ONLINE BOOTCAMP
Maintaining Momentum, Productivity, and Purpose: A Program for Mid-Career Faculty
This event has been canceled. Check back soon for more details or sign up for our newsletter to stay in the know.
Create an intentional plan to advance and find fulfillment in your mid-career.
Overview
By mid-career, faculty have generally mastered their roles in academic systems, developed reliable teaching practices, and established a scholarly record and research agenda. Yet the mid-career stage brings up a new set of questions for faculty, such as:
- Should I work towards a full professorship?
- Should I move into an administrative or leadership role?
- Should I start a new line of research?
At the same time these new challenges emerge, institutional support often wanes and career progress becomes less clear. These factors make the mid-career point an important crossroads that requires intentional and proactive planning. Otherwise, you may find yourself pulled in too many directions or following someone else’s priorities for your career.
This bootcamp explores common barriers you may experience as a mid-career faculty and solutions for moving past these barriers towards a fulfilling academic life. We will guide you through the process of crafting an intentional mid-career path that moves forward your research and scholarship and your service and leadership activities in order to advance your career in ways that work for you.
A Highly Personalized Experience
This online bootcamp consists of:
- Four live online weekly sessions where you will work collaboratively and individually to craft a career plan to guide your mid-career path.
- Asynchronous activities between sessions to accommodate differing schedules and learning preferences so that you can craft a career plan that meets your unique needs. These activities will consist of brief readings and/or videos of no more than 30 minutes.
- You can also consider adding three success coaching sessions with our expert, Corinne Nicolas, or another Success Coach to continue honing your next steps as a mid-career faculty member.
To preserve the intimate and interactive nature of this training, the bootcamp is limited to 30 participants. Register early to reserve your spot!
Who Should Attend
This bootcamp is designed for mid-career faculty members seeking to proactively design the next phase of their career, such as:
- Assistant professors in the late stages of the tenure track
- Midcareer faculty at non-tenure institutions
- Newly appointed associate professors
- Associate professors who feel “stuck”
Follow Through With Success Coaching
Have you ever gone to a training only to find that you came back with great ideas but don’t have the time, support, or skills needed to make the changes?
Academic Impressions has produced thousands of trainings and we have learned that utilizing a coach after attending a conference helps provide accountability and bridges the training with the on-the-ground work of getting the job done.
As a result, we are now offering success coaching on select conferences.
- Purchase this training + 3 one hour follow up success coaching calls
- Work with an assigned coach who has extensive experience in higher ed.
- Get individualized support to help you follow through on what you’ve learned.
- Workshop your plans, run your ideas by someone and get additional help/practice.
To get success coaching, simply purchase the Bootcamp and add Success Coaching during registration.
Learn More About Success Coaching
REGISTERHear About the Bootcamp Experience
[vimeography id=”33″] The Academic Impressions Bootcamp Experience: Dr. Jeffrey Malanson ExpandDr. Jeffrey Malanson: The way the experience was structured, it provided a tremendous amount of flexibility to self-pace a lot of the material in a way that made the most sense for your schedule. But then you had the weekly structure of the Thursday and Friday face-to-face, in-person sessions, which were much better and more effective than I was expecting given everyone’s Zoom fatigue these days.
I generally think of myself as being a pretty reflective person, a self-reflective person, but was really impressed with the degree to which some of the activities we did made me confirm things I’d already thought about myself. But a lot of the activities really opened my eyes to the strategies I use in crisis situations and the way I communicate with other people, and the way maybe I need to do a better job of communicating with other people. A better understanding of the different buttons leaders can push to get better results out of their teams and to get better buy-in from the people that are working with.
One of the hard parts about a conference is you want to pack as much learning and as much experience as you can into the time you’re there. So by halfway through the second day or after lunch or whatever, you’re feeling pretty tired, maybe not as engaged with the material. So the online workshop really allowed you to engage with material on a timeline when you were prepared to do that when you’re prepared to learn the most, and really engage in, and then, you can ramp up for those weekly sessions each week and make sure you were fully prepared.
One of the nice parts is that the way they structured our bootcamp is that whenever we did little breakout sessions, they tended to put us with the same smaller group of people. So you had an opportunity, even if it was just in 10 or 15 minutes increments, to start building a longer-term relationship and to learn more from each other, rather than needing to essentially do new icebreaker events or get to know each other for the first time each week. You really got to build some relationships over time, which was really nice.
The focus on leadership philosophy that came from the bootcamp has really been eye-opening in terms of really thinking carefully about each experience I pursue, each opportunity I pursue, each interaction I have, “How is this confirming who I am, or how is this deviating from who I want to be? How is this getting me to that next step in my career?”
The two pieces of advice are one, make sure you really have the time to engage with the material each week. Then two would be to make sure you come to the participatory sessions ready, able, and willing to engage. It’s not the kind of experience where you can passively sit back and just absorb what others are saying and really fully benefit from it. You need to be willing to do the work, engage with the material, talk to your peers because that’s when you will fully be able to benefit from the experience.
The Academic Impressions Bootcamp Experience: Dr. Marilyn Odom ExpandDr. Marilyn Odom: Well, I have been department chair for a little over four years, and with many academicians, we move into these leadership positions without having any formal training in leadership, so I try to seek out opportunities where I can. I had attended a conference by AI and I was really impressed with it. So when I saw this opportunity, I thought it would a good experience for me. I approached my Dean, he said yes and we did it.
I thought it was probably one of the best experiences of my academic career. I’d learned so much, I reflected a lot, I pulled things out that I had not thought about in a while. I had not really thought about my leadership philosophy in eons. It gave me an opportunity to think about that, reflect on it, to really pull out my core values.
Now I have my new leadership philosophy printed out and it stays right here in front of me, between my two monitors and at my keyboard, and I look at it. Especially when I’m about to have a meeting with my faculty, I will look at it and I will read it and I will remind myself what my philosophy is, and remind myself to stick to that philosophy. Whether that means I’m about to have a good conversation where I’m going to build them up even more, more, more, or if it’s going to be a not so good conversation where I have to hold them accountable. But I have that, and that is probably the most significant impact that I took away from the bootcamp.
Other than the leadership philosophy, one thing that I know that I probably had not been as attentive to is really telling my faculty how great they are. Because I chair a department, and I probably had not just applauded them enough. I did do some, I will not say that I did not do any, but to recognize that.
Just do it. Go in open-minded. Be prepared to work, be prepared to think, be prepared to reflect, but just do it. I told my Dean that this money was well worth it, it was a good investment.
“This was a wonderful, innovative experience. Great ideas and resources were shared by participants and presenters. High energy and an overall wonderful learning experience.”
– Marisol Marrero Executive Director of StudentLink Centers, New York University“I was so impressed with Academic Impressions that I cannot wait to recommend these trainings to colleagues and bring Academic Impressions to my institution!”
– Kristin Miller Director of Advancement, College of Visual and Performing Arts, NIU Foundation“The variety of expertise allowed me to bring skills back to my shop and overall improve our tool-kits.”
– Garrett Aanestad Chapman Fund Manager, Chapman UniversityOUTLINE
This event has been canceled.
Session 1: Common Barriers & Your Professional Identity Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2022, 1:00 – 3:00 p.m. ET
During our first session, we will address common barriers at the mid-career point-barriers that may leave you feeling stuck, overwhelmed by increased service or leadership expectations, unsure of where to take your research next or how to compete for and secure needed resources, to name a few. You will explore your professional identity: what is working for you, what is not, and how you envision your career moving forward. We will conclude by identifying a professional vision and career goals that will drive your individual agenda for this bootcamp going forward.
Session 2: Your Role: Leadership, Management, and Service Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2022, 1:00 – 3:00 p.m. ET
Mid-career faculty are often called upon to engage in more service activities at their institution and in their profession as a whole. For some, being mid-career means opportunities to fulfill their call to lead and become administrators. For others, there is pressure to take on leadership roles in some capacity-whether as a program coordinator, director or leader in a professional organization, etc.
Through case-study examples from current academics who have achieved full professorships, moved into administrative roles, and who now lead centers and programs, we will overview the pros and cons of different career decisions and paths. Then, using your career plan from Session 1, you will identify where you want to go and what skills and resources you need.
Session 3: Your Research: Reboot or Reset? Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2022, 1:00 – 3:00 p.m. ET
During the mid-career stage, faculty often re-examine their commitment to the research agenda that led them to tenure. In this session, you will explore what directions you want your research and scholarship to follow moving forward and create a plan for your research that supports the goals you identified in session 1.
To support you through this process, we will explore three approaches to mid-career scholarship and research: building and leveling up your current research agenda, exploring new research strands, and developing a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) agenda. We will discuss their merits within specific institutional contexts as well as long-term career goals.
Session 4: Making It Happen Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2022, 1:00 – 3:00 p.m. ET
For our final session together, we will return to the goals you laid out during session 1 and the common barriers that get in our way. Under the guidance of our expert, you will work on revising your initial goals and identifying actions and timelines for them. We will discuss how to proactively plan for challenges that may get in the way of implementing your career plan along with how to create a support system for the mid-career stage of your academic life.
INSTRUCTORS
Corinne Nicolas, Ph.D., ACC
Faculty Coach
Corinne is a faculty coach who leverages 25 years of experience in higher education to help early-career and mid-career female faculty navigate key professional transitions. In her academic career, she was a writing professor who enjoyed helping students find their academic voices, as well as leading colleagues to experiment with student-focused and engaging pedagogies. She also led several academic programs, serving as chair of a humanities division and director of a general education program, while also leading efforts to revise curricula and faculty policies. More recently, she was a faculty development consultant for a large university’s teaching and learning center, working closely with the provost’s office to design and implement a university-wide, programmatic assessment training for academic leaders as part of a reaccreditation process.
Questions About the Event?
Alicia Miranda Associate Director for Learning & Development,
Academic Impressions