Art Carden

Dr. Art Carden (@artcarden) shares some motivational advice on overcoming one of the most difficult barriers to publishing, submitting it.

One of the barriers to publishing scholarly articles is the conviction that a paper has to be perfect before you can submit it to a journal. It’s a vice of my own: I have far too many papers in various stages of completion that are waiting for another round of revision before they’re ready to go to a journal. Nonetheless, I’ve been able to overcome this barrier for enough papers to have a decent publication record.

Here are a few pieces of advice for meetings based on mistakes I’ve made and things I’ve observed:

1. Be There

You’re meeting someone whose time isn’t free. They could be doing other things. Respect that by keeping your appointment or by making sure you let the person you’re supposed to meet know if you aren’t going to make it. You might not have their phone number, but you might be able to reach the coffee shop, restaurant, hotel, or wherever.

2. Be On Time

Try not to introduce additional uncertainty into your friend or mentor’s day. Be where you are, when you said you ‘d be there. It never hurts to be a minute or two or three early. My high school band director—a fountain of wisdom I didn’t fully appreciate until I was older—once said that the only way to be on time is to be early.

3. Be Prepared 

Have a pen and paper (preferably a notebook). Write things down on something you will see regularly so you can

Professor Art Carden has several posts up on LifeHack on how to write well and write often. The site is a little ad heavy, but the content is stellar:

Improve Your Writing With Word Limits

Writing Research Papers

Hunt, Gather, and Build: A Review of "Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method"

Deirdre McCloskey on Writing

Just Keep Writing!

I just got off the phone with someone who identified herself as a PhD student at Middle Tennessee State University (I didn't catch her name, unfortunately). She had a question about the Southern Economic Association graduate student poster session, and she told me that she saw on my resume that I had participated (as of this writing I'm speaking at MTSU in two days, so it isn't too surprising that she has my CV). She called me because apparently her call to the SEA offices was unanswered.

Some people might be put off. I was actually kind of impressed. Here's why. The student had a problem and found a creative way to solve it: instead of throwing herself into an abyss of uncertainty and hoping things work out, she identified a clear problem ("are the poster dimensions vertical or horizontal?"), identified someone who might be able to answer her question, and then had the boldness to cold-call a complete stranger (someone she will probably meet on Friday) to try to get her problem solved.

There's a fine line between showing boldness and initiative and just pestering someone. As I'm visiting her institution, this was on the "boldness and initiative" side of the line.

Professor Art Carden gives tips on preparing for the tenure process.

Dr. Carden is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Rhodes College in Memphis, a Research Fellow with the Independent Institute, a Senior Fellow with the Beacon Center of Tennessee, and a regular contributor to Forbes.com and Mises.org.

Filmed at the Institute for Humane Studies' HSF-RC weekend seminar on November 5, 2011.

Transcript:

As of this filming I am being evaluated for tenure. A couple of months ago, I turned in my tenure portfolio which included my research, it included statements about my teaching, my research, my service, a statement of my teaching philosophy, a list of people who are going to evaluate me from outside of the institution, a list of people to evaluate my service to the institution and a list of people who observed me in the classroom.

A couple of things you want to think about as you get ready for the tenure process are, first make absolutely sure that you know what is going to be expected of you. The requirements for tenure differ from institution to institution and the process itself actually differs from institution to institution. In some places teaching really matters and in some places it doesn’t matter that much, some places really emphasize scholarship, some places want to see if you have been on a couple of different committees. So you want to know exactly what is expected of you as a faculty member as you are getting ready because of your process.

In some cases the department ultimately makes the decision, in other cases there is a tenure promotions committee that makes a decision so you might actually have to appeal, you might actually have to write a letter or a statement that is going to describe and summarize your research from people who are outside your field and help them understand how you are making a serious contribution to say the field of economics if their work is in English literature, psychology or biology.

A second thing that you want to do is make sure that during your time as a junior faculty member that you are getting the kind of feedback that you need. At a liberal arts college, I have gotten regular feedback from my dean, I have gotten regular feedback from my department chair and I have had regular meetings with at least one person in upper administration about this process of going to tenure or about this process of teaching, research and service, leading ultimately to my evaluation as a candidate for tenure.

So periodically and regularly, not regally or not daily, you want to find out what you need to do or you want to find out who is ultimately going to be in charge of making the decisions and you want to make sure that you are getting feedback from the kinds of people who are going to be evaluating you.

Long story short, you don’t want to set yourself up to be surprised. You want to know what is going to be expected of you, you want to know what you are going to have to deliver and you want to get regular feedback on the degree to which you are preparing yourself to deliver what is expected of you.