Tenure File Mental Notes

 Ok so I am procrastinating on working on my tenure file. A little.

Here are some of the thoughts I had while I was putting this together. There is little to no clear guidance and a lot tends to change when the next Dean in charge of the process rotates in or another “system” is adopted. This is to be expected. Nothing is set in stone and if, for example, not having all your publications loaded is fine, it could be dropped. 

1. Have a google drive or dropbox or something that is on the cloud and on your computer and organize EVERYTHING in there.
2. It’s ok to rename things. I am liberally renaming files to more legible titles that are descriptive. Why? Because no one is reading this whole thing.

No one. Make it easy to skim.

3. Make a little note explaining what this giant list of files is. Explain acronyms etc. I keep adding more. And this is what MNRAS stands for. 
4. Everything goes into the cv. I did not fully appreciate that. Send it to your HoD. There is a thing that all the different levels expect. Check with those experienced with the process. 
5. Hey do you have a summary sheet or something that HR made? Check if it has your birthday and/or social security information on there. No need for ID theft...
6. There is going to be a time-wasting thing. Possibly linked to point 4 or 2 or 7. There is some task that feels insulting and grinds in that last exposed nerve you have left at the end of the process. There it is. Expect it. It may well be yourself who is making you do it. 
7. Completeness is great but it’s more about box checking. You should have something in every category. It’s nice if you have everything but it’s ok if you miss that committee you were on for a week four years ago. 
8. Use the official PDFs of your publications. I had quite a number of preprints initially because working from home but I took the effort of downloading the full in-print versions and replaced them. Looks much better but also has the DOI numbers on them. 
9. Summarizing plots. I made a plot with h-index, number of citations, number of papers etc etc. All lines racing higher.  It’s meaningless of course but looks impressive. Pre/post improvement of undergraduate in my astro class. Pretty picture of Hubble release and one of my book. 

Doesn’t that tell you I’m solid researcher and teacher? Sure it does.