by a major publisher-is presented in the chapter appendix. While this book is not a college textbook, and the prospectus is brief, the same elements of a good prospectus are there.

Your Preliminary Book Outline

An outline functions as both a writing guide and a organizational scheme. Each part or unit and each chapter is identified by number and title, followed by topics and subtopics in the order you plan to write. Observing the formal rules for outlining rather than merely listing topics will help you establish a structure for the book. Preliminary book outlines typically undergo changes as a result of the publisher’s market analyses, analyses of competing books, and feedback from editors and peer reviewers, not to mention needed changes that authors themselves usually discover during drafting. In addition, if your undergraduate textbook involves a large investment, the publisher might propose changes to your outline to ensure any of the following outcomes, based on consumer wants and needs:

*Chapters generally have consistent and appropriate lengths.
* The book includes timely topics and topics that customers generally expect. It also foregoes topics that customers insist they do not want or need.
* To a reasonable extent the book organization works according to known ways in which the course is taught.
* The content is appropriate for the intended course level or for the reading or intellectual level of the intended audience.
* The book can compete successfully with market leaders in its field.

The writing outline is the basis for a table of contents (TOC), which is perhaps the most important tool for marketing and selling the book. If you are developing your book in collaboration with editors, you may receive specific informed suggestions for converting your outline into the system of headings and subheadings that will become your table of contents. Otherwise, you will need to do this yourself in an informed way. Chapter 7 of this book is devoted to the art and science of creating a proper heading structure for your book.

Your Sample Chapters and Cover Letter

If possible, include two or three sample chapters with your prospectus and drafting outline, or establish when you will send sample chapters. A sample chapter should be double-spaced with pages numbered consecutively and should have all its components in place, including any apparatus and pedagogical features you have planned, figures and tables, and references. It is assumed that you are working on a computer and saving to hard drive and disk. Aside from giving the editor an example of how far your planning has gone and what you have to say, sample chapters present your voice and show off our ability to maintain a consistent writing style and format (see Chapters 5 and 11).

The cover letter recalls your previous contract, briefly reiterates that you have a manuscript or book idea for the publisher’s consideration, and identifies all your enclosures. You also provide detailed information about your availability for your project and where, when, and how the editor can reach you. The editor will need practical information as well, such as the present status of the manuscript, your timetable for submitting sample chapters and for completing the work, the estimated length, and even the word processing program you are using.

In your cover letter also indicate if you are making a multiple submission-submitting a prospectus to more than one publisher simultaneously-although you are not obligated to do so. Publishers naturally discourage simultaneous submissions to multiple submission outright. Because of the extreme competitiveness of the textbook industry and the amounts of money involved, publishers are sensitive to needs for product secrecy and competitive edge. Authors have used the multiple submission strategy to their advantage, however, as it facilitates an earlier response from the publisher.

Getting an Offer

Waiting is next and often takes longer than one would like. Acquisitions editors may be on the road, traveling to conventions and campuses, and unable to attend to your submission immediately. Editors typically send your prospectus and sample chapters out for professional peer review, which also can take some time. Finally, the sponsoring editor may need to present your book plan to other tiers of corporate management before an offer can be made. Regardless, prospective authors are perfectly justified in recontacting the editor in a month or two if there has been no response.

Sometimes editors will offer you a contract on the basis of your initial submission of your manuscript proposal, but they more typically request more information or more sample chapters or your response to peer reviews. Let us say, for instance, that reviewers unanimously felt that your sample chapter on law enforcement is too long, overemphasizes federal law enforcement over local and state law enforcement, and omits any mention of special law enforcement units such as border patrol, tribal police, and campus police. The editor might ask you to address these concerns by revising and resubmitting the chapter. The decision to make you an offer will rest on your response. Inexperienced or unknown textbook authors who do not respond well or refuse to make changes, perhaps in the belief that their draft is fait accompli, do not get signed.

Let us assume that you offer a thorough, timely, and well thought out response to the editorial suggestions, however, and that, as the next chapter suggests, you get to sign a contract with the publisher of your choice.

Folks:

The posting below looks at the advantages and disadvantages to faculty of self-publishing books.. It is from Chapter, Chapter 2: Self-Publishing Has Potential Benefits and Risks, in Self-Publishing:Textbooks and Instructional Materials: A Practical Guide to Successful-and Respectable-Self-publishing by Franklin H. Silverman, Ph.D. Atlantic Path Publishing, Copyright © 2004 by Atlantic Path Publishing. All rights reserved. Atlantic Path Publishing, P.O. Box 1556, Gloucester, MA 01931-1556 [www.atlanticpathpublishing.com]. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Student Services for Distance Education Students

Tomorrow’s Academic Careers

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SELF-PUBLISHING – POTENTIAL BENEFITS AND RISKS

Self-publishing, like all activities, has risks and can yield both benefits and losses. If you find that the potential benefits of self-publishing a textbook or academic material appear to outweigh the risks, then self-publishing is worth considering. However, you also will need to determine the benefit/risk ration for self-publishing each particular book or material, because this ratio is unlikely to be the same for every project. That is, self-publishing could be advantageous in some cases and not in others.

There are a number of ways that you can gain or lose by self-publishing a textbook or instructional material. Ways that are among the most relevant for college instructors are indicated in this chapter along with factors to weigh when considering options-i.e., determining the benefit/risk ratio for a particular project. This information should help you when deciding whether to self-publish a particular project.

Potential Benefits of Self-Publishing

Many academics have self-published more than one academic work. They did so again because the benefits they derived from doing so outweighed the losses. This is certainly the reason that I have continued to self-publish. Some of the benefits from self-publishing include the following.

* Providing information or tools that otherwise might not be available to others
* Retaining control over price, form, length, and content
* Making it unnecessary to cope with contractual matters, such as the “satisfactory manuscript” clause
* Controlling the length of time that a textbook or instructional material stays in print
* Authorizing revisions to keep textbooks and instructional materials current
* Retaining the copyright
* Controlling reprint rights
* Shortening the time lag between the completion of a project and its publication* Generating greater income than from royalties and rights sales
* Controlling marketing and promotion
* Learning new skills
* Benefiting indirectly from family participation
* Having pleasure!

This list is not intended to be exhaustive or to dictate priorities. Implications of these items are considered next.

Providing Information Not Otherwise Available

Textbook publishers, because of their bottom-line orientation, may be unwilling to publish some textbooks and instructional materials that could be helpful (perhaps even extremely helpful) to students. One reason may be that their author(s) are unable to document a market of adequate size for publishing to be profitable. By self-publishing such a textbook or instructional material, you are likely to make a contribution (perhaps even a substantial one) to your field. Another reason may be that the publisher rejected the manuscript because some of the material was highly controversial-i.e., not mainstream or politically correct. Self-publishing might enable you to contribute nationally to the discussion of issues about which you have strong feelings.

Controlling Price, Form, Length, and Content

The publisher has the final word on the form, content, and length of a book or material. Consequently, if the author is not the publisher and the author and publisher degree on cost, form, length, and/or content, the publisher’s preferences usually will prevail. Decisions that textbook publishers make regarding cost, form, length, and content usually are dictated mainly by what customers want or expect. Another factor is the amount of income that a book or material has to generate to be profitable. Furthermore, the publisher may require a book to be a particular length so that it can be sold for a particular price. Length is determined through research on what customers regard as appropriate for a course.

The content of a book also can be influenced by a publisher’s bottom line. To maximize adoptions of a textbook, for example, a publisher may insist that the content an organization be traditional. A publisher may also insist that any points of view (or biases) the author has that could reduce adoptions be eliminated. However, it is possible that the author’s points of view, which must be declared, are more strongly supported by research than traditional views.

Avoiding the “Satisfactory Manuscript” Clause

All book and material publishing contracts contain what is referred to as the “satisfactory manuscript” clause. This clause states that the publisher can refuse to publish a book or material that, in its judgment, is not satisfactory in form and/or content. Some manuscripts are substandard and not salable as written. However, publishers have unfortunately misused this clause to escape having to publish books and materials for reasons not legitimately related to form or content. Textbook publishers have been known to use the satisfactory manuscript clause to escape having to publish a book for any reason. Perhaps the market for that book has been satisfied by another one of the publisher’s titles, for instance. Or the cost of publishing the work will make it unprofitable. Some publishers invoking the satisfactory manuscript clause even demand that the author return his or her advance with interest!

If you are planning to self-publish a textbook or instructional material, you will not have this problem. You are the one who decides whether the book or material gets published. You can publish it even if the niche it was intended to fill is considerably smaller than when you began the project. And you are the one-for better or worse-who judges the quality of your work.

Controlling How Long the Work Is In Print

A textbook publisher may declare a book or material out of print when it no longer sells a particular number of copies in a year. For a textbook, this number can be as low as 500. A self-publisher can keep a book or material in print for as long as it sells any copies, however, particularly if individual copies are printed on demand or in short print runs or if the book or material is distributed electronically (e.g., as downloadable files on the Internet).

It can be advantageous to you, incidentally, if your publisher keeps your textbook or instructional material in print indefinitely by using print-on-demand (POD) technology. Your publisher could then reduce competition for one of its other textbooks by preventing yours from being revised and marketed by another publisher. A self-publisher would never run into this situation, because he or she would own the copyright and could, therefore, revise and market the book or material in any lawful way that he or she desired.

Authorizing Revisions

A textbook publisher is unlikely to permit a book or material to be revised unless it is selling a certain minimum number of copies a year. For a textbook, this number could be high, as many as five thousand or more. A publisher also may refuse to authorize a revision for other reasons, for example, if it has acquired another title for the course that has more adoptions. Textbooks in most fields must be revised periodically to continue to be adopted. Consequently, not revising a textbook periodically is likely to kill it, regardless of its merits as a teaching tool.

A self-publisher can revise a textbook or instructional material whenever a revision seems to be needed. In fact, he or she can do so almost continuously, particularly if the textbook or instructional material can be either published on the Internet or printed on demand.

Retaining Copyright

A textbook or instructional material that you author is your property. Amendments to the Copyright Act of 1976 give you and your heirs the exclusive right to exploit the book or material until 70 years after your death. By signing a publishing contract, you transfer ownership of it to the publisher. You lose very little by doing so if the publisher pays you a fair royalty and does an adequate job marketing your book or material. However, based on my own experience and that of many members of the Text and Academic Authors Association, this often does not happen, particularly for a textbook or instructional material that publisher assumes does not have the potential to become a best seller.

If you self-publish a textbook or instructional material, you retain the ownership of copyright. Consequently, you can market it in any way you want, including selling it to a textbook publisher.

Controlling Subsidiary Rights

If someone wants to quote portions of your book or material in a publication, and that use is not permitted by the “fair use” doctrine of the copyright law (see Chapter 10), he or she must get the permission of the copyright owner. Consequently, by transferring copyright to a publisher, the authors essentially loses control over who gets permission to quote from his or her book or otherwise use the material. In fact, as author you lose the ability even to quote extensively from your own work without the publisher’s permission. The author receives only a percentage (probably 50 percent) of the permissions fees that are paid. Authors who self-publish a textbook or instructional material retain copyright, and thus retain control over reprint rights as well as other subsidiary rights.

Getting into Print Quickly

It usually takes a minimum of nine months to publish a textbook or instructional material after a publisher has accepted the manuscript for publication. Much of this time is consumed by the manuscript waiting its turn for something to be done to it (e.g., copyediting). By undertaking or outsourcing many of the production tasks, a self-publisher often can shorten this interval.

Making More Money

Your textbook or instructional material may generate more income for you if you self-publish it. Whether it does so depends, of course, on how must it costs you to produce and market it and the number of copies you sell. A number of academic authors who could easily have gotten publishing contracts for their textbooks or instructional materials chose to self-publish because doing so could generate more income.

Directing Marketing and Promotion

Textbooks and instructional materials that a publisher regards as not having the potential to become best sellers are rarely marketed adequately. This means that if you want your book or material to reach as large a segment of its intended audience as possible, you will have to assume an active role in marketing it. However, the publisher’s agents responsible for marketing your book or material may not welcome your involvement. Or they may be unable to do what is necessary to market your textbook or instructional material adequately, because the budget available for doing so is inadequate. In fact, the budget may be close to nothing.

If you self-publish a textbook or instructional material, you will have full control over marketing and promoting it. Marketing and promotion involve significant cost in time and money, however. Some possible strategies for these purposes are described in Chapter 11.

Inviting Family Participation

Your involvement in self-publishing may have the potential to benefit one or more members of your family in a number of ways, such as the following.

* Providing spending money for one or more of your high school-age children. Their pay would depend on their responsibilities. As their responsibilities increased, their salary would be expected to also.
* Bringing your relationship with a partner or spouse of one of your children closer to you by working with them on a book project.
* Interesting one or more of your relatives in textbook publishing as a career.

There may well be other indirect benefits from family participation.

Having Pleasure!

Most people who have self-published more than one book or material continued doing so because they enjoy it. As one advocate-Judith Applebaum (1988, p. 151)-stated:

In these push-button times, the pleasures of physical achievement are reserved mainly for children, but self-publishers, along with a handful of other adults who work with their hands building things they love, are privileged to share the I-made-it-myself elation.

Folks:

The posting below looks at the new mentoring roles that most faculty must now assume. It is from Chapter 19: Reconceptualizing the Faculty Role: Alternative Models, by James R. Chan, Michael V. Fortunato, Alan Mandell, Susan Oaks, and Duncan RyanMann, SUNY Empire State College, in Reinventing Ourselves: Interdisciplinary Education, Collaborative Learning, and Experimentation in Higher Education, by Barbara Leigh Smith & John McCann, Editors. Copyright © 2001 by Anker Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved. ISBN 1-882982-35-5 Anker Publishing Company, Inc. 176 Ballville Road, P.O. Box 249, Bolton, MA 01740-0249 [www.ankerpub.com]. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Self-Publishing – Potential Benefits and Risks

Tomorrow’s Academic Careers

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RECONCEPTUALIZING THE FACULTY ROLE; ALTERNATIVE MODELS

Faculty as Mentor

A certain privilege has traditionally been associated with the status of the faculty member: access to specialized knowledge, the prerogative to identify what is important to learn, the right to impart that knowledge to those who come to us to gain it, and the authority to judge if another has acquired appropriate learning. In conventional academic settings, the very expertise of the faculty has been framed by a set of boundaries that separated faculty from students. Faculty held the important knowledge, conveyed it to those who cared to know, and developed criteria for and carried out what was determined to be appropriate evaluation.

The presuppositions of such a model have been opened to debate by a range of issues and realities that now characterize our educational landscape. We live in a world where the question of what is important to know is not easily answered and where the amount of knowledge at least theoretically available to us continues to expand at a phenomenal rate: that is, in a world where such authority is fleeting. Even the supposedly clear and meaningful disciplinary conditions that informed so much of our own education and our identities as academic professions have been thrown into question. No thoughtful faculty person can know enough about what there is to know to make final claims about that knowledge.’

Further, the institutions within which we work have dramatically changed. The range of students who enter our classrooms-in terms of ethnicity, race, gender, age, and life experiences-has expanded. It is nearly impossible to prejudge who will sit before us, what they already know, what they want to know, and what tools we might employ to most effectively help them learn. What we had taken for granted before (however appropriately or inappropriately) we cannot assume today.

Institutions have responded to some of these realities in a number of ways. The drive to find a viable market niche and to respond to new clientele has meant more flexible schedules, evening classes, weekend options, distance learning programs, the formal acknowledgement of learning gained outside of accredited academic institutions, and institutional fixtures (from orientations to the library to course guides) that are more user-friendly. Clearly, colleges have become more aware of trying to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse student body-of providing levels of access, particularly through newly devised delivery systems that had not existed before.

Most of these institutional changes have been at the edges of faculty experience. They have not usually touched the more protected arena of faculty privilege. Particularly with the inclusion of a greater number of working adult students, however, faculty have been called upon to expand the range and nature of their interactions with students. On a simple level, it has not been unusual for faculty to have increased the hours they are available to students outside of the classroom. More significantly, because of the experiences, goals, dilemmas, and academic strengths and weaknesses that these so-called nontraditional students have brought to our academic worlds, faculty have found themselves taking on more advisory roles, serving as guides and consultants, and helping their students negotiate their way through formerly alien academic terrain to gain the kinds of skills and competencies that we know they need. The inclusion of such a counseling dimension into the very fab!
ric of many of our lives as academic instructors has also meant a subtle but important shift in the nature of communication between faculty and student. We have learned to listen with new attentiveness and care, knowing that our ability to understand and respond is directly related to our students’ success as learners.

But the most powerful shift occurs when the interrelated movement from providing better institutional access to listening and counseling does touch the very core of the conventional faculty role. And it is here that the potential of a new relationship between students and teacher emerges. As Mandell and Herman (1996) have described such a collaborative stance is at the heart of the role of faculty as mentor. That is, in an institutional context that works for true access (not only for admittance but for the possibility of success), listening becomes a necessary art, and teaching-and the knowledge upon which it is based-becomes an ongoing project of locating and/or creating imaginative learning tools to respond to the academic needs of individual students whose voices we can never disregard. Garrison (1992) describes the emerging dialog this way:

Only through continuous and critical dialogue between learner and facilitator can a dynamic and optimal balance of control be realized. The balance of control will probably shift depending on the context and the proficiency of the learner. However, through sharing control there is an increased probability of students reaching desired and worthwhile learning goals which, in turn, would result in improved motivation, ability to learn, and self-directedness. (p. 144)

In the last few years, the word mentoring has taken on a rather hierarchical cast. In such contexts (many of them corporate), mentors are experienced guides who know and can offer expert advice, those who have been especially successful and can show others how to succeed. But the notion of faculty as mentor introduced here emphasizes sharing control and meaningful reciprocity. In fact, it is about the deliberate creation of opportunities for common learning. It also is motivated by the quest to follow the lead offered by an individual student’s questions, concerts, or idiosyncratic understanding into new areas of academic exploration, even those that stretch and challenge our own sense of what we know. In this way, mentoring accents the importance of our strengths as academic generalists who have learned work with problems that cut across the disciplines and themes that are inherently interdisciplinary. Mentoring embeds us in a distinctive approach to teaching and lear!
ning that deliberately legitimates the questioning of faculty authority and the claims to knowledge upon which that authority rests. By inviting a student to participate in his/her own learning (for example, through faculty and students creating individualized learning contracts as an integral part of the learning process or working together to design an entire curriculum), and by providing room for a student to gain the new skills necessary to work independently, we offer ourselves as engaged interlocutors who demonstrate that we care deeply about dialog and reflection and about the critical examination of pertinent questions, many of which were not our questions at the start.

In effect, through interactions with their students, mentors try to model the very kind of learning they hope their students will continue to pursue. That is, in a quite powerful and palpable way, the ideal of lifelong learning, usually reserved for students, equally pertains to the faculty mentor. We are always in the process of creating new studies with students, tinkering with old plans, searching for and coordinating effective resources, immersing ourselves in a new question, following the lead of an issue that a student has begun to articulate, making connections with a colleague who may offer a suggestive direction. We are, above all, listening, guiding, trying out new learning strategies, and staying alert to what may become yet another opening.

Perhaps like all more democratic experiments, the experience of faculty as mentor is a rather precarious one. Traditional faculty authority has been based on bodies of knowledge and academic structures that reinforce them. To enter a world of mentoring is to practice with the expectation that through serious and honest discourse and negotiation (and a community of other mentors who can provide support, encouragement, and critical scrutiny), plans for individual studies and curricula can be built that are academically rich and that flow from the lives of our students as parents, workers, scholars, members of a community, and citizens. To gain experience in such a faculty role that emphasizes not separation but connection, dialog, and a reweaving of relationships of authority is, in itself, a new kind of privilege.

olks:

The posting below gives some excellent suggestions on finding faculty mentors. It is from Chapter 4: Early and mid career mentoring and support: Finding mentors and setting priorities, maintaining momentum after tenure, in: Mentoring for Academic Careers in Engineering: Proceedings of the PAESMEM/Stanford School of Engineering Workshop. Editors: Eve Riskin, Mari Ostendorf, Pamela Cosman, Michelle Effros, Jia Li, Sheila Hemami, Robert M. Gray Grayphics Publishing. [www.grayphics.com] 1114 State Street, #7 in La Arcada, Santa Barbara, California Copyright (c) 2005 by Eve Riskin, Mari Ostendorf, Pamela Cosman, Michelle Effros, Jia Li, Sheila Hemami, Robert M. Gray. This material is freely available provided suitable acknowledgement is made to the source, PAESMEM, the National Science Foundation, and Stanford University and provided no changes are made without the permission of the editors. No claim is made to ownership of the images and these should not be used for other purp! oses without specific permission from their owners.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu

UP NEXT: Teaching for Tips

Tomorrow’s Academic Careers

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JUNIOR FACULTY – HOW TO FIND GOOD MENTORS

Co-chairs: Jia Li and Sheila Hemami Panel: D. Richard Brown, Assistant Professor, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Lydia Sohn, Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley Rebecca Willett, Graduate Student, U. Wisconsin/Rice Sheila Hemami, Associate Professor, Cornell Univ. Yoonkyung Lee, Assistant Professor, Ohio State

The needs and methods of junior faculty differ markedly from those of a graduate student. Be prepared by absorbing all you can from your graduate school mentor before you leave the nest, “be prepared” is good advice for more people than Boy Scouts. Many of the desirable attributes and effective strategies still apply, but many are no longer relevant. Perhaps the biggest difference is that you now have an entirely new system to learn. With luck you will know something about such things, but most likely you will not be well equipped to handle them. Most beginning assistant professors have had minimal teaching experience, no experience obtaining research funding, no advising experience, and little grasp of “how things work” in academia.

Some schools have organized programs for mentoring new faculty, sometimes forming teams based on preferences. Investigate to see if you have such resources available to you. Some departments assign mentors for new faculty, and that gives you someone to talk to and it may be enough. Often, however, it is not sufficient and you may need to seek additional council, possibly even from other institutions. It is particularly important at this stage to find someone with a reputation for both strong teaching and strong research and for a good balance between the two. Unfortunately deans and chairs are not always suitable for this role because they are less active in both teaching and research because of their administrative duties. Two attributes often mentioned for good mentors are that they should have a good sense of humor and that they should be pragmatic.

Probably the best strategy for finding a primary or secondary mentor is to chat with many possible candidates and pursue conversations with people with whom you feel comfortable. Take advantage of any connections you might have, for example local friends of your PhD supervisor or other professors you know and like. It is best to look for someone who is tenured, because learning about the tenure process early can make it far less scary. Every institution operates differently, but all have similar criteria for excellence in research, teaching, and professional service. Finding good advice for allocating your time can be very helpful.

How Can A Mentor Help?

In addition to addressing the skills needed to survive and prosper in academia already mentioned as reasons for seeking a mentor, there follow many other helpful influences a mentor can have on a new faculty member.

* A mentor can provide good advice on the key academic responsibilities of teaching and advising, including negotiating which courses to teach (balancing core and advanced), giving tips for getting good teaching evaluations from students and taking advantage of available resources for improving teaching skills, teaching the basics of students and advising (and where to find all the program and other requirements you will need to have at hand), supervising undergraduate and graduate projects, writing exams, grading strategies, interpreting course evaluations, and preparing for the unpredictable crises you are likely to encounter when advising students. Know your resources!

* A mentor can help guide you through your department’s maze. You need to know how to get things done, whom to see for what, how teaching assistants and research assistants are approved and appointed, and, unfortunately, what to do when you encounter cheating or violations of the university ethics or honor codes. These things happen at the best of places. This type of mentoring requires inside knowledge and hence a mentor within your department or school.

* A mentor can be invaluable when you write grant proposals for research funding. They can provide you with successful examples and review your draft proposals. They can also be a big help in dealing with the rejection that often comes with a failed proposal.

* A mentor can be a demystifier of the tenure process, and in planning ahead for the process. This often means encouraging you to maximize your visibility in your field through publications, talks at conferences, talks in industry and other universities, grant applications, and professional service as reviewer, associate editor, program committee, professional society officer, and other visible positions that enhance your field. Key to a successful tenure process will be having people in the field know and like your work.

* A mentor can help build relationships with other colleagues both within your department and elsewhere on campus.

* A mentor can help you to keep things in perspective-they often have a more global and experienced viewpoint that can transcend the daily crises that can beset junior faculty. In particular, mistakes will happen. Get past it. Grants and papers will get rejected, don’t take it personally and try again (and make it better).

These advantages only accrue if you maintain regular contact with your mentor, and regular lunches or walks or coffee provide a good opportunity for doing so.

Mentors at other institutions are less helpful in dealing with the home institution, but they can be a big help in many other aspects of your career. They can provide independent advice on your grant applications and an outside objective perspective on your career advancement. Sometimes they can find out useful information through their own informal networks. They can also nominate you for editorial and program committee service that can provide an excellent means of expanding your knowledge of the field and its members.