Is this primarily a lifetime of building? Or is it usually centered around some successful period in their career?
Build a radio out of coconuts and seashells and you’re golden.
During her graduate studies, she delves into her topic(s) and engages in research or practice to develop her expertise in her chosen field. She receives positive feedback and acknowledgement for this work even before graduating. If she doesn’t, she might leave the doctoral program or change careers. By the time she applies for the first rung of professorship, she already has several presentations, publications, or research studies authored by herself or with her dissertation chair or mentors. These are sources of professional acclamation and esteem. In addition, she will teach and mentor in turn, which is an additional source of esteem.
ETA: Universities expect ongoing productivity and in dome cases, good teacing evaluations. Service to the program or university in the form of committee or other work, obtaining grants, advising theses, etc. All are potential sources of esteem.
Thank You!
Edited comment.
While on faculty, I’ve received awards for some of my work. That’s nice, too. I especially like hearing from students that my class was interesting and useful.
I had already corrected it when I saw your post
I see that now.
I’m not sure what is meant by esteem. Publishing papers which get cited a lot I’m sure helps. Publishing in high impact journals does also.
Getting on editorial boards and running conferences builds visibility but I’m not sure if it counts as esteem.
Getting a Nobel Prize is nice also, though it happens late.
As a grad student you start off slow, usually. In Computer Science there’s a lot of conferences, some a lot more prestigious than others. You get some papers in those. Later converting those papers into journal papers. Having a well known advisor helps. (Nobody reads your thesis, BTW. But your thesis should contain some work that you’re putting into conferences, etc.)
As a young prof it’s lather-rinse-repeat. The early papers should help you get some grant money. With that you can hire some grad students which add to your research. Plus it’s easier then to go to conferences, whether you have a paper in them or not, and get to know people.
Sometimes a grad student just hits it big right away. I did really well but I know people who just went nova in grad school by comparison.
It’s important to find out what the famous bleeding edge of your field is and going to conferences, getting invited to give talks at other universities, etc. help a lot in this way.
One side effect of getting known a bit early on is you get sent papers to referee as well as just being sent the latest drafts of papers that will come out later. So you should learn all about the latest and greatest and this gives you a head start on pushing thru the next set of results.
Some of my results came about since I saw an early version of a paper and quickly saw a way to improve the bounds quite a bit. But generally I had my own ideas.
Note that there are less … prestigious ways of getting a reputation. At one school we had one prof who was in an area where a lot of papers were simulations of various methods of doing things. So they’d just vary one little bit some, have a grad student run the simulations, put out a paper on this. And keep doing it over and over. Their buddies did the same, were in the same journals, etc. So a really impressive list of publications was built up with virtually no effort. No one in the department was at all impressed by this … except the chair. And that’s all that was needed.
I also knew people who got their names on papers by just being an annoying pest who claimed that they had the same idea, too. Lots of pubs. Not so sure about the esteem. And I know of one Turing Award winner whose most famous papers were ripoffs of other peoples’ work.
I’m unclear on what the OP is asking.
Are you asking how someone can build his reputation among his peers?
Or does this professor have low-to-average self-esteem for some reason?
(If “esteem” is a code-word in academia for something or other, then I’ve been whooshed, and please ignore this post.)
See, THAT’S real prestige.
In almost thirty years of teaching, I’ve avoided awards and accolades. To get them means a lot of blowing your own horn, sucking up to bureaucrats and being on (needless) committees.
I was hired to teach, not to build up my own “esteem”.
Not always true. The government division of RCA decided to try to get a government contract continuing the work of my dissertation. They asked me if I wanted to help manage it.
Hell no.
A lot of reviews I got to see when I was program chairing conferences were from grad students, who got given the paper to review by their professors - with my blessing, you are always looking for new reviewers. In my experience grad students often do a better job than their big name professors.
ETA: I’d be nervous about doing anything based on papers I review, at least until they get published. Papers under review are considered secret. Not quite as secret as NSF grant proposals.
Some other ideas
We survey attendees at the conference I help run, and the number one benefit they give is networking. A lot more interesting stuff is going on in the corridors and lounges of the conference hotels rather than in the meeting rooms. My daughter’s strategy is to network in the bar of the conference hotel.
If you are working on anything that might be of wider interest (theoretical computer scientists won’t find this helpful) there is a mailing list called HARO (Help a Reporter Out) which consists of journalists looking for sources. It can get you on a reporter’s Rolodex. Probably better after you get tenure, depending on your field.
That was very interesting
I read many dissertations in my subject area while writing my dissertation. In addition, when I ran undergraduate programs, I read the theses and dissertations of all the faculty I was responsible for. If I like a general author’s writing and they have a graduate degree with a thesis or dissertation, I’ll read it as well.
If you are just starting a career as a professor, your goal is to get tenure. Tenured professors are guaranteed lifetime employment at their universities. In the social sciences, a tenure application is based mainly on research published in academic journals, a system informally known as “publish or perish”. Journals run the gauntlet in terms of prestige, from the mostly highly regarded (such as the American Economic Review) to average, to fake publications that will publish anything for the right price. One way to measure the impact of your research is by tracking citations - the number of other papers that mention your paper. Teaching ability is also considered, but it’s generally secondary to research results. In some fields, you’d be expected to produce a book as well.
Once you get tenure, you can advance your career by serving in the bureaucracy of the university, doing more research, and overseeing the research of graduate (PhD.) students.
Bribery worked for me.
Popular esteem-building tactics in today’s academia center first and foremost around publishing lots of papers.
It doesn’t matter if your research output is insufficient or isn’t high-enough quality to interest top journals. You can get around such problems by fabricating data, paying to submit articles to predatory journals or purchase them from paper mills.
Don’t forget the benefits of plagiarism. As Tom Lehrer’s Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky once said, “plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize…only be sure and call it, please, research”.
Esteem can also be obtained through a strong social media presence. Generating admiration and/or income via YouTube videos, Twitter followers and Substack subscriptions is increasingly popular.
These are some of the things I was wondering about.
Except that the quality of the journals, not the paper count, is significant. A person whose entire publication record is in journals no one ever heard of is not going to do very well.
My observation of the professors on the committee of the conference I’m involved with seems to indicate that the best conference will have 100 submissions, one accept - theirs. Low accept rates are considered to be important to conference or journal quality.
Some years back some people wrote a program that generated papers. Some got accepted at conferences - but only those where they accept everything and you pay them.