How to get tenure*

C. Titus Brown

UC Davis

* While doing open science

Hashtag: #opencon

Caveats and Disclaimers

• Research intensive (R1) in the USA

Details are particular to

• College of Engineering / Computer Science

• College of Natural Sciences / Microbiology(every dept / college has its own culture)

• My life and research :)

Many ~80% true statements

Y1

Y2

File for reappointment

Receive reappointment

File for tenure

Y3

Y4

Y5

Y6

Y7

Receive tenure (?)

Default Asst Prof timeline

2008

2009

File for reappointment

Receive reappointment

Take position at UC Davis;apply for tenure.

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

Receive tenure

(Extension: Jessie born)

Apply for jobs

My Asst Prof timeline

What did I do for 7 years?

60% “scholarship”

30% teaching

10% service

(I think this is a typical split for R1)

(But virtually nobody cares about the 40%)

I gave talks.

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

Presentations 0 3 4 7 22 11 23(Invited) 0 1 3 6 21 11 23

I wrote (some) papers.

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

Research papers 1 1 0 1 1 10 2(Senior author) 0 0 0 0 1 0 2

I wrote grants.

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

Grants / applied for 4 5 9 6 15 3 ?(Primary author) 1 1 1.5 1 5 0.3 1(Received) 1 2 1 1 5 0 1

I worked with students & postdocs.

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

Postdocs 1 2 2 3 2 1 1

PhD students 2 4 5 6 6 5 5PhD committee memberships ?? ?? ?? 18 15 10 10

I taught classes.

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

Courses 1 2 2 1 2 2 1Contact hours 96 153 150 60 93 180 150

Let’s revisit that…

I gave talks.

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

Presentations 0 3 4 7 22 11 23(Invited) 0 1 3 6 21 11 23

This is flat out insanity

I wrote (some) papers.

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

Research papers 1 1 0 1 1 10 2(Senior author) 0 0 0 0 1 0 2

Papers… papers… wait, I’m supposed to write them?

I wrote grants.

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

Grants / applied for 4 5 9 6 15 3 ?(Primary author) 1 1 1.5 1 5 0.3 1(Received) 1 2 1 1 5 0 1

This is also flat out insanity(yet it is what I think must be done today)

Three big grants.

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

Big USDA grant

NIH R01

Moore DDD Investigator grant

I worked with students & postdocs.

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

Postdocs 1 2 2 3 2 1 1

PhD students 2 4 5 6 6 5 5PhD committee memberships ?? ?? ?? 18 15 10 10

Kind of crazy, but kind of OK.Ends of terms (defense/committee deadlines) were HORRIBLE.

I taught classes.

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

Courses 1 2 2 1 2 2 1Contact hours 96 153 150 60 93 180 150

This is actually all pretty reasonable…

Non-standard career actions

1. Training workshops.

2. Blogging.

3. khmer, an openly developed software project.

I made a very early decision to be “open” in both the physics model (preprints) and OSS

model (source code, development, etc.)

“Analyzing Next-Generation Sequencing Data” – 2 week summer

workshop

2010 2011 2012 2013 2014Workshop applicants 33 133 170 210 180

Blogging

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014Blog posts 52 59 32 15 61 73 69

I wrote a number of long, in-depth blog posts;Some of them were in depth on my research.

In 2009, Jared Simpson tweeted: “With blog posts like this, who needspapers?” – very encouraging.

All papers posted as preprints.

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

First preprint (Pell et al., 2012)

Second preprint (Brown et al., 2012)

Third and fourth preprints

(Howe et al., 2014; Zhang et al., 2014)

More – reasonably important papers

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

Pell et al, 2012 (73 cit)

Brown et al., 2012, unpub (52 cit)

Howe et al, 2014 (22 cit)

Zhang et al., 2014 (3 cit)

=> Very non-linear leveling up!?

In 2014:

• 3 keynote talks, 1 Gordon Conference invitation;• Job offer;• Moore Data-Driven Discovery Investigator grant;• Tenure;

(Yeah, 2014 was a good year, professionally..)

Note: expectations are now scarily high.(Mmmh, 1%-er problems, I know…)

Moving to a new job: Jan 2015.

• For family reasons, applied for ~6 faculty positions in fall 2013. Some R1, some second-tier/research.

• All 6 places were good places for us to live; fallback plan was to apply more broadly in 2014 as I was going up for tenure.

• Also looked at ~3 non-academic “open science”/data science positions.

• One faculty interview, one job offer, one job acceptance.

Miscellaneous observations

Personal opinions.

Happy to kibbitz about them on Twitter.

(May ignore/block combative schmucks.)

Luck plays a huge part in this.

• Getting position in the first place;

• Hiring productive people;

• Picking tractable research problems;

• Hitting the right grant program(s) at the right time;

• Choice of subject, timing of big grant programs;

• No personal illness or financial problems.

Corollary: don’t take an assistant professor job.

(Or at least, don’t have taken one three years ago…)

• The funding situation is horrible, and we are in a lag time between a wave of decreased funding and the adjustment of chair/dean expectations.

• So, if you take a faculty position, there are good reasons you might “fail” that have nothing to do with you, the quality of your research, or the quality of your students. (You will know which it is, because your colleagues will tell you.)

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/07/21/the-awesomest-7-year-postdoc-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-tenure-track-faculty-life/

Pursue your passion(s).

• You can’t write 5+ grants a year without somethingunreasonable driving you!

• That something may not be getting a high profile paper, or amassing piles of cash (I know, crazy!)

• All of your colleagues understand this.

• Pursue what makes you happy and excited to be there.

• But don’t ignore the bottom line, either: grants and pubs.

Investigate alternatives

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

Applied for job outside academia (no offer)

Recruited for faculty position (no offer)

Investigated non-faculty jobs

Build a broad mentoring network.

• Find career mentors who align with your personality (Jim Tiedje, Weiming Li)

• Find “discipline” mentors who are willing to put up with Type-A Assistant Prof energy (Hans Cheng, Bill Punch, Rich Enbody, David Arnosti)

• Chat regularly with super-smart people outside your immediate discipline (Rich Lenski, Erik Goodman)

• Have friends who will put up with your whining (Charles Ofria, Chris Adami)

Your online colleagues may be your best research colleagues.

• I had very few computational science colleagues, and very few open source/open science colleagues, at MSU.

• Twitter, blogging, and the Software Carpentry community were incredibly important avenues of support!

Note: two of my rec letter writers (Ewan Birney and Jonathan Eisen) I know almost entirely from

online/e-mail conversations!

Find low cost ways of being open

• Doing a paper review? Blog the top few overview paragraphs once the papers is out.

• Attending a conference? Take 15 minutes during a boring talk to write up a few exciting talks.

• Live-tweet talks.

• Work reproducibility, open data, open source into your daily workflow.

Build a positive reputation outside of your university.

• You can be the best liked and most respected person at your university…

• …but come tenure time, that simply will not matter.

• It also doesn’t matter for grants, papers, or invitations.

(Note: Internal grants don’t count for anything.)

Corollary: Ignore admin advice.

• Administrators (Chairs, Deans, etc.) are arbiters of local evaluation. They generally do not pay much regular attention beyond your stats.

• As we all know, many of these stats are silly and/or have a high latency (3-5 years for a paper to accrue citations!)

• …but you’d better have a damned good story when they ask what you’ve been up to.

Note, you might not want to take this advice; I mismanaged my relationship with administrators at MSU :)

Don’t “compete” head-on with others.

• You are not going to regularly get high profile papers (C-N-S, or whatever).

• You are not going to outcompete Dr. Big Shot in Overcrowded Field, and Dr. Big Shot is not going to “make space for you.”

• You do have the freedom, and energy, and perspective, to do/try different things. Do something that will make you stand out.*

* Yes, easier said than done.

Tackle hard problems & think as deeply as you can.

(Your research should have a “bus factor” of 1.)

• “Intellectual impact” is absolutely key for tenure letters.

• No one will reward you for publishing a bunch of shallow papers, even though it will look good on your annual reports.

• …despite that, this is the advice you will essentially get from some administrators…

(This is the most important piece of advice I give to postdocs and assistant professors.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

Serve on hiring committees

• I helped hire two faculty in CSE in 2013/2014!

• Tremendously valuable experience – so this is what other packets, research statements, CVs, recommendation letters, etc. look like!

• “Straight talk” in hiring committee is a proxy for tenure committees – “this person not doing deep work”, or “why this person leaving their current position?”

Plan to apply for jobs.

• You have no leverage with respect to tenure without another job offer. Period, full stop, end of sentence.

• If you cannot compete well for a job at an equal or better department, then something has gone wrong (bad aim or failure to execute). (Note, doesn’t mean getting another job, just “are you competitive?”)

• Applying for jobs is a LARGE investment of energy, but oddly worth it (and dovetails nicely with tenure package).– What have I done so far?– What do I want to do going forward?

See my asst prof vs assoc prof research and teaching statements.

Work-life balance.

(I did not do this well, needless to say.)

• Wife (2004), two daughters (2007 and 2010).

• My wife was tremendously supportive, at expense of her own academic career (along with other things)

• Main rule: when I was home and kids were awake, NO WORK.

YMMV, but this is something to continually reevaluate.

Work-life balance.

Also, exercise and “fun” (trash) reading.

Also, passion for things other than work.

(If there is one thing I could change, I would have spent more time with my kids; remember, no one

ever said, “man, I wished I’d written one more grant app” on their deathbed.)

None of your administrators/committees care about

“open”.• …but my research active colleagues mostly

appreciated “why”, if not “how”.

• Contra, no significant negative consequences of being open, because (in the end) I met traditional metrics (papers, grants, intellectual contrib).

• Had I not met traditional metrics, I would be out of a job.

Contra: being open can help you with traditional metrics!

• Training, blogging, preprints, open source all led to many connections.

• Workshop attendees recommended me as speaker;

• Blog followers recommended me as speaker;

• Preprints got my research out there earlier;

The secondary impact of openness: you can leverage network effects!

Caveats

• I’m a Methods guy; being open is a force-multiplier for methods.

• I’m in bioinformatics and genomics, which is super-important right now.

• I timed my career well! My faculty position started when Illumina GAII first came out (=> Big Data)

• I am a 3rd generation academic white guy, so I totally played on “easier mode”.

• Tenure extension was very nice but probably not essential.

Caveats to the caveats.

• Computational methods are generally not respected in biology.

• Switched fields – I did not work on most of what I work on now, prior to becoming faculty.

• Absolutely no grad or postdoc advisor support. Zip, zilch, none – no contact after ~2009.

• Split department/college (65% CSE/Egr, 35% Micro/CNS). Don’t do this.

The myth of exceptionalism

“Well, sure, that’s fine for you and Ethan, but I couldn’t get away with that.”

Yeah, well, I didn’t know if I could, either :)

• In some ways, I’ve been a piss poor prof. (See Ethan White for someone who did this all before me, and better.)

• I’ve also been extremely lucky with timing (rise of bioinformatics, rise of data science, rise of open.)

• I think we mostly need better mentoring on what paths work for open science, and we need better incentives. “Early adopter” benefits will eventually go away.

Conclusions

• Fewer than 20% of the slides in this talk have anything to do with being open!

• You don’t have to be open to get tenure.

• Grants and papers and intellectual impact are all necessary for tenure.

• Good science is the only solid foundation for grants, papers, and impact.

• Open science can be viewed as one way to market your intellectual impact.

Looking forward => Assoc Prof.

• Switching to yet another new field – VetMed!

• Being interested in openness, training, (anti-)sexism, and diversity has led to some greatapplicants for my lab.

• Passion beyond “get tenure” gives me a long-term motivation.

http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Are-Associate-Professors/132071/

Looking forward => Assoc Prof.

Interested in using bottom-up approaches, adapted from open source community, to

enable change in:

1. How scientific impact is measured.

2. How computational science is viewed.

3. How biology training is done.

Questions? Thoughts?

• This is a very polemic take on being a tenure-track scientist in academia, but I think it’s not too far off base. Pushback & other experiences welcome!

• Every situation is different and you need to strategize about your situation and your incentives regularly.

• Strongly consider fleeing academia for greener pastures (better paid, more respect, less self-importance, better work-life balance).

ctbrown@ucdavis.edu / @ctitusbrown