six things you shouldn't bother saying to someone pre-tenure (and some things you should)

Tenure is quickly becoming what I blog about the most, it seems.

Now that the semester is over, I can say I've officially wrapped up my fourth year on the tenure track. I'm no longer new, but I'm still junior (a fact that many of my colleagues seem to forget, actually). This means I'm entering my fifth and final year before I go up for tenure (Tenure is done in your 6th year at PCU, but it takes almost a year for your materials to work their way through the system).

I'm learning a few things about the tenure process. First, no one seems to know what to say to junior faculty members going through the hoops. Second, people seem uncomfortable when I share my pre-tenure stress with them. As if my senior colleagues want to pretend that this process isn't entirely awful or that they are not in many ways responsible for the process. (Hello? This is cognitive dissonance calling...). I suspect my colleagues would rather I not bring this to their attention. Third, people usually seem to try to say something helpful that ends up making me feel angry and invalidated.  Sure a lot of that likely has to do with my personality, but it would seem to me that so many people have gone through tenure before me that there ought to be some helpful statements people could try out. (I have a few suggestions in the second half of this post).

But first, six things I've learned you shouldn't bother saying to someone pre-tenure (in my experience)  (with an explanation as to why):

1. "You'll be fine."

I swear the next person who tries to make me feel better by saying "You'll be fine" is going to get kicked in the shins. It has taken me, literally, years and an entire therapy session to figure out why this statement makes me so angry. To me, it undermines the sheer amount of work that has to go into getting tenure. "You'll be fine," implies that by some magical fairy-dust experience of luck everything will just work out, somehow.  Second, it remains possible that I won't be fine. It is actually possible, in the system of T&P I work under, that I won't be able to finish everything and that I will have to cross my fingers and sacrifice a graduate student or lab animal or something to the tenure gods and hope the rules are bent for me. This is because (third) a lot of things that are needed for tenure (e.g., grants, publications, book chapters) are ultimately beyond my control. We all know the rates for grant success and people who write up amazing projects but don't get funded. We all know the rates of journal article rejections. Also I do interdisciplinary work that is often difficult to find a forever home for. So don't tell me "You'll be fine" - it sounds like you have your own head in the sand, and would like me to put mine there as well (Or at the very least, stop talking to you about my stress because it makes you uncomfortable).

2. "It's not that hard." (or some version of "You're over-reacting.")

You might say "Who would actually say that?" - trust me, I've heard it. And if "You'll be fine" makes me want to assault someone, "it's not that hard" makes me want to sit down and examine exactly what cognitive foreplay they've engaged in that has changed their own experience of tenure. Very few colleagues I have observed went through tenure with no stress whatsoever - even the ones who quickly met the requirements and for who tenure was clearly in the bag. First of all, it is hard - see what I said above about a lack of control. Second, even if it isn't objectively difficult to achieve the tenure requirements at a specific institution, the very process wears on you. It is constant - you don't turn it off on the weekends. It's long (6-7 years), it's chronic and constant, it's the stress of constantly being observed and evaluated. Of never wanting to say the wrong thing in a department meeting, of not wanting negative teaching evaluations, etc. It's hard. Some people's amnesia sets in after they themselves get tenure - the people who were rocking themselves in a fetal position for 9 months while they waited for the decisions to come down often seem to be the ones who assure me it's not that hard. That's hindsight bias people.

3. "So-and-so did..."

Shut the fuck up. I don't want to hear about how someone else coped with tenure. If I'm talking about tenure and not specifically saying the phrase "Can you give me some advice about tenure?" then I don't want to hear about what someone else did. Nor do I want to hear about how they weren't stressed out, "were fine," or coped with it. My own stress is real simply because I'm experiencing it. It doesn't need to match anyone else's experience of stress. It's not a competition for who is dealing the best. My experience is my experience and that's all I need support with.

4. "Try not to stress about it." 

I'm not even going to explain why this is not helpful. See my previous points.

5. "Maybe you should..."

Most people are problem solvers. They hear someone venting and they automatically start brainstorming ways of fixing that problem. That doesn't mean that is the kind of support that everyone always needs. Personally, I'm a decent problem solver. When I can't figure out how to solve a problem, I will ask for help. Sometimes I just want to talk about my stress without hearing about how to fix it. Because even though others might think "I'm going to come up with a way to help Psyc Girl deal with this misery because I care about her" (for example), it's also possible for this to sound like "I don't want to listen to you, so here is something to go do about it" or "Clearly you can't address this yourself..." Tenure is stressful, period. And in academia (as probably in many other cultures) we have a history of not talking about things that are stressful and difficult. I hate that about academia. Particularly when every single one of us on the tenure track is going through/will have to go through/has gone through this process. We should be able to talk about it and just be listened to.

6. "It won't be the end of the world if you don't get tenure." 

I'm well aware that if my final letter arrives in my campus mailbox and says some version of "Sorry, you're not good enough" that I'm not going to instantly explode into a supernova of bright white light and cease to exist. I get that. And abstractly, I know that if I don't get tenure I will have to find another job, or another career. And even more abstractly I know that my life might open in amazingly positive ways if I don't get tenure - I've certainly had amazingly positive things come out of difficult experiences before. And maybe I don't want to keep this job forever - but I want the choice to keep this job forever. Please understand - I have been working toward this since I was nineteen years old. I've moved six times for this career (and many of my friends have moved more), and I've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars related to my career. I've missed weddings, birthday parties, and many Thanksgivings with my family. I want this to pay off - or I wouldn't have sacrificed this much.

A few weeks ago I was talking to my bestie, ECB, about this and she said one of the best things to me (in the list below). And after a complete (and expensive) therapy session complaining about feeling invalidated by yet another instance of one of the statements above, I thought about what I do want to hear pretenure. Here is that list: (Note: Friends who read my blog. Yes you can copy and paste these word for word into a text message, I'm okay with that)

"You're sacrificing a lot, and it is noticed."

"I know this is hard."

"You will figure this out, I have faith in you."

"The fact that you haven't given up is impressive - you keep going and that's what you need to be doing."

"I'm sorry you feel so out of control."

"This is a long journey, and it isn't always a fair one."

"I think this will be worth it."

"What do you need from me?"

I picked up that last phrase from a friend (hope you know who you are) and it's amazing. A lot of people, as I mentioned, roll pretty automatically into problem solving mode. I'm lucky - I have a few close friendships where I have the freedom to say "I don't need you to help me solve this, I just need someone to listen." It's hard to find friends like that, and in my experience that kind of freedom only comes from some very frank conversations. But until I met this friend and they responded to my stress with "What do you need from me?" I'd never really had anyone ask before. It makes me pause, and it makes me think - and often the answer is "I just needed you to ask that, that's enough." Sometimes it's "I just needed you to listen, thanks" or "I need you tell me [X]" or sometimes something more tangible. But just by asking, I know that I'm getting more than lip service and platitudes, and furthermore that I'm being validated. Most of the people who care about me can't actually help me get tenure - they can't help me write papers or run experiments or get grants - but they can make a big difference in whether I feel validated or not. At this point, validation that my experiences are okay, this process is hard, and that I am working the best I can, is all I need to keep going.