The life of the pre-tenured faculty

I knew going into my academic career that things were going to be hectic. There is a common understanding that life as an pre-tenured faculty is especially crazy - just check out my favorite comic strip. It is entirely too accurate. Yes, starting a lab, securing funding, mentoring students, and proving your worthiness for tenure can stress a lot of people out. I won't pretend like I'm immune.

But like all things, faculty life also has its silver lining. I for one thoroughly enjoy that I now have the opportunity to mentor my own students. The first-ever Meyer-Kaiser lab PhD student started last year, and it has been my utmost pleasure to work with her since. 

We hit an especially high point last week. Now that my student, Kharis, is in her second year of the program, her main occupation is planning her dissertation. (Of course, she's also done other things, like accompany me to Palau.) Planning a dissertation is hard. Planning any research is hard, but for most people, their dissertation is the first large, multi-faceted study they've ever undertaken. The task can seem overwhelming. 

Fortunately for Kharis, I'm a relatively young mentor and still remember what it was like to design my own dissertation. I kind of started backwards - I already had most of the data I wanted to analyze, and the challenge was coming up with a set of coherent, important questions. I had to work really hard in my third and fourth years to unify everything. Kharis doesn't have that problem - in fact, she has the opposite problem. There are some datasets already sitting around the lab that she could choose to work on, but she's not obligated to use them. We have some field trips coming up when she could undertake her own unique study, but the plans are pretty flexible. For Kharis, the field is wide open - almost anything is possible. 

So here's the challenge: if you had four years, a good mentor, and a modicum of resources, what would you want to learn about the world? What is the most important, interesting, timely question you could answer? What would you hope to find? 

I told Kharis to start with that question - what do you want to learn? I don't mean learning in the sense of looking something up at the library. I mean research: learning what has never been learned before. She took a week to think about it, and then we met in her office. 

Kharis' thesis plan on our lab white board.
Shared with permission.

When I walked in, Kharis had four main ideas on a white board and several other questions on strips of printed paper. She walked me through her ideas - this could be a chapter, maybe these two questions could go together, then there's this interesting tangent. I listened. Then she pointed to one of her strips of paper and explained what she thought could be an interesting chapter of her dissertation on larval biology in a warming Arctic. And I stopped her - that was it. That "chapter" was large enough to be a full dissertation, and an incredibly cool one at that. 

Two hours later, we had filled not just the little white board in her office but the giant, wall-sized white board in my lab with an outline. We had three solid chapter ideas, a number of back-up plans, and most importantly, a compelling, unifying question: "How do changing ice conditions influence life-cycle completion in Arctic benthic invertebrates?"

I am incredibly proud of my student. She just sailed over a major hurdle and has a solid dissertation plan forming. Getting to watch her science take shape is incredibly gratifying for me - the best part of the pre-tenured faculty life.