New TT Faculty - Advice for Recruiting the First Students and Building Early Momentum?
Hi everyone, I’ve been a long-time silent reader here, and before anything else, I just want to sincerely thank this community.
Over the past few years, I’ve learned so much just by reading people’s experiences, advice, successes, and even failures here. As someone who did my education outside the US and later moved here for a postdoc, many of the discussions in this subreddit helped me better understand the US academic system and prepare for the faculty job market.
I started applying in this cycle and submitted 34 applications, received 3 online interviews, 1 campus visit, and recently accepted a tenure-track assistant professor offer at an R1 university.
Honestly, a lot of the advice shared here helped me more than you probably realize.
Now I’m thinking ahead about how to create strong momentum from Day 1 as a new faculty member. For those who have gone through this transition (or worked closely with new faculty), I would really appreciate advice on things like:
- What helped you create momentum during your first semesters?
- What are the highest-ROI things to focus on early?
- What mistakes do new assistant professors commonly make in Year 1?
- How did you recruit your very first student(s)?
- How early did you start recruiting before arriving on campus?
- What strategies actually worked for attracting good students when your lab was still completely new?
- How did you balance teaching prep, proposal writing, lab setup, and publishing during the first year?
I would especially love to hear lessons that people only learned after the fact.
And thank you very much again. Even though most of us are anonymous strangers on the internet, many of your posts genuinely helped someone reach a life-changing milestone.