Don't Get Stuck in the "Circle of Life"
Find new ways to make an impact by running in other circles occasionally
In graduate school, I quickly learned the value of publishing: your work did not exist until it could be cited, which only happened once it was peer-reviewed and published. A conference paper enabled you to plant a flag in the ground, share your preliminary findings, and indicate the direction you were heading in your work. The follow-on research eventually culminated in a journal paper that made a unique contribution to the literature, making it worthy of archiving in print.
When I started as a faculty member, publishing papers took on a whole new meaning. Journal papers are the primary “currency” by which faculty are evaluated, particularly on the tenure track. Getting tenure required “peer-reviewed papers in top-tier journals”, which was relatively broad in engineering compared to other colleges. In the business school, for instance, it was all about the “A-tier” publication—no “A-tier” journal publications often meant no tenure.
As I exhausted the papers from my graduate research, it became clear that papers were only part of the equation, an outcome of what I called the “Circle of Life” in academia: write proposals to get money to fund students to do research to write papers…repeat, repeat, repeat.
Why hire students to do your research? You get pulled in so many different directions as a faculty member that you don’t have time to do the research yourself. This was probably the biggest eye opener for me as a shifted from PhD student juggling one ball—my dissertation—to a faculty member juggling multiple balls: teaching, research, service, and everything else.
In order to have students work for you, you have to have money. In order to get money, you have to write proposals, which tend to be submitted to government agencies that support research like the National Science Foundation (NSF). New faculty often don’t have the industry or federal connections when they begin, which decreases their chances of getting funded. Luckily, NSF—and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for those doing research in those areas—is the “gold standard” for funding since it uses a peer-review process to vet ideas and recommend funding.
In order to write proposals that will get funded, you need to not only have good ideas but also be a recognized expert in your field. This is where your papers come into play. They define who you are as faculty member because they are the “products” of your “research” that “exist” in the public domain and are therefore citable by others in the field. More importantly, journal papers have passed the “peer-review” process, which provides the “stamp of approval” that your work has the necessary scientific rigor and novelty to be archival in nature. The more papers you have, the more expertise you have, the better your chances of funding in that field.
As you can see, the “Circle of Life” is self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing. Faculty write proposals reviewed by other faculty to hire students (preferably PhD students that want to go into academia) to do research under their supervision, which is then published in journals reviewed by other faculty.
Faculty on the tenure-track turn this into a hamster wheel, doing everything they can to go faster and faster around this loop so that they have more money, more students, and more papers than their previous colleague that went up for tenure.
While this may sound cynical, those are the basic “rules of the game” for tenure-track faculty. In fact, we get so used to being on this hamster wheel during the tenure process that we just keep accelerating it as we prepare for the next promotion: more money, more students, more papers, more recognition for the work by your peers at home and abroad. I know I did.
It took a while for me to get that first NSF grant (0 for 9 at the start), but then a few hit, I found some amazing students, and the “paper factory” was up and running. I also found creative ways to leverage my graduate class to work with students to initiate projects without funding, leading to pilot data and conference papers that helped make my proposals more competitive and more likely to get funded.
This eased the time and energy that I had to put into maintaining the momentum in the Circle of Life, and as my teaching settled into a routine that required less and less prep, I started to look for ways to engage companies in the research that I was doing. Luckily, my first PhD student (Martin Meckesheimer, who I was able to co-advise with my colleague Russell Barton right when I started) had landed a job at Boeing, and he was able to put me in touch with several of his colleagues there, which I had briefly met at conferences.
I remained in touch with them, and I made sure to let them know whenever my travels took me to the area. When they did, I always made sure to arrive a day early or stay an extra day, and I would meet them for coffee, lunch, or dinner and occasionally give a seminar on my work.
As the relationship grew, I gained insight into the challenges this group was facing at Boeing, and I was able to tailor one of my seminars to explain how my latest research might help their engineering designers make better decisions from their modeling and simulation efforts. Apparently, whatever I said caught the attention of a few key members in the audience, and follow-on discussions over lunch and in the afternoon led to discussions about me conducting a study with some of their engineers.
I was excited by the opportunity to try doing research with practicing engineers instead of students, and I met with the NSF program director that was funding my current grant when I get back home. Delcie Durham was her name, and I’ll never forget that meeting with her as she listened patiently to what I had to say and what I wanted to do with the team at Boeing. She then suggested ways to make it happen and connected me with NSF’s GOALI program. In the end, the two programs jointly funded a supplement to my existing NSF grant to support travel and lodging for a three-month stay in Seattle to conduct my study on-site with Boeing engineers.
Fortunately, this was before I was married and had kids; so, once I was able to overload my teaching and free up a semester from classes, I was able to spend time in a real company conducting research with industry practitioners. Martin also helped introduce me to others in the group, and regular meetings with senior researchers and Technical Fellows like Evin Cramer, Andrew Booker, and Tom Grenadine helped me connect with the right folks at different sites to identify and develop a test problem for my study.
I spent the final month running experiments with different aerospace engineers, structural designers, mathematicians, and statisticians, gathering data to verify and validate my research work. I analyzed and presented the results right before I left, and my former PhD student and I co-authored a technical report that was then turned into a peer-reviewed conference paper.
The study never made it into a peer-reviewed journal, but during a visit to Boeing almost 10 years later to share my most recent work, I learned that my study with them all those years ago was still being talked about within the group. I still remember sitting in a Technical Fellow’s office when this was shared with me, and I left with a high that I had never felt for any journal paper that had been published or conference presentation that I had given. I also realized that there was no easy way to document the impact that my work had had in industry, as there was no category to list such an accomplishment on the dossier that would be used to evaluate me for promotion.
While that realization was saddening, remembering that feeling continues to energize and galvanize me to this day to find new ways to engage industry in the work I do, even if it doesn’t immediately lead to the almighty peer-reviewed journal paper that we so value. It didn’t in my time with Boeing, but when I shared what I had done with a colleague at GM, I was able to arrange a week-long visit to build another example and conduct research that did led to a series of peer-reviewed journal papers. This opened up new doors with other companies, lead to new funding streams, and created new circles and more impact. I don’t think I’ve been the same ever since.
Granted, we only have so much time in the day to do so much, but it is OK to pause, look around, and try running in other circles from time to time. While they may not all prove fruitful, you will invariably see and learn things that can give your “Circle of Life” more meaning and more impact. You just have to be open to explore them.
Hamster Wheel is an apt metaphor. I'm trying to start a group of faculty who can "think outside the journal" and have impact on industry through our science. The senior ones who signed on originally are dropping like flies, because they are too busy with grant-seeking and then doing that grant-funded work, rather than talking to industry about what is really needed.
Tim, I went to Research Gate and Google Scholar to check on your publication record. I found that you have been credited with over four-hundred publications with thirty-thousand cites. The leading measures of impact: h-index is over seventy for your career, plus a comparable I-10 index which places you in the "truly exceptional" category. Your inner hamster has be able to spin the publication wheel at a very high speed, and your career is probably only half over. Congrats!!!