A self-paced workshop to help you demonstrate your competence in your own authentic voice.
It Takes Professors to Make Professors. And then…?
Many Ph.D. programs are sufficiently structured to take aspiring entrants, apprentice them to supervising faculty’s research, and through course-work, paper-writing, and a series of high-stakes presentations, crank out well-prepared PhDs.
If you’re lucky, as you entered the market you had support from your faculty committee to land a tenure-track position.
Then usually that structured support ends. Senior and mid-rank faculty colleagues at your current institution may extend encouraging conversations about your research; or they may view you as a threat to the department’s established pecking order; or as is often the case, they may be too busy with their own teaching, research, and service to engage in substantive ways about your work and your trajectory.
While you may have great co-authoring connections from the university where you earned your doctorate, it’s unlikely you’ll find rich support from those sources for the process of applying for retention, tenure, and promotion at your institution.
Locally Lonely
Many of us find ourselves locally lonely as we prepare a comprehensive dossier summarizing years of effort—to create and deliver new courses, to establish ourselves as independent researchers, and to serve our departments, institutions, and the academy.
After years of honing our expertise, we find that, in a dossier, we must be specific enough in describing our work so that experts in our field can recognize it as truly distinctive, while still using language understandable to people who know nothing about our domain. We often feel pressure to present ourselves and our work in ways we THINK others want to hear that don’t sound quite authentic or true to ourselves.
This workshop exists so that you don’t have to face your dossier preparation alone. Yes, you must have DONE the work you’ll summarize, and you must do the actual narrative writing and compilation. But here you can find guidance, other’s perspectives, and—if you want it—help for your work-in-process. Here we emphasize helping you demonstrate your competence in your own authentic voice.
More Diverse Faculty, Richer Education, More Resilient Society
We focus on women because we believe helping competent women rise in their academic institutions deepens our universities’ capacity to provide rich educational opportunities for increasingly diverse populations. In turn that helps our communities be more innovative—and compassionate—as we work to address complex problems created by previous generations’ solutions and improvements. Helping women describe their achievements, in their own voices, in the narratives needed to navigate pivot points of retention, tenure, and promotion is the right thing to do—for the women faculty, and for the rest of us.
Get Started
Take a few minutes to complete the Professional Narratives Readiness Assessment. It will help set the stage for productive conversations about how to improve your dossier or other professional narratives.
