Christy L. Haynes, an assistant professor of chemistry, expected to apply for tenure a year from now, or even later. But her department chairman at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities told her that her work was ready and encouraged her to apply this year. Ms. Haynes, who studies nanoparticles and how they affect the way cells communicate with one another, pushed to assemble her tenure dossier and is preparing for a September 29 “tenure talk,” a presentation about her research for professors in her department and from chemistry departments at other institutions.
Q. So you weren’t expecting to be at this point now?
A. No. I had actually stopped my tenure clock for a year to have a baby. My chair kind of casually mentioned sometime in the spring that I should consider going up early. I assumed he was thinking about sometime next year. Then he didn’t talk to me about it again until June, and he said, “Why don’t you put your tenure packet together?”
Q. How did that change your summer plans?
A. I was going to be at three major conferences, and then I just wanted to think for a while about my projects. I lost that luxury of thinking because I was putting together my dossier. But it’s not like I had a lot of time to worry and procrastinate about it.
Q. What part of your dossier was toughest to pull together?
A. The research description. The rules of it are completely nebulous. You want to include enough details so that your colleagues in your field know that you know your field. But you don’t want to lose the forest for the trees. That’s the part of the dossier I put off the longest. I never had an epiphany about it. I just had to suck it up and write it.
Q. Are you nervous about giving your tenure talk?
A. I’m kind of intimidated, and it’s been a long time since I’ve been intimidated by a talk. This one is obviously a really big deal. On one hand I want to make sure people get the breadth of the science that [my colleagues and I] are doing. But you can try to prove that you’re the smartest person on the block and kill them with details and have half the audience not know what you’re talking about. You have to take complicated science and make it into a story that everyone gets. I’m sure there will be people who vote on my tenure case where this talk will be the major piece of information they have about my research.
Q. You’ve given a lot of talks. Do you know any tricks to combat nervousness?
A. Sometimes when you’re nervous you talk fast, and you end up not using all your time. Your tenure talk needs to be 50 minutes, and then you have 10 minutes for questions. If you talk for less than your time, that looks really bad. So if you have an extra set of slides that you can pull out and talk about if you need to, that will keep you from coming up short. I’ll be nervous on Slide 1, and then once I start talking I’ll be fine. My first slide has to be something that I can talk about in my sleep.
