Welcome to the next episode of Growing Up Comm, a production of the ICA podcast network. I’m Arienne Ferchaud, an assistant professor at Florida State University, and ICA Student and Early Career Advisory Council member. This series covers topics that are primarily relevant for students and early career scholars. As academics, we tend to make our work our identity – maybe because we’ve been in school for so long – but it's important to have a good work-life balance so you don’t end up a burnt-out mess. Today, that’s what we’re going to be talking about experiences, advice, and mistakes made along the way from school to scholarship. I’m joined for this episode by Andrew Gambino, assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University, and Drew Cingel, associate professor in the Department of Communication at UC Davis. Without further ado, let’s get into it. I know when I first started as a professor, I had a really hard time. When you made the move from graduate student to professor, how did you find transitioning into that role? Drew, let’s start with you!
It’s hard. You think that you have been trained up to that point to just seamlessly make this move, and what was difficult for me is that when you're a graduate student, you do your work, you do your research, but you have that person above you, whether it's your advisor, whether it's a postdoc in your lab. You can always check and make sure that you're on the right path, asking the right question. There's that built-in guardrail. Then all of a sudden, you get that “magical” degree, and you move to the other side, and all of a sudden, you're that person, and people are coming to you and saying, “Hey, is this right? Should I do this?” It takes a while to build up that trust in yourself. You have put yourself in a position to be that expert, and it takes work.
Andrew, you had the added complication, also moving across the world in a pandemic. So how was that for you?
That was extremely nerve-racking, but in terms of transition, it's been oddly similar. I appreciate, very much, Drew's advice about having faith in yourself. We all have uncertainty when it comes to actually being in that position of where students are looking up to you.
I would say switching from grad school to being a professor, we were teaching one class a semester, and then all of a sudden, you're teaching two. Being at a research institution, research expectations are relatively high, especially on the tenure track…so it's a lot thrown at you right away, right?
I tell my graduate students that if you have put yourself in a position to be hired at an R1 University as a tenure track assistant professor, you're already on that trajectory, you're doing the research at the rate needed to get tenure. It's not like you're working at a fairly low trajectory, and then all of a sudden need to go up dramatically. You wouldn't have gotten that job offer in the first place. If someone has hired you, you've already done the work needed to get to that level. In addition to having the trust in yourself, it's about figuring out how much time does teaching another class take. Then you balance that with the fact that it does get easier when you teach the same class the next time.
We're all at R1s. Our experience is not going to be the same as if you were at a liberal arts college or a university that is more focused on teaching. In those situations, typically you have less research obligations, but more teaching. For reference, I'm in my fourth year on tenure track, so I've gotten into a groove at this point. But throughout the first year, I felt like I was drowning a little, particularly in teaching. Would you guys have any advice for people making that transition, particularly with regard to how to prioritize time with teaching?
I'm a big planner. I'm not saying I've done it well all the time, but I don't want to be prepping for my class the Sunday afternoon before teaching Monday morning. It's going to happen at some point, but that's not the goal. I spent the summer prior to moving to UC Davis, to get that first prep ready. I was working on my syllabus for the fall quarter. I was putting the lecture slides together, getting the videos ready, getting the readings ready. Not that I stopped doing research that summer, but my priority was getting that course prepped, so that I wasn't up late the night before prepping. I would look at the slides to remind myself what I was going to talk about, a few days before, and then get in and go. And what that allows you to do is use that fall quarter of your first year to get situated as being a professor for the first time in your life, to getting some research started at your new institution, while not having to worry as much about prepping for teaching. You just worry about what you're going to do in that hour or two hours when you're in front of students.
Fantastic answer. It's so comprehensive and put together because I'm the opposite: I'm a very poor planner, just winging it as we go. Teaching can be a time-sink, even if it's just one course or two courses. I've seen it happen with many friends. They teach great courses, but they sometimes fall behind in other places. But I think we all have done our due diligence in knowing what we're getting into at our institution.
Obviously, our goal with teaching is for the students to have good class experiences, but at a certain point, you do set yourself on fire to keep other people warm, and it's figuring out, “How can I be an effective teacher without completely burning myself out?” My first semester, I was spending a lot of time trying to get my classes exactly perfect, to the point where research just was falling behind a little bit. I think I fall somewhere in between Andrew and Drew: I take the summers to really plan out syllabi but the day-to-day of classes’ less so.
I don't think students want their professors to be perfect. I think that they want us to be real and at least mildly approachable. They're looking for you to get up there and speak passionately about the things that you care about. That's what they get most excited about, at least in my experience.
We talked a bit about teaching, we talked about research, and how to prioritize that. One thing as a student we never talked about, was departmental service. I don't think anybody ever told me about any of that stuff when I was a graduate student, navigating that service component of your responsibilities, faculty meetings, things like this.
They're pretty good about service here, departmental-wise – we are required, of course, to have office hours and be in the office for a certain amount of time – but for the most part, the service that I partake in quite heavily, is reviewing and editing for journals. I can parlay that into taking some of that load and not serving on as many departmental committees that can be very time-consuming. I'm trying to avoid as many meetings as possible, but the flip side of that is I end up reviewing 20-some papers a year, which is absurd.
I was fortunate that I was, as an assistant professor, really protected from service. When I arrived here at UC Davis, I was told, essentially: review some articles for a journal every now and then. The nice thing about that is that it is entirely under your control when that email comes through and pings, you are the only person that decides, “Do I have the time right now to review this paper?” It's not one of those committee meetings that meets for two hours every other Friday that no matter what happens, you have to go to that meeting. By the end, I had joined a few editorial boards. I did serve on one or two search committees, which is fairly minimal as service goes. When I went up for tenure, my department chair gently nudged me, “Okay, now you're going to start to serve on the undergraduate committee.” And then I decided to run for Vice Chair of the Children, Adolescents, and Media Division of ICA. I wanted to give back to the division that has meant so much to me, career-wise, and then I was in a place where I had the time to do it.
Yeah, I feel like I've been protected also as an assistant professor, but I do have to do more departmental service than you guys, apparently. I think that's just a matter of the size of our department – it's not possible to not do anything. Our P-T-and-E committee tends to privilege departmental service more than professional service. The departmental service I've done has been, “serve on this ad hoc committee that meets a couple of times a semester” or, “review these syllabi once a month” – not terribly onerous. Typically, once you get tenure, the service obligations increase. I think it's important when you're first starting off, to learn how to say “no” to stuff.
When you first start and someone asks you to do something, your immediate thought is, “If I say ‘no’, they're never going to ask me again. I'm never going to get on that editorial board. I'm never going to be able to publish there.” Here's the secret: they will ask you again.
They might ask you again the next week.
Right. It's okay to say “no.” I still say “yes” to more things than I probably should, but it is that knee-jerk reaction – like you're trying to find your place in this field.
So far, we've been talking about how to balance the different responsibilities of what it means to be a professor, particularly at these R1 schools. But, the topic of this podcast is not just work balance, it’s work-life balance. When you become a professor, typically it's not only starting a new job, but it's also moving to a new location: very rarely are you going to be able to stay in the same spot. How do you navigate picking up and starting over in a new spot, along with this new job?
In terms of work-life balance, like my former adviser said about teaching being a time-sinking thing, any free time you have as an academic can go somewhere. You can answer emails. You can always put in more time on the slides. I just turn my brain off. I will play games, or I'll just sit on the couch or read a book. Unfortunately, it's bad for some things because I have 98,000 unread emails in my inbox, but I am a person, in terms of work-life balance, who does “turn off” from work entirely when given the chance.
My wife and I moved to Sacramento, which Davis is next to in summer of 2016. It's important not just to integrate yourself within the department that you're working in, but also within the larger environments in which you're living. You're going to be a better researcher, a better teacher, more successful at your job, if you are also happy, if you are also successful in your everyday life. My wife and I had never lived in California before, we're both from the East Coast. For the first few months, our goal was, every weekend, to do something new – it didn't have to be anything major – and through all of that, you're able to recharge on the weekends, then go back into the grind on Mondays.
As academics, when we go through graduate school, we're conditioned to always be working on something. One thing that I did, a really simple sort of thing, is I downloaded this app called Meetup: people put together social groups that you can join.
But when you get a bunch of academics together, it's easy for the conversation to just be about work, and that's fine, that's helpful. But, it's always nice to have people that don't know what you do, that don't understand what you do. It's important to try to form those kinds of friend groups, too. I have friends that work in marketing and advertising. They change their jobs all the time – they can move to any city that they want to in the world, and be able to do what they want to do. I'm definitely jealous of that sometimes. Being a professor may be the only job that you ever have. Even if you move around, you're probably not going to live more than two or three places while you're a professor, and it is really important to be cognizant of that when you're making that decision of where you're going to sign on the dotted line: “If this is where I end up retiring, can I live here and be happy for the next 30 years of my life?”. Once you get there, you need to do everything that you can do to put yourself out there and integrate yourself, however you want to do it, in the local community.
I also want to just point out with the job market being what it is, sometimes you don't really have a choice. I was fortunate that I had two options to go between… Not everybody has that.
Yeah, you have to be open to it.
I would say that the work I'm doing now – where I'm “lazy”, and take time off, and take breaks for myself – is much more interesting work.
I'm gonna say you're not being “lazy”. Stop that!
How did you make that switch that shift in seeking balance?
A lot of graduate students who are in top programs, experience a lot of pressure. It was an agreement: “I'll say ‘yes’, and do these things, and I'll hope to build this record.” But at some point, I had what I thought was a good enough record where I could probably just relax a little bit. And then, in true happenstance, the pandemic happened, and I was just like, “I really don't want to do work,” and I kind of enjoyed it. and I started working with a few other collaborators that I'd met through different networks, and we did a bunch of strange work together, and I've been enjoying doing work like that since.
2021 was the worst year of my life, without exaggeration. My father passed away, and he had been in and out of the hospital for much of the year. What I realized was, my work didn't really suffer. I stopped caring so much about it all the time, I guess is how to put it. I spent a lot more time focusing on my family and myself, and I still did enough. At the end of the day, we are academics – we do feel like it's part of our identity – but we are complete human beings, and our job is only a portion of that. That was a big lesson for me: I'm gonna do a good job, but I'm not going to drive myself into depression or mental health issues. Coming to that understanding that you are not your profession, that is just an aspect of yourself, helps me to reframe things.
I always think it's very ironic that so many people in our field are at least familiar with, if they don't use it in their own research, social comparison theory – and yet, all of us do it all the time. We write in a paper, “People who compare themselves upwardly, are more at risk for depression,” from social media use, or whatever it is. Then, we publish that paper and then we go do it. I think it's okay to socially compare yourself. But then what you need to do is be cognizant of when you're doing it and be like, “We're all chugging along at our own rates…”
And also celebrate yourself. I think that's another thing.
I think in really any career, certainly this one, you're always looking for that next hill to climb, without ever taking any time to sit and admire the view. That's really important, to think about where you were just a couple of years ago, and where you are now. There's nothing in your contract that says you need to become an editor of a journal, or be chair of your department, or need to be Dean. Think about what you want, what your goals are out of not just your career, but your life, and then try to plan your career.
I think we're conditioned like, “Publish, publish, publish!” – but there are other aspects of the job that maybe you find more enjoyable. You can branch out and figure out what aspects you really want to focus on. There's nothing wrong with that.
This grad student asked me this great question. She said, “How do you figure out what type of work, or how do you choose what type of work, you should do, versus what type of work you want to do, in terms of research?” So if a student had a question like that for you, and even early career scholars, do you think there is a balance between work you should do versus work you want to do? My answer was, “You should just always work on what you want to do.”
I'm an entertainment scholar: the number of jobs that are looking for entertainment scholars specifically, is low these days. My first instinct is to be like, “Do what you want to do, because you're not going to be happy doing what you don't want to do.” On the other hand, it's an issue of practicality, as well – you have to get a job, you have to pay bills, and you do have to balance that. I think a lot of jobs are hiring based on what you can teach. For example, there's people doing very important research on things like social injustice. I, personally, for my own mental health, can't do it – it's too draining for me. I can't put myself in a situation where I'm like, “Well, that's what I'm going to do so that I can get a job.”
It's about being strategic within a certain area. For instance, right now, looking at the job calls from this past year, health aspects related to health communication, is a very popular job that there are a lot of opportunities for that. Health communication is huge: the number of things that you could study under that umbrella, and still can still be qualified as a health communication scholar, is quite large. A lot of my students study adolescent mental health, and so they're still studying the population that they're interested in, the developmental variables that they're interested in. But when they go on the job market, they can apply for jobs that are “health comm” jobs, and slowly get that “child and adolescent development” part into a program that may not be looking for that piece, specifically, but are looking for this “larger” piece. There are jobs for media effects scholars or people who study digital media, so again, most of my graduate students are studying, at some level, how media affects some aspect of development, so they can apply for those jobs as well. If you're researching what you're passionate about, it's going to be easier to do that work, you're going to want to do that work, more of that work is going to be higher quality. If you can do that in a way that is also strategic so that you can pay those bills, I think that's what you want to shoot for – and there are many opportunities to do that, if you're thoughtful and mindful of that upfront.
That's good advice. A lot of job calls are somewhat broad: it's a matter of learning how to position yourself in what you do, and thinking creatively, or strategically, about how you can market yourself. I've really enjoyed this conversation that we've had! Before we wrap up, are there any last-minute thoughts that you guys want to leave us with?
I think being an academic is one of the best jobs: it's one of the few jobs in this world where you can study the phenomena, the questions, that interest you; where you can teach people about the things that interest you and that you're passionate about. There's this built-in flexibility to it. And that is the blessing and the curse of it, especially since we're talking about work-life balance. I always think about “How can I balance that flexibility so that I'm doing the things that I'm interested in while taking advantage of the flexibility so that I don't have to work on the weekends, or I don't have to answer emails past 4pm or 5pm.” If you're mindful of that, it is just the best job in the world. I have loved every minute of it.
That’s such a great answer. I feel similar: part of the appeal to academia was its flexibility in terms of time, and I use my free time to come up with ideas, think about things, play games. Academia affords that, and I get to talk about, and teach about, things that I'm very passionate about, and study exactly what I want to study. I think we're very spoiled, in that sense. I know that it is sometimes tough to get that work-life balance, and we often do often over-work ourselves, but my advice: just to embrace your laziness every once in a while.
“Embrace Laziness”. I love that. I'm gonna cross-stitch it and put it on my wall. Thank you guys so much for agreeing to hang out with me for this podcast. It was lovely to chat with you.
The Growing Up Comm podcast series is a production of the International Communication Association Podcast Network. Our producers are Christian Elliott, Jo Lampert and Lacie Yao. Our executive producer is DeVante Brown. The theme music is by Will Van De Crommert. If you'd like to learn more about the participants on this episode, please check the show notes in the episode description. Thanks for listening!
