Tips for ECRs?

[JeanneDeMontbaston]

Hi,

I figured since this new section exists, I should put this here. I'm an English Lit ECR, submitted my PhD in 2013 and graduated 2014. I'm on my first postdoc, which is a temp teaching job, mostly lecturing/admin/marking plus some freelance class teaching. I love it and really feel well supported in terms of the teaching experience. Obviously, though, it's not wonderful in terms of getting research done. I've submitted an article which is in the late stages of review and I'm kicking my PhD into a book proposal at the moment. I also have some drafting towards the next book and I've got a draft of an article towards that, which will be a chapter.

Annnyway, that's all very boring really (just wanted to give context). What were the best tips you had as an ECR? What's worked for you? I need to motivate myself and get working.

I had completely no advice given to me as an ECR.

However, I had a very enjoyable ECR - I did what I loved. It's just that those are not the things that got you promoted ...

Hopefully someone will come along an be more helpful!

Well, no, that is helpful!

I have been wondering how common it is to have very little advice. I was reading this piece by Mathew Lyons. www.historytoday.com/mathew-lyons/young-academics-great-betrayal

I love what I do, too. I get a lot of support from colleagues. But I wonder what slightly more senior people would do/say.

I'm not very senior, but I'll think about what I would say to my younger self ...

I'm technically still an ECR (I think - PhD in 2009).

Best advice I had was to try to publish fewer high-quality pieces rather than churning out loads of book chapters, conf proceedings etc.

Oh that Lyons piece caused quite a stir! Twitter was HILARIOUS with affronted (mostly male) egos all over the place.

Are you wanting a permanent academic job in a research intensive university? If so, forget these students - just give them the bare minimum and concentrate on publications in top journals.

Thanks all for comments. maud, that's comforting and I've heard it before, about not publishing too many small things.

I saw the twitter stir - a bit odd, TBH. I thought it was a good piece, some issues, but basically good. I didn't think it was even that rude to senior egos.

jclm - nope, not wanting it that much I want to forget about students. I like teaching.

When I got a fellowship a couple of years ago, a senior colleague told me, "Papers are good, but grants are better".

I'd say start to plan the next fellowship or whatever step quite early on. See if there's any specialist advice on applications. Get networking within your field so you can be a named researcher on someone else's application. And don't take on too much that you don't look after your own primary goals.

Thanks, both!

Noting it all down and thinking.

Interesting article by Mathew Lyons!

What's ECR?

love Early Career Researcher

Jeanne do check out what training your Staff Dev dept offers. We have several courses aimed at ECRs at my uni on how to teach more effectively, how to write grant proposals, where best to publish, how to up your profile etc etc.

Jeanne, my advice would be to decide now what kind of academic position you want to have in 5 years' time, and do things now to make that goal attainable. ????Lecturer in a research-intensive institution (e.g., modal 3-4 REF)? Avoid teaching-only contracts if you can (even if you enjoy teaching and it pays the bills!) because it's hard to make up for the research dead time later. Focus on getting journal papers out rather than longer pieces of work like books (though this will be field-dependent) because you really need to populate your publication list in the first 2-3 years post-PhD. The easiest way to publish more is probably to wangle a postdoc or fellowship that gives you 100% research time, but not everyone is so lucky and it's still possible to publish quite a bit in other arrangements. Until you're in your first permanent lecturing position where applying for funding is probably a condition of your probation period, papers are more important than grants. Also, make sure you are clearly the senior/corresponding author on as many publications as possible (especially important in fields where collaborations are the norm). Having several publications where you have clearly led the research, and preferably with your PhD supervisor nowhere in sight, will make you an attractive candidate for a lecturing post. ????Lecturer in an institution where research is encouraged but not intensive (e.g., modal 2 REF)? Take whatever job pays the bills but try not to go more than 2 years on teaching-only contracts or it will become difficult to break into teaching-and-research contracts. If you are on a teaching-only contract, try to ensure it has some lecturer-level responsibilities like co-ordinating modules and setting assessments (rather than just teaching assistant stuff like delivering seminars and marking), and make sure you have stellar student evacuation. It's still important to populate your publication list, but a clutch of papers from your PhD will cut you some slack for the first 1-2 years afterwards. Showing you can handle the academic teaching role and do it well, on top of publishing some research, will make you an attractive applicant for a lecturing post. ????That's my tuppence worth, though it will certainly vary across fields and there are no guarantees. For context, I'm an SL in a research-intensive institution, who once worked in a not-so-intensive institution, and I've seen hundreds of job application CVs over the years.????And I'm definitely an academic ??

Gah - sorry for lack of paragraphs, folks. Stupid bug in new app replaces line breaks with ??? Have reposted from mobile site for readability.

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Jeanne, my advice would be to decide now what kind of academic position you want to have in 5 years' time, and do things now to make that goal attainable.

Lecturer in a research-intensive institution (e.g., modal 3-4 REF)? Avoid teaching-only contracts if you can (even if you enjoy teaching and it pays the bills!) because it's hard to make up for the research dead time later. Focus on getting journal papers out rather than longer pieces of work like books (though this will be field-dependent) because you really need to populate your publication list in the first 2-3 years post-PhD. The easiest way to publish more is probably to wangle a postdoc or fellowship that gives you 100% research time, but not everyone is so lucky and it's still possible to publish quite a bit in other arrangements. Until you're in your first permanent lecturing position where applying for funding is probably a condition of your probation period, papers are more important than grants. Also, make sure you are clearly the senior/corresponding author on as many publications as possible (especially important in fields where collaborations are the norm). Having several publications where you have clearly led the research, and preferably with your PhD supervisor nowhere in sight, will make you an attractive candidate for a lecturing post.

Lecturer in an institution where research is encouraged but not intensive (e.g., modal 2 REF)? Take whatever job pays the bills but try not to go more than 2 years on teaching-only contracts or it will become difficult to break into teaching-and-research contracts. If you are on a teaching-only contract, try to ensure it has some lecturer-level responsibilities like co-ordinating modules and setting assessments (rather than just teaching assistant stuff like delivering seminars and marking), and make sure you have stellar student evacuation. It's still important to populate your publication list, but a clutch of papers from your PhD will cut you some slack for the first 1-2 years afterwards. Showing you can handle the academic teaching role and do it well, on top of publishing some research, will make you an attractive applicant for a lecturing post.

That's my tuppence worth, though it will certainly vary across fields and there are no guarantees. For context, I'm an SL in a research-intensive institution, who once worked in a not-so-intensive institution, and I've seen hundreds of job application CVs over the years.

And I'm definitely an academic

My top tip to my younger academic self would be to develop the ability to say "no" to things that are not going to be helpful to your career in the longer term. There are just so many things in this line of work that are hugely draining of time and energy, and that it is assumed you will do out of sheer good will. Be very strategic about what you agree to take on in term of administration, committees, external examining, etc

Publish.
Get your name on research grants (or whatever people in English do to look good, our lecturers have minimum grant target = £60k).

Look for ... opportunities. Like

write grant proposals (very many aspects to that)
represent RAs at School Board meetings
interview PhD students & colleagues
interview UGs
attend research / REF strategy meetings, & contribute to them
network so you can review papers (or whatever English people do that's equivalent).
work hard to have a good rep with (ratings from) your students
join the AUT or whatever it's called now
represent staff or RAs at pension negotiations
organise dept. events, so that everybody knows your name

At our Uni there is a qualification you MUST get in order to lecture, PhD alone doesn't cut it. Requires original research to complete.

Teach the topic nobody else wants to teach :).

Do people really use academia.edu or twitter to get ahead in academic careers? ResearchGate is a good place to dump my old papers, at least.

... say yes to every paper you're offered to review.

Find out who in your dept. is on editorial board for summat & ask them for advice how they got there; edit or sub-edit a journal if you can.

See, reviewing papers (and also writing reviews for publication ) is one of the things I have now classified as thankless. I've done quite a lot of this kind of thing, and it's not done anything for me other than add to my workload. I don't do it now , unless I have a particularly strong interest in the topic. It sounds like things may be a little different in the sciences, but in the humanities you need to be totally focused on having a strong REF profile, which means eliminating things (I'm not talking about teaching here!) that might distract you from publishing. And make sure that you are strategic about where you publish. No point publishing something and finding out that your department doesn't consider that publisher or journal REFable. Also, impact is likely to carry more weight in the next REF, so making sure that you understand what impact is, and factoring it into your future research /outputs is important.

I can tell you, having shortlisted and been on the interview panel for many posts, that the very first stage of shortlisting involves eliminating anyone who does not have a full REF submission, preferably including a substantial monograph. No one will care how many committees you've sat on, or what admin you've done. I do predict that the TEF will result in teaching being given higher priority, though, which will be interesting in terms of departmental cultures.

Would OP be REF'd? My institution only put forward a relatively small number of the most prominent people to be REF'd.

You're probably right, Jeffreys.

Widespread unwillingness to review papers is probably why we still end up waiting 3-4 months+ for decisions on submissions. Drives me insane.

I consider reviewing pretty essential, even for ECRs. Reviewing sharpens your critical analysis skills, as well as providing a sample to let you judge where your own submissions rank in terms of quality. ????That said, it can be a time sink. So I always advise to: (1) review a max of 3 times the number of papers you're submitting that year, which is a fair ratio that means you're neither leeching off nor propping up the peer review system. And (2) only review for journals you want to publish in yourself, and be certain none of them are on the "predatory publisher" list. ??

What geeka said!

Academic jobs are now being pushed into two directions, either teaching focused or research focused. If you want a research focused post (or a post that has at least 40% research focus) you need to publish four strong pieces in the next REF period. The strongest pieces you can publish are original articles in peer reviewed journals, as highly ranked as possible. You can derive 1-2 psych pieces from your thesis but you then need to move on to show you have breadth of research interests.

Monographs are also strong pieces but not your PhD thesis. You've done this, it's been assessed, move on. I know this sounds harsh and it would be wonderful to see your thesis in print but in terms of REF it is not that valuable.

Chapters in volumes are only worth it if they are at the top of your profession, e.g. a cutting edge article in an OUP volume.

Do not write book reviews, publish in generic conference proceedings papers, encyclopaedia entries, etc. These are good will gestures you can only afford to do if you have a secure position.

Take advantage of your ERC status and apply for any grant you may be eligible for. See what they are looking for, interdisciplinarity was a big thing up until now, war studies is very fashionable, so try to taylor your work to that.

My institution expects everyone to be entered for the REF; if you don't have a submission, there are consequences to this (eg. research hours taken away or even being moved to a teaching-only role). The union even had to step in to make sure that staff weren't penalised when they weren't submitted through no fault of their own (eg. they had a submission but there weren't enough impact case studies across the department so the number of people entered had to be reduced).

English is a very competitive field (often 200 applicants for a junior post) and departments can and do easily pick and choose to make sure they get someone with a strong research profile.

I'm not sure I agree about not publishing your thesis. I developed mine for publication with a prominent publisher in my field, and that was definitely a good decision for me. It got my work known much more widely than leaving it as a thesis could have, and I have been asked to do quite a bit of public engagement work and a museum exhibition on the back of it). However, I do agree that you need to demonstrate that you are developing new projects and research interests.

Oh - and for any ECRs at the point of being interviewed for their first permanent lecturing post, I strongly advise asking what kind of workload support ECRs get in their first couple of years and whether there is a specific % of time ringfenced for research.

The best departments to work in will have a functioning workload model that will ringfence at least 50-60% of your time for research for a couple of years and around 40% thereafter. They will also have a separate time allowance for whatever academic teaching programme you will probably be require to do, plus allowances for admin jobs, which means you can't be overloaded with teaching because only a relatively small % of time is left. A few deparents do this, but it's not easy to find out where unless you know someone there or you ask at interview.

Okay departments will have a workload model that ringfences a smaller % of time for research - maybe 30-40% - but should also give you some allowance for completing the academic teaching programme. They might not have proper allowances for admin jobs though, so you may find yourself stretched to manage admin and teaching without it eating into your research time. Most departments are like this.

Bad departments either have no workload model or a disfunctional one that only counts up hours with no efforts to equalise load. They will have no ringfenced research allowance, and any allowances for academic teaching programme or admin are fairly meaningless because your teaching hours are not properly capped and will constantly eat into your research time. A few utterly poisonous departments are like this (including ones with good REF scores because their profs don't teach and everything gets dumped on ECRs) and are marked by their high turnover of ECRs due to burnout and disillusionment with academia.

Even in a really tough job market, I would advise turning down a job in a bad department unless you were truly desperate for the income right now. And if you do take the job, don't wait and see how you cope but start applying for other jobs before the ink is dry on your contract.

I had the misfortune to work in a bad department for several years without realising just how bad it was in comparison to the norm across the country, and I wish I had left years before I did. I feel quite sorry for new lecturers starting there now because very little has changed.

Just a warning about workload promises. I have worked according to departmental workload models since 2000 and basically all it meant was that you could see how you were 110- 150% overloaded. When you are overloaded the first thing to go out the window is research unless you are willing to let down your students and ignore admin tasks.

Yeah, workload promises are definitely just promises. Shortstaffing means everyone gets overloaded. But it's the places that don't even make promises - because the entire notion of equitable workloads is anathema - that mean ECRs have to be particularly wary of the place.