Anxiety and Overwhelm

Image by James Lee, and used under a Creative Commons license

I can’t recall the context, but one of my colleagues, a full professor, mentioned recently that she enjoyed encouraging new faculty and really wished she could help junior faculty work more quickly through the anxiety that attends the first few years on the tenure track.

I don’t think she was referring to me; I’m not really feeling any anxiety, so I hope I’m not exhibiting any.

I wanted to take a moment to puzzle out why this is so, as while I am very laissez-faire about many aspects of my life, I can be a bit, ahem, obsessive about others. It seems to me that if I was going to feel anxious about anything, pursuing tenure, and especially on my institution’s clock—we go up for tenure in year 4 or 5, which seems to be a bit faster than elsewhere—would be an excellent catalyst. I’m hoping my musings will help others in similar situations—and their mentors—identify those factors that might ease anxiety. (Note: I’m listing my experiences here, not giving advice—your mileage may vary.)

I’m a bit older than many of the people I’ve seen on the job market at conferences and on campus interviews. I’m 35—I’ll be 36 this spring—and I’m significantly more comfortable with myself than I was in my mid and late 20s. (I loved my 20s, but they were more of a confidence-building decade than anything.) Those extra few years of life experience have made me more secure in my identity.

My colleagues are all very supportive and let me know, without prompting, that they think I’m doing a great job. They’re exceptionally kind individuals, quick with a laugh or (mostly) harmless snark, and they’re full of invitations to coffee or lunch. They offer good advice, and they clue me in to the subtexts of conversations that have been going on for years. And they totally consider me to be an honest-to-goodness historian–and even better, a public historian–which still makes me smile when I think about it, as it’s absolutely the right disciplinary home for me and my work.

The scale of the university keeps it from feeling overwhelming. The student body is growing quickly, but I feel as if the faculty community is still a size that makes it reasonable to get to know people in other departments. I’m participating in various “Faculty Connections” groups through the teaching center, and I’ve joined a faculty interest group on community outreach. I’m collaborating with folks from across the disciplines on a creative project about women in science. The university’s president knows my name* and recently asked me to come chat with him about possible directions the university might take with regard to instructional technology.** A week or so ago, our college’s dean hosted lunch for a group of new faculty, so she’s very accessible, too.

I suspect my years of working in non-faculty positions also have helped to decrease any anxiety I might be feeling. My jobs have tended to be either public-facing or in service to very large affinity groups (e.g. university faculty, parents of elementary-age students). I’ve had to work with a lot of different kinds of people, and I know my years of consulting with faculty on technology and teaching helped me get to better know, from a position of relative equality (versus the student-professor relationship), the various genera and species of faculty.

Last—but certainly not least—my domestic partner in crime has done much to bolster my confidence. Prior to meeting him, I was always a bit shy and unsure how to interact with strangers. Fang has modeled a particular way of engaging with the world that has proved salutary to me. He has a facility with people–he both plays with them in ways they might not recognize (I’m not so good at this) and is tremendously talented at putting himself in other people’s shoes (I’m learning!).

Yes, I feel an occasional twinge of nervousness about the whole tenure process, but for the most part I’m confident in my work and in my place in my department and at the university. I suspect I’ll feel even more confident after making progress on my book this summer and getting those three articles out the door.

What about you? What has bolstered your confidence at work and in life? And what have you done to help make “new” people (in whatever context) feel less anxious and more confident?

*OK, that may be more because of my rantings about the campus’s acquisition of a Chick-Fil-A than my academic brilliance. But still. It’s nice.
**He’s actually invited me to chat a couple of times. But I’m waiting until the state legislature is no longer in session because there’s too much batshit insane stuff going on in the statehouse, and methinks his attention is a bit divided at the moment.