About a month ago, I realized I had stopped planning somewhere along my tenure journey. With the pressure to produce, I was so focused on individual articles, I had lost sight of the big picture. So I set out to fix that and get back to a systematic, strategic approach to my research work.
Strategic planning should be a regular part of our work. Like a nonprofit or research center, academics have a vision and mission for their research work. This means we need to take the time to define what we’re aiming to accomplish and assess how the work we’re doing and have planned fits into that vision.
In my planning process, I started with what Cathy Mazak calls an academic mission statement. As Mazak describes, “The big idea here is to clarify and articulate your mission, then line up all your activities so that they are serving this mission.” The mission is an overarching guide that should be used to organize the rest of your work. Just as a nonprofit might have a mission to alleviate child poverty in the U.S. by 2050, you can have a mission that drives your work as an academic. In fact, as Mazak talks about frequently on her podcast, you should use your mission to identify what work you should say yes and no to. That was the first thing I did after crafting my mission statement by reviewing all of my research projects and ideas with the question “Does the topic align with my mission statement?”
While my mission statement focused on the kind of scholarship I wanted to produce, I was also thinking about my goals for how I wanted to produce scholarship. Here, I thought about how I work best, drawing on Michelle Boyd’s writing metaphor and her book Becoming the Writer You Already Are. For example, data analysis is the part of the research process that brings me the most joy, so while it may be necessary to outsource data analysis for some projects because I do not have time to do all of the data analysis, I would like to always have data analysis work to do myself to have those moments of pure joy in the research process.
The other aspect of how I do research that I tackled was thinking about how research gets done. Out of necessity to keep research moving forward towards tenure, I have taken on more solo research than I originally thought I would do as a faculty member. In stepping back to plan for the future, I want to have a balance of research projects that (1) I lead, (2) I collaborate on with peers, and (3) I lead in a mentored research project with graduate students.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what a reasonable workload looks like moving forward. Here, I turned to the common advice to tenure-track professors at research institutions to always have 2 articles under review at any time. What isn’t commonly discussed is what the rest of your research pipeline should look like to accomplish this goal due to differences in how faculty approach the research process (see prior paragraph). Without any clear guidance on this, I got stuck on this point for a bit. I talked to my frolleagues (friend-colleagues) about what they thought they would need in the writing and data analysis stages to maintain a goal of 2 articles under review. I also looked at my current research pipeline (which is frankly clogged with too much in writing stage) in search of an answer. I landed on an answer that is personal to the kind of research that I do and aim to do, which is solo and collaborative with small teams of up to 4, and includes both article and book writing (I count each book chapter as an article): 2 articles under review (or chapters out for feedback), 3 in writing stage, and 3 in data analysis or collection stage. To be transparent, this is not a tested ratio, so I cannot say whether it is effective or not, but I will see over time.
With my mission statement, writing metaphor, thoughts on how I want to do research, and goals for my research pipeline, I wrote tenets for my research work and strategies for how to achieve each of them. This included tenets like “Collaborations produce stronger research” with strategies like “Approach frolleagues about joining existing and future research projects,” so that each tenet has a clear list of strategies that I can use to implement it.
This process is experimental and on-going, so the last thing that I have implemented, and perhaps the most important, is reflection and revision. I started a research journal where I work through each of these parts of the process, reflect weekly on how the changes I’m trying to make are going, and think through new parts to this strategic planning process as I realize the need for something else.
How are you reflecting on your research process and goals?
practical phd 