Career Profile: Adam Forte

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Department of Geology and Geophysics, Louisiana State University

Louisiana State University is a large public research university.

Briefly describe your educational background and career path.

I started as a math major at the College of William & Mary and actually bounced around a variety of majors before finally finding geology somewhat late in my college career. After finishing my B.S. in 2005, I was still a bit unsure about what I wanted to do and did not feel ready to commit to a Ph.D., so applied for M.S. programs and ended up at UC Davis. Toward the end of my M.S. degree, I was still a bit non-committal about continuing in academia, but there was an opportunity to continue the project I was working on, which focused on the tectonic evolution of the Greater Caucasus mountains and which I really enjoyed, as a Ph.D. student and so decided to stay at Davis, finishing my Ph.D. in 2012. I made a pretty large switch as a postdoc, moving to Arizona State University to focus on geomorphology and stayed there for 4 years while I spent what felt like forever on the job market until being hired as an assistant professor at Louisiana State University in 2017. I was promoted to associate professor in 2024 at LSU, a year late because of an extra "COVID year" added to my tenure clock.

What were some of the challenges you faced in your early years of full-time teaching? Could you briefly describe how you overcame one of those challenges?

I definitely got sucked in to trying to perfect my materials way too much. It was easy to spend hours and hours tinkering with lectures or activities, which in the end, were not really that much better than what I started with. This should not be read as a "slack on your teaching" suggestion, but more that you have to prioritize what's actually going to make more of a difference in your teaching. E.g., there's a difference between taking the necessary time to make a competent lecture and spending hours searching for the "perfect images" (that probably don't exist) for an already competent lecture. What I found worked for me was setting aside a defined block of time before my class sections to work on my lecture for that day so that there was a defined end. For example, if my class was at 11, I'd start working on the slides for that lecture at 9 am and so a bit before 11, I would have to go teach so I couldn't keep looking for the perfect image of SC fabrics. Finding how much of a buffer you need is a personal thing as we all work at our own pace and you don't want to make this so short that you're stressing yourself out or feeling like you're coming in unprepared, but working on teaching will often expand to fill whatever time you give it, so it's worth scheduling how much time you want to spend.

How did you make the transition from your Ph.D. research to your current research program?

Moving beyond my Ph.D. research really started happening during my extended postdoctoral fellowship at Arizona State, so by the time I was starting my tenure track position at Louisiana State, my research program had already sprawled into a variety of different directions. As such, a lot of my early time at LSU was about trying to be purposeful about which research directions I wanted to continue, and which ones I was comfortable with either withering or setting on the back burner. Ultimately, strongly moving away from my Ph.D. research was less my choice and more reflected that between political unrest in the region where I did my Ph.D. and COVID, the opportunity to continue working on the specific problems I had for my Ph.D. wasn't really an option for a lot of my pre-tenure time and as such I had to largely adapt much of my research and pivot toward research threads I had developed during my postdoc.

An essential component of achieving tenure is finding or making an alignment of your teaching/research goals with the goals of your institution.... How do your goals fit with those of your institution? Did you adjust your goals to achieve that fit? If so, how?

For research, it never felt like there was much of an expectation that I bend my goals to fit my institution. I study the evolution of mountain ranges, but am based out of a school in one of the flattest and least tectonically active places in the US and no one really cared as long as I was able to continue to secure funding, train students, and write papers. Similarly with teaching, I never felt that there was much of a mandate to craft my teaching too much to the institution, but by the nature of the department I am in and the interests of the majority of the students here, many courses that I might have been interested in developing were unlikely to be popular enough to hit enrollment minimums. Instead, I focused on developing courses that were at least tangential to my expertise and interest, but that also could fill unoccupied niches within the department's teaching portfolio. For example, I would not describe myself as either a geochronologist or thermochronologist, but I use them as tools often enough that I could teach a course on them and that has consistently been a course that there is interest in from a wide swath of students in my department.

Many of the new faculty members in these workshops are interested in maintaining a modicum of balance while getting their careers off to a strong start. Please share a strategy or strategies that have helped you to balance teaching, research, and your other work responsibilities, OR balance work responsibilities with finding time for your personal life.

I absolutely burned myself out as a graduate student and then postdoc. I worked all the time, felt like I never took any time off, and was just generally pretty ragged after years of that when I started my permanent position. It was clear that my prior work habits were really not sustainable, so when I started at LSU, I pretty strongly enforced myself to mostly work "normal hours" in the sense of not working after dinner and trying to avoid working weekends. This wasn't a hard and fast rule, I would definitely sometimes get sucked into a project and work late or work over a weekend ahead of a deadline, but on average, I tried to maintain something at least resembling a normal schedule. Part of this was basically making a deal with myself to the effect of, "If this isn't enough work for me to get tenure, so be it," because I was just too tired of feeling like I was burning the candle at both ends and while I had worked hard to get where I was and had no intention of slacking off, I just wasn't willing to continue sacrificing my sanity and physical well-being like I had as a grad student or postdoc.

What advice do you have for faculty beginning academic careers in geoscience? What do you know now that you wish you had known as you started your career in academia?

Protect your time, yourself, and learn to say no. There are just so many things that will start competing for your time, committees, managing the finances of your lab, managing your students, tinkering with your lectures, reviewing papers, etc. All of these can gradually eat up every last minute of your day and you mental energy. To some extent, all of them are necessary and all deserve your attention, but you have to choose how many of them, and what level of effort to give them. As an early career faculty, it can often feel like you can't say no to anything, but you can, and you should say no to many things. For example, you should be on student committees that are not your students, but that doesn't mean you need to be on every student committee that asks if you're already over committed. Or similarly, you should be reviewing papers, but you don't need to say yes to every review request. Finally, be circumspect with opportunities for collaboration in your department. Establishing in-house collaborations can be great, but if they are pretty tangential to where you want to take your career, think about whether it is worth the time and effort. Often these collaborations are offered by established faculty with the best of intentions, but if it's not a good fit with what you're doing or planning to do or if you're already over extended, try to find a way to say no in a diplomatic way.