*The* book for early career academics trying to stay afloat (plus bonus recs)

For the PhDs, postdocs, and early career faculty (hoping to be) among us

If you could really only read one single book to improve academia, I’d probably pick this one. (Image: beasternchen/Pixabay)

I’ve had a remarkable convergence of requests and conversations recently, all in the vein of what kind of career prep we should really give to folks who want to be academic faculty.

If you want to consult with me to co-create the type of new faculty orientation and first-semester grad course I believe we owe students and peers, send me an email!

But, in the meantime, here is the basic reading list I’d like to see us assign (or at least suggest) to folks intending to join the academy for (even a part of) their careers:

Top 2

• Top choice: Sustaining Your Well-Being in Higher Education: Values-Based Self-Care for Work and Life. It’s a small, readable, and vital book.

• Also this article from Chanda Prescod Weinstein on balancing commitments. While it emphasizes grad school, the takeaways are relevant to any career stage.

From there, we could guide folks through one book (and/or a handful of readings) per semester (or more intensive reading if schedules allow). My shortlist would include the following books:

Other great books

In no particular order:

1. The No Club—if we are ever going to have the academia we want, we have to change our metrics of success to reflect what we actually say we value. This book exposes the deep inequities of who does unpromotable work (aka service) and details precisely how we can change that to benefit us all.

2. The Happier Hour—a life-satisfaction researcher shares insights (and great activities/prompts) to define and prioritize what you value.

3. Four Thousand Weeks—a short, insightful book on human’s history with the concept of time, coupled with the reality that our to-do lists will never be done. Written to help you see the reality of our limited time on earth as freeing, not despair-inducing.

4. Social Change Now—a workbook to help you acknowledge (1) that no one person can do everything (and trying is toxic, unsustainable megalomania), and (2) it is a just, sustainable practice to identify which roles in a group/effort you want to do and which can/should be done by others.

5. Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto—An insightful systems analysis and bracing call to action for anyone still clinging to a sense of meaning and purpose as an educator in higher ed.

Blogs/newsletters with really helpful perspectives

• Dr. Beronda Montgomery on working from affirmation, not for it, in academia.

• Dr. Terry McGlynn’s blog Science for Everyone 

• Dr. Jorden Cummings’ blog Rebel Scholar Dispatch

• Dr. Loleen Berdahl’s blog Academia Made Easier, especially her posts with time-tracking/management worksheets.

I also talk a lot about work-life harmony on my School of Good Trouble blog. The following posts, and/or resources and citations in them, could fuel a lot of discussion. Especially relevant posts include:

• A mini-series about exactly how I articulate my own metrics!

• This series on burning out after a decade of leadership-level service in the Ecological Society of America

• Schmoozing is part of our job (as academics) (this one is freakishly prescient, considering when I wrote it.)

• And also, the following individual posts:

  • No, you do not have to love your job

  • I don't need a nap, I need help making a better system.

  • Discomfort in the comfort zone.

  • Forget the 'summer of everything': saying no changed my life.

  • Graduate school is a great thing...if and when it is.

  • Yeah, we're busy. But, we need to run grad school better.

  • Not being a scientist made me a better scientist.

  • If student evals suck, how do we know we're doing a good job teaching?

  • Community voices: the importance of diverse networks in academic mentoring.

  • Not an expose: Publishing a department-level climate survey as a tool for action.

  • Staying in this doom loop is untenable: Rethinking how we gift our attention.

  • Leveraging grad student training to transform institutional attitudes on scicomm.

  • I've spent most of my career advocating for strategic planning, but never thought I needed to do it personally. Now I'm rethinking "resolutions" and what they mean for academia.

How about you?

There are, of course, a host of other fantastic perspectives on being humane and doing meaningful work in academia. What I’ve listed here isn’t a comprehensive reading plan, nor is it a full course syllabus (the design of which is scholarly, intellectual labor worth compensating!). I haven’t even begun to describe how I would facilitate discussion, reflection, and articulation of early career folks’ priorities, self-determined metrics of success, associated work plans, etc.

Even so, I imagine my rough list stimulates some ideas for you.

So: what would you add to the reading list and why?

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P.S. You still have time to get 30% off of Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences! Just use the code UCPNEW. This is a labor of love I co-wrote with Stephen Heard to help folks in the sciences connect with the 50+ years’ of research on how to effectively teach writing. It comes out from University of Chicago Press on November 18th!