Aydinli: As a newcomer with a recent PhD trying to make my way in the community of International Relations (IR) scholars, I sometimes feel like a juggler with too many balls in the air. How can I possibly keep aloft the many different roles I see for myself in this community? I feel I must be a good teacher and guide students in gaining disciplinary knowledge, yet I believe I should also be a thoughtful and well-informed intellectual who can possibly positively influence political developments in my local Turkish environment as well as internationally. Moreover, it is obvious that I must be a researcher, produce quality scholarship, and hope in doing so that I contribute to the accumulation and progression of disciplinary knowledge. Finding an appropriate balance between these roles, or deciding whether one or more should take precedence, presents me, and no doubt other young scholars, with very difficult choices. Furthermore, within each of these roles that I see for myself, I am faced with additional choices concerning not only the messages I present, but also the ways in which I want to get these messages across. If I consider only the role of researcher, I need to ask whether I want to try to forge my way alone or whether I would be better served by clearly identifying myself as part of a particular research community. And if I choose the latter, then which research community should it be? Should I pay homage to the most traditional ideas so that I remain a part of the core of the IR community? How do I act so as to retain my own perspectives while at the same time becoming an accepted member of this community and survive? In other words, how do I build my professional identity? …