Here is what I am going to talk about slide 1. The first three bullets are "pre jobs". We'll talk about optimizing your vita, how people go about recruiting, and what kind of offer you should ask for. This is something that I think women generally don't spend much time thinking about. And we'll talk about what you should do once you get a job. We will talk about real life at the end.
Ok, let's talk about getting the job for those of you who are grad students. What's a good vita? slide 2 This will vary from school to school as will all this information, but there are a lot of things that people look at in your vita. Graduate students have a tendency to think "Well, if I do a really great thesis, that will be really important." This is true, but there are a lot of other factors that recruitment committees will look at. One of the things they'll look at is what school you come from and how famous your advisor is. These things will be relatively important. If you come from a top school with a relatively good advisor, that will count in your favor. Of course if you pick a Turing Award winner for your advisor, remember that that Turing Award winner will also compare you when they write you letters of recommendation to all their other students. Pick an advisor who is a good in their area and a good mentor. Try hard to really impress that advisor. Make sure that they can write you a really good letter because those letters will count a lot.
Another thing that recruitment committees will look at of course is how good is your thesis. They will look at your resume and try to decide how many and what quality are your publications. There has been a tremendous amount of inflation on publications. I think that when many of us got out of school, people had maybe one or two publications. We now typically see vitas with a half dozen or more publications in good conferences and refereed journals. Sometimes we see vitas with a dozen publications! Graduate students are having to write a lot of stuff. One thing you should think about as you go through graduate school is to try to get out papers every year. And if you can do that, and if they are good papers, you can go to conferences and give talks and start letting people know who you are. That will really help you in getting a job. So think about writing papers, and write stuff up as you go along. Don't wait until your thesis is through to write papers.
Also, if you have any awards or special fellowships, that will help your vita. If you've been an IBM fellow, if you've worked at Xerox over the summer, if you've worked at other places, those are things that look good on your vita. And you should try to do that as you go along, so try to get on track even before you look for a job and these things will help you. People who know you will help you.
Sometimes it's helpful to be a target of opportunity for some departments and some years. That can really depend on timing. Maybe a department is getting a lot of pressure from the dean to hire minorities or women or something like that. Sometimes that's helpful for you too. There are some times when being a woman is helpful and many times when being a woman is not so helpful as you all probably know.
How do you try to optimize these factors? Given that you are already at the institution that you are at and you probably already have an advisor, what you want to try to do is optimize all the other factors you can here. Don't drop everything now and go to Berkeley and ask Dick Karp to be your advisor! Basically what you want to do is to get good publications, and make sure you have good letters. To optimize your letters, make sure that you letter-writers know something about you. Saying "I had Jane in class and she was the best student in class and she got an A+." is not an especially good letter. Saying "You know, Jane's come to me and she has talked about a bunch of research ideas, and there is real creativity here. She has done a lot of interesting work in field X." That's a good letter. These are the kinds of letters you want to try to cultivate.
So, what's the recruiting process? Well, the first thing you do is to send an application. We get hundreds of applications and most other schools will too. There has to be a way to differentiate them, and that's where you try to optimize your vita and all your other factors. A certain set of those applications will be followed up by requesting letters on them. Now one way you can get letters requested on you is to actually track your application at the school: Have your advisor or somebody you know at your institution call somebody else at University X and say "Gee, I have this good student who is applying. Can you check and see how that person is doing?" A lot of time if a faculty member walks in and says "I'd like to see some letters on this person.", your file will get through to the next level. So one thing you want to do is try to track your applications and get as many people at as many universities as you can kind of watching out for you. That helps a lot.
After your letters have been received, there will be a lot of discussion. Some programmatic needs will be discussed, some political maneuvering will happen; it's kind of a mystical process and either the recruitment chair or a committee or the whole department will decide on a group of people to interview. If you are one of those asked for an interview, then you actually have gotten through a fairly narrow bottleneck, because departments don't like to interview zillions of people. The most we're ever interviewed for multiple positions is 20 and that's a lot. Mostly it's 4 or 5 or 8 or something like that. I'll talk about the interview itself briefly in a moment. After the interview, there will be a lot of discussion. The outcome will be a result of how you did on the interview but also how everybody else did on their interview. Also a result of politics: the guys in VLSI will want a faculty member in VLSI and the guys in theory will want someone in theory. It may be relevant who was hired last year and whose "turn" it is this year. It may be hard to tell at this point what's going to go on, but if things go well, you'll get an offer. Then you start negotiating. We'll talk about that in a moment.
I'm going to talk only briefly about the interview slide 3. There is a wonderful summary on academic systers and Nancy Leveson promised me that if you wait for a week and ask her about it, then there will be a place from which you can actually FTP it.
Let me briefly go over a typical interview day. A typical day will be exhausting but it will also be fun, so get enough sleep and be prepared for it. Wear clothes that make you feel confident. First, you'll have breakfast with your host. There will be meetings, meetings, meetings, and more meetings. They will generally be from 30 to 60 minutes. You will meet with other faculty, you might meet with groups of students, you might meet with a dean, or you might not meet with a dean, you will have lunch with a group from your department. Your talk will be either in the morning or in the afternoon. There will be more meetings all around it, and then there will be dinner with a group from your department. So typically that's an exhausting day. There are some things you can do to make a good impression.
You should practice your talk at least three times in front of an audience. This is critical. The first time you give your talk, you should give it to your lab or seminar group or whatever, and they will give you lots of hopefully constructive comments. You should go back and completely redo your talk. Then you should find another lab group and give it to them. Then you should completely redo it again. I have a student who applied for a job at a small liberal arts college this year and there were 400 applicants for this job. We went through his interview talk four different times and by the fourth time it was a wonderful talk and he got the job. I was really really very pleased about that. The way the talk changed from the beginning to the end was significant. So get good feedback. The other thing doing your talk three or four times does, is it kind of puts it on automatic pilot. We all get nervous in front of an audience and knowing your talk well will help minimize the effect of your nervousness.
Another thing you should do is read up on the department you are going to visit and your potential colleagues. It is very important to know what they are doing and to think a little bit about where you are going to fit in. What they are going to do when they interview you is figure out where you would fit into the department, and the more champions you can make, the better off you are going to be during the discussion part.
You should be able to describe your research succinctly in about five minutes to people before their eyes start glazing over. Make it sound exciting and know what you are going to do after your thesis. You've done this wonderful piece of work and people say "What are you going to do next?" If you say, "Well, I don't know.", it doesn't make a good impression. Know your stuff.
You should be prepared to talk with all kinds of people and in fact you might ask to talk with the systems staff. These are people that you are going to be working closely with if you use equipment. It's nice to know the configuration before you get there. It's nice to know how the kind of equipment you are going to use will fit in, so talk to them.
When do you tell people about the two body problem? My feeling about assistant professor jobs is that it's probably best to mention it at the interview stage and not in the initial letter. I wouldn't say that for more senior people but I would say that at the assistant professor level because there are so many hoops you have to jump through that you don't want to be excluded from the pool even before you've gotten there. Wait until the interview and wait until the right time to mention the fact you have a partner who will also need a reasonable job. Sometime during the day you can say "Well you know I've got a partner in sociology and our first priority is to find jobs in the same place." (if it is). At some point you have to say something really, but I would say to wait until the right time.
If you have children or are planning on having children, you want to ask about daycares, benefits, parental leave, etc. Ask a person (a) who is likely to know about this and (b) with whom you feel comfortable asking these questions. For some people these are not very good questions to ask. So use your good judgement here.
It's actually illegal for us to ask you things about your marital status, children, etc. Some people may bring it up anyway because they are trying to be friendly and helpful. I sometimes bring it up with candidates saying "By the way, if you have children we have a really good daycare center at UCSD." You don't have to respond to these statements if you don't want to.
Let's see, you should look like you are interested in the job. I can't tell you how many candidates have come through who actually don't look like they are that interested. You know it's their ninth interview---Laughter---you know they are tired, they don't want to interview anymore, they don't want to talk to another person about their area. This is not good when we discuss these people. We say "Well you know so and so came through but I don't think they will really take a job here." If people think that, you are much less likely to get an offer.
And you actually do want to get an offer, you especially want to get your first offer. Once you get your first offer, you can call up the school you really want to go to and say "Well UCSD made me an offer. Are you guys going to make an offer anytime soon?". Sometimes you can leverage things a little bit. So there are lots of things to think about. As I said, get the systers summary and there is a lot of good advice in there about interviewing.
OK, so you've gotten through this hoop and the mystical discussion process has gone on and you finally get an offer at the school you want to go to. All is not over yet, you really want to do some negotiation at this point. slide 4. This has really changed over the years. I graduated from the University of Washington with my PhD in 1979 and I went to Purdue as an assistant professor. I remember calling up to accept the job and they had offered me $17,500 which actually was a reasonable amount of money then! When I called up to accept the job, I talked to the guy who was my host and he said "The other guy we gave an offer to is getting $18,000 so you should ask for that." So you know I waited and I called the department chair and I said "OK, I'd like $18,000" and he said OK! ------Laughter------Of course it's different these days, but it's still important to negotiate for a good package.
In some places you can negotiate for salary. At a place like UCSD, you can't negotiate for salary but you can negotiate for rank which actually gives you a higher or lower salary. You can negotiate for reducing your teaching load or your committee work load during the first year. This is a great idea. If you can get reduced teaching and committee work during the first year, it will really pay off. So try to do that. Sometimes you can negotiate for RA support. Equipment -- you certainly want to get the best equipment you can. Sometimes you can get things like discretionary budget or travel funds, summer salary, moving expenses, etc. Sometimes you can get them to help you with the two body problems as part of your offer. What you really want to do is to get as much as you can as part of the initial offer. Now note that the pot of money that most schools have for new faculty is different than the pot of money that they have for existing faculty. So you will never again have the opportunity to negotiate as well as you can negotiate now. And it's a completely different source of funds. If you don't ask for an RA now and plan to ask for an RA when you get there, you may not get one because they may have startup money for RAs but no general department funds for RAs. So this is the best time to ask for what you think you'll need.
So you've made the best offer you can and you are now a new assistant professor and ready to start at your new place. slide 5 I'm going to talk about getting started a little bit and then I'm going to give the floor over to my distinguished colleagues here.
slide 6 The first thing you want to do is you want to establish yourself as a researcher, and to do that there are some basic things that every first year person ought to be doing. You ought to write a grant proposal. There are lots of good grant programs around. NSF has some for new faculty (the Research Initiation grants). Take the fall and spend that time writing a grant proposal.
You should try to think about starting a research program at your institution and there are lots of ways to do that. You can teach a course in your research area. Try to do that in the first year -- that's a good way to attract students and to get people to know what you do. Give talks. Let your colleagues know what you do. Start or participate in a seminar in your research area. I'm in parallel processing. I started a weekly seminar in parallel processing at UCSD because there was none. In that seminar, we give research talks, practice talks for conferences and interviews, talks on work in progress and have guest speakers. It's been very helpful to our lab group.
You should write up the papers from your dissertation. You are going to be sick to death of it, you are going to think that anybody could have come up with the ideas in your dissertation by the time you are done with it, your dog could have done it, right?---Laughter---It's true, but write papers anyway. Write up all the papers you can from your dissertation. It will enable you to close that chapter and go on to something new and moreover, this is what you are known for so far. So really write all of that stuff up, leverage your dissertation if you can.
You want to start thinking about tenure this early. What Janie said and what Maria said was exactly right. You'll want to start thinking now kind of informally about who you are going to ask for letters, so you'll want to start developing a research network. Go to conferences and start developing a group of colleagues. Start giving talks and really start making those connections now, that's the best thing you can do. Those letters of recommendation will really be key at tenure time. Start thinking about it now and people will have a long history with you and that will be good. They will be able to write you a letter that says "I've known Jane since she was a beginning assistant professor. Her work has really matured. It is now the best work I know of in this area.", and that is a good thing for a letter to say. So establish yourself as researcher and think about this your very first year.
slide 7 Ok, you also have to live in your department; that's your community so you need to establish yourself as a departmental presence. Your department like everyone else's department is going to have sort of strange rituals and ways of dealing with each other and you need to figure out what those are before you jump in. The most diplomatic people I know spend some time laying low figuring out who are the reasonable guys, who are the unreasonable guys, who are the powerful guys, who are the not powerful guys, and just observing their department. So spend some time figuring out kind of who is who and that will really help you a lot in your dealings with the department. It's very helpful to find local mentors. You could send me some email and say "What should I do about this?" but if you are not at UCSD I may not be able to really give you good advice. You need to find safe reasonable people to talk to in your department. There may not be very many, there may be a whole ton of them, but find some people that you can talk to. Go to lunch with those people and develop those relationships, so when it comes time for people to discuss your file they will know you pretty well.
You should always be nice to staff and systems people, I think it's really important. First of all it's just the right thing to do. Staff and systems people are often under appreciated and they could use a little of your good will. Second of all it's a politically astute thing to do because staff and systems people can be extremely helpful to you. Knowing the right secretary to do the right thing, and having the systems person be willing to come in at 2:00 in the morning to reboot some machine is a really valuable thing and you should take some care to really cultivate those relationships.
You should be collegial and professional with your colleagues. That goes without saying, and I'm sure you all know how to do that already. You should also volunteer sparingly. In your first year, you may want to go in and be a team player or go in and get involved with everything, but you know you have a lot to do in your first year. Volunteer sparingly, do a good job when you do volunteer, but don't volunteer for everything. Pace it.
slide 8 Lets see, where are we? Teaching. Well we are going to have a panel on teaching so I only have a few bullets on this. I think we do a good job of teaching because we are at universities and that's really the right thing to do. Do the best job you can, treat your students with respect, treat them like adults. Don't bake cookies -- this is my slide.---Laughter---. You can take your students out for a beer, that's fine, but don't bake cookies! ----Laughter---. You should have a realistic role of teaching at your institution. Know if teaching counts. At some institutions teaching does count, at some institutions they talk about teaching counting, but it doesn't. Generally teaching does not help your tenure file. However, it may hinder your file if they are looking for an excuse. We had a faculty member who spent an enormous amount of time teaching, I think to the exclusion of research, and this faculty member didn't get through. I was very sad to see that, so be very realistic about this, this is really important.
slide 9 My last thoughts are about real life. I think that this is an incredibly important topic. You may not get a lot of encouragement to have one, but you should definitely have a real life. You may be shocked at how many of your colleagues sing in rock bands, have run marathons, are brownie leaders, have rafted down the Colorado River, etc. but they might not talk to you about this the first 10 times you talk to them. Many people in computer science, not everyone, but many people have a real life. ----Laughter----. They usually are discrete about it and you should consider this too. The reason to be discrete about your real life is because people may not know you yet and they need to form a professional impression of you.
After a certain point, discretion is not so important. When I first came to UCSD, I focused on work in conversations with my colleagues. Now if I leave work at 3:00 to see my daughter be a fork in her dance production, I'll tell people about that. But by now, people in my department know me and don't worry that I'm not productive. I wouldn't have talked about this in the beginning. Have a real life because that makes you feel OK about yourself, and that's good for you as a person.
You should also have friends who are not in computer science, I think this is really important -- there is a whole world out there. In fact you should have friends who are not academics! I think all of this is important and good for your mental health.
I'm now going to give the floor over to Jill who has a great set of slides, and also a real life! Laughter---.
One or the nice things about being in a development group is that you do get the satisfaction of seeing the utility of your work fairly immediately, and there is a finished product at the end. That product maybe used by millions of people, and that can be a tremendously satisfying thing. When you write papers you often feel lucky if a few people read them, so there is a tremendous difference there.
One of the things about research in industry is that one really needs to worry about the bottom line. It is the profits of a company which support the research efforts in that company. That means that when times are good in a company, there is a lot of opportunity to do more basic and undirected research. But, when times are bad, everybody looks at the research group and says, "What are we paying them for?" That's ok, because if you are in such a research group, then you believe they are paying you for a good reason. However, you have to keep this attitude in mind and be aware that you need to constantly keep your colleagues in other areas of the company, and your management, aware of the importance of what you are doing and how it relates to the bottom line of the company. And that's something to always remember if you are in a research group in a company. The next point just goes along with that. It really is important to understand what the company's long rang goals, and marketing and development strategies are, and how what you are doing relates to them. This is all part of understanding where you fit and how you are contributing and justifying what you are doing in terms of that bottom line.
On the other hand, academia gives you another kind of flexibility. The flexibility of what you work on may be much greater in academia because research and development are tied to the bottom line in a company and that may somewhat restrict what you work on. Also one's schedule can be more flexible in an academic job. Of course that depends on the particular company or group, but I would say that if you integrate over all jobs, then it's probably more flexible in academia than it is in industry. In academia you don't have to teach during the summer, and you can concentrate completely on your research. That's nice! There is also the opportunity to take sabbaticals and visit other places. Those opportunities are much more restricted in industry.
What about security? You know there was a whole session in this workshop about getting tenure. Long term, tenure in academia gives you a lot of security. Short term, industrial jobs may give you more security because once you are hired by a company that's it. Now long term, that industrial job may not give you as much security. Companies can go out of business, companies change functions, companies under stress may jettison whole groups. So, long term, you may not have as much security, but short term you will. That's the trade off.
What about teaching? One of the advantages of industry is that you don't have to worry about students. One of the disadvantages of industry is that there are no students around. --- Laughter----. I really mean that. One of the nice things about having students is that they are constantly questioning you, raising new issues, forcing you to look at different view points, forcing you to keep current in your field. There's a tremendous number of advantages to having students around, but they can be a tremendous strain on your time also. So I think there are trade offs both ways.
Keeping current -- in many industrial positions you have to make a much more conscious effort to keep current in your field, to keep abreast of the literature, and to know what's going on. In academia that's more or less considered part of the job. That's what you are doing when you are teaching courses, especially graduate courses.
What about attitudes toward women? I don't think there is a tremendous difference in the attitude towards women in industry and academia. Although I will say my experience in industry is that it's probably tougher towards the research and development end of the spectrum than in the marketing and sales end. And I certainly have had the experience of being the only technical person in a meeting with a customer and had the customer ask all the technical questions to the sales person, who didn't know a thing, just because the sales person was male. Well, they soon find out who knows the answers to their questions.
First, I think it's important to remember that an interview is not just your perspective employer interviewing you, but it's also you interviewing your perspective employer. You want to find out, " Am I going to be happy in this job? Is this what I want to do for the next N years of my life?" Where N might be anything between two and fifty. Right? Therefore, you want to get a good answer to those two questions when you go in and talk to people during that long day from breakfast through dinner.
For example, what's the sort of distribution here between applied and undirected research? If you are going to a place like Bell Labs it's pretty obvious but there are a lot of other places that you might go where it's not so obvious so you want to get as accurate a picture of the research environment as possible.
Who will set your research agenda? You? Your manager? Someone else? Some people actually prefer some external guidance. You might not mind being led in certain directions, or you might find that to be a complete anathema. Only you know the answer to that question.
What are the career paths at the company? Will you have the opportunity, if there tend to be lots of projects going on, to set some directions. If you are interested in management, or eventually research management, will you be able to move up? Is there a technical career path? Some companies have both administrative or management career paths and purely scientific career paths, and some don't. Maybe you don't want to ever be a manager but you want to know that your salary is not going to stop going up at a certain point because there is no where else to go.
How flexible is the place in terms of publications? There are some companies which do not allow you to publish, not because your are working on state secrets, but because you are working on company secrets. So you want to find out what are the proscriptions on publication of your work, or, on the other hand, are you encouraged to publish a lot? Are you encouraged to, and are you supported to, travel to meetings to speak about your work? Because if you are working in industrial or academic research you want to be able to let people know what you are doing and you want to make connections in the outside world. One of the main ways to do that is to go to meetings, have outside collaborators, and to give talks. So you will want to know whether or not the company is going to support you and to what extent. Also what about professional community service, what about serving on program committees for conferences, what about other kinds of professional community service? Will the company pay your travel for that? Will they understand and do they believe that that's a good use of your time? Do they not? You have to understand all those issues so that you can make decisions about whether to say yes or like Nancy Reagan says, "JUST SAY NO".
What is the salary scale? How do salaries compare with academic offers that you may have?
What are the company's goals and strategies? That's very important! Do they align with your own research interests, with what you want to do?
Are there other women around? This is more important to some people than to others. Some people like to be pioneers, they like to be the only woman forging ahead. Other people like to have other women around. This is something that you know about yourself. If there are other women around, you may want to talk to them and find out what the environment is like for women.
What's your boss like? That's a really important question. A chair in an academic department is nominally your boss, but in terms of what you do day to day, and what your research program is, a chair will have much less to say about it than your manager in an industrial environment. How does your manager view the group goals and the company's goals? Do people in the group tend to work as individuals or do they tend to work in groups? What criteria will your manager use to evaluate your work? Will it be evaluated by how it affects the company's bottom line? Will it be evaluated by the quality of journal in which it is published? Will you be evaluated by how much you interact with the development groups in the company? What are the rules here so to speak? It's just like finding out what it takes to get tenure in academia.
What kind of hardware and software environment will you be provided with? That's a very important question. I have been in a situation, going into a company, where one development station was shared by four or five developers, so you can imagine that you could never get your work done unless you came in between two and six in the morning and actually that's when everybody came in so they could get their work done too.
Finally, I think it's very important not to say that you will work on something that you don't want to work on, because you won't be happy and neither will the company. Don't say "Yes, I will work on a runtime system for this machine," with the idea that in six months time you will finagle your way into doing something else. That's really a recipe for disaster.
And finally... You know I put this on this list, TAKE CARE MIXING WORK AND PLAY. Somebody asked me last night, "What does that mean? You mean you shouldn't play tennis with the guy in the office next door?" No. Quite frankly, what I mean here, and I didn't want to write it down but let's be explicit, I mean be very careful about dating your colleagues and especially about dating your manager. You know, it's something that people think about and they don't say, but it can cause you a lot of grief, and naive attitudes about such things can often result in personal hardship. And yes, there are lots of special cases, and every case is different, and so on and so forth, but I think as a default strategy, that's the right one. It's tough enough for women out there without people dismissing you for this kind of reason. ---APPLAUSE ---
One of the many things that I considered in terms of my offer was the start up package, which included travel for conferences. The travel budget is very important. When you walk into the office and you have to buy a ticket, where do you get the money to buy the ticket? You want to be sure that it's included in your start up package. I received money for two conferences per year for the first two years. Another aspect of the start up package is summer salary. When you walk in the door you don't have a grant and it takes time to obtain a grant, which is the source of summer salary. The first year you are writing a proposal and then it takes time before you get the results of the proposal. Further it takes time to set up the account. Generally, at least one summer will have passed before you have a source for summer salary. If possible, try to get summer salary for the first two years included in the start up package. Another important aspect of the package was support for students. I will get to that later, well let me discuss it now. When you get student support one thing you want to consider is the difference between RA support and TA support. RA support is very nice because the student is working on research full time beyond classes. With TA support, 20 hours of the student's time is devoted to working and helping out with the course. They are not doing research during these 20 hours. I asked for student support and when I arrived at NU I found out that it was TA support. So during the interview process or when you are negotiating the offer find out if it is TA support or RA support because it is very different. Another important aspect of the package is the teaching load. At Northwestern it is really nice because we are given one course per quarter for the academic year and no teaching over the summer. I was very explicit about asking about the teaching load at the various universities. At state universities the course load may be dictated by the state and you may have to off load your course requirements with monitoring grad students. It was very important to me that I not have a large course load or be required to have large number of grad students.
Second on the list is a supportive environment where people collaborate and they don't mind sharing information. I realized that during my first year I needed a lot of advice and help and I wanted to make sure that that particular environment provided that. Another aspect was class size, which was important, well class size and TA support. I would often ask about the ratio of students to TA in a course. At Northwestern for undergraduate classes if you have beyond 23 students you automatically get a TA. And so that's very important because if you have a class size of 60 and you don't have a TA then you are grading 60 papers and you are looking at 60 different hand writings, 60 different interpretation of the problem, and 60 different exams to grade. This can be a tremendous load when added on to doing research, working with grad students. working on committees, and then attempting to have a life of your own. So, one thing you want to consider is the TA support and class the size.
Lastly, even though it's at the last part of the list it was very important, was salary. I asked people that were interviewing at the same time if they wouldn't mind sharing what they received in terms of salary offer. I asked both male and female to find out what was the range and to find out if I was getting the average salary. So that's one thing you want to consider. Then I learned also that the salary is given in terms of the 9 month academic year. Further, you want to find out how your salary is distributed over the year. Some universities give you the academic salary over the 12 month period and some universities give you the academic salary over the 9 month period. So it varies.
slide 2 When setting up your research lab, be sure to negotiate for the following. Desk space or lab space. Be sure to negotiate for this prior to signing the contract because once you get there it's hard to negotiate for desk space or lab space. I used the average of three students and I would say can I have enough space for three students and equipment. Consider what happens when you purchase equipment, where will it go? So you want to be sure that you do have some space for your students and your equipement. Negotiate for funding of students and lab equipment. Be honest about what you need. List the items you need along with the dollar amounts. Attempt to replicate your grad school environment. When I was considering my equipment needs, I tried to duplicate the environment that I had at Berkeley as a grad student. Once you start working on the job they ask you to produce immediately. And so you don't want to have to spend time learning a whole bunch of different tools and getting a whole bunch of executable files just to produce a document. Inlude money for software and equipment for your grad students as well as yourself.
Once you have your lab, be selective when taking on grad students. One thing I learned from Dave Patterson, via Corinna Lee, was to look at the number of hours in a day or the number of hours in a week and count how many hours you have for grad students. So I decided I only had three hours left out of the week---Laughter--- where I could try to keep up with their projects. Given that I like to meet with each grad student one hour per week, I have three grad students. I didn't take on any grad students until the end of my first year. I waited until I had the students in my class where I could actually find out about their background and determine if they are really interested in my particular area of reasearch. You don't want to take on too many students; it will eat up your time significantly.
The last item in terms if setting up your research lab, is to be sure to have one research project of your own. When you start as an assistant professor, often you will have first year grad students. It's not very often that you go in and get senior grad students. With first year grad students it takes time before the grad students can produce results and papers. It takes time for them to get the background they need. In constrast if you do the project it's a very short turn around time given that you find the time in the week. ----Laughter---It's a very short turn around time before you can actually get some results. So it's very good to have one project that you are doing for which you are not relying on grad students to produce papers. Further, it gives you a chance to publish papers where you are the sole author. So that's one thing to keep in mind, and plus working on a research project of your own will cause you to stay current and to consider other research projects.
slide 3 Lastly, I'll discuss balancing your load which I am still learning to do but I will discuss some of the things I 've learned so far. First, be honest with your time. There are only 24 hours in a day. Seven days in a week, you know, and four weeks in a month. No matter how hard I try, I can work 25 hours and it's still the next day---Laughter, laughter, laughter---. So I can only allot 24 hours and I've missed some deadline if I go beyond that. So be honest with your time in terms of saying you can only get a limited amount of work done. You will end up saying no to some people. For example with grad students I had to say I only have three hours and I can only take on three students. When I have my three students, which I have right now, I decided I can't take on anymore.
Second, delegate as much as possible. As a grad student you do everything. You're doing the copying, writing your paper, writing correspondences, you're doing all of it. And when you become an assistant professor your responsibilities are so varied that you need to delegate some of the responsibilities to the staff. To give you an example, I have a limited amount of money in my accounts so I need to know every penny that I have available so that I will know how much to spend for travel, etc. Initially, when I received my account statements I would go through them to make sure there were no accounting errors. Now I've asked the secretary if she could keep up with all of my expenditures and now when the account statements come in she goes through them. She calls people to correct the account and it gives me an extra hour that I can use for something else. So try to delegate as much as possible.
Third, as mentioned previously, don't take on too many students. Be very selective about activities and committees and find out how much work is required for a committee or an activity before you say yes. Find out as much information as possible. And one thing you want to do is talk to other people and find out what you can say no to and try to say no as much as possible.
Another thing is to be aware of hidden time sinks. For example, I realized that when I walk through the halls a lot of times I enjoy stopping to talk--Laughter-- So what I had to do is to be aware of that and walk through the hall with a paper in my hand and say I am going to the office and I can't stop for too long. Before, I would find myself chatting for an hour or an hour and a half. So I had to be aware of my hidden time sinks. Another one is receptions. When I would go to receptions I noticed that I would stay a little bit longer and chit chat --Laughter---. So I limit the number of receptions I attend --Laughter---.
Lastly, take time for yourself. One thing that I enjoy doing is working out. So one thing that I don't sacrifice is going to the Gym. No matter what I am doing a lot of times I'll just leave things, and go to the Gym. Generally, when I return I feel a lot better and more relaxed about what I am doing. And so as Fran said, be sure to have a real life and have time for yourself. That's it. -----APPLAUSE, APPLAUSE, APPLAUSE.