Hey Shag. In a word, hell no. I was living in Boston, got off to a fairly good start in my doctoral program, trucking along. Publishing opportunities kind of came at me - I had a terrific mentor (he still is in that role) and brought me along. So it was “easy,” in the respect that I was usually writing and researching something that was going to end up in a chapter or a book. My mentor, though, is at the twilight of his career and can pretty much will a book or chapter out of the thin air.
At the same time, I was working on a well funded, prominent research project - similarly, I was hopping on planes conducting research and getting paid for it. So for at least the first three years of my doctorate, I had a false sense of how publication and research works - it seemed way easier. When I started doing my own research, I opted to not take a piece of either research projects I’d been involved in, and do my own thing. Pro of this approach: very liberating, call your own shots, being a pioneer. Cons: you have to cultivate your own networks for funding and publication opportunities. I actually enjoyed that piece, to an extent.
When I started my job here, I was pretty unprepared for all of the tenure track stuff coming my way. I had to research, sure, but there was also teaching at the grad level (and I had never taught my own class - led sections, but basically doing the bidding of the supervising prof), and service (committee work in the department and assisting as a dissertation reader). This was further exacerbated by the arrival of our oldest kid in October of my first year. I had a 1-1 teaching load, so instead of writing up cool articles, I was trying to learn to pin nappies and get an infant to sleep in my free time. Additionally, my department was very “top heavy” (lots of full profs) so the mentorship wasn’t great - none of them had gone through tenure and promotion recently (the most recently tenured prof got it when I was in middle school!). They were very kind and protective but literally did not know what we needed to do, besides “publish.” No guidance or what, where, or how much.
Fast forward to year 3 - I am pretty popular with students, as are my other junior colleagues, so I’m chairing dissertations. We’re losing senior profs - some to retirement, one passed away from cancer (he was emeritus), and some to other positions. The other senior profs had significant administrative roles that kept them away quite a bit - so a lot of the day-to-day departmental work fell to me and the cadre of young profs in the department. I had very few peer-reviewed pubs and was beginning to panic.
One of my mentor’s proteges was running a fellowship program for a national foundation, and he encouraged me to apply. I almost did not get the fellowship, as it is intended for academic (not professional) fields. In some circles education is considered “professional,” like law, business, and medicine. My mentor got involved and essentially the director went to his board and stated that I was practically a sociologist, having been trained by one of the dominant sociologists in the field. That got me in, and gave me a year’s fellowship (no teaching duties!) to write. That year, we also had our second kid, who was very premature (but she’s doing great now). So I needed the time to help with that, and get articles out. As fate would have it, I got most of the projects I wanted to do out that year, and a number of articles that were in bad shape years ago finally got accepted, AND some unexpected publication opportunities came up. So that year literally changed my trajectory and I stopped having daily panic attacks about not getting tenure.
The tenure track life is a grind because you are constantly trying to get articles out that you know aren’t ready, with research designs you’re not entirely happy with - but the clock is running so you have to move. That’s the hard part. Also, there is so much rejection - you start to question your worth and ability until stuff starts getting accepted. Now I am very thick skinned and don’t particularly care about rejection, unless it takes a long time to learn the outcome (just had an article rejected after 9 months at the editor - that was infuriating).
But, yes, I had no idea of what was going to be required, and that probably didn’t become clear until about two years into the job. Much harder than I anticipated - almost like doing another doctorate!
