Context: I was a tenure track Assistant Professor from August 2014–July 2019 in an R2 University (R2 is a high research output University). I was on track to submit my tenure package and was confident of getting tenured, but I decided to move to an R1 University (R1 is a very high research output University). I restarted the clock as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in August 2019 and was promoted as a tenured Associate Professor in August 2025. In this write-up, I have tried to articulate the tenure process and some strategies I used in order to be successful. If you are considering switching Universities, then you might be interested in reading how I did it: https://pab47.github.io/my_job_hunt.html
TIP: This is a long document. If you want the major scoop, read these three parts: “2. Tenure Timeline”, “3. Rubrics for earning tenure”, “4. Planning your tenure track timeline”. The rest of the document can be read at your leisure.1. Some basics before you start: If you are straight out of school with a PhD or have some post-doc experience, it is important to understand the differences between the workload of a PhD/postdoc versus a faculty member.
As a postdoc/PhD student, your responsibilities are: to read literature, perform research and write up your work, attend conferences and give talks, and occasionally, you might have to mentor undergraduate or newer graduate students. But as a faculty member your responsibilities increase several fold: you have to generate new research ideas, perform research (atleast in the beginning), write papers and proposals, setup a budget, manage funded proposal ensuring that you are spending appropriately, hiring and advising graduate and undergraduate students, setting up an running a research lab, providing service to your community by reviewing papers, proposals, and to department committees, attending and giving talks at conferences, networking with other faculty, writing letters of recommendation, ordering lab supplies, and so on. But like the PhD/postdoc student, you have the same 24 hours and perhaps increasing family responsibilities. In summary, you have many more things on your plate as a faculty member. Hence, prioritizing and delegating work and being more efficient with your time are of paramount importance to be successful.
The tenure track job is like a startup but a lot safer because 1) you are guaranteed a salary for the first 6 years, 2) the chances of success are quite high, typically 75% or more compared to only 10% for a startup, 3) it is quite well-known what is needed to succeed at a tenure track and is by far much more controllable unlike a startup where the things are unclear and to a great extent out of your control; timing and luck matter a lot.
As a faculty member running a lab, the research is going to be performed by graduate students in your lab. They are going to be the backbone of your research, which determines the impact you will have on the field. While the top R1 Universities generally attract top talent from within and outside the United States, it is always challenging for R2, R3, and even mid- and low-ranked R1 schools to attract the same talent. Because you are just starting, recruiting good students is going to be even harder for you if you are not in a top R1 University. This has to be the most important factor you take into account when you plan the years leading to your tenure; you need a feasible research plan that you and your students can execute in the limited time available at your disposal.
2. Tenure Timeline: The tenure track clock is shorter than you think: it is 5 years and not 6 years. If you join in Fall (August) of Year 1, under normal circumstances (There are two exceptions: 1) You got a maternity/paternity leave for a semester or two, which will extend it by a year; 2) You started in Spring (January) instead of Fall, which will give you two extra semesters, Spring and Summer), you will submit your tenure package in Fall of Year 5 and submit recommendation letter writers to the Head of the Department in the Summer of Year 4. There will be at least one mid-tenure review, either at the end of Spring of Year 2 or Fall/Spring of Year 3. During the Fall of Year 6, your tenure package will undergo voting at various levels: first in the Department, then at the College, and then at the University, eventually making it to the President/Chancellor/Board of Regents for their approval. Most schools let you know the status of the vote at various levels. If you are successful, you will be promoted with indefinite tenure as an Associate Professor in the Fall of Year 7. If you are not successful, you will have a year, that is, from the Fall of Year 7 to the end of Spring Year 7, to find another job.
3. Rubrics for earning tenure: Your tenure package will be evaluated on a set of rubrics for research, teaching, and service. So let’s start with the end in mind. What are the evaluation rubrics?
Unfortunately, these rubrics are never quantitatively defined by the University/College/Department in any concrete form. However, the rubrics are informally communicated within the Department circles. You could check this with the recently tenured associate professors or non-tenured assistant professors who are further ahead on the academic clock. For most research-intensive, mid-ranked Universities, the rubrics for securing tenure in Engineering are about the same. They are in the order of decreasing difficulty (in my opinion):
Publish around 2 technical papers every year, or about 10 papers when you go up for tenure. The majority of these should be with your students.
Win one federal grant as the Principal Investigator. Some Universities may require you to secure another grant as a PI or co-PI.
At least one PhD student from your lab has to be close to graduation.
Teach courses assigned to you with an average rating close to that of your Department/College or average.
Serve on at least one Department Committee and serve your research community in some capacity, such as reviewing papers or proposals.
Be able to recommend 3-5 full professors who can write a strong letter for your tenure case.
In a nutshell, the point of the tenure process is for the College/University to be able to judge your ability to run a sustainable research program (hiring students, raising money, writing papers), teach courses (which helps to generate tuition revenue), and provide service to the Department and to your research community.
If you changed jobs, that is, you moved from one University to another, it is highly likely that your research, teaching, and service contributions will not transfer to the new University; you would need to start from scratch unless you negotiated transferring some research credits to your new job. There are two exceptions: 1) If you are able to transfer your unspent grants to the new University, you will get full credit for the transferred grant. 2) If your graduate students are willing to move with you to the new University, then the majority of their coursework should transfer, provided you negotiated the transfer of students. Getting research-ready students to transfer will help you jump-start your research program and also help set up your new lab. When I moved mid-tenure, I was able to transfer two NSF grants as well as 4 graduate students. This gave me a great head start at the new University on my second tenure track job.
4. Planning your tenure track timeline: It’s not only important to focus on what to do, but also when to do it. Here is an overview of the timing
Publications: It takes six months to a year to formulate, solve, and write up a new project. It will take another six months to a year to get it published (i.e., resubmitted or accepted paper does not count; it has to be published). Thus, it takes at least a year (a conservative estimate) to get a publication out. Given that you need at least 2 publications per year, you need to be working on 2-3 papers every year. This also means that you need to start publishing a sizeable number of papers early, in years 1 to 4, to ensure that the papers are published by the time you go up for tenure. Thus, expect to be busy working on research and publications throughout the five years.
Grants: New faculty have startups which last for the first 3 years. A standard startup will include monies for student support and equipment. Thus, you need to hit grants starting in year 3. A good strategy is to work on grant writing skills by attending workshops in the first two years, submit just enough proposals (say 3 - 4) in those years, and peak in terms of quantity and quality of grants in years three and four. By focusing on research from year 1, you are able to generate preliminary results to support your proposal ideas.
Hiring and Training PhD students: Incoming PhD students take mandatory coursework, which helps them prepare for the preliminary exam at the end of the first year. You can’t expect incoming PhD students to produce research products in the first year. It may take them another year to produce publishable research. This means that you need to hire PhD students as soon as possible. But if you join in the Fall, you have a big disadvantage because you might have to wait till the following Spring to get your first PhD student; PhD applicants get accepted around mid-April. This implies that, realistically, you can get a publication from your first PhD students in year 3 onwards. But you cannot afford to wait to publish in year 3; that’s too late. Thus, you need to find a shortcut to hire students and start publishing early. Here are some strategies
Hire MS students into your research group. MS students who have completed their coursework can be relatively quickly turned into research-productive graduate students compared to new PhD students. Try to solicit MS students in your major to join your research group by paying them tuition and/or a stipend.
Hire research productive MS students into the PhD program. Ask other professors to recommend their MS students. These students have completed their coursework and have some experience with research. This boosts your research productivity very quickly. You could also hire PhD students who are looking to move from one group to another, but be careful about this choice, as these students could be problematic; check with their PhD advisors and interview them before you make the call.
Send out unpublished work from your PhD and postdoc for publication. You might have some results from your PhD or postdoc that need some analysis to turn into publishable work. Get these out in the first two years.
Hire postdocs. It is rare for beginning investigators to hire postdocs, but if this is viable, then it can help boost productivity in the first two years. But note that postdocs are generally twice as expensive to support compared to PhD students.
Teaching: As a new faculty, you will get a course release for the first 2 to 3 years. For example, if the regular course load is 3 courses per year, then you will teach two courses in the first 3 years and 3 courses per year after that. In the 5 years leading up to the tenure, expect to be asked to teach at least 4 unique courses, one of which would be a graduate course in your field of expertise. For undergraduate courses, try to stick to courses that are close to your research field. It is to your advantage to teach core classes with prescribed texts and question banks rather than teaching elective courses with no prescribed texts, as these require you to develop your own notes from reading multiple sources. Try to stagger teaching new courses so that you are only teaching one new course per year. Stick to the same 4 courses till you earn tenure.
Service: You are required to provide some service to your Department and to your research community. Your goal is to find the minimum threshold and stick to it for the 5 years leading to tenure. Choose a Department committee that requires minimal effort on your part (2-3 meetings in the semester). My favorites are the Seminar committee, which meets 1-2 times per year to solicit external speakers for the Department seminars, and the Awards committee, which meets once per year to decide teaching/service awards. Service to your research community could be done by reviewing a few (2-5) papers per year and/or serving on proposal panels, which also helps you to learn about the review process.
5. Making it easier to complete your tenure package: At the end of the five years (and sometimes for the mid-tenure review), you will have to submit a package, usually in a PDF format, in which you will have to document all things you have done.
It’s easy to forget your contributions unless you keep track of these things as they are achieved. I recommend three specific things. (1) Capture your achievements in your Curriculum Vitae (CV). If it’s too much work to constantly update the CV, then I recommend capturing these achievements in a text file (e.g., on the desktop) and updating the CV once per month. (2) Capture the papers/proposals/review invitation, etc., on your computer. I recommend creating a folder on your computer, say “my_tenure”. Within that, create folders for every academic year and within that keep documents pertaining to grants, papers, teaching review, and service. (3) Understand what is expected in the tenure package as early as possible and collect evidence in support of it. All the information on how and what to submit as part of your tenure package is freely available for download on the University website. Skim through the tenure requirement package to understand what things need to be captured. You will be amazed to know how many details are needed. For example, for teaching, you are expected to keep track of the number of students who signed up for the course, the number of course evaluations you got, and your course evaluation rating. For advising, you have to keep track of the number of PhD/MS committees that you served on, including the names of the PhD/MS candidates and sometimes the title of their thesis. Such things are tedious to track if you don’t capture them at the right time.
6. Writing proposals: Writing proposals and winning grants is one of the hardest requirements because: 1) writing proposals is a new endeavor for early-career faculty and you have to learn it on the fly while juggling other responsibilities, and 2) the success rate on federal grants is very low, ~ 5 - 20%. The solution to 1) is to go through some formal grant writing workshop or books to learn about the tricks of grant writing, and the solution to 2) is to write as many quality grants as possible while maintaining a decent research portfolio.
Although it is expected to win at least one federal grant, it is a good idea to write other local, state, or industry-related proposals, at least in the early stages of your career. This exercise gives you some practice to tackle the harder, longer, and more competitive federal grants.
I highly recommend the workbooks by Grant Writers Seminars and Workshop https://www.grantcentral.com/workbooks/. They have workbooks that are specific to the agency NIH, NSF, DoD, etc. Assuming that you have a good idea for a proposal, these workbooks help to lay out your research ideas in a convincing manner. That is, assuming you have identified a gap in knowledge in your field and have an idea to close the gap, the workbook helps you craft a good story.
A federal grant is about 15 - 20 pages, and it is speculative. That is, you are going to propose things that you are going to do over 3 to 5 years. But you also need some preliminary work to support your studies. The preliminary work can come from your past published or unpublished work. The preliminary work is usually a simulation study or a small subset of experiments that you are proposing. It is important to keep this in mind while performing your research.
Assuming you have a great idea and preliminary work to support your proposed research, I recommend that you start writing at least 2 months before the grant deadline. Also, try to write 1 - 2 hours every day. If you can write 0.5 to 1 pages per day, you can get the proposal ready in 30 days. This gives enough time to revise the proposal and work on other things, such as collaboration letters and the budget. It is also important to read the Request for Proposal and additional documents (e.g., budget, current and pending funding, equipment, data sharing, mentoring plan, collaboration letters) and other guidelines (e.g., letters of collaboration versus letters of support letter, page limits, font size, margins) thoroughly as minor mistakes can lead to your proposal being returned without review.
In my first tenure-track job over the course of 5 years, I had submitted 34 proposals (7 in the first year), of which 12 were funded. This included 2 sole PI National Science Foundation Grants. The total funding attributed to me was about $650,000. In the second tenure-track job, I was able to transfer about $450,000. I submitted only 17 proposals, of which 5 were funded. The total funding attributed to me was $1.5 million because the size of the grants was larger. The higher funding in my second job ensured that I could focus on more bold ideas, including hardware validation and getting into a new area of research.
7. Structuring your grant applications: To make tenure, you need to win at least one federal grant as a Principal Investigator. But the catch is that if you win a grant, you cannot stop writing proposals. This will look questionable on your CV. Thus, you have to keep writing proposals to demonstrate that you are continually putting in the effort to raise money to support your research. Also, given the low success rate in funding, it is important to submit many proposals. In fact, it is highly recommended that you always have 1-2 proposals under review at any given time.
So, how do you keep a steady stream of proposals going out, given that writing a proposal can be a time sink? Note that not all proposals are the same. This is the most important fact that you can exploit to diversify your portfolio. For example, NSF proposals are limited to 15 pages, some state-level proposals might have a proposal template, and many Department of Defense submissions require you to write a white paper that can be 2 to 5 pages long. Thus, in any given year, you can mix the types of grants and agencies you apply for funding. You can also improve and resubmit rejected proposals. You could take a given tool and apply it to a different application and submit it to a different agency (e.g., collaborative robotics can have applications in security, which is funded by the Department of Homeland Security, and also in agricultural research, which is funded by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture). You could also collaborate with another PI, both of you submit two proposals to different agencies, and each one takes up the majority of the writing task.
As an early-career-faculty (The definition of early career faculty varies. One definition is based on terminal degree, e.g., 10 years from the PhD degree. Another one is by the job, e.g., untenured Assistant Professor) you have access to special programs e.g, NSF CAREER award, DoD Young Investigator Program (YIP) that give you a smaller pool to compete with. These are prestigious grants, and getting these awards could potentially lead to tenure if other aspects of your package meet the minimum expectations. Sometimes a University/College might have internal grants to help early-career faculty. These grants are small, but they help you get started with fundraising and generating preliminary data for external proposals. There are some programs that depend on the designation of your University, e.g., HBCU, MSI, EPSCoR. There are certain opportunities called limited submissions, which means that only a set number of applications (usually 1 or 2) may go out from one University. These usually involve an internal competition, but they would have a smaller competition pool if you succeed at the University level. As an early career faculty, it is best to avoid submitting to large, multi-university, multi-PI opportunities and equipment grants unless there are special circumstances (e.g., research cannot be done without a specific instrument).
8. Writing papers: The normal expectation is that you publish 2 papers per year in journals/conferences in your field. While the time to acceptance in conferences is generally shorter, 3-6 months, journals can take 6 months to a year or more for the first decision. Also, in some of the more traditional fields in engineering, conference papers are not counted as full papers. This means that based on your field, you have to factor in the time needed from submitting to publication in the conference proceedings and/or journals. It is always a good idea to have at least 1-2 papers under review at any given time.
It is important to send out papers as soon as you start your tenure-track position. It is a good idea to use your PhD/postdoc work as a basis for these papers. To count as a publication, your affiliation on the paper should be your current institution. Also, as you are working on setting up your lab and hiring new students, it is important to send out a steady stream of papers. This can be done by resorting to theoretical/simulation work if that is possible. If you are into experimental work, there is no other way other than to set up your lab quickly and perhaps do the experiments yourself, as it takes a year or two for the graduate students to be productive.
The initial few years are the hardest because you have to not only set up your lab, but also write proposals, and hire students. It’s best that you don’t take any risky projects but focus on relatively safe projects, which would likely lead to publishable work. Keep the risky projects for later, possibly after earning tenure.
In my first tenure-track job (5 years), my lab published a total of 33 papers that included 13 journal papers. I chose to work in an area that was close to my PhD work on trajectory optimization for legged robots and focused on extensive simulations for generating publishable work, which is considered a safer bet. In my second tenure-track job, when I submitted my tenure package, my lab had a total of 33 papers that included 12 journal papers. In addition to my core area of legged robotics, I ventured into a new area of combinatorial optimization and vehicle routing. I was able to do extensive hardware validation in addition to simulation in legged robotics, which is something I always wanted to do. Reflecting back, the first 5 years (first TT job) were the hardest, where I wrote most of the 33 papers and also did quite a bit of research for some of them. However, the second 5 years (second TT job), it was much easier; I wrote a few papers in their entirety, but was largely involved in the overall direction of the work and editing/commenting on the student-written papers.
9. Recruiting and Training PhD students: Having a successful PhD student(s) as you go up for tenure is sometimes a norm for earning tenure (for non-PhD granting departments, there might be a requirement to supervise MS thesis students). Here “success” usually means that the student has at least passed the thesis proposal examination, which indicates that the student is well on the way to a PhD degree.
A good student can be a multiplier, which just doubles or triples your output for research, but a bad student can be a time sink. Thus, it is important to recruit good students to your group. This is something that comes from experience, and everybody whom I know has failed to some extent, so don’t overthink, but go by your instinct. Some of the tips are: try to hire alumni from schools that have been successful in your program, connect with friends/colleagues in other schools and ask them to recommend their students, hire undergraduate students at your institution, and groom them to be your future students. For the first and/or second graduate student in your group, you might have to spend extra time teaching them how to develop niche skills needed in your area of research. Then these students can train the next set of students that you hire in your group. In my group, I try to give more attention to new students to help them flesh out a research problem, solve it, and then write it up. There are certain easy conferences in my field, which I encourage new students to publish in the first year or two. Once they have their first paper published, the goal is to publish in a more competitive venue relative to the last one, and so on.
New students are often confused about what they are expected to do during their PhD studies. They need general guidelines. But you can really help them by explicitly spelling out clear rubrics for the Phd. The Department-wide rubrics are that students should maintain a certain minimum GPA (usually 3.5 on a scale of 4.0 or above) and pass the preliminary exams within two tries. Beyond that, it is your job to provide realistic research expectations to the student by creating appropriate rubrics, which might be field-dependent. The rubrics for getting a PhD in my lab are straightforward: publish three technical papers in a journal/conference by the time you graduate. To help plan the paper submission, the timeline is as follows. During their thesis proposal exam (1 year before defense), they should have paper 1 accepted and paper 2 submitted or close to submission. During their thesis defense, they should have papers 1 and 2 accepted and paper 3 submitted or close to submission. The criteria for getting a technical publication are that the work should push the field by introducing a new idea and supporting it with theoretical and/or experimental work, which naturally meets the criterion for a PhD. These three papers, which indicate three novel contributions, can be recycled as three chapters of a PhD thesis. These three chapters, along with an introduction chapter and a conclusion chapter, are adequate to be awarded a PhD degree. Since technical papers have gone through a peer review by experts in the field, the chances of a student failing the PhD exams after getting 3 papers accepted are usually minimal. For a Master’s student, the rubric could be 1 technical publication to be accepted/submitted/work in progress by the time they appear for the Thesis defense. Note that publishing the PhD work in a journal or conference is never required in most programs. However, for the student to be competitive in the job market, having a technical publication has become a necessity. The students who aspire to be faculty members after graduation will have more than 3 papers accepted by the time they graduate.
These rubrics need not be set in stone and should be modified based on the career goals of the students. For example, if a PhD student is seeking a teaching position after graduation, they may want to focus on improving their teaching skills by becoming instructors rather than working on research projects; if a PhD student is seeking an industry position they might want to have a more hands-on project that may have more depth and end up publishing only a single paper; a Masters student may not be interested in having publications at all. This latter point, the fact that Master’s students have limited time and may not be able to produce publications, might deter you from signing up Master’s students for your group. But on the upside, there is the possibility that the Masters might be interested in continuing into the PhD with you. Thus, you might have to gamble on hiring a Master’s student into your group as a beginning investigator.
Once you have a few graduate students working in your lab, you need to figure out if you want to assign individual projects or group projects. The advantage of individual projects is that one student can control the pace of the project without getting slowed down by others, but if you have a strong group with complementary skills (e.g., hardware engineering and software engineering), then group projects might be required to enable speedy progress. For group projects, you have to be careful about who takes the lead role in the research and, consequently, the first authorship on the resulting paper. In my research group, students have their individual research projects that they take on. But it is up to them to seek collaboration from others in the lab or not. Some students do end up working in groups, and some others prefer to work individually, and this seems to have worked well for me without generating any conflict.
I started my first tenure-track job in August 2014. I was able to get my first PhD student in 2015. I added 2 more students in August 2018 who transferred from the MS program to the PhD program. Over the 5 years from 2015-2019, I supervised 9 MS student theses, some of whom published at least 1 technical paper. I was also able to get 5 technical papers with undergraduate students. When I moved to my second tenure track job, I was able to transfer all 3 PhD students and a fourth one who moved from another group to mine. Around the time I submitted my tenure package, I was advising 6 PhD students and 2 MS theses, but I had already graduated 2 PhD students (both were transfer students) and completed advising 2 MS Theses. One advantage of moving from an R2 University (first TT job) to an R1 University (second TT job) was that I was able to recruit significantly better students into my research group, which improved the quality and quantity of publications and proposals.
10. Teaching: Teaching courses to graduate/undergraduate students is a primary requirement even in research-intensive schools. The course load is usually 2 to 4, depending on your research load. Many elite Universities (usually called R1 or with very high research output) will have only a 2 course per year workload, usually state or small private universities (usually called R2 or high research output R3 with moderate resaeach output) will have 4 courses per year, and those in between, other R1 and some R2 with a relatively high research demand will have 3 courses per year workload. New faculty will get 1 course release for the first 2 or 3 years. You could also buy out courses anytime by adding the cost of the course release to your grants.
Irrespective of the University you work for, whether a very high research or moderate research institution, bad teaching will definitely sink any hopes of getting tenure. However, good teaching is not generally rewarded with tenure. Hence, aspire to be an OK teacher who gets close to average or above Department average ratings, but not any more. The time you save by being an OK teacher should be utilized for research, including paper and proposal writing, and working with your graduate students to make them independent researchers; note that independent graduate researchers are like a multiplier to your research productivity.
It is usually easier to teach core (mandatory) classes with well-established textbooks. These textbooks help immensely in creating notes for teaching and questions/answer keys that can be used for setting up homework and exams. Your goal is to put some effort into teaching the course the first time and then try to use that momentum to teach it again with minimal time and effort. Thus, it’s important that you teach the course a couple of times to justify the effort it took to create the course. It takes me 10 hours per week to prepare and teach a new course. This includes the time it takes to learn the material and prepare the homework. But once done, it takes me only 5-10 minutes to be ready to teach the lecture material the next time.
Teaching graduate courses and technical electives in your field of expertise can be gratifying. It can also help to train the students on the research skills needed to be successful in your lab. But this should be done later in your tenure years, as it can be significantly time-consuming. Courses with a lab component can be particularly challenging, and if you have to develop labs as part of the course, that can be a whole semester lost to teaching. Be wary of such commitments. All that said, I did develop a new course on Mechatronics with a lab component in my first year on my first tenure track job. I had no choice because I was hired to teach that course, and the lab part of the course was in really bad shape. Since then, I have taught it multiple times and also added more labs. You can see it here https://tiny.cc/mechatronix.
You can expect to teach about 3 (2 courses per year workload) to 5 (4 courses per year workload) new courses during your tenure track years. Generally, one of these courses will be a technical elective in your field of expertise. Try to stagger these courses so that you are taking up teaching a new course every year instead of every semester. When teaching the course for the very first time, try to meet the minimum requirements; you can always up the ante as you teach it the second and third time. Once you develop notes for a new course, try to teach it as many times as you can to save time. In my first tenure track job, I taught 4 new courses. In my second tenure track job, I taught 7 new courses, but 3 of them were already developed during my first tenure track job. I also had ample experience teaching new courses that I ventured to record and make my courses freely available on the web: http://tiny.cc/educate.
One of the most time-consuming and least enjoyable aspects of teaching is grading. It’s best to get graders or teaching assistants to help with them. If possible, check if the textbook publisher has computer-generated problems that are automatically graded by software. There are also automated grading software such as https://gradescope.com/ that enable efficient grading and seem to be available in many Universities free of cost. This software works best with multiple-choice questions and, more generally, where students submit the final answer in a box that can be read using OCR and graded for accuracy. Once graded, the scores can be transferred to your course management tools (e.g., Blackboard) with a few clicks. It’s only most recently that I have started to capitalize on this tool to assign multiple-choice questions and put text boxes for students to input their answers. This has cut down grading time substantially. To give you an idea, check out this video at Time 2min 09 seconds https://youtu.be/I7o0hyhp4WY?si=jvtHEnY05thrmAqi&t=129.
The easiest way to get a poor rating (and many instructors make this mistake) is not having clear grading rubrics or not following the grading rubrics. Use the syllabus to set up clear rubrics for grading (e.g., 20% for homework, 40% for project, and 40% for exams) and indicate in detail your class policies for each of these items, such as due dates for homework, project expectations, missed exam policy, etc. Post the syllabus in a prominent place where students can download and read it. This is usually a learning management software, such as Blackboard or Canvas, for most universities. At any cost, don’t change the rubrics midway in the course, but follow them closely. Don’t introduce a different grading system or cancel exams. It will not help. If you anticipate changing anything, put a clause in the syllabus that gives you the authority to change, but this practice is best avoided. The only time I had to make major changes was during COVID, but other than that, I have stuck to the rubrics I set in the syllabus at the beginning of the semester.
11. Service: All faculty members are supposed to do some service toward their community and school. However, as a tenure-track faculty, you are often given a role to serve on a Department committee. If you have a choice, find a committee that does as little work as possible. One example is the seminar committee, whose job is to solicit seminar speakers from faculty and coordinate the visit. Another one is the awards committee, where your job is to meet at the end of the semester or year to decide who will get the teaching/, research, and/or service awards. It is highly advisable to avoid being on time-consuming committees such as undergraduate/graduate committees or accreditation committees.
You are also expected to do some service toward your research community, such as reviewing papers, serving on review panels, or serving as a session chair for a conference. These are usually more enjoyable as they are related to one’s profession and can help you network in your research community.
In my first TT job, where we were a small Department of 25 faculty members, we were required to be on 2 Department committees. I served on a combination of search committees, seminar committee, accreditation committee, and faculty advisor for a student org. In my second TT job, where we were a relatively larger Department of 40+ faculty, I was expected to serve on a single committee, the UG recruitment committee, first as a member and then as a chair. The work I did for this committee also resonated with my research on using robotics to recruit and train students, so it was a good fit in spite of the relatively more work that was expected of me. I also served as the faculty advisor for a student org involved with robotics, again, a role that is closely connected to my research on robotics I served on multiple National Science Foundation (NSF) proposal panels and NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF-GRFP) through the 11 years I was a tenure-track professor, thus helping me to learn how research and graduate student proposals are reviewed and funded. I was also the Associate Editor for two of the biggest IEEE robotics conferences for most of these years, and for an ASME journal for 3 years. Though I reviewed almost 20-30 papers every year in the first 8 years, I have since reduced these reviews to almost negligible as I was closer to earning tenure. I also stopped serving as an Associate Editor once I submitted my package, and was instead recommended by a former PhD student to that role.
12. Writing recommendation letters for students: One of your responsibilities is to write letters of recommendation for students who took your courses or worked with you on research and/or thesis. It is up to you to agree or disagree to write such letters. I usually don’t say ‘No’ to any student who did reasonably well in one of the courses with me and who asks me for a letter. A recommendation letter needs to be on the Department/College/University letterhead and needs your signature. The body contains a generic statement about the nature of your recommendation (strong/not strong), a paragraph introducing you (or you could make this a footer on the last page), and 2 or 3 paragraphs about the person for whom you are writing the letter.
These letters can become a time sink. But here are some general ideas that might help you speed up the process of writing these letters. I save all my letters in folders (e.g., internship, graduate studies, postdoc, jobs) so that I can reuse parts of the letters. For students (graduate and undergraduate) who have just had a class with me and did reasonably well, the letters are short. These don’t take much time to write. For students who have been involved in a more intense research experience with me, the letter is more detailed with concrete examples on how their work is novel and/or interesting. If you can’t say anything good about the student, you should refrain from writing the letter.
Ask your colleagues to give you the letterhead they use for recommendation letters. You can then customize it as needed (e.g., some headers might require you to add your contact details). You should also have a soft copy of your signature that you can embed in the letter without having the need to print it out and then sign it by hand. Avoid sending the letter to the students, but directly submit it to the admission portal (for grad applications) or the contact person (for postdoc applications and internships).
13. Letter writers for your tenure: At the start of the summer of Year 4, you will have to give the names of potential letters for your tenure application. Ideally, you should give about 3 to 5 potential letter writers. It’s a good idea to email these people and ask them if they would be comfortable writing a letter for you before you give their names. The Department head will only pick 2 or 3 from your list, but will seek 2 or 3 additional letter writers in your research area. In my case, I emailed 6 full professors to see if they would be willing to write me a tenure letter. Two of them had other obligations that summer, and they declined. The remaining 4 agreed, and I sent out their names to the Department head while indicating the names of the other 2 who had declined based on other commitments.
These letter writers have to be full professors in schools that have a reputation as strong as your current school or better. However, these people cannot be your advisors and co-authors on papers or proposals. Associate professors and senior personnel in industry are generally not recommended. Also, full professors in a different country (even if the University there is ranked higher than yours) is not recommended because they may not be aware of the norms and criteria in your school/country for tenure. You can also indicate people who should not write letters for your tenure case; this is optional. These could be people who have strong disagreements with your work or have personal biases.
The Department head will send your CV and research/teaching/service statements by early summer. The letter writers (if they accept) will be expected to submit their letters by the end of Summer or early Fall.
During your 5 years, you should try to find letter writers who can vouch for you. There are a couple of ways of finding full professors: introduce yourself to them at conferences, invite them to your school to give a seminar, and organize workshops with them. Also, do not submit papers or proposals with potential letter writers because that would disqualify them from writing a letter for you. Almost all of my 6 potential letter writers, except one, knew me from my PhD days through conferences. So I did not have a need to invite full Professors to give a seminar at my school. I used the seminar opportunity to call Assistant Professors who worked in similar areas to learn more about their research and introduce them to the students in my lab.
14. Managing startup/grant monies and setting up the lab: Besides running your research group, you have the important task of continuing to use your startup/grant monies to pay for students and buy equipment. I highly recommend that you never delegate this activity to anyone, as poor management of funds can lead to catastrophic effects on your ability to support the research activities in your lab.
There are many aspects of purchasing that you will learn as you work with the system. Here are a few tips from my experiences working in two public Universities.
If you have major equipment which is in excess of $100,000 then you might have to go through many levels of approval. For a public institution, you might have to go through a bidding process where companies can bid for providing the equipment, or you might need to justify why your chosen supplier is the most cost-effective supplier. All these things take time, usually 6 months or more.
If you are into computational work, I highly recommend staggering the purchase of computers/graphical processing units, other electronics, over the period of a few years to avoid having outdated computing resources.
Most Universities are non-profit and hence tax-exempt. That means they do not pay taxes on purchases. There is a tax-exempt form that can be used to purchase items without paying taxes. You can use this form if you are buying something for the lab and want to get reimbursed (e.g., lunch with a seminar speaker). If you don’t use this form to get tax-exemption, you may not be able to get reimbursed for the taxes. For low-priced items, I don’t bother with the tax exemption form, just absorb the taxes myself.
The startup money usually has an expiry period (usually 3 to 4 years from year 1), so you want to factor that in while making purchases.
When you have funded grants, a part of the overhead comes back to you via the Indirect Cost Recovery (ICR). The money is not a lot since it comes primarily from a slice of the overhead on funded grants. This could be something like 2% - 5% of the overhead. It’s not a lot of money unless you have really big grants. This money never expires. You can use this for any purchases, including equipment, graduate support, and summer salary. In my opinion, it goes the longest way if you use it for equipment, as that has no taxes, then graduate support, and finally your salary, as the taxes for graduate students are a lot less than your salary.
Sometimes the ICR can be supplemented by other means; for instance, in my second TT school, they regularly gave ICR funds for mentoring senior design and hosting freshmen interns in the lab during summer. There was also one time I could get one month’s salary equivalent money deposited in my ICR for teaching an extra course. Since the money never expires, it is a great way of “saving for a rainy day”.
Certain funds, such as the NSF supplement called research experiences for undergraduates (REU), can only be used to fund undergraduates who are US citizens or US permanent residents.
As items are brought, they will get lost and/or misplaced in your lab. I keep track of all items (ever) purchased in a simple text file so that even if the lab is disorganized, I can still check my notes to see if an item was ever purchased. I also recommend a label maker to mark out important items, especially chargers and batteries, which, if swapped, can have a catastrophic effect if used to power the incorrect device.
I collect a list of items to be ordered based on the supplier over time. Then I batch order them. This saves shipping costs, as many vendors will offer free shipping if your orders are above a certain $ threshold.
15. Running the research lab: Running a research lab has its own challenges. You have to meet with students at least once per week to assess their progress and to provide feedback. Some people prefer a one-on-one meeting while others prefer a group meeting. We use the latter. We have a shared Google Slides show, one for each week. Each student puts slides that talk about the work they did in the last week and the work they plan to do in the next week. The online nature of the slideshow enables us to do a virtual or in-person meeting and/or record the meeting if needed. During the meeting, one person (usually the PI) opens the slideshow and shares it with others using screenshare. The students present their work one after the other, and the listeners give comments. The meeting has a variable end time that depends on when all the students are done with their presentations. This ensures that everybody has enough time to present their work, and we are not rushed for time. The virtue of having a group meeting is that if one student is stuck, it is possible to give collective feedback that is often better than that provided by a single person, the PI. The students have also found that forcing them to put their ideas on a slideshow every week helps them to prepare for presentations as they can recycle the slides and/or get practice. Students often volunteer to give a practice talk before a conference and/or thesis presentation.
The group meeting is the single most important tool that has helped me keep my lab productive. Besides research projects, we also talk about other important items such as writing and reading papers, lining up conference papers/deadlines, tools to help productivity, etc. Since the lab meeting is important, we never cancel it, but move it a day early or back as needed. But we do break for 2 weeks at the end of the year (i.e., in December). I avoid keeping the lab meeting on Mon or Fri of the semester because those days are usually holidays if it is a long weekend.
We have also found that it is important to have an instant messaging service for the lab. This is often used as a means for asking others for help (e.g., I cannot find the drill in the lab or I need a certain special wire, do we have it in the lab?) to sharing interesting ideas and resources. We have tried using the free version of Slack, but it deletes all history after 90 days. We have moved to Microsoft Teams, which is provided for free by the University. We can now use many of the Teams features, such as Meetings, Calendar, and integration with online Excel, to manage the lab meetings.
Maintaining the lab research website is very important, in my opinion. It is a conduit for prospective students, graduate or undergraduate, to scroll through your work and understand projects done in your lab. You can check my lab website here: https://tiny.cc/ramlab. Note that I am using a URL shortener. The advantage of the shortened link is that if I change the domain of the website, I can change the underlying link without having to change the shortened URL. If you skim my lab website, you will see that I keep track of publications, funding, and lab alumni. I think these are the three most important items on a lab website. I also have a “videos” page that has lots of research outputs in terms of videos. This eye candy helps to attract new students by giving them visual information that is easy to process. I update the website about 3 times per year, once after each term, Fall, Spring, and Summer. This is the reason why I don’t have a “News” page, which needs constant updating. I maintain an “undergraduate alumni” page on which I have put reports/code links with the specific research experience (e.g., Senior Design, Undergraduate Research). This kind of information sharing helps future students who might want to understand the type of projects done in the lab. The “Contact” page not only gives the address to my lab, but also parking and navigation information. This is very helpful if you want to tell a visitor where you are located without the need to type it out every single time.
16. Curriculum Vitae (CV): You should strive to keep your CV up-to-date. This is the single most important document that will help you track your important achievements. The CV is sent out to your letter writers, and it might also be used in tenure decisions by your Department/College/University. The CV, if structured properly, can dramatically help the letter writers to write compelling letters and the committee members to vote in support of granting you tenure. Besides the standard experience/education items, you can make it easier for them by including items that they can use to check off on the list of rubrics to earn tenure that I described earlier. Here are some of the important considerations.
Publications should be clearly demarcated as “During TT” and “Before TT” with numbering starting with the items “During TT”. That way, it is easier to just count the number of publications.
Publications with students should be easy to distinguish. You can underline your graduate/undergraduate students in the publication list to make this point very clear. The committees are looking to see if you have publications with your own students. This indicates that you are training them well.
At the top of the grants section, indicate the total money that you raised.
For grants that were funded, clearly mark your role (PI, co-PI, senior personnel), agency, years, total dollar amount, and dollar amount attributed to you (i.e., your share).
Put forth all submitted proposals that were not funded in a separate heading to show your effort.
Include a section on students trained on research, including graduate and undergraduate students.
List all your courses, ideally by semester or year. Optionally add your class rating.
List all service items, including committees served, paper and panel reviews done, workshop organized, sessions chaired, etc.
Do not have a substantial number of papers with senior collaborators. It will look like the papers were attributed to the senior author. The majority of the papers have either a single author or share authorship with your undergraduate or graduate students. It looks great if your student is the first author and you are the last one. Some faculty want to be corresponding authors, but I don’t insist on being the corresponding author unless I have done most of the work.
Do not aim only for the best journals in your field. It’s best to submit to a variety of journals that accept different quality of papers and with different acceptance rates.
Do not stop writing and submitting proposals even if you get a proposal accepted early in your tenure clock.
Do not let graduate students manage the spending on your grants or startup. It’s your money and not theirs, and there is no guarantee that they will do a good job on it.
Do not piss off staff members in your Department/College. Many are underpaid and overworked, and pissing them off won’t help but hurt you.
Avoid submitting equipment grants as a PI unless you have to. Such proposals take a lot of time, and they don’t really get you credit as much as a research grant.
Avoid submitting multi-university multi-PI grants as a PI. These can be very time-consuming unless you have the support structure to get the required letters of support.
Avoid changing policies, especially grading rubrics, mid-semester. Students don’t like this, and it will lead to poor reviews.
Do not teach summer classes. Instead, focus on your research.
Do not write a textbook. It’s a time sink.
Do not teach a course where you are developing an experimental lab. It’s a time sink.
Do not take on any service commitment that requires you to put a few hours of work every week. Any service should be limited to 2-3 meetings in a semester.
Do not be the lead organizer of a conference. These things drain your mental and physical resources and can lead to almost a semester or two of unproductivity which can be catastrophic for your tenure.
Avoid large meetings such as those at the College and University level. They are usually not that informative.
Stay away from Department politics. Be neutral.
18. List of things that might help you become more productive:
Try to get a senior faculty member, either an associate or a full professor, to mentor you; some Departments/schools have a mentorship program. The mentor should be interested in your success and be available to provide you with sound advice. Use the services of the mentor when confounded with problems; it will save you a lot of time.
You could also have a mentor for research and another one for teaching. It’s up to you. Most senior faculty are happy to advise and help. Just ask for their advice.
Give students feedback on their progress as often as needed to make them responsible and productive. Encourage openness and instill an atmosphere of responsibility and care. There should not be politics or favoritism in the lab at any cost (e.g., treat undergraduates with the same respect as graduate students)
Try to get leverage as much as you can; this is something that helps you to be more productive without requiring substantial efforts. If you have a collaborator and you split the work of writing papers and proposals, you have 2x the number of papers and proposals that you would normally have. If you are able to repurpose a proposal idea by changing the application or methods slightly, that gives you leverage. If you can teach the same course a couple of times, that is a good leverage, and so on.
Create templates for writing, drawing, and presentations. For example, in my work, I have to draw schematics with things such as the center of mass, pin joints. I have created a template of all such objects in a drawing software called Adobe Illustrator, which I can simply copy and paste to make new figures. For creating plots, I have written code that puts out the x-y-label, legend, and line type, so I have to do minimal post-processing.
Keep a list of conferences with deadlines and share with your research group. If needed, get a student to keep this list up-to-date.
Reuse your figures from papers/proposals. Reuse course material. Reuse question banks. Do not reinvent the wheel.
Using a slideshow made in Microsoft PowerPoint is a great way of teaching that reduces preparation time. But many students don’t like this approach unless you are solving problems by hand on the PowerPoint. Another popular approach is to use the whiteboard or blackboard. With this approach it is next to impossible to post lecture notes after class. I use the computer Microsoft Surface Pro, which has a touchscreen and lets me write with a pen. I use Microsoft OneNote software to write my notes in real-time in class. I am able to output this as a PDF and post it after class. With Microsoft OneNote, I am able to include figures/photos/tables into my presentation. Since I use a computer, I am also able to show videos and other multimedia in class. I also like that I am able to face the class when writing on a computer versus facing a whiteboard.
Use tools such as Grammarly (https://app.grammarly.com/apps) to do a Grammar check on your writing, especially your proposals and papers. The free version is adequate.
If something is important for success and you lack it, do a little of it every day. Small efforts add up to big results. For example, I had no grants in year 1. So in year 2, I spent 1 hour writing a little bit of a proposal every day. I was awarded 3 grants, one of which was a federal grant in that year.
Don’t carry paper copies of anything. Just scan it, mail it to yourself with keywords, and shred the paper.
Name your lab to reflect the work your lab does. For example, my lab is called Robotics and Motion Lab because I want it to represent our work in developing techniques to make robots move around. The name is generic enough that I could do robot construction or robot control, yet not change the name Don’t add the University to the lab name (e.g., UIC Robotics and Motion Lab is a No-No) because you may change affiliation, which means that you might need to change its name.
Maintain a functioning website that is easy to update. I prefer creating a website with HTML/CSS over no-code websites such as Wix, Squarespace, because the former tend to be portable. I also prefer hosting my website on a separate domain (I use GitHub, which is free) and not on the University domain, because that way, if I move institutes, I don’t have to port the website over.
Sign up to serve as a proposer reviewer. This will help your own grant writing process. To get started, email program managers with your CV.
Sign up for Google Alerts (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_alerts?view_op=list_alerts&hl=en) to be updated with papers in your field. These are sent to your email every few days and help you stay in touch with the latest papers in your field.
Sign up for proposal alerts. These are curated lists that may be available through your University or other services such as the Pivot tool.
If you get a chance to invite seminar speakers, use this opportunity to invite big shots in your field (letter writers) or people who you would want to network with (collaborators). This is a great way of building your network on the Department’s dime.
Learn touch typing. It helps to speed up writing proposals and papers.
Use a second monitor to increase the visual space available on your computer. It can boost productivity.
Use AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini to brainstorm ideas. Be careful with such tools if using them to write proposals and papers, as they may sound robotic and/or give incorrect information. Never use these tools for reviewing proposals and papers; it violates the data privacy policies of the review process.
Use a calendar to keep track of appointments and the classroom schedule. Set up the events in the calendars such that you get reminders before things are due.
Invest in a label maker for the lab; put labels on all equipment. Invest in a fridge, microwave, coffee maker, and printer for the lab; these are indispensable and will make your student workers happy and productive.
You will have to sign forms that are emailed to you. Learn how to e-sign them. I used the software “preview” on a Mac that lets me sign these based on a stored signature. There is probably something similar for Adobe, which is the most common software for PDFs.
Many Universities will let you print business cards. Use this service. Carry these cards around with you and give them out to colleagues, potential collaborators, prospective graduate or undergraduate students as the need arises.
Serve as a committee member for other students’ PhD/Master’s Theses when requested, even if your contributions to the thesis are minimal or non-existent. That way, other faculty will return the favor and serve on the thesis committee of your students.
Auto direct phone calls from your office number to your cell phone. That way, you won’t miss important calls just because you are out of your office.
19. Some non-academic items that you might need to consider:
If you are on a Visa and need to get permanent residency/citizenship in order to succeed, prioritize the process early in your career.
Your school will probably have a 401K or retirement plan. Usually, the plan matches your contribution to a certain percentage. For example, the University will match the first 5% that you put into the fund. It is always a good idea to contribute at least 5% of your income to get the full match.
The University will provide health / dental / vision insurance coverage at a discounted rate by contributing a major share of the expenses. For example, if the cost of insurance per month is $2000, it is not uncommon for the University to pay between 50 - 75% of the expense. If your spouse does not have competitive coverage, you can sign up your family on your insurance.
The University will provide supplemental insurance, such as life insurance and disability insurance. If you have a family to support, it might be best to max out these insurances.
If you have little ones who go to day care/summer camps, you can sign up for a Dependent care flexible spending account, which gives you about $5000 per year pre-tax to pay toward day care/summer camp. Normally, you will pay out of pocket for the service and get reimbursed for expenses.
For University monthly services like gym membership and parking, you can do a paycheck deduction instead of paying using a credit/debit card or bank account. One advantage of doing this is that you might be able to pay pre-tax, saving you some money every month.
If you have a two-body problem or want a better faculty job/salary, you might have to go on the job market. In such a scenario, having marketable skills (e.g., independence in research publication) and grants that can move with you are very helpful. However, note that going on the job market can be physically very draining, and this will affect your productivity.
20. After earning tenure: You have not earned tenure till you get an official letter to that effect from the highest person in the University system, the Chancellor or the President. Also, your appointment as tenured Associate Professor does not start till the beginning of the academic year of Fall of year 7, so you might factor that in before announcing it to the world and updating your CV/profile on LinkedIn, etc. For most schools, earning tenure means you have a job for life; you cannot be fired unless the school goes south and closes down or if you personally do something that violates the policies of the University. Some of the things that open up for you are:
Pursue new directions of research and/or risky projects.
Pursue entrepreneurship
Develop and teach new courses or write a textbook.
Take a sabbatical leave for a semester or a year.
Say ‘NO’ to service commitments that don’t help your career.
At this point, you want to re-evaluate yourself. Some faculty will give up on research and choose to remain as tenured Associate Professors. Unfortunately, such professors are always given the most hated service jobs, such as chairing the accreditation committee, which has a lot of work. If you like this path, then go for it. If not, continue working hard like you did for your tenure and get promoted to a full professor in a couple of years; it’s worth it.
Closing remark: Succeeding on a tenure track is not as hard as it seems. Once you know the rubrics and the timeline, you can create and follow a reasonable work plan. It is important that you don’t burn out during the tenure track years because you have to continue working with the same focus toward a full professorship. Take the time to wind down and recharge yourself every day/week. Focus on the journey, enjoy it, and the destination will unfold on its own.