How to Become a Professor (When You Don't Know What You Are Doing)-- Lesson 3: Don't Give People a Reason to Talk Shit About You

This quarter, because I am now officially PhD-ed, I'm able to become hired as a lecturer at the university in which I have been attending for the last 7+ years as a graduate student. The class I'm teaching is on Asian Diasporas, and it's offered through the Asian American Studies department, which does not have a graduate program. It's a class of 60 students, which means that I get to hire a reader to help me grade assignments. I figured this was a nice opportunity for me to help out a fellow graduate student who may be struggling to find funding. It's absolutely imperative that graduate students here get at least a 25% appointment, because that's the amount needed to have your fees waived and receive health insurance coverage without having to pay extra for it. After checking to make sure that all of my friends had some form of employment for the spring, I asked the graduate counselor at my home department, English, to let me know if there are any graduate students who are still unemployed. She gave me a couple of names, and told me to come into her office to look at their files.

So I did, but it was really weird to be put in that position. Luckily, both of the candidates were M.A. students whom I had never met, so I wasn't being granted access to my friends' files. (I would have declined to look at them, if that were the case.) Still, it felt wrong to be able to read a grad student's statement of purpose, to glance at her letters of rec, to see what her GRE scores were. I became all too aware of the fact that anyone who has ever hired me has also looked through MY file, which I haven't seen.

I'm assuming I'm not allowed to see what's in my file, but I actually don't know because I've never asked. Aside from what I submitted when I applied to the program 8 years ago, I don't know what's actually IN my file. It wasn't until I had TAs that I realized that every instructor I ever worked for had to do a little write-up on my performance and stick it in my file. It wasn't until I wrote to the department chair mentioning that the two professors running our job placement workshop were doing an excellent job and got a reply from him saying that he was going to print out my email and put it in their files that I realized that even not-so-official documents can go into my file as well. So it kind of weirds me out to know that there is an 8-year-old file that contains all sorts of documents that I don't even know about.

I wonder if bad evaluations ever get put into someone's file. I'd like to think not, but I guess one could never know. I can think of a couple of professors I've worked for who would probably have no qualms about writing a graduate student a scathing review But even if an employer were more diplomatic and would never write up a negative evaluation, it's always easy to distinguish between generic evaluations and glowing ones. I imagine a file full of boring and half-hearted reviews would be just as damaging to one's career.

For my entire life, I've taken the philosophy of just getting my shit done and doing it with excellence, but I've never been interested in, or that good at, self-promotion. But now, the most important file I may ever have is my tenure file, which I have to start building. I'm going to have to be aggressive and strategic in making sure that things going into it present me as an indispensable employee. I wonder if I could get someone to write up a document that says, "AsianGirlProf is the awesomest person in the world and wears really cute shoes."