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I'm up for tenure this year, and as part of that process I'm required to submit a portfolio that "makes the case" that I've fulfilled the college's requirements for tenure and promotion. That's been hanging over my head for months, but at long last it's finally finished! I turned it in on Tuesday, which means that my part of the process is essentially over. (I may have one or two more peer reviewers visiting my classes over the next couple weeks.) Now I can just forget about the whole thing until the end of the semester: I won't hear anything one way or the other until then, so there's no use worrying.
I'm optimistic about the outcome. I feel pretty good about my portfolio itself and about the accomplishments that it describes. On the scholarship side, I got to include the peer review response from my latest journal article: the reviewer didn't have any suggestions to make other than adding a few references, and I directly quoted its concluding line: "In summary this is a high quality piece of work that addresses a well known question and answers it!" For teaching, while there's always room for improvement, I think I do a darn good job, and I decided to pull a few favorite quotes from my end of semester teaching evaluations: "Lots of work, but I’m smarter than I was when I started.", "Most enthusiastic teacher I've ever had since kindergarten. ...This nutjob truly loves this class & loves to teach physics and is the coolest prof I've had to date.", "I had always disliked Physics so I had to put in a lot of effort, but it turns out I like it more than I thought.", and perhaps the highest tenure-credit-per-word quote of all for a liberal arts college, "I look at the world in a different way now."
Classes have been awfully intense, too, but maybe I can finally start getting caught up, without dreading all the high-stress work that the next week will bring my way.
I'm optimistic about the outcome. I feel pretty good about my portfolio itself and about the accomplishments that it describes. On the scholarship side, I got to include the peer review response from my latest journal article: the reviewer didn't have any suggestions to make other than adding a few references, and I directly quoted its concluding line: "In summary this is a high quality piece of work that addresses a well known question and answers it!" For teaching, while there's always room for improvement, I think I do a darn good job, and I decided to pull a few favorite quotes from my end of semester teaching evaluations: "Lots of work, but I’m smarter than I was when I started.", "Most enthusiastic teacher I've ever had since kindergarten. ...This nutjob truly loves this class & loves to teach physics and is the coolest prof I've had to date.", "I had always disliked Physics so I had to put in a lot of effort, but it turns out I like it more than I thought.", and perhaps the highest tenure-credit-per-word quote of all for a liberal arts college, "I look at the world in a different way now."
Classes have been awfully intense, too, but maybe I can finally start getting caught up, without dreading all the high-stress work that the next week will bring my way.