Early-Career Faculty

Being an early-career faculty member can be overwhelming given the variety of responsibilities and demands on your time. Effectively prioritizing your tasks by scheduling them based on urgency and importance is key. 

We can offer guidance on balancing your time based on your workload model through a time-management workshop on MediaSpace. We invite new faculty to participate in our PI Academy soon after joining KSU, so be on the lookout for an email invitation. Because scholarship and creative activity (SCA) is a major factor in qualifying for tenure, a lack of research productivity is a key reason for faculty being denied tenure. Schedule a one-on-one coaching session with us for advice on meeting the promotion and tenure guidelines set by your college and department. Consider joining NCFDD to take advantage of their online seminars and writing challenges.

As an early-career faculty member, you can take advantage of numerous external funding opportunities targeted at early-career researchers. 

Learn about NIH’s Early State Investigator (ESI) status, resources for ESIs, and grants/awards that do not revoke ESI status. Learn about NSF’s opportunities for early-career researchers. You can also apply for KSU’s internal funding opportunities, and we particularly encourage you to pursue seed grants. For other funding opportunities, check out our pages on
 External Funding and Limited Submissions.

Research is increasingly becoming a team science. We can help you find collaborators with complementary expertise and recruit students and post-docs to build your research team. Our interdisciplinary research communities  are a great starting point.

Sometimes early-career faculty equate productivity with volume, but volume must not come at the expense of quality and significance. In the funding acquisition phase, your time will be better spent carefully crafting a few grant applications than taking a shotgun approach. Also, do not underestimate the value of improving a grant application or research article that has been returned for revision.

To boost your grantsmanship, accept your PI Academy invitation, enroll in our six-week-long Summer Research Fellows workshop, or attend one of our discipline-specific workshops. We maintain a database of grant-writing resources on D2L. To request access, email us and ask to be added to the RDSI Resources for Faculty course. When you reach the stage of generating publications, check out the KSU Library’s resources that support research and publishing.