Write on
There are two groups of pre-tenured faculty who meet regularly on my campus: one departmental and one campus-wide. It doesn’t surprise me that both groups express concerns with finding the time to write and publish research. We’re an institution that focuses on teaching, so research often gets pushed to the back burner, especially during the first few years.
The most common argument I hear for not writing is time. With all the grading, meetings, planning, etc., we have to do, where does one find the time to actually complete a project report and submit it? While time is a constraint, we can do very little to mitigate its impact on our lives.
But there are other variables in this equation that we can change. For example, it may be that we new faculty feel that, because we can’t rely on our reputations to get us published, our work needs to be of the highest quality to get published. I’ve discovered this to be false.
Last year I was finishing up the research track I started with my dissertation work. I desperately needed to get the paper accepted to a conference, so I worked many long days tweaking it. I sent it to established colleagues begging them to look over it. I proof read and proof re-read it more times than I’d like to admit. I submitted it on the deadline.
At the conference I was shocked to learn that it won an “outstanding paper” award. I realized that the level of quality I thought would be minimally acceptable was actually exemplary. That emboldened me, as did the assistant editor who passed me his card after my presentation and asked me to submit the report to his journal.
This year I submitted again to that conference, but with a twist. I put a great deal of work into one paper, but I also wrote my first “position paper.” The latter took me about two hours; I just typed out my thoughts on a certain aspect of the field – thoughts that had been ruminating in my mind for years – and backed them up with a few seminal references that just about everyone knows. If that paper wasn’t accepted, I would just post it here on my blog.
That was two months ago.
On Tuesday morning I received an email telling me that the journal that had asked for my award-winning conference paper had accepted it – with revisions. (Don’t believe all the horror stories you hear about the revision process; I agreed with every one of the recommendations.) Five hours and thirteen minutes later, I received two emails from the conference, informing me that both papers had been accepted.
So don’t let perfection be the enemy of completion; write what you have to say; submit your papers; shout it from the rooftops. Prestigious researchers were once young unknowns too.