The Road to Tenure offers humorous recollections of the messiness and confusion that fill the days of a pre-tenure academic—from graduate school through the postdoc and into the assistant professor days. The book’s three sections roughly map onto the chronology of academic life, beginning with graduate school and the job search experience; followed by teaching, research, and service; and finally the challenges of family and academic identity. The book is not a how-to, nor does it emphasize “lessons learned” on the way to tenure. Instead, the collection earnestly, and with good humor, captures a significant and meaningful slice of the experience of pursuing academia in contemporary colleges and universities. For the doctoral student or newly hired faculty member, these essays will provide some comfort with their implicit suggestion that, while it’s certainly hard work, you are not alone.

Saved from certain death on the Whistler-Vancouver highway after his luxury car malfunctions, Mark Morata feels honour-bound to reward his rescuer, Geoff Pybus, with a token of his undying gratitude. Geoff, a frustratingly humble university professor, happy with his family's lot in life, only wants the impossible: for his modest, straightforward wife to get tenure at her university. Luckily, Mark is a man for whom impossible is just another word. As a sophisticated importer-exporter of certain recreational substances ("drug lord" is such a cliché), Mark gets to work on the academic world with the same relentless nature that helped him climb to the top of the cartel. However, the hallowed campus halls reveal an environment that is vicious and corrupt beyond anything he has ever encountered in the drug business... Kieran Egan's Tenure is a wildly entertaining satire mash-up, where campus culture collides with crime.

Upon completion of a doctoral degree, how does the newly-minted doctoral completer move forward with their career? Without a plan, or even a mentor as a guide, the path forward may be filled with a variety of professional and personal challenges to overcome. Navigating Post-Doctoral Career Placement, Research, and Professionalism is a collection of innovative research on the methods and applications of navigating the post-doc, professional environment while also handling the personal anxieties that accompany this navigation. While highlighting topics including self-care, graduate education, and professional planning, this book is ideally designed for doctoral candidates, program directors, recruitment officers, and postgraduate retention specialists.

Helping assistant professors and pre-tenure faculty balance competing obligations in teaching, research, and service, this comprehensive book explores the challenging path toward tenure. Drawing from research literature on faculty development, pedagogy, and psychology, How to Get Tenure covers topics such as productivity, research agendas, publication, service, and preparing a dossier. Whether read from beginning to end or used as a reference, this book provides clear, concrete, and accessible advice on the most effective and efficient strategies for navigating the inherent ambiguity of the tenure process, tackling the challenges and complexity of the tenure track, and building a strong case for tenure.

The definitive career guide for grad students, adjuncts, post-docs and anyone else eager to get tenure or turn their Ph.D. into their ideal job Each year tens of thousands of students will, after years of hard work and enormous amounts of money, earn their Ph.D. And each year only a small percentage of them will land a job that justifies and rewards their investment. For every comfortably tenured professor or well-paid former academic, there are countless underpaid and overworked adjuncts, and many more who simply give up in frustration. Those who do make it share an important asset that separates them from the pack: they have a plan. They understand exactly what they need to do to set themselves up for success. They know what really moves the needle in academic job searches, how to avoid the all-too-common mistakes that sink so many of their peers, and how to decide when to point their Ph.D. toward other, non-academic options. Karen Kelsky has made it her mission to help readers join the select few who get the most out of their Ph.D. As a former tenured professor and department head who oversaw numerous academic job searches, she knows from experience exactly what gets an academic applicant a job. And as the creator of the popular and widely respected advice site The Professor is In, she has helped countless Ph.D.’s turn themselves into stronger applicants and land their dream careers. Now, for the first time ever, Karen has poured all her best advice into a single handy guide that addresses the most important issues facing any Ph.D., including: -When, where, and what to publish -Writing a foolproof grant application -Cultivating references and crafting the perfect CV -Acing the job talk and campus interview -Avoiding the adjunct trap -Making the leap to nonacademic work, when the time is right The Professor Is In addresses all of these issues, and many more.

Is a career as a professor the right choice for you? If you are a graduate student, how can you clear the hurdles successfully and position yourself for academic employment? What's the best way to prepare for a job interview, and how can you maximize your chances of landing a job that suits you? What happens if you don't receive an offer? How does the tenure process work, and how do faculty members cope with the multiple and conflicting day-to-day demands? With a perpetually tight job market in the traditional academic fields, the road to an academic career for many aspiring scholars will often be a rocky and frustrating one. Where can they turn for good, frank answers to their questions? Here, three distinguished scholars—with more than 75 years of combined experience—talk openly about what's good and what's not so good about academia, as a place to work and a way of life. Written as an informal conversation among colleagues, the book is packed with inside information—about finding a mentor, avoiding pitfalls when writing a dissertation, negotiating the job listings, and much more. The three authors' distinctive opinions and strategies offer the reader multiple perspectives on typical problems. With rare candor and insight, they talk about such tough issues as departmental politics, dual-career marriages, and sexual harassment. Rounding out the discussion are short essays that offer the "inside track" on financing graduate education, publishing the first book, and leaving academia for the corporate world. This helpful guide is for anyone who has ever wondered what the fascinating and challenging world of academia might hold in store. Part I - Becoming a Scholar * Deciding on an Academic Career * Entering Graduate School * The Mentor * Writing a Dissertation * Landing an Academic Job Part II - The Academic Profession * The Life of the Assistant Professor * Teaching and Research * Tenure * Competition in the University System and Outside Offers * The Personal Side of Academic Life

This book explores the meanings, experiences, and challenges faced by Black women faculty that are either on the tenure track or have earned tenure. The authors advance the notion of comparative intersectionality to tease through the contextual peculiarities and commonalities that define their identities as Black women and their experiences with tenure and promotion across the two geographical spaces. By so doing, it works through a comparative treatment of existing social (in)equalities, educational (dis)parities, and (in)justices in the promotion and retention of Black women academics. Such interpretative examinations offer important insights into how Black women’s subjugated knowledge and experiences continue to be suppressed within mainstream structures of power and how they are negotiated across contexts.