As I am writing this, it is almost literally the eve of my departure from the United States: it is early June, the packers are scheduled to arrive in just two short weeks, and my tickets to Denmark are booked and confirmed for July 1. I’ve been going to Europe at least once or twice a year since moving to the U.S. (save for the COVID annus horribilis of 2020), but this time it’s different: this time, it’s for good.

Well, not really “for good”, as I am sure I will be returning many times to the U.S. over the next few years. But what’s different is that unlike the other times, this time I am relocating back to Europe after 15 years of living in the United States and being a member of the U.S. academic system as a faculty member. I hope you will forgive me if I indulge in a little bit of reflection to mark this occasion.

I moved to the U.S. together with my wife Helene back in October 2008 to accept a position as a tenure-track assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN. I still remember arriving at the Indianapolis airport late at night (especially late given the 6-hour time difference), picking up a rental car, and then driving the hour and a half to Lafayette. When we arrived at midnight, after a brief detour to Walmart (of course!), the house that we had bought in absentia was all lit up, a warm and welcoming glow from every window.

My time at Purdue was great, and lasted from 2008 to 2014. That’s when I was awarded tenure and moved to the University of Maryland. In fact, I actually got tenure twice that year: from Purdue and later in the spring from UMD.

Tenure was actually one of my own personal reasons for going to the United States in the first place. I had been fascinated by the idea of the tenure track and the concept of a “six year temporary position”, and I had challenged myself that I could do it. So just getting to that point was a big bucket list item for me.

Why did I move from Purdue? There are several reasons, both personal and professional ones. In terms of professional reasons, UMD has a much stronger HCI research ecosystem than Purdue, especially with the HCIL (which I had known about since being a wee graduate student), and is also located close to several funding agencies and a healthy computing industry. And in terms of personal reasons, the D.C. area is geographically better situated and has better airline connections to Europe. And it is close to the water. In fact, we ended up buying a historic townhouse in Annapolis that’s literally two blocks from the Chesapeake Bay.

Incidentally, as I grow more senior, I am coming to find that personal reasons are increasingly outweighing professional reasons when job hunting. During my first job search, I was willing to accept almost any faculty position that would have me, regardless of geographic location. Now, after having finished my third search, I find that the primary reasons for moving are personal: to be closer to family. That’s not to say that there aren’t some compelling professional reasons as well: my new CS department at Aarhus University is one of the strongest in Europe, and I have been given the opportunity to launch a brand new center in my own research area.

Another bucket list item for my academic journey was becoming a full professor. That happened in 2019, and perhaps that was the beginning of the end for my family’s U.S. adventure. Whether that’s true or not, by getting not just tenure and promotion to associate professor, but also subsequent promotion to full professor, perhaps I have proven to myself that I can succeed in the U.S. academic system? I’d like to think so.

So, it’s been fifteen years, and now I am returning to Europe. A natural question might be what I think of the U.S. academic system, both in terms of the good and the bad. However, before I do so, let me start with a caveat: so far, my faculty experience only comes from the U.S. In other words, you will have to wait a little until I can perform a real comparison between what it’s like to be faculty in Europe vs. the U.S. Nevertheless, here is a quick rundown, first of the positives about life as an academic in the U.S. (note that these are specific to my U.S. academic experience, not necessarily everyone’s):

• Plentiful resources: As stated above, I have no way of comparing this to Europe or anywhere else, but research funding is relatively easy to come by in the U.S. Not only are there many federal funding agencies, but there are also many potential corporate sponsors. And while it can be challenging to receive federal funding, there are several young investigator opportunities that level the playing field for early career researchers. Finally, U.S. universities (at least the ones I have worked at) tend to provide significant pre-award and post-award support, and because funding is such a big deal for tenure, everyone is committed to mentoring junior faculty in the art and science of writing research proposals.

• Excellent students: When I started in 2008, the U.S. was the one of the best places in the world to get a Ph.D. for students in my greater research field (computer science), and while this is slowly changing, it is still mostly true. Practically speaking, this means that U.S. research universities can get away with admitting top students from all over the world and largely ignore recruiting from their own states and surrounding areas. As a case in point, I remember one year that Purdue ECE received close to 3,000 Ph.D. and masters applications. Naturally, the very best students apply to many universities, get many admission offers, and tend to pick the highest ranked one. Nevertheless, the sheer numbers mean that U.S. universities have lived under an embarrassment of riches for a long time. What happens as the balance of power in CS research equalizes across the world (and as U.S. immigration policies continue their downward spiral) is anyone’s guess, but many U.S. universities may be in for a rude awakening. Salary: U.S. faculty members, at least in computer science, are very well compensated. This is not at all true for the rest of the world, but in the United States it is a fair acknowledgment of the fact that computer scientists can often get an exorbitant salary if they join industry. As a result, U.S. universities do their best to compete with high industry salaries. For those of us who worked at universities in rural areas (such as West Lafayette, IN), a faculty member’s salary is often enough to put them in the upper middle class: not rich, per se, but definitely well off.

• Spousal hiring: Many European universities take a rather callous view of two-body problems, leaving most of these problems to the candidates themselves. U.S. universities, on the other hand, recognize that to attract the best faculty members, they need to take care of the faculty member’s whole family, not just the actual candidate. For this reason, U.S. universities often have specific spousal hiring programs that provide department and central university subsidies to hire a trailing spouse elsewhere on campus. (I will hasten to say that my new university, Aarhus University, seems very sensitive to two-body problems.)

• Tenure: Tenure is pretty sweet and the idea of academic freedom is a good one. While some argue that the concept is somewhat outmoded, especially in areas such as computer science where scientists are in high demand, it is still a bastion in a U.S. society that otherwise puts very little value in stability of employment.

Of course, there are several negatives to the U.S. academic system as well:

• Students as “customers”: One of the things I worried about before joining Purdue was that because students pay so much money in tuition to go to university, they would behave as if they were “customers” and I was a mere “clerk” providing them a paid service. Initially, I found this fear unfounded, but in the last few years I have increasingly started to sense this sense of customer entitlement in my students. Maybe it is my imagination, but several student emails over the last year have taken an imperious tone, telling (not asking) me to regrade their work and to do it “ASAP”, etc. I don’t like it and I worry that rising tuition and decreased state funding for universities will make it worse.

• Poor student working conditions: Perhaps because of the embarrassment of riches outlined above, many U.S. universities tend to treat their Ph.D. students as expendable. As a result, Ph.D. student working conditions are often pretty abysmal. Their position is often uncertain and at the whim of their faculty member (see below about my point on student hiring), they typically get pushed into a tiny cubicle as a working space (if they get a personal workspace at all), and they are often paid a low half-time “stipend” rather than a proper salary. It is no accident that graduate student unions are popping up all over the U.S., even in the most prestigious universities who presumably should know how to appreciate their student workforce.

• Summers: Ahh, summers. Perhaps my most hated aspect of the U.S. academic system. You see, tenure-track and tenured faculty in the U.S. tend to be hired on a 9-month basis, which means that the remaining 3 months are unpaid. Most research-active faculty tend to use research funding to pay their own salary from their own grants during the summer. In fact, during all my 15 years as a faculty member in the U.S., I always managed to cover my own salary. However, this does not mean that it is not stressful and tedious to do: it is. Arcane sponsor requirements (such as the fact that the NSF only allows for maximum two out of the three available months of summer to be covered by NSF funds) means that most summers end up being a patchwork of funding from different sources that you scramble to put in place before the semester ends. I know that most universities allow you to spread the 9 months of salary across the full year, but here is an idea: why not pay faculty for all of their labor, even during the summers? It’s not as if I don’t work hard to further my own expertise and the university’s reputation during the summer.

And then there are a couple of neutral points that are both positive and negative in equal measures:

• Ph.D. academic procedures: I am sure this is most likely a fact of life regardless of where you go, but as a European, I had considerable difficulties understanding the Ph.D. journey from coursework, proposal, and defense. For someone who went through U.S. graduate school, this is probably as natural as breathing, but it took my first Ph.D. student to go through the whole process for me to understand it properly. Having said that, there are many nice features of the U.S. system that I like. In general, proposing your dissertation to your committee before you go and complete it is a good idea, because this gives your committee some input on the direction of your research before it is too late. I also like that most U.S. Ph.D. defenses are semi-formal events where outcomes such as minor and even major revisions are possible. In Sweden, the Ph.D. defense is a very formal affair, involves both family and friends, and is often followed by a huge dinner or party. In other words, anything other than a pass is virtually impossible.

• Student hiring: The power balance for student hiring in the U.S. is almost entirely in the faculty member’s favor. For both UMD and Purdue (not necessarily elsewhere), there is a lot of flexibility in hiring (and firing) students, even for short semester-long projects. Furthermore, if a student is not performing well or is changing their research direction, a UMD or Purdue faculty member can easily withdraw funding. In fact, some U.S. departments admit more Ph.D. students than there is available funding, yielding a situation where excellent but unfunded students are “roaming the hallways” looking for a faculty sponsor to hire them. While this is convenient for faculty members, this is neither fair nor equitable for the students. The one time I can see this is beneficial to both is situations where both the faculty member and the student want to work together, but the faculty member only has funding for a limited time. In many places, like in Denmark, the faculty member needs to have funding for the entire duration of the Ph.D. in order to hire a student, making the above scenario impossible. In the U.S., on the other hand, I can hire the student on temporary funding and look for new funding opportunities to fill in the gaps as the time approaches.

• The tenure track: As I stated above, I was weirdly attracted to the U.S. tenure track system because it is such a unique and specialized challenge: you agree to a six-year probationary period with a university on the condition that they give you sufficient resources, and in return you commit to achieving a research and teaching trajectory that the university deems sufficient for a permanent faculty member. There is a lot to say about the tenure track and most of it is out of scope for this short treatment. Suffice it to say that the pressure of the tenure track can lead to a lot of stress, worry, and poor work-life balance. The vagaries of external funding, peer review, and personal, gender, or racial bias can also lead to vastly unfair outcomes. However, on a very personal level, it is clear to me that the tenure track pushed me to work (much) harder than I would otherwise have done if left to my own devices, and it instilled a work discipline that I still (mostly) hold on to today.

• Sink or swim: My final point about the U.S. academic system is that it is very much based on a “sink or swim” situation. While not quite the “survival of the fittest’’ dystopia I was envisioning before starting, where several assistant professors compete for a single tenured position (this is true for only a handful of top universities in crowded disciplines), new assistant professors are still pushed into several roles for which they have little or no preparation when they join a university. Do you have teaching experience? Good, cause now you’re the instructor of record for a few hundred undergraduates and have to direct a small army of TAs. Oh, so you know how to write a research paper? Good, cause here’s some Ph.D. students who are starting in the position you just vacated, and you need to lead them to successful Ph.D.s of their own. Can you balance your checkbook? Excellent, cause now you’re responsible for seeking and then managing hundreds of thousands of dollars in pursuit of new research advances. If this all sounds daunting, it is because it is, and for some of us, we relish the challenge. For others, it can be pretty overwhelming. In fact, it is overwhelming even if you wanted it.

As already stated, that I am leaving the U.S. “for good” is certainly an exaggeration. For one thing, I still have four Ph.D. students at University of Maryland that I will continue advising and, hopefully, see to graduation. While their day to day and week to week advising will have to be conducted remotely on Zoom, I do plan on being back for their defenses and/or commencements. And besides, solely meeting on Zoom is literally the reality we have been living for the last few years anyway (thanks, COVID).

But for now, my future lies in Denmark, and I am excited about it. Many academics that I know have a certain degree of restlessness and sense of adventure, and I’m no different: I can’t deny that I feel a thrill in anticipation of this new chapter of my life.

Will I ever come back to the United States? That’s a hard question to answer. For one thing, I am now a dual Swedish/U.S. citizen, which makes moving back across the Atlantic if not trivial, then at least a lot easier than it used to be. And, as stated above, the U.S. is still home to some of the world’s best universities. Who knows? After all, the road goes ever on and on.

I have an unofficial rule that whenever I find myself explaining something to a student more than twice, I should write a blog post about it. Well, I’ve given my spiel on different kinds of dissertations far more than twice, so it is high time I collect my thoughts once and for all. So, what’s the deal with dissertations again? Here is my attempt at an answer, but, as always, YMMV.

The traditional form of the Ph.D. dissertation is the monograph: a single-authored long-form piece of writing on a specialized topic. In the olden days, when you were writing a dissertation, you were writing a monograph; essentially, a book on your research. You would spend your time writing this book locked away in your ivory tower (okay, okay, I admit that I am oversimplifying and stereotyping here), and only once you were done with it and had defended it would you think about how to publish it: either as a single book, or chopped up into articles.

In many fields, however, this practice has gone out of fashion in favor of collection dissertations: a dissertation made up of a collection of previously peer-reviewed and published articles. This form of dissertation mirrors the modern approach to science in many of the engineering, medical, and natural sciences where no Ph.D. student can afford to be locked away with their research until it is finished, but rather will publish it in article-sized chunks as they go along.

The primary difference between these two types of dissertations is that the monograph, by virtue of being a single and unified piece of work, is likely going to be more coherent and focused than the collection dissertation. In contrast, the collection dissertation consists of some more or less related articles stapled together and sandwiched between an introduction and a discussion and conclusion. For this reason, such dissertations are sometimes called “sandwich” or “stapler” theses.

I personally tend to think that you can go to a little more effort than this to reach a point halfway on the continuum between a monograph and a collection thesis. More specifically, even if your Ph.D. work is really a collection of articles, you can still make some effort to turn these articles into something resembling a monograph to create a more unified and satisfying reading experience. To achieve this, there are several things you should do:

• Use a unified dissertation format throughout your entire dissertation (in other words, don’t just use the disparate formats used for each of the different articles).
• Turn each of your articles into a chapter. (Sometimes you may want to chop up and move around material even more than this.)
• Create specific introduction, discussion, and conclusion chapters and accordingly reduce the corresponding material in each article chapter to minimize redundancy.
• Unify your references and your discussion of the related work into a single chapter and move all of the references to the back of the dissertation. Of course, you may still need to cite specialized literature in specific chapters.
• Move all of your appendices to the end of the dissertation.
• Replace all occurrences of “this paper” and “this article” with either “this dissertation” or “this chapter”.

Finally, one of the most common questions that my students ask me is how many articles need to go into the collection dissertation. In other words, when do you know that you are done (Ph.Done, as it were)? Obviously, this exact number depends on your discipline and institution. For computer science and informatics, the number is typically three for a Ph.D. and one for a masters’ thesis. All of the articles don’t have to be published, but the more articles have been accepted for publication, the less quality control has to be done by your committee for your defense. However, a more meaningful (but potentially more confusing) answer is that your dissertation should contain just the right amount of articles to answer your research questions: no more, and no less. Ideally, your work has a nice and symmetric shape to it with no major loose ends.

A final word on your dissertation: once you are done and your committee has signed off on your work, you will likely be asked to upload a final version for archival. Remember that dissertations are forever. Take an extra spell checking pass and think about future-proofing the writing. For example, if you very ambitiously submitted a paper to an aspirational journal or conference, you may want to leave that information out lest it become a frozen testament to your embarrassment of rejection for all time. (No, I’m not speaking from hard-won experience, why do you ask?)

Ever since becoming a full professor, a not-insignificant portion of my summers are taken up by writing tenure recommendation letters. These requests typically start to trickle in at the end of the spring semester, hit their stride at the very beginning of the summer, and typically end around June or July. Most of the deadlines for these letters are in August or September, although I have dealt with both October and later deadlines. Since tenure review is anonymous (and should remain so), I don’t want to be very specific about actual numbers, but I tend to get up to almost a dozen letter requests each year.

First a note to institutions who request these letters: the earlier you can send your request, the better it is for your letter writers (and, by extension, your candidates). Having been on tenure preparation committees for our own assistant professors at the UMD iSchool, I know that a potential reference declining to write a letter has to go into the candidate’s record, so I really want to avoid having to say no. But if you ask me with less than a month to go before the deadline in the middle of a semester, I may have to.

Anyway, given this background, I felt it could be useful to shed some light into the tenure review process for new or aspiring assistant professors. What goes into a tenure reference letter and how are they used in the tenure review? I’ll try to answer this question from my own viewpoint in both writing and reading such letters. As always, this post represents my own personal opinions and experiences as an almost 15-year veteran of the U.S. academic system; it is not the official stance of my institution or any of the organizations I am associated with.

In all of the U.S. and Canadian tenure review processes I am aware of, the names of your tenure referees as well as their letters are confidential. You will never know who wrote a letter for you (unless they tell you). In some circumstances, you may get to some anonymized excerpts of the letters in a report at the end of the process. Many times you will not even get that.

The key for me to be able to write a letter for a candidate is that I know the candidate, at least by name. Sure, I can read a CV just as well as anyone, and I suppose I have a better view of my research field than many people given my varied experiences as papers chair, associate editor, and conference organizer. However, my research field is not very large. If I don’t know of a candidate by name and reputation, that is already a strike against them. And yes, I realize that this is not a very equitable situation.

Of course, if I don’t happen to know a person and feel that I cannot write anything intelligent about them (perhaps their work is so far afield from mine that I cannot judge the contents of their CV), then I will politely decline serving as a referee. Again, a potential referee declining often goes into the candidate’s record, but this is much better than the candidate receiving a negative letter.

What can you do about name recognition as a candidate? It’s simple: you need to get your name out there. The COVID pandemic has been disastrous for many early-career scientists (ECRs) because it effectively put a halt to in-person conferences where networking opportunities abound. However, in a way, the opportunity to give online presentations via Zoom is actually more equitable than physically having to travel everywhere to speak because it eliminates many cost, ability, and opportunity barriers.

One of the pieces of advice I received when I was an assistant professor was to do a “pre-tenure tour” where I would travel around and give talks at important institutions a year or so before my tenure review. The thinking is that your tenure letter writers are likely to be drawn from these “important institutions”, and thus you will benefit from having visited them. Disregarding the aforementioned barriers for a moment, this is not a bad idea, and it is often as easy as emailing a colleague at your target institution to the effect of “hey, I’m going to be in the area, do you think I could give a talk at your university?” As long as you ask well in advance and don’t require funding or honoraria up front (before you pounce on me for encouraging unpaid labor, speaking fees and even travel funding for academic talks are uncommon in my field, especially for ECRs), this is usually an easy “yes” for your colleague. If you want to save on travel costs, you could do this in combination with an existing trip: look around in the immediate physical vicinity of where you’re going and see if there is a likely institution nearby. Or you can explore virtual talks if travel is not an option for you.

Of course, these “pre-tenure tours” are a bit of a gamble: there are likely many potential letter writers and you would have to do a pretty impressive tour to have a chance at visiting them all. On the other hand, each visit - physical or virtual alike - is an invited talk that counts as a line on your CV. That is never a bad thing, and you never know what the exposure of your research to your colleagues will lead to in the future, such as finding new collaborators on research projects and papers or even job opportunities. And having the chance to meet colleagues outside of the bustle of a conference or the stress of a formal interview can be quite nice.

Besides working hard, there are a few other things you can do leading up to your tenure review. One is to become intimately familiar with your institution’s rules for who can serve as a tenure referee, because the procedures vary slightly. For example, at my old university, former collaborators could serve as referees, whereas my current university only allows referees who have a strict “arm’s length” relationship to the candidate. Knowing this may have an impact on how you strategize collaboration with senior people in your field. Perhaps you need to “save” a couple of people for potential refereeing, especially if your field is small.

Another useful piece of information is to know whether you as a candidate gets to have some input on who is chosen. For example, perhaps you get to suggest six names, three of which will be asked, and the senior colleagues managing your tenure review get to choose three. This should all be clear from your institution’s tenure and promotion guidelines. At my old university, I was allowed to informally communicate with would-be tenure referees to ensure that they would be willing and available to help. At my current university, this is a big no-no; there should be no communication, informal or otherwise, between the candidate and would-be referees with regards to their promotion or tenure review. Knowing the rules at your place will prevent you from unintentionally “tainting” your referee pool. Again, forewarned is forearmed.

Finally, here is a potentially contentious note on your collaboration patterns as an assistant professor: my recommendation is that you stop collaborating with your Ph.D. advisor and postdoc mentor until you are awarded tenure. The reason is that I have several times seen colleagues point out situations when a tenure candidate has had a continued pattern of collaboration with their former advisor and mentors. This raises the question of whether the person is capable of independent research or needs constant supervision from a more senior colleague. From the candidate’s point of view, it can seem wasteful to stop a productive collaboration just because of how it can be perceived by some fictional tenure referee, and you should certainly finish all of your outstanding projects with your former mentors. However, my advice would be to not start any new projects with your advisor and instead focus on your own students.

As a corollary, this point also extends to academic couples. It is probably better to avoid collaborating with your spouse until after tenure to avoid any questions about your capabilities as independent researchers. Come tenure review time, you do not want to appear an inseparable unit where referees cannot tell one person from another. Finally, once your would-be referees have accepted writing a letter for you, what happens next is outside your immediate control and depends on the body of work you have amassed as an assistant professor. At this time, the only thing you really can do is sit tight and wait. If something momentous happens from the time you submitted your tenure packet to the actual review - such as a major publication or grant coming in - it can be worth sending an update if your institution’s process allows for that. Otherwise, now it’s time for the waiting game. Good luck!

Tenure review is shrouded in mystery, and a lot of assistant professors (rightly) fear the process because of its finality and potential impact to their careers. Some of the details I have outlined above can seem very unfair, and I am probably guilty of perpetuating inequitable practices in academia merely by giving some of this advice. However, at the same time I feel that demystifying the process as much as possible can only help.

It may be some consolation to worried assistant professors everywhere that in all of the places I have worked, senior faculty are invested in the success of their junior colleagues and are - for all intents and purposes - cheering for them. They may not say so to your face, and they will constantly be challenging you to do your best work, but secretly they are hoping you will be able to submit a “slam dunk” tenure case.

Let me add a final note: most people who are not on the path to get tenure tend to get dropped sometime around the three-year mark. Again, this can sound a little brutal, but it is typically a better outcome than the trauma of tenure denial. It also means that if you’ve made it to your final year, your colleagues likely think you have what it takes to get tenure. Take solace in this fact.