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Academic Career Advice from Curt Bonk
This must be the longest post I read this year, but Curt Bonk wrote a brilliant post on how to get tenure. His advice is good. He clearly thought this through.
The gist of it:
- Keep at it: fine tune your papers, fine tune them again, keep resubmitting them, draw beautiful pictures and diagrams. (Like there is any other choice? Well, I hear there are conferences in Las Vegas that will accept all papers if you send them a check…)
- Explore new ideas, read a lot, and stay current. (Do not become boring.)
- Do not bother attending entire talks, just listen to the first 5 minutes. (Or do like I do and skip them entirely and browse preprints on the Web instead.)
- Publish a lot, always worry about where you are going to publish the result of a project. (Yes, to get tenure that is probably sane advice.)
- Write a lot. Write all the time.
- Network a lot. Send your papers to people in your network. Ask for help.
- Find emerging new areas before they are hot. (Right. And how do you reconcile this with the next point? Let us call it “luck”.)
- Do what inspires you not what inspires someone else.
- Have a plan, track your progress. (The guy was an accountant. But I think you do have to grow a vision. I’m not sure that measuring your progress necessarily help?)
(Source: Downes.)