9 ms·

How to Get Tenure

308 points by norswap 11y ago

rayiner 11y ago
> So, if you love your spouse and you want to have kids, then have kids. This is a great takeaway for ambitious people who worry about the impact of having kids on their career.
- eitally 11y ago
  Yes, but you need to both go into it with eyes wide open. Children absolutely will have an impact of some kind on almost any career.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
dude_abides 11y ago
Easily the most amazing "How to Get Tenure" article that I've ever read, even though (or maybe because) it hardly talks about how to get tenure! Passion and success are so strongly correlated, and Matt Might is such a great example of this, as are most successful researchers and entrepreneurs.
seibelj 11y ago
What an unexpectedly interesting post. I read a bunch of other posts he made and they are all very well thought out, with little fluff. He sounds like a really great and brilliant guy.
- branchless 11y ago
  Agreed, cracking communicator. And smart.
trequartista 11y ago
What an amazingly insightful post. I've always wondered how people derive the internal strength to do amazing things in the face of severe personal adversity. This post addresses this in some ways.
- bbcbasic 11y ago
  Reminds me of http://www.noogenesis.com/pineapple/Taoist_Farmer.html http://www.noogenesis.com/pineapple/Taoist_Farmer.html
jackson1372 11y ago
A really fascinating personal story. One thing that bothered me though: The author's wife quit her job to become a full-time mom. I would guess that the author was only able to have so much professional success because of this. Perhaps you can't get tenure/be really successful while also taking care of a child with disabilities. It just happens to be the case that the author didn't have to take care of a child with disabilities (his wife did), and so his professional career was unaffected.
- barry-cotter 11y ago
  This is the norm. It's not just that you can't have a successful career while taking care of a child with disabilities, you can't be a power couple with two high powered careers and a family without two nannies or massive support from grandparents. IIRC if you match childless single men and women by educational attainment and job experience the gender pay gap is about 3%. But most women downshift or exit their careers after having children and most men don't. Anyone with a really dedicated support staff or person is at a massive advantage when competing against those without. The only single people with support as dedicated as a competent spouse have butlers. Even corporate executives with personal assistants don't have that kind of always available, for all tasks help, not in the overwhelming majority of cases.
  - xorcist 11y ago
    A "norm" needs to be geographically and culturally specified. Couples in other countries with working child care systems do not share this experience.
- bbcbasic 11y ago
  There are evenings, nights and weekends. The distant father-figure-bread-winner is a 20th century phenomenon that is rarer these days, at least in the western world, from what I am seeing.
- danharaj 11y ago
  It turns out, when you have a whole other human being doing full time unpaid labor that is completely essential to your well being, you can succeed professionally. I find the other comments full of praise tarnished by their elision of this crucial detail. This is the story of a family, not a man.
Rainymood 11y ago
A lot of his articles are awesome, I especially like this one http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
- _asummers 11y ago
  This is a pretty terrific list, as well. http://matt.might.net/articles/what-cs-majors-should-know/ http://matt.might.net/articles/what-cs-majors-should-know/
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
ChuckMcM 11y ago
I found that article really inspiring. And I especially liked the validation of switching from externally driven goals to internally driven goals. Many, many times, when someone has asked me "What do I need to do to get a top job" or "Get into company X" my answer has been a variant of the author's epiphany: "I stopped working on problems for the sole purpose of notching up a publication. I shifted gears to cybersecurity. I found a project on cancer in the med school. I joined a project in chemical engineering using super-computing to fight global warming." The truth is that you can't serve two masters of "chasing success" and "solving a problem." Pick hard problems to solve and run them down. That says way more about you than any sort of resume buffing you might do.
- mjn 11y ago
  I liked most of the article, but the part you quoted struck me as a bit contrary to the main thrust of it. As a CS researcher, I occasionally think, what would be the #1 thing I'd do if my sole goal were to chase career success in academia? And it would be this: transition into a currently hot, well-funded applied area like cybersecurity, cancer research, or climate modeling (or big-data analytics, or robotics, or a few other such things). A lot of things just become easier if your research aligns with the current opinion among deans and funding agencies regarding which areas are important. So he did... exactly that as an alternative to chasing success? I mean it's certainly believable that he moved to those areas because he's personally interested in them, rather than just following the money. If so, he had the good fortune that his personal interests aligned closely with the current priority areas of major U.S. funding agencies. There are plenty of cases where that isn't true, so I think it's a bit dangerous to take it as the normal outcome. If your passion is something people with money are not currently interested in, the odds that everything will just work out fine if you focus on your passion are much lower. So my modified advice would be: to get tenure, follow your passion and solve problems rather than micro-optimizing citations, but first macro-optimize research area by choosing problems that the NIH, NSF, and/or DARPA are pouring money into. :-)
- seanmcdirmid 11y ago
  It is sad that the system is often setup for "chasing success" rather than "solving problems."
BiologyRules 11y ago
He says: "Applying the cold logic so common in computer science to the cell biology of the disorder, we’ve started predicting therapies, some of which have since come to bear fruit and improved my son’s quality of life beyond measure." I curious to read his research on this, but I haven't been able to find it here: http://matt.might.net/#papers http://matt.might.net/#papers It's mostly security/GPU/Static analysis stuff.
- a_e_k 11y ago
  Most of it is here: http://www.overcomingmovementdisorder.com/ http://www.overcomingmovementdisorder.com/
- mattmight 11y ago
  It's in my talks, but not yet in a paper. I'm just about done writing a blog post on this topic too.
kkkkllll 11y ago
> Life is too precious and too fleeting to waste my time on bullshit like tenure. I didn’t become a professor to get tenure. I became a professor to make the world better through science. From this day forward, I will spend my time on problems and solutions that will matter. I will make a difference. This is hypocritical and heartless to those who are now starting their careers as scientists. You spent a decade of your life to get to a tenure-track position, and now that decade and the rest of your life are on the balance. You can bullshit all you want about making the world a better place, but you'll be teaching Java Programming 101 in Podunk state college unless you deliver publications and grants.
- kaitai 11y ago
  A lot of the people teaching Java Programming 101 at Podunk Directional University are making the world a better place. Compare that to actually doing Java programming 101, for instance: teaching is about a lot more than communicating the meaning of syntax.
- ninjaboy 11y ago
  It actually turns out that Matt Might got tenure through the research lab model: he's got a group of post-docs that manage a group of graduate students that sometimes oversee undergraduates. When you have a team of 15 people publishing papers with your name on them, only managing the top 3-4, then you'll have the publication record and time to write grants to bring in money and thus make tenure. This isn't even uncommon in today's academic environment: many of the most successful professors run these business-structured research labs, producing amazing results they oversaw the people overseeing. I think it's a lousy way to treat academia, but hey, it gets you tenure.
bachmeier 11y ago
I feel compelled to respond to his (by no means unique) claims about teaching and tenure. "Doing a good job with teaching is perversely seen as a cardinal sin in some departments." Name one. Give some examples. If you're going to play this game of taking the obviously popular side of "ethical enough to do your job" then you need to be more forthcoming. The part about teaching is self-promotional BS. Perhaps in the very best departments, where they have so much money that good researchers rarely teach, tenure decisions are not based solely on research. There are very few institutions for which that is true though. You don't have to be a star teacher, but claiming that anyone not entertaining the students at a level to win university-wide teaching awards means they are "Torturing a captive audience every semester with soul-sapping lectures is criminal theft of tuition" is quite a jump. This is one of the most arrogant blog posts I've ever read. He did what most faculty members do to get tenure. He did research, teaching, and service at an acceptable level.
- seanmcdirmid 11y ago
  He mentioned his adviser, Olin Shivers (works on Scheme, inventor of CFA, very famous in PL).
  - bachmeier 11y ago
    He was at Georgia Tech. The tenure standards are very high. It's unlikely that he was denied tenure because he won a teaching award.
    - seanmcdirmid 11y ago
      No, there was politics involved, as always. And that dean is no longer there, I heard.
      - mattmight 11y ago
        Olin (my advisor) deserved tenure on his strength as a teacher alone. (If tenure were awarded on such things anyway.) He also founded the entire field of static analysis for higher-order languages (like Scheme, Python and Haskell). His long-term research impact has been extremely significant. It's hard to figure out any surface reasoning on which to deny him tenure, except that he refuses to thin-slice his work into many tiny papers. He operates on the model of "one paper = one major idea." Denying Olin tenure (after an overwhelming faculty vote in favor of tenure) seemed to me to be the tipping point that led ultimately to the ouster of the Dean.
JamesBarney 11y ago
"I even won what some academics jokingly call the “kiss of death” for tenure – the annual oustanding instructor award – the year before I went up for tenure." Ugh I don't know why we force so many researchers to teach. My university was filled with very smart and passionate professors who had absolutely no interest in talking to or teaching another human being.
- dspearson 11y ago
  "The Dignified Professor" excerpts from "'Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!' Adventures of a Curious Character" by Richard Feynman, Bantam Books: New York, 1986 I don't believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don't have any ideas and I'm not getting anywhere I can say to myself, "At least I'm living; at least I'm doing something; I am making some contribution" -- it's just psychological. When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they are not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come. Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing! In any thinking process there are moments when everything is going good and you've got wonderful ideas. Teaching is an interruption, and so it's the greatest pain in the neck in the world. And then there are the longer period of time when not much is coming to you. You're not getting any ideas, and if you're doing nothing at all, it drives you nuts! You can't even say "I'm teaching my class." If you're teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn't do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? The elementary things are easy to think about; if you can't think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you do think of something new, you're rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it. The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I've thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn't do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It's not so easy to remind yourself of these things. So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don't have to teach. Never.
gcb0 11y ago
tl;dr wife gave up her career so he could have his. down vote and deny all you want.
- sfk 11y ago
  Men would not even have the option to give up their career for their spouse, since that would trigger a divorce in most cases. And yes, intelligent women are the worst in that respect. Until that changes, who is in denial?
- mattmight 11y ago
  Not exactly: http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/#addendum http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/#addendum
  - gcb0 11y ago
    i read it all before commenting. how did you interpret "she drop her career and spent years caring for the son" as NOT dropping her career? note how all the accomplishments are a result of staying at home. and the only big effort listed was raising funds for his research. not saying it was right or wrong. I'd probably have dropped my career in similar situation. but trying to spin it is weird.
daxfohl 11y ago
Annoyed by all the "feel-good" pieces out of wherever. Push "all the bad things" into one little scapegoat and suddenly the rest of life becomes nothing but good. I mean, that's great for the people for whom it works (if there are any), but, guess what, when "the rest of us" want to "emulate that person", we get a few steps and realize we can't be that person because all of us are imperfect. It'd be more inspiring if these kinds of posts also included existing "skeletons-in-closet" to make the person seem more mortal. And not the interview answer "I'm too much of a perfectionist" skeleton. What does it really take? "My wife resents my success." "My kid doesn't even like/know me." "My grad student actually did all the work." "I'm sleep deprived and suicidal most of the time." "Half my statistics are lies." Seriously, nobody has a perfect life. What does it really take to make (at least) a "successful" one?

308 points by norswap 11y ago

> So, if you love your spouse and you want to have kids, then have kids. This is a great takeaway for ambitious people who worry about the impact of having kids on their career.

eitally 11y ago
Yes, but you need to both go into it with eyes wide open. Children absolutely will have an impact of some kind on almost any career.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

dude_abides 11y ago

Easily the most amazing "How to Get Tenure" article that I've ever read, even though (or maybe because) it hardly talks about how to get tenure! Passion and success are so strongly correlated, and Matt Might is such a great example of this, as are most successful researchers and entrepreneurs.

seibelj 11y ago

What an unexpectedly interesting post. I read a bunch of other posts he made and they are all very well thought out, with little fluff. He sounds like a really great and brilliant guy.

branchless 11y ago
Agreed, cracking communicator. And smart.

trequartista 11y ago

What an amazingly insightful post. I've always wondered how people derive the internal strength to do amazing things in the face of severe personal adversity. This post addresses this in some ways.

bbcbasic 11y ago
Reminds me of http://www.noogenesis.com/pineapple/Taoist_Farmer.html http://www.noogenesis.com/pineapple/Taoist_Farmer.html

jackson1372 11y ago

A really fascinating personal story. One thing that bothered me though: The author's wife quit her job to become a full-time mom. I would guess that the author was only able to have so much professional success because of this. Perhaps you can't get tenure/be really successful while also taking care of a child with disabilities. It just happens to be the case that the author didn't have to take care of a child with disabilities (his wife did), and so his professional career was unaffected.

barry-cotter 11y ago
This is the norm. It's not just that you can't have a successful career while taking care of a child with disabilities, you can't be a power couple with two high powered careers and a family without two nannies or massive support from grandparents. IIRC if you match childless single men and women by educational attainment and job experience the gender pay gap is about 3%. But most women downshift or exit their careers after having children and most men don't. Anyone with a really dedicated support staff or person is at a massive advantage when competing against those without. The only single people with support as dedicated as a competent spouse have butlers. Even corporate executives with personal assistants don't have that kind of always available, for all tasks help, not in the overwhelming majority of cases.
- xorcist 11y ago
  A "norm" needs to be geographically and culturally specified. Couples in other countries with working child care systems do not share this experience.
bbcbasic 11y ago
There are evenings, nights and weekends. The distant father-figure-bread-winner is a 20th century phenomenon that is rarer these days, at least in the western world, from what I am seeing.
danharaj 11y ago
It turns out, when you have a whole other human being doing full time unpaid labor that is completely essential to your well being, you can succeed professionally. I find the other comments full of praise tarnished by their elision of this crucial detail. This is the story of a family, not a man.

Rainymood 11y ago

A lot of his articles are awesome, I especially like this one http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

_asummers 11y ago
This is a pretty terrific list, as well. http://matt.might.net/articles/what-cs-majors-should-know/ http://matt.might.net/articles/what-cs-majors-should-know/

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

ChuckMcM 11y ago

I found that article really inspiring. And I especially liked the validation of switching from externally driven goals to internally driven goals. Many, many times, when someone has asked me "What do I need to do to get a top job" or "Get into company X" my answer has been a variant of the author's epiphany: "I stopped working on problems for the sole purpose of notching up a publication. I shifted gears to cybersecurity. I found a project on cancer in the med school. I joined a project in chemical engineering using super-computing to fight global warming." The truth is that you can't serve two masters of "chasing success" and "solving a problem." Pick hard problems to solve and run them down. That says way more about you than any sort of resume buffing you might do.

mjn 11y ago
I liked most of the article, but the part you quoted struck me as a bit contrary to the main thrust of it. As a CS researcher, I occasionally think, what would be the #1 thing I'd do if my sole goal were to chase career success in academia? And it would be this: transition into a currently hot, well-funded applied area like cybersecurity, cancer research, or climate modeling (or big-data analytics, or robotics, or a few other such things). A lot of things just become easier if your research aligns with the current opinion among deans and funding agencies regarding which areas are important. So he did... exactly that as an alternative to chasing success? I mean it's certainly believable that he moved to those areas because he's personally interested in them, rather than just following the money. If so, he had the good fortune that his personal interests aligned closely with the current priority areas of major U.S. funding agencies. There are plenty of cases where that isn't true, so I think it's a bit dangerous to take it as the normal outcome. If your passion is something people with money are not currently interested in, the odds that everything will just work out fine if you focus on your passion are much lower. So my modified advice would be: to get tenure, follow your passion and solve problems rather than micro-optimizing citations, but first macro-optimize research area by choosing problems that the NIH, NSF, and/or DARPA are pouring money into. :-)
seanmcdirmid 11y ago
It is sad that the system is often setup for "chasing success" rather than "solving problems."

BiologyRules 11y ago

He says: "Applying the cold logic so common in computer science to the cell biology of the disorder, we’ve started predicting therapies, some of which have since come to bear fruit and improved my son’s quality of life beyond measure." I curious to read his research on this, but I haven't been able to find it here: http://matt.might.net/#papers http://matt.might.net/#papers It's mostly security/GPU/Static analysis stuff.

a_e_k 11y ago
Most of it is here: http://www.overcomingmovementdisorder.com/ http://www.overcomingmovementdisorder.com/
mattmight 11y ago
It's in my talks, but not yet in a paper. I'm just about done writing a blog post on this topic too.

kkkkllll 11y ago

> Life is too precious and too fleeting to waste my time on bullshit like tenure. I didn’t become a professor to get tenure. I became a professor to make the world better through science. From this day forward, I will spend my time on problems and solutions that will matter. I will make a difference. This is hypocritical and heartless to those who are now starting their careers as scientists. You spent a decade of your life to get to a tenure-track position, and now that decade and the rest of your life are on the balance. You can bullshit all you want about making the world a better place, but you'll be teaching Java Programming 101 in Podunk state college unless you deliver publications and grants.

kaitai 11y ago
A lot of the people teaching Java Programming 101 at Podunk Directional University are making the world a better place. Compare that to actually doing Java programming 101, for instance: teaching is about a lot more than communicating the meaning of syntax.
ninjaboy 11y ago
It actually turns out that Matt Might got tenure through the research lab model: he's got a group of post-docs that manage a group of graduate students that sometimes oversee undergraduates. When you have a team of 15 people publishing papers with your name on them, only managing the top 3-4, then you'll have the publication record and time to write grants to bring in money and thus make tenure. This isn't even uncommon in today's academic environment: many of the most successful professors run these business-structured research labs, producing amazing results they oversaw the people overseeing. I think it's a lousy way to treat academia, but hey, it gets you tenure.

bachmeier 11y ago

I feel compelled to respond to his (by no means unique) claims about teaching and tenure. "Doing a good job with teaching is perversely seen as a cardinal sin in some departments." Name one. Give some examples. If you're going to play this game of taking the obviously popular side of "ethical enough to do your job" then you need to be more forthcoming. The part about teaching is self-promotional BS. Perhaps in the very best departments, where they have so much money that good researchers rarely teach, tenure decisions are not based solely on research. There are very few institutions for which that is true though. You don't have to be a star teacher, but claiming that anyone not entertaining the students at a level to win university-wide teaching awards means they are "Torturing a captive audience every semester with soul-sapping lectures is criminal theft of tuition" is quite a jump. This is one of the most arrogant blog posts I've ever read. He did what most faculty members do to get tenure. He did research, teaching, and service at an acceptable level.

seanmcdirmid 11y ago
He mentioned his adviser, Olin Shivers (works on Scheme, inventor of CFA, very famous in PL).
- bachmeier 11y ago
  He was at Georgia Tech. The tenure standards are very high. It's unlikely that he was denied tenure because he won a teaching award.
  - seanmcdirmid 11y ago
    No, there was politics involved, as always. And that dean is no longer there, I heard.
    - mattmight 11y ago
      Olin (my advisor) deserved tenure on his strength as a teacher alone. (If tenure were awarded on such things anyway.) He also founded the entire field of static analysis for higher-order languages (like Scheme, Python and Haskell). His long-term research impact has been extremely significant. It's hard to figure out any surface reasoning on which to deny him tenure, except that he refuses to thin-slice his work into many tiny papers. He operates on the model of "one paper = one major idea." Denying Olin tenure (after an overwhelming faculty vote in favor of tenure) seemed to me to be the tipping point that led ultimately to the ouster of the Dean.

JamesBarney 11y ago

"I even won what some academics jokingly call the “kiss of death” for tenure – the annual oustanding instructor award – the year before I went up for tenure." Ugh I don't know why we force so many researchers to teach. My university was filled with very smart and passionate professors who had absolutely no interest in talking to or teaching another human being.

dspearson 11y ago
"The Dignified Professor" excerpts from "'Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!' Adventures of a Curious Character" by Richard Feynman, Bantam Books: New York, 1986 I don't believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don't have any ideas and I'm not getting anywhere I can say to myself, "At least I'm living; at least I'm doing something; I am making some contribution" -- it's just psychological. When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they are not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come. Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing! In any thinking process there are moments when everything is going good and you've got wonderful ideas. Teaching is an interruption, and so it's the greatest pain in the neck in the world. And then there are the longer period of time when not much is coming to you. You're not getting any ideas, and if you're doing nothing at all, it drives you nuts! You can't even say "I'm teaching my class." If you're teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn't do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? The elementary things are easy to think about; if you can't think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you do think of something new, you're rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it. The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I've thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn't do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It's not so easy to remind yourself of these things. So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don't have to teach. Never.

gcb0 11y ago

tl;dr wife gave up her career so he could have his. down vote and deny all you want.

sfk 11y ago
Men would not even have the option to give up their career for their spouse, since that would trigger a divorce in most cases. And yes, intelligent women are the worst in that respect. Until that changes, who is in denial?
mattmight 11y ago
Not exactly: http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/#addendum http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/#addendum
- gcb0 11y ago
  i read it all before commenting. how did you interpret "she drop her career and spent years caring for the son" as NOT dropping her career? note how all the accomplishments are a result of staying at home. and the only big effort listed was raising funds for his research. not saying it was right or wrong. I'd probably have dropped my career in similar situation. but trying to spin it is weird.

daxfohl 11y ago

Annoyed by all the "feel-good" pieces out of wherever. Push "all the bad things" into one little scapegoat and suddenly the rest of life becomes nothing but good. I mean, that's great for the people for whom it works (if there are any), but, guess what, when "the rest of us" want to "emulate that person", we get a few steps and realize we can't be that person because all of us are imperfect. It'd be more inspiring if these kinds of posts also included existing "skeletons-in-closet" to make the person seem more mortal. And not the interview answer "I'm too much of a perfectionist" skeleton. What does it really take? "My wife resents my success." "My kid doesn't even like/know me." "My grad student actually did all the work." "I'm sleep deprived and suicidal most of the time." "Half my statistics are lies." Seriously, nobody has a perfect life. What does it really take to make (at least) a "successful" one?