Shaping Your Career

Going beyond providing you with the tools, strategies, and approaches that you need to navigate the complexity of academic life, Don Haviland, Anna Ortiz, and Laura Henriques offer an empowering framework for taking ownership of and becoming an active agent in shaping your career.

This book recognizes, as its point of departure, that faculty are rarely prepared for the range of roles they need to play or the varied institutions in which they may work, let alone understand how to navigate institutional context, manage the politics of academe, develop positive professional relationships, align individual goals with institutional expectations, or possess the time management skills to juggle the conflicting demands on their time.

The book is infused by the authors’ love for what they do while also recognizing the challenging nature of their work. In demonstrating how you can manage your career, they weave in the personal and institutional dimensions of their experience and offer vignettes from their longitudinal study of pre-tenure faculty to illustrate typical issues you may have to contend with, and normalize many of the concerns you may face as a new member of the academy.

This book offers you:
• The resources, tips, and strategies to develop a strong, healthy career as a faculty member
• Empowerment― you take ownership of and become an active agent in shaping your career
• Advice and strategies to help women and members of traditionally underrepresented racial and ethnic groups navigate institutional structures that affect them differently
• An understanding of the changing nature of academic work, and of how to grow and succeed in this new environment

While explicitly addressed to early career faculty, this book’s message of empowerment is of equal utility for full-time faculty, both tenure-track and non-tenure track, and can usefully serve as a text for graduate courses. Department chairs, deans, and faculty developers will find it a useful resource to offer their new colleagues.