Career Profile: Christy Till
School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University
Arizona State University is a large public research university
Click on a topic to read Christy's answer to an individual question, or scroll down to read the entire profile: Educational background and career path * Early teaching challenges * Research transition * Institutional fit * Balancing responsibilities * Advice for new faculty
Briefly describe your educational background and career path.
I started college as a non-traditional student after spending 5 years as a professional ballet dancer. I only got into one college, but luckily things clicked, and I went on to do a 5-year BS + MS program in Geological Sciences at UC Santa Barbara. After, I briefly worked as a Forest Service Geologist before going to MIT to get my PhD on mantle magma genesis in subduction zones. A Mendenhall postdoctoral fellowship at the USGS expanded my toolkit to include upper crustal magmatic processes and I started on the tenure-track at Arizona State University in 2014, where I have been ever since. At ASU, my research interests have continued to expand such that my research portfolio now includes a myriad of approaches to understanding magmatic processes and eruption triggers on Earth and exoplanets, as well as studying how to improve equity in geoscience graduate programs.
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?
Like every new professor, early on I felt overwhelmed by the scope and pace of my teaching and mentoring commitments. One important lesson was learning to let perfection go and realizing that often my best classes occurred when I thought I was under-prepared and instead was really present with the students and their needs. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out spending more time making slides isn't the key to being a better teacher. It also helped to learn techniques about how to engage students in discussions and activities and think about my teaching goals strategically, just as you would research goals.
How did you make the transition from your Ph.D. research to your current research program?
A few things that really helped in those early years were, 1) coming to the early career faculty workshop (class of 2013!), 2) signing up for a faculty writing workshop, where I learned a lot of practical skills about how to approach my scholarly work and built a community of writing partners (who I still meet with to this day), and 3) building a peer mentoring community with an active Slack workspace, where I could ask questions and get emotional support from peers at other institutions and other disciplines.
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?
When I started my tenure-track job, as much as I wanted it, I feared I'd fall on my face and make a fool out of myself, especially at a large public research university, where the research expectations felt high. But what I found was there were a lot of benefits of working at my institution. First, big schools mean more faculty – more potential in-house collaborators and researchers with overlapping interests, more mentors (I could go to different people for different things), and more diverse perspectives. Second, my institution's charter includes the statement "ASU is a comprehensive public research university, measured not by whom it excludes, but by whom it includes and how they succeed," which means that I have the opportunity to teach and mentor students with a much wider range of backgrounds and experiences than I might otherwise, which I really enjoy, and I find makes my job significantly more meaningful to me. It turns out my institution is a great fit for me and has inspired a lot of positive growth in my research and teaching portfolio which might not have occurred otherwise.
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.
Rather than "maintaining balance," I prefer to think about this as asking, how can I prioritize taking care of myself (and my family) while having a job in academia? One big thing I do is that I don't work weekends almost ever, and I take regular vacations with NO work (not even email!). We need more time than we probably realize to recharge and build resiliency to deal with all the challenges that we face at work and at home. When I rest regularly, I feel like I can handle all the obstacles that pop up, and I also find I do better and more efficient work. I also have a chronic illness and not resting enough means that I can be in danger of not being able to work on any given day. Hopefully, my achieving tenure etc. can be proof that it is possible to do this while taking weekends and vacations.
The other thing I have learned is that I feel best about how I use my time when I am intentional. I.e., if I make a plan about how I want to use my time and mostly follow it (and keep readjusting it when reality intervenes), then I feel much more content about my time use. I also find that focusing on one high priority work task at a time (with a couple of others in maintenance mode) is when I feel I can do my best work. When I try to focus on more, I always feel overwhelmed and scattered. While I often have many projects going at once, on any given day or hour, I am only focusing on one thing and trying to tune out the rest until I choose to focus on it.
(And P.S. it turns out most deadlines are flexible. I say that not as an excuse to procrastinate but rather as a tool to lessen your stress when you're in crisis mode and feeling very overwhelmed. When that happens, pick some things to move to a later date on your calendar and send the appropriate person a nice request to do so, and I can just about promise they will say ok).
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?
Be kind to yourself. I was really good at beating myself up about not doing enough or not doing things well enough earlier in my career. But it turns out chastising oneself is actually a terrible motivation strategy. Very few people ever accomplished anything significant by yelling at themselves, and in fact, research shows it cultivates more harmful than helpful behaviors. Instead, building positive mental associations with our work by setting very reasonable goals and achieving them over and over again builds a lot more momentum and joy in our work. Not only does this help me enjoy my job more, but it is something I want to pass on to the students I mentor, as I want to teach them positive and sustainable ways to do their best work.