#EveryLittle Action Counts Week 6: Be proactive.
Referring to Anne-Wil’s blogpost on proactivity in 2020, this week is dedicated to Being Proactive in Academia. Success in academia doesn’t happen overnight: it requires lots of hard graft, initiative, and resilience, and of course a dose of pure luck!
Every career is different and so are everyone’s life circumstances. So, measure your “success” based on your own goals, values, and circumstances, not on “internalised external goals” derived from a mythical person such as the “world’s most successful academic”.
Realise though that much of your academic career can only be shaped by one person: you!
“We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.”
– Epictetus
As an academic you are a professional shaping your own career. That means taking actions that cause positive change in the longer term. Show initiative, don’t wait for things to happen, or wait for other people to reach out to you or tell you what to do.
- If you would like to work with someone, just approach them, but do your due diligence beforehand. And remember: “You don’t get married to someone after one date“, effective collaborations take a long time to build up and require repeated (face-to-face) contact.
- If you are unsure about submitting a paper to a particular research outlet, ask your colleagues for advice. You can use your university’s research repository to find out who has published in the journal before.
- If something takes a long time to do, ask yourself: are there smarter ways to do this? There almost always are. Just Google and you’ll normally find something easily.
- Get a mentor. Your university might have a formal mentoring scheme. But even if it doesn’t, don’t sit down moping, find your own mentor. There are plenty of senior academics who are happy to help a bright and hard-working young academic. Just make sure you thank them if they do help you! (see also: Thank You: The most underused words in academia?)
- In general, reach out. I hate to say this, but you are not unique. Every single thing you experience in academia has been experienced by someone else. Ask around with your colleagues, Google your problem, visit academic forums such as Academia stack exchange, talk to others at conferences. Do not try to solve every problem on your own!
- And finally… Step back and reflect occasionally. I see many academics operating in a very reactive mode, running from one emergency to another. Many of these emergencies could have been prevented by spending a bit more time in reflective mode. Yes, initially that might mean spending yet more time on the problems you are facing, but it will pay itself back with dividends.
We would be very happy to learn about your own suggestions on how to be proactive in academia.
Anne-Wil Harzing & Christa Sathish.