The importance of asking, mentoring and building networks for academic career success - a personal and social science perspective

Abstract

This article aims to provide both personal and scholarly perspectives on how seeking mentoring and cultivating the skills of asking and networking are important habits that all faculty members can use on a day-to-day basis to build a successful academic career. While there are many different pathways that one can follow to achieve success, the examples included here come from the first author’s experiences as a faculty member at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Arkansas. The social science perspective for this article focuses on how these practices affect women, because 41% of Association for Women in Science (AWIS) fellows (men and women) state that mentoring of non-tenured (“junior”) faculty is still the major institutional policy that must be addressed in order for junior faculty to succeed [1]. There is a significant literature that provides practical advice as well as individual accounts of how women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) have dealt with important career issues specific to academic settings [2–4]. Additionally, there are books available for navigating academia that are worthwhile for individual faculty members of all levels to read [5, 6]. While more systematic studies of the scientific careers of female faculty provide an important insight into the nature of the academic workplace and its operation, they do not provide the unique insights into the issues of intellectual growth, intellectual influences, and problem-solving strategies that individual stories provide. It is for this reason that principal investigators of a National Science Foundation (NSF) Advance grant at CUNY Hunter College decided to use interviews to gain the specific information that surveys could not provide [7]. In fact, in social sciences research there are rich scholarly traditions, the standpoint perspective, and a case-study approach emphasizing the importance of listening to and learning from the biographical narrative of a knowledgeable individual [8–12]. A case study-standpoint approach is especially valuable when the numbers of successful women faculty in a specific discipline are relatively small, creating obstacles for conducting large scale and more generalized studies. Importantly, even if such a study were an option, there is still great value in learning from specific experiences, especially when their meaning is likely to disappear in the aggregate data describing factors underlying the overall career patterns among women scientists. The importance of the experiences described here has been emphasized by social science literature covering the operation of social networks and the importance ofmentoring for faculty careers [13–15]. In addition to recognizing the importance of individual initiative, this scholarship also emphasizes the need to institutionalize the practices and strategies discussed here to ensure that diverse talents and skills of all scientists are fully utilized [16, 17]. We both hope that all readers who are either interested in or are currently starting an academic career will find this material useful.