Now the hard part begins: Refining and refocusing

As I wrap up my first year here at Claremont McKenna College, I wanted to focus my reflection post on what I believe is the hardest next step — refining and refocusing.

The STATS Lab has been very, very busy this year. 20+ students attending weekly training and discussion meetings. 10 students working diligently on real research projects. On my end, I’ve invested in the lab, in the classroom (trying to build new pedagogy with AI and career outcomes in mind), new classes (teaching undergrads Structural Equation Modeling!), and of course research. We’ve received a R&R from a top journal for the first research project I started here at Claremont, with an undergraduate student co-author, plus a number of research and teaching awards that I’m genuinely proud of.

And of course, I shouldn’t go any further without first recognizing the amazing support I’ve had from my family (all my students have met Ruth, my better half, and had more fun talking with her about travel and food than the would talking with me about stats!), colleagues, and the staff and community at Claremont.

But it’s been busy. And yes, I’m spread thin.

So that’s why this summer begins the hard work of refining where I’m invested in, refocusing on what’s meaningful, and learning to say “no” next year.

In beginning this reflection, I’ve realized that there’s two ledgers, if you will, that I’m balancing. One scorecard tracks my file of accomplishments that count towards my eventual tenure evaluation. The other is an arbitrary, subjective collection of moments that make the long journey of academia feel worth it.

Ledger #1: The Scorecard

I wrote a fairly critical blog post a few months ago about this. (Funny side note: someone I don’t know reached out to a close friend of mine in academia, sharing concern that I might be “very upset and about to leave academia” — don’t worry, I’m not.)

But I’ll hedge my claims in that blog post to say, here, that the Scorecard matters. There may be many problems with it, but at the end of the day, we need a Scorecard that captures measurable output from faculty so a potentially lifelong decision can be made about their tenure case.

Perhaps the criteria will change in the years to come — I hope so!

In the meantime, I know what goes on Ledger #1 and what I’ll keep investing in next year.

Research projects with a clear, structured path to publication. This year was mostly exploration of new risky projects, next year will be focusing on a few with high potential. I’ll begin work on competitive grants to fund said research. And I’ll keep teaching (and hopefully continuing to do so well — thank you CMC for this year’s Huntoon Superior Teaching Award!) and developing new courses (tentatively next year: Natural Language Processing and Large Language Models for Social Science Research!).

But one caveat to all of this: I still want to make space for Ledger #2. So as much as I’ll devote my time and energy to the measurable output, I’ll still want to contain it, so that I can also invest in the life-giving moments that may or may not add to the the Scorecard.

Ledger #2: The Moments

One day in Advanced Statistics, after a particularly mind-boggling foray into all of the assumptions of statistical analysis and researcher degrees-of-freedom in deciding estimation methods and enumeration and all of that, a student asked: “So what keeps you going? Why do you still do research?”

Good question. I shared three reasons to start: getting to expose students to difficult, state-of-the art material; contributing to a larger body of research that, in aggregate, can make a difference; and one day helping to reshape the academic infrastructure to hopefully improve it.

It’s those moments like the classroom discussion that followed that keep me motivated. Or it’s the moments of walking through campus and running into students who then strike up a conversation about their future plans and advice on how to get there. Or it’s bringing all-stars like Louis Tay to campus to help students connect with both faculty and practitioners around the world. Or it’s experimenting with new ways of teaching, often inspired by AI-integrated tools like simulations and gamifications to help students learn — and getting to share them with fellow faculty at upcoming events like our AI Conference in October. Or it’s building training resources and platforms for first-year students to help them get started in research (whether in my lab or someone else’s!).

I’m grateful to have so many moments like this here at CMC. And the next time I’m sitting there agonizing over another R&R I need to complete, I’ll balance that time with these “side projects” that I find to be so much more meaningful.

Maximizing the A ∩ B — Minimizing the (A ∪ B)ᶜ

(Sorry for the nerdy probability language here.)

Maximize the intersection of the two ledgers, minimize anything that falls outside of either.

That’ll be my job this summer, to find the activities that really count — in more ways than one — and to learn to say “no” to things so I don’t spread myself too thin again.

To be clear, I’m not saying everything else is worthless. It’s just that I need to be honest with my own time and learn how to delegate, restructure, or stop the activities that fall outside of both ledgers.

I know it’s easy for a first-year professor to talk about refining and refocusing, and it’s easy to dismiss. But I'd rather set a sustainable pattern in year one than try to correct it in year four.

And if anyone has advice or thoughts on this process, I’m all ears!

In the meantime, happy summer — I’ll be taking a break, but don’t worry, blogging is definitely on Ledger #2 and will come back (perhaps scaled back a bit) in the Fall!