Hey, you found our meta-narrative! Make sure to check out our 'two cents' in each of the three sections of this webtext. In this one, you'll find a preface to the whole piece(s), as well as acknowledgements to all of our wonderful contributors.

Preface
This past summer, Robin Murphy, editor of C&C Online’s professional development section, asked us to contribute to the series of interviews the journal has been publishing. Originally, the plan was to have one of our graduate students interview us about work that the grad student had collaborated on with us. The problem was that we were brand new (in Kristin’s case) and relatively new (in Cheryl’s case) to our institutions, and so our interactions with grad students was still fairly limited. Instead, we decided to interview each other about our collaborative work.

However, after some thought, our interest in discussing our collaborations (specifically on the ix series of Bedford/St. Martin’s CDs) didn’t seem all that engaging for this particular project. What did seem most pressing at the time was an email that Kristin sent Cheryl one day in late August, the first week of classes. That email was sparked by a confrontation of choosing a faculty identity – that is, Kristin had to choose what areas of expertise to list on the departmental website. All of a sudden, she (or insert any of us) was thrust into becoming a faculty member. Should she choose areas that related to her dissertation topic, which was partly why the department hired her? Or should she choose areas that she was interested in pursuing in the future, which differed slightly (but enough) from her dissertation topic that other faculty members might question her research agenda? Why the heck did she have to start thinking about her research agenda in her first week of class at a new school?! It was a new-faculty-member identity crisis. One that lots of grad students-turned-tenure-trackers* face in their first year (or years) on the job.

And, so, that is where this webtext started. We realized—with our limited understanding of being at the beginning or in the midst of our tenure tracks—that there were three stages to the transition between grad school and tenure-track life. First, how do grad students make the transition from being grad students to being addressed by the lucrative term, Doctor? (The use of which still makes both of us feel slightly giggly and uncomfortable—although Cheryl, in her third year out at this writing, finds it is growing on her). Second, what should brand new tenure-track faculty members expect their first year out? Third, there’s another (usually) five years ahead of you until tenure—so how should tenure-track faculty members prepare themselves for those seemingly-long-but-all-too-quick years?

Our intention here is not to tell you how to find your tenure-track identity (although we do offer some conversations between us as models for sorting through that issue) or even to suggest that you necessarily need one (and only one) identity. In fact, being that we’re sorting out all these issues ourselves, our only hope with this webtext is to provide an example of the emotional freak-outs that can occur because of this crazy shift in personas required by the transition between grad school and full-time academic life. Our purpose? To remind you that you are not alone. And that there are plenty of colleagues in our field (or even outside our field) who are wonderful mentors and can guide you through this transition.

Since we aren’t experts yet – not yet having completed the 6-year cycle ourselves – throughout this text, we draw on the advice of mentors who have successfully navigated the tenure-track years of their career. We also draw on the experiences of others like us who are just starting, or are in the midst of, their tenure-track careers. (Maybe doing so was to assuage our own fears that we weren’t alone, and certainly our junior colleagues supported this hypothesis.) So, what we hope you take away from this webtext is that we are all in this together, we are here to support each other, we all have colleagues we can get encouragement from and rely on, and no one has the one answer to managing your tenure-track years because there IS no one answer.

Contributors
A big thanks to all the contributors who literally dropped what they were doing to offer their experiences and advice for us to use. The computers and writing community is special, evidenced by the fact that, with only five days notice, 25 mentors set aside time—and more than a few while they were traveling and conferencing—to prepare written or media-rich texts for readers’ benefit. We are especially grateful to them, and grateful as well to those who responded kindly when they couldn’t participate, because we know that in this field, we have each others’ best interests at heart. What more could one want as we transition into the next stage of our careers?

Because we never expected to receive the wealth of responses we did, and although we only asked for a 30-second sound byte or a brief paragraph of their time, the contributors often spent a great deal of effort to prepare thoughtful advice. We made sound-bytes to cite from when it was appropriate, but we also wanted to offer the full texts that folks produced. Below we have linked to the unedited versions for each contributor whom we soundbyted/cited within our webtext. They are quite worth your time, such as in the case of seeing how crazed Matt Barton's eyes look when he's talking about tenure. lol. Or reading Jim Kalmbach's explanation for his proverbs. Also, the video files are less compressed than the versions we used, so you can enjoy - for instance - Tony and Becky and Rich at their intended size. Please enjoy.

Daniel Anderson, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Anthony Atkins, University of North Carolina-Wilmington (Full Text)
Michael Day, Northern Illinois University
Kristie Fleckenstein, Florida State University
Matt Barton, St. Cloud State University (Full Text)
Michelle Comstock, University of Colorado, Denver (Full Text)
Tammy Conard-Salvo, Purdue University
Gail Hawisher, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign
Amy Kimme Hea, University of Arizona
Christine Hult, Utah State University
Jim Kalmbach, Illinois State University (Full Text)
Steven Krause, Eastern Michigan University
Heidi McKee, Miami University of Ohio (Full Text)
Carole Clark Papper, Ball State University
Clancy Ratliff, East Carolina State University
Alex Reid, SUNY-Cortland
Rich Rice, Texas Tech University (Full Text)
Becky Rickly, Texas Tech University (Full Text)
Michael Salvo, Purdue University
Cynthia Selfe, The Ohio State University
Victor Vitanza, Clemson University
Janice Walker, Georgia Southern University
Carl Whithaus, Old Dominion University
Anne Frances Wysocki, Michigan Technological University
Kathleen Blake Yancey, Florida State University

We owe Robin Murphy a big thanks for allowing us the freedom to explore professional development from a framework that encourages embracing the emotional experience of it all. Finally, we hope that reading this text is enjoyable and also shows, in some small way, how Kristin and Cheryl collaborate like yin and yang.

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* Of course, becoming a tenure-track faculty member is only one option out of graduate school. We recognize the importance of other options including (and certainly not limited to) adjuncting, becoming a professional staff person, consulting, working outside of academia altogether, and even other faculty-type positions that don't involve tenure processes as such, like working at a two-year college or being a permanent lecturer. (For a great resource on innovative professional paths, see Technology and English Studies, edited by James Inman and Beth Hewett.) Tammy Conard-Salvo, for instance, wrote about her transition from graduate school to becoming Associate Director of the Purdue Writing Lab, which is a professional position instead of a tenure-track one. For us, however, the call to tenure-track-hood was our first choice, and so that small slice of academia is our focus here.