Disclaimer: The UF Faculty Handbook is provided as a general reference rather than the official source of university policies and guidelines. For your convenience, links to official UF documents are provided.
- Think about annual review as you complete projects, submit grants and papers, plan new activities.
- Keep an up-to-date Vita and list of the year's activities.
- Create a template for your annual review early and add to it regularly.
- Use the mid-career review as a mock tenure review.
- Look at University, College, and Department Promotion and Tenure documents early. Make a folder for each section in "Criteria for Tenure, Permanent Status and Promotion" (University document, Faculty Handbook) and put items in these folders as you do your professional work.
- Understand your responsibilities and design your goals in scholarship, research, teaching, and service with those responsibilities in mind.
- Identify what kinds of publications are most valued in your department.
- Work towards a continuity in your research agenda.
- Don't let teaching evaluations terrorize you.
- Get peer reviews.
- Emphasize innovation as you document your work.
- Save documentation of your work, including acceptance letters, conference programs, cards and letters, commendatory e-mails.
- Set a timeline for submitting materials outside of the institution. Any external review is important feedback on your work.
- Official mentors may not give you all you need. Be sure to seek out advice beyond your official mentor when necessary.
- Think about choosing a mentor from outside of your department.
- Let students know what you are doing and they will communicate your work to others.
- Avoid over attachment and over reaction by assuming a playful and tentative stance. Seek out and learn from criticism while not reacting emotionally to it.
- Moderate Classroom incivilities- such as students who arrive late, noisily, or who persist in talking when someone else has the floor— with simple strategies of openness, pacing and patience.
- Try to recruit grad students at conferences.
- Look for teaching grants.
- Don't change your course text too often.
- Remember: it usually takes teaching a course three times before it is perfected
- Try to contain your teaching to the proper percentage of your work time.
- Be aware that the nature of graduate education makes it much more time-consuming than other forms of teaching. Don't take on weak grad students without a clear plan for addressing the weaknesses.. Be sure to ask graduate students "why" they want you on their committees and make sure it is a good expenditure of your time. Try to balance your commitment to graduate students with your other commitments to teaching, research and service.
- Do some of your writing with others as a way to hold yourself accountable.
- Get a co-PI on grants. Working with established researchers can help you obtain your first grants.
- Apply for University Research Grants (URG), since they are designed to support new faculty.
- Be accountable to someone for writing deadlines (use mentor or collaborators).
- Limit the number of your projects. It is easier to work on a series of related issues. Be strategic in your planning.
- Choose service commitments carefully; try to match service with your other intellectual interests where possible.
- Be sure to do some department work so that your colleagues will get to know you and see that you are contributing to the common effort.
- Talk to many of your colleagues about expectations for service.
- Aim to develop a mix of departmental, university and national or international service over time.
- Remember you are great! We hired you because we think so and you should too.
- Treat support staff well.
- Maintain a holistic vision of the world of academics, connecting teaching and research.
- Keep a notebook to jot down ideas, responses, goals, and frustrations--an academic journal of sorts.
- Create thinking time.
- Learn to say "NO".
- Don't be shy about promoting yourself. Determine why your work is necessary in an AAU, Land Grant University as UF. Make sure people know about your ongoing research projects and accomplishments.
- Boice, Robert. Advice for New Faculty Members. 2000. Needham Heights: MA, Allyn and Bacon.
- Carlson, Susan, "New Faculty Tips." October 21, 2001. Iowa State University .
- Rice, R.E., Sorcinelli, M.D. Austin A.E. 2000. Heeding New Voices: Academic Careers for a New Generation. Washington, D.C. American Association for Higher Education.
- Sorcinelli, M.D. 2000. Principles of Good Practice: Supporting Early Career Faculty. Washington, D.C. American Association of Higher Education.