Welcome to part two of navigating academia. I'm Judy Thompson, and I'm going to be leading you through the second part. And in the second part, we're going to talk about reviews and promotion, how you get promoted from an assistant to a professor, some information about mentoring. I'm going to talk a little bit about faculty workload. And then at the end of this presentation, I'm going to give you a couple of pearls that I've learned from my years of being in an academic institution. One of the things that I think is important to know is that there are exceptions to the requirement for appointment review, promotion, and or tenure. And these exceptions many times candidates don't realize are there until you get a chance to read the handbook. And sometimes these exceptions are not made any time after you're hired. So there are things that might be made at the time of hiring. So I think it's important to know where and where exceptions your degree is. Do they look at candidates for the positions of assistant associate and professor that don't have the degree? So that's not so much of an instance, but it was in the literature. So I did include it. Prior experience, this is probably very important for you to know, because unless you come from an academic institution where you've already attained a rank, you most likely are going to go into an academic institution as an assistant professor, assistant clinical, or assistant tenured professor. You may have many, many years in an institution that you didn't get a paycheck from the academic institution. For example, maybe you were in a hospital-based program, but you were affiliated with an academic institution and your paycheck came from the hospital. So you didn't have a chance to attain any kind of rank at the university because you weren't actually hired by the university. And you may have a lot of years of experience when you go into an academic institution, and they may not count that experience. And as far as rank goes, so you may be hired as an assistant professor when in fact you've put in enough years that you could at least attain the rank of associate professor. So these exceptions are something that you would have to look at your handbook, your handbook on tenure and promotion, and find out if you might be eligible to be hired at the time of hiring. And do speak to that, because I came into my academic institution with 28 years of experience as an educator, but I still started as an assistant professor. I didn't know at that time that this was available to me to challenge that and consider being hired as maybe an associate professor. So it depends on your university, and it depends on what they're willing to do as far as, you know, your hiring. You may attain tenure early, and this may be because you have documentation that will allow you to apply for early promotion or early tenure. So that also would be identified in the handbook, and it's so it's possible that you don't have to wait the five to eight years to become a full professor. You may be able to show a documentation that you have earned that ahead of time. But these are things that you need to learn from your university handbook. Moving up the ladder, most universities will have a very rigorous review schedule for faculty appointments. Sometimes they usually start within the first year, and I'm going to go over some of that so that you'll be aware. It's designed to assess your overall contribution and performance as a faculty member, so you're very heavily evaluated. Gives the faculty member the opportunity also to receive feedback and mentoring as they progress toward the application of tenure promotion. So it's for your promotion, but also is for your education as to your role in the profession. And the first part of criteria for promotion is obviously to have the education and the degree requirements, and that's pretty simple. You have it. You have your transcript from the university that you've earned. So if you start out as an instructor and then you attained your degree, you may get on this track for promotion starting out with your educational qualifications. You need to identify effective teaching, and those are looking at your classroom performance. You may have a faculty member come in and observe your classes and write a report. They're going to look heavily at your student course evaluations each semester, and they're going to also look at the syllabi, your exams, your student research projects, things, papers that you've written, papers that students have written that you've been the mentor for. So there's a number of things that they're going to take a look at. Is the faculty member available to students? Do you have adequate office hours? And I'm going to talk about that a little bit later too. And also, have you maintained your professional certification or licensure? Most of us that are advanced practice nurses or that are nurse anesthetists are going to continue hanging on to our professional certification and licensure not only as required for our accrediting body, but it is part of what the university expects. Anything, any scholarship or creative work that you've done, this is going to be very important for your promotion. So it's critical if you're doing talks, if you're writing for journals, if you're doing any kind of publication, even editorial work, things like that need to be put toward your promotion and will be helpful toward your promotion. And any contributions and any contributions to the university, this is where your service comes in. Academic advisement, for example, any active service on the department, school, senate, university committees. If you've been elected to any governing bodies within the university, if you have active service, say to your state organization, to the ANA, or to say the New England Assembly of School Faculty, for example, just being chair of that was something that showed service and contribution, and also any community or professional organizations that you're involved in. And this shows the very rigorous schedule that most university professors or university faculty will have to go through. The first year is very critical. They look from the time that you're hired to what you've done the first year, and usually you go through a committee that will review the materials. So one of the things that I think is very important that I didn't know when I first came into academia was hang on to absolutely everything. Even thank you notes that you get from, for example, a faculty member that you've come in and spoken their class. Somebody that's taken a student around on a tour for the university and the family sends you a thank you note. Save everything. These are things that will go toward your promotion and go toward your first review. The second review looks at everything that was in the first review. So like I said, save everything. And you submit these for these materials for your secondary review. Usually a second year review is a little bit more formal. Then most places will go through a third, a fourth year review, and this again is submitting everything. So it becomes very laborious to continue to build up what you need for your review and for promotion. When you get to the sixth year, usually they will have you submit anything from the last review, your fourth year review, which was pretty extensive. And then for promotion, this occurs at different times. Again, look at your faculty handbook, but when you're promoted, you're evaluated in the sixth year of full-time employment. Usually for us, we would go up from assistant professor to associate professor around the fifth or sixth year. So this, again, we had to submit everything from the time we were hired to get that first promotion. And building a portfolio, this is a very important thing. A portfolio is basically a self-study of yourself. So instead of the self-study of your academic institution, you're doing your own self-study. It starts out with an executive summary or a lengthy self-evaluation. And then inside that also, you have to include all of the evaluations you've received in your teaching, any excerpts from students' projects, any kind of faculty mentoring that you've done, any kind of course materials that you've generated, syllabi, publications, presentations that you've mentored with students or yourself, and examples of any kind of creative teaching methods, for example. So there's a lot of things involved. So that's why in order to do your portfolio, and most universities do now use, I'm sorry, do use the portfolio, which is electronic. So there's no books or anything like that involved like there used to be. Now the portfolio is electronic and you can submit all of your documents there. So examples of your, for example, working with a student that might have academic difficulty, sometimes those notes, things that you've done over and above, those are important to include. So it was like I said before, make sure that you save everything. Even if you use Healthstream in your clinical area and you take Healthstream courses, make sure that you include those in your portfolio. And these are other things that might be included in a portfolio. Comments, as I mentioned before, unsolicited comments from students or families. For us in anesthesia, our annual reports were included. Any awards or honors that we received, evidence that we helped a colleague, I used to lecture to the undergrads on anesthesia just to, in their surgical class. And I would come in and do one or two lectures and I would get a letter, usually from the faculty, that was part of my portfolio. Anything that's, any updates on your CV, of course, gets included. And any letters from the board or committee chairs. So as you advance and you're promoted from first year to fourth year, usually a letter comes from the provost's office and that needs to be included as well in your portfolio. Any service that you've done, professional organizations you're involved in, community service. I helped with the COVID clinic, for example, giving shots. I included that in there, showing that I was scheduled. Anything about clinical practice. Sometimes clinical practice is listed as service. It may or may not be. So that's important for you to look at your student, at your faculty handbook to find out if your clinical practice is something that you need to also put in your portfolio to indicate that you've done service. Some schools have committees. And I always used to think I'd be very fortunate if I had a committee or somebody that would look over all of my portfolio work before I submitted it. Because submission of your portfolio, it goes through many, many hands once it's submitted. And it would have been helpful ahead of time to have a portfolio committee review my portfolio. If you don't have a portfolio committee at your university, then a senior member of the faculty can sometimes be very helpful and they can go through your portfolio and make suggestions of things that you should include. Once you go for a promotion and you do your portfolio and it's reviewed by first usually the department evaluation committee, which might be just the members of the school of nursing, for example. And then it goes through the school evaluation committee. Some schools have this and some schools don't. But you'll see in the handbook how this, your portfolio and the comments that are made go from committee to committee. So before you get any kind of a promotion, even before you're recognized as going from, say, a second year to a fourth year, all of these documents go before the committee. It may take a year before any kind of promotion is granted because it takes, it ends up at the dean, the board of directors, the provost. So depending on, you'll see the sequence of events when you look at your faculty handbook. I'm going to talk a little bit about faculty workload. Faculty workload, I think, for a lot of us was something that was kind of unknown. I thought when I went to the academic institution that my main job was going to be, you know, running the nurse anesthesia program. But in fact, it was a lot more than that. I had, I had, I started out with the number of credit hours that I was expected to do. And from that, some universities will deduct your service. Maybe if you're grant writing, they'll take some time off for that, some time out of your teaching credits. There's really, interestingly enough, there's no real set formula, but you do need to know from your university exactly what is expected of you as far as your teaching credit, your faculty workload. And that can be, like I said, some things are subtracted from that main number of credit hours for each semester. If you're doing certain service projects or requirements, or you're doing some kind of scholarship, but it's important to find that out ahead of time. And I thought this was an interesting quote, and I got this actually from a faculty handbook, where I did a school review, and it actually said, and I have it in quotes here, put simply, there is no set formula that can be applied evenly across the university, or even within a large college. Rather, each department needs to develop its own workload system, which is subject to approval by the dean and the provost. I think one of the things that I was very surprised at was, and I'm going to give you an example of how one university calculated what your teaching assignment was, and what they did was they took the number of credits that a course was, and then multiplied it by the number of students in class, and you were assigned, say, 300 teaching units, for example. Well, somebody that had a class with 100 students in it, that three-credit class, pretty much reached their teaching units right away. But somebody that had small classes, like many of the nurse anesthesia classes are, had a three-credit course, but maybe only had 10 or 15 students or 20 students in a class. It took them a lot more teaching to reach that number of assigned teaching units, so it was very in favor of very large classes. So I thought that was another interesting way that one of the universities calculated their faculty workload. So definitely, when you're thinking of taking on a position in academia, or you have a position, definitely look at the faculty workload and how that's calculated. Some schools, as I said, have a more prescriptive policy. That was a fairly prescriptive one. Some of them just take, for instance, work units like 15 to 18 in each semester, and from that, they subtract different functions that you have to do. So teaching workload may range from that number for faculty with 100% teaching time, for example, teaching faculty, and then for faculty that are assistant associate and professors may have service research and scholarship. They may have work units again deducted from that. Faculty with an administrative appointment will have teaching workload adjustments to define their different responsibilities. So again, very important to look into that when you're considering taking an academic position. And this just gives you an example of some of the other things that may be in your workload that you may not be aware of. For example, student advising, being on committees, writing syllabi. If you've got a new anesthesia program that you're writing syllabi for, these are things that take a great deal of time and they may not be calculated in your actual workload. Office hours. For example, those of us in nurse anesthesia often have clinical evaluations that we have to do with each one of our students individually, and that may be one or two times each semester. That's part of our workload, but that may be not counted in the workload calculations. Times it takes you to grade, for example. Many schools, the nurse anesthesia faculty, do all their admissions and their interviews. That also may not be taken into account when calculating faculty workload. You may be orienting a new class. Site visits. Some schools calculate site visits into your workload and some don't. For us in anesthesia, we are expected to make one site visit per year of all of our clinical sites that are affiliated with your school. That in itself takes a great deal of time and takes us away from teaching. Faculty development. For example, we were expected to attend all of the university and the School of Nursing's faculty development. That was not calculated into our workload, but we were expected to attend. We were also expected to attend open house events, commencement, graduate award ceremonies, convocation, pinning ceremonies. We went to the School of Nursing's welcome event, which was for undergraduates. When I first came to the university, I also had student advising, and because I only had 15 students in each anesthesia class, I was also assigned a number of undergraduate students that I had to do for advisement. Sometimes these things are not calculated ahead of time in workload, so you need to know what things are included. The council on accreditation in our standards actually speaks to faculty workload. A standard A8 states the conducting institution provides sufficient time to permit faculty to fulfill their obligations to students, including clinical and classroom teaching, counseling and evaluation, and advising on doctoral level scholarly projects. So they do look at the schools and they do look at your time, the time that you're committed and your faculty workload, and can be your best friend if you're really overextended. Standard A9 again looks at basically the balance, if you have a a reasonable balance between personal wellness and professional responsibilities. So again, they look at your protected time, and this is another thing that may help you adjust an overly full workload, for example, that you have some decent health, healthy work-life balance. Mentorship is a very important thing. Many schools will have mentors. If you're going into a program that has an anesthesia school, an academic institution that has an anesthesia school, somebody may be assigned to you as your mentor, and that's very, very helpful because they can help you transition from the clinical setting where you might have come from to academia in itself, and they can really speak the language of academia and help you define your role. They may also have workshops on curriculum design, item writing, testing methods, evaluation, and research methods. I found all of those things very, very helpful, and I did have a mentor when I started my university job. Unfortunately, though, we didn't have a nurse anesthesia program, so I did not have anybody that mentored me in that, and many times, they don't really understand exactly some of the commitments that we're expected as faculty in anesthesia, some of the things that we are required to do as part of our career, and she was able to mentor me as far as some of my role in academia was concerned, but certainly not my role as a nurse anesthesia educator. I thought this was an interesting article. This was an article that was taken out of a nursing education journal from 2014, but it kind of looks at the transition that we all go to if we, say, don't have a mentor that maybe is in anesthesia, and it's looked at the shift. This was a study that was done with nurses that were in the UK and the United States, and it looked at those that moved from a clinical area to an academic institution, and it kind of defined their various experiences. They really looked at the time frame of one to three years because they gave people the opportunity to move through the system and also didn't look at people that were way past this because they wanted to have them fully remember their feelings and some of the issues that they went through, and phase one I call feeling, you know, pretty clueless. When you come into the academic institution, it's sort of a feeling of you really aren't, you don't even know the terminology, so it was, it was a different, phase one is a different trans, it's a different thing that you need to go through, and that's probably one of the hardest because you come in there and you feel so new and vulnerable and you really aren't sure how to navigate the system and what your responsibilities might be, even if you're a seasoned program director that maybe came from a place where you were hospital-based, for example. Phase two is where you're starting to adjust to the fact that they do things differently. For example, students that might get dismissed, how they go through the different adjustments, how they can appeal the different appeals committees, for example, how those kinds of things may work. By the time you get to phase three, you're beginning to expect the unexpected, you're sort of understanding how the academic institution works and what hoops you're going to have to jump through. For example, just getting a change in your curriculum may take a whole year because it has to be voted on by the committees. And then phase four, they looked at most of the people in the study as finally involve, evolving into an academic and completely understanding and transitioning into the role. So I thought that this was a very good article that looked at very realistically how we transition. So a couple other things, these are the pearls that I want to give you. Things that I didn't know, but before you go to academia, make sure that you are aware of some of these things, that some of the work that you do while you're there, all of the syllabi that you create, the scenarios for your simulation lab, all of those may become, if your university has the stipulation, intellectual property of the university. So if you leave, you can't take it with you. So do be aware of that. Some universities have rules about outside teaching or consulting or doing any outside work. And I'm not talking about your clinical professional work, I'm going to talk about that in a minute. But outside work, for example, if you want to teach a course, just one class, or just give a lecture somewhere else at another university, you may need to check your handbook or speak with your graduate advisor or your dean, whether this is permitted. Some universities do not permit you to do any teaching or outside work or consulting with anybody else. Professional work, clinical work. It's very important for you to know as a clinician that how you're going to be paid. Some universities have made arrangements with hospital systems where you will work eight to 10 hours in the clinical, and that money goes to the university to supplement your salary. So you don't actually get any of that money in addition. It's not additional money for you. Sometimes it's a requirement of your professional work and your university commitment. And this diagram just shows all the pros. And I wanted to include this because a lot of us go into education because we truly, truly want to. We love to teach, it keeps you on your toes, it's stimulating. We love to see students get that aha moment. I personally really liked mentoring students because I love to see them go from a nurse to a nurse anesthetist. And I used to ask my students one question, when do you feel that you're no longer a critical care nurse but you're now a nurse anesthetist? And most of them would say probably somewhere in the second or third semester. They truly sort of got that connection. And I used to love particularly seeing that in the students I mentored. If you go into academia, you may be able to follow your interests. Say you're interested in simulation, you're interested in doing research in a specific thing, you're interested in publication. These are things that allow you time to follow your interests or encouragement to follow your interest. You may have more flexibility. A lot of people go into academia because they have more flexibility than you certainly had in the OR where you were working eight or ten hours and only got out when you had lunch or coffee breaks. So you have freedom or flexibility. You can also, once you have been at the university for a period of time, you can apply for sabbatical which will allow you time with pay to pursue a research project or some writing that you're interested in doing. So you have that, you have more autonomy, you have more collaboration opportunities. And I loved working with some of the people at our university, some of the web designers, IT, statisticians, all those people, the librarian, the writing center, all those people were really at my fingertips. So I was very happy for the opportunity to work with them. You may have stability once you reach the tenure track or as you go along in promotion. You may have more and more job security and more stability. Some universities allow you to take courses for self-enrichment. Some of them even will waive or partially waive family tuition. So those are things that are important reasons to go into academia. We had the ability to take courses there. Unfortunately, I never really had the time, but I did look forward to taking some of them. Some of the cons of academia. These are some of the things that you do need to look at before you go into an academic setting. Salary is usually a lot less money than we make as clinicians. Sometimes you can supplement that by working, but then you're taking time away from your academic duties. So that may be a higher price to pay on yourself as far as wellness goes if you're working a lot of hours and still trying to go through the academic setting and do the teaching and the service and the scholarship. So sometimes your salary goes into the university, as I mentioned, to supplement what you make. Usually academics make less money than people in clinical practice. Dismissing students. If you've ever tried to dismiss a student as a program director, it might have been easier in a hospital-based program. Universities often will allow students to continue to appeal and appeal for things that are often things that you don't even know you could have them appeal for, appeal the decision. And so you may find that you're trying to dismiss a difficult student and it may be a much more difficult task for you to do this. Universities have numerous, numerous rules. So make sure that you look at the handbook as far as any kind of appeals go. Hiring. If you wanted to hire somebody for your, for the anesthesia program at your institution, your hiring may go through an entire committee that includes all of the School of Nursing. And since they really don't know that much about what we're looking for, sometimes what we actually need in a faculty member, this may prove to be somewhat difficult. I mentioned before that when you want to do anything to change the curriculum, it has to go through a curricular committee and it may take a year before you're able to make that change. Academia is long hours. It's long hours. It's certainly not a 40-hour week. It is, program directors are often on 24-7 and there's a lot of expectations, not only for the anesthesia portion of your, of your teaching and your mentorship, but also other things that may be involved in just the School of Nursing that you're required to do. And many places do not have mentors or have mentors that aren't related to what you do, and it may make transitioning from the clinical to the academic setting much more difficult if you don't have somebody that can give you a hand with that. And in conclusion, I want to just give you a couple of pointers. I think I've mentioned many times in this talk, make sure that you look at your faculty handbook and know what you're getting into or what you're looking forward to, what things you need to come into with open eyes. You need to familiar yourself before you take the position. Get on committees, since you're going to be required to get on university committees, and sometimes there's quite a few committees that you're on. Get on committees that have some kind of meaning for you and your discipline. Sometimes you'll be assigned to a committee by the dean when you first come in, and it has absolutely nothing to do with you or your discipline, it just kind of takes time from your day. So make sure that when you get on committees that there are committees that have something to do with what you're teaching. Save everything that speaks of your service, teaching, and scholarship, and I'm talking about everything. I had a major box in my office where I would throw all of my certificates, pamphlets from educational things I spoke at, and so make sure that you have all of that available for your portfolio when it comes time for promotion. Find out all additional committees or commitments that you'll be expected to be part of. You may be expected to go to undergraduate, you know, nursing, the School of Nursing pinning, for example, or Welcome Weekend, things like that. You may be expected to stand at a table during an open house, so do find out if those things are going to be required. And communicate with the dean or the CEO what they need to know about our profession, and I think that's very important because I think when you go into a lot of academic institutions and into schools of nursing, I think many people are not aware of what the expectations are for us, that we have a different accrediting body even, as well as the accrediting body of nursing, so we often have to go through an accreditation twice in a period of time. Please understand the expectations and demands and have them understand what is expected of us. I think that you'll be saving yourself a lot if you do, and thank you for your attention.

academic promotions

faculty workload

mentoring in academia

portfolio building

certifications

academic responsibilities

effective communication