Hello! I am a first-year assistant professor at an R1 in the United States. Soon, I’ll have to gather materials for an annual review. One piece of advice I keep getting from within and outside of my institution is to document everything I’m doing, and to do so as I’m going because it’ll be harder to do all at once.
I have two questions about this: 1) What tools people use to do this? and, 2) What is the extent of the documentation I’ll need? For the first question, where do you log things you’re doing? Do you use something like Trello? Your regular note-taking tools?
For the second question, exactly how much and what document do you find yourself needing to submit? For instance, for meetings that classify as service, can I just say how much time I’ve spent on this or do I need literal artifacts such as meeting notes? For publications that are in preparation, do I literally give them unfinished drafts?
I’m very unsure what will be asked of me. I feel confident I’ve done far more than enough to receive very good reviews; but I don’t want that confidence to lead to arrogance by not considering how I actually document this work. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Comments
It’s really going to depend on the school. Some places, you’ll need a big three-ring binder of artifacts, etc. At my school, our tenure app, all included, is max 10 pages. I just keep a running list in a Google document of each thing I do. I divide it into separate sections for research, teaching, and service. For research, I just list presentations, publications, and grant awards, with submitted or unpublished works in their own section (though only published works count for us, i put it in there anyway). For service, I say what committees I served on, for what semesters, and my role (chair, member, secretary, whatever). If I did anything extraordinary, I list those in follow-up bullets. I have never had to have documentation of anything.
ETA: ask a trusted colleague or two at your institution for examples of their annual and tenure reviews. That’s what I did so I understood the scope.
This is a conversation to have with your chair and your mentor. Those should be two different people.
Your Dean of the Faculty should have documentation on your annual review: template documents, guidelines, checklists, etc.
How you document things depends on your training. I keep my CV as a living LaTeX document, so that captures all my publication/conference talks/etc. My institution uses an online document management portal for annual reports, so I add items there whenever I pick up some extra service (committee, volunteer, etc), especially if it’s not significant enough for my CV.
“and to do so as I’m going because it’ll be harder to do all at once” – yes this is general good practice for a CV. I look at my CV a lot and am constantly like “oh wow I totally forgot about that.” Maybe I have a poor memory but I always log conferences, presentations immediately after.
The rest though have others have said is very uni./dept. specific so talk to trusted colleagues. Most colleges/depts. have some sort of written guidance. As one associate dean once told me, who is now retired a few years, upon my initial hire “just play the game and give them what they want.” Of course figuring out what that is can be the tricky part so ask around.