I’ve alluded to a significant change in my work life in my posts for a few months now. I’ve shared the news with those who know me in real life (which, for all I know, is the entire readership of this blog anyway, ha ha), but I’ve been a bit quiet about it on the blog, because I wanted to do a full post about my thoughts behind this transition and not just drop the news.
Starting next year, I will be Director of STEM at Carleton.
This is a 3 year, essentially half-time administrative position. This means that except for next year, I will teach 3 courses instead of 5. (Due to complicated staffing/leave issues in my department, I’m taking one for the team next year and teaching 4 courses.) Teaching-wise, this isn’t a huge change for me, since I’ve been in various positions with course releases continuously since 2013. And in 2012 I had a term of parental leave, so it’s been a looooong time since I’ve taught 5 courses in a year.
This position is brand new as of this year (we have an acting director now). The position codifies a reality we’ve faced for a while: the sciences don’t exist in a bubble. We share resources: grant initiatives, student research funds, classroom space. We have similar agendas, and face similar issues around student achievement and career readiness and broadening participation. We do research that crosses disciplinary boundaries. We want our students to contribute in positive ways to the campus, local, state, national, and global communities via academic civic engagement. And starting this coming fall, we will all share a new science facility.
This last piece — the new science facility — is the catalyst for the change. Moving into a new physical space presents a golden opportunity to rethink and reimagine our relationships to each other, as departments and programs, as people, as disciplines, as scholars and teachers. The new facility was designed for collaboration and sharing; how can we ensure that we all have a collaborative and sharing mindset?
To that end, a handful of us met last year to work through different models of coordination among the sciences. How could each department and program’s voices be represented? Who should, and how should they, coordinate the shared resources, ideas, and initiatives? How should we develop a vision for the future of the sciences at Carleton, and who should direct and guide that vision, and represent it to the dean (who ultimately makes the decisions)? We developed a couple of models and put them up to a vote among the science faculty and staff. The model that “won” features a representative board of science faculty and staff from each department and program, a staff person to serve as program manager for the day-to-day details (whom we are currently hiring), and a faculty member to serve as the director or “vision point person” for the whole enterprise, working with the dean and the program manager and the board to make this vision a reality.
When the call went out for the STEM Director position, I’d just started participating in the HERS Institute, a leadership program whose goal is to get more senior women into administrative roles within academia. I’d been contemplating a move to administration for some time and because of my HERS participation, I’d started to think about what a good first move in this direction might look like. The part-time nature of the STEM Director position appealed to me as a way to “try out” academic administration, in a space that also allows me to think about things I’m passionate about, like interdisciplinarity, broadening participation, inclusion, student/faculty collaborations, and academic civic engagement, on a larger scale. So I put my name in for consideration….and the rest is history.
I’ve been sitting in on the STEM board meetings this term, to get a sense of how the board operates. At this week’s meeting, we’ll be setting an agenda for next year. I’m excited to hear what the board feels our priorities should be, and eager to have some time this summer to reflect on how to help bring those to fruition. The dean, present director, and I have started brainstorming about public, creative ways to introduce the new space to the community, as well as how to start off with communal and community-building events among the sciences. My HERS leadership project (more on that in my next post!) examined ways to build community in the new space in ways that are welcoming, inclusive, and thoughtful, and how this might extend to other collaborations beyond those in physical space.
I’m excited, and more than a bit nervous, about some of the challenges I’ll be facing. New buildings bring new, unforeseen problems, and while half of the sciences are moving into the space in the fall, construction continues in the rest of the space. How do we navigate around the physical limitations of the building? And how do we ensure that our community building welcomes all of the sciences, including the ones not physically in the building until the following year? The fact that this is a brand new position also brings challenges: we’ve outlined, to the best of our abilities, what the position entails, but what does it really entail? What are the unwritten rules and expectations? What did we forget to anticipate? I’ll get to shape this role as I occupy it, and that’s both exciting and terrifying. On a personal note, what will happen to the research I’m doing with my student collaborators, and my work on academic civic engagement in CS? I’ll have to figure out how I can carve out space for those, and what that looks like over the next few years.
In my next post (Part 2 of this special mini-series on academic leadership), I’ll talk more about my HERS Institute participation and what lessons I’m taking from that as I move into this role.
This is what a computer scientist looks like 