Episode 8 - Advice for Your Former Self

Overcoming challenges, embracing opportunities, and using your resources: A compilation of advice from faculty 

Welcome back to the CFI Faculty Lounge Podcast, where we explore the experiences, challenges, and strategies of dedicated educators. In this special episode, host Eric Magrum shares a collection of interviews with various faculty members, each responding to the question: If you could go back in time, and meet yourself before your first day at JMU, what advice would you give -- and why? 

Faculty members share advice on: 

• Staying present 
• Networking 
• Recognizing your skills 
• Planning 
• Community-building 
• Being open to new experiences 
• Using campus resources 
• Engaging in meaningful teaching 

Tune in for an inspiring compilation of faculty members reflecting on their early experiences at JMU.  

Listen to advice from various JMU faculty members at the timestamps indicated below 

Dr. Bobby Vaziri 0:30 – 1:42 

Dr. Chen Guo 1:43 – 3:05 

Professor Colleen Watson 3:06 – 4:20 

Dr. Delores Phillips 4:21 – 5:18 

Dr. Elizabeth Brown 5:19 – 6:44 

Dr. Eric Guinivan 6:45 – 7:59 

Dr. Leonard Richards 8:00 – 10:16 

Dr. Modjadji Choshi 10:17 –12:41 

Dr. Robyn Kondrad 12:42 – 14:05 

Dr. Tiara Brown 14:06 – 15:15 

Dr. Timothy Ball 15:16 – 18:58 

Transcript

Welcome to CFI Faculty Lounge Podcast, an outlet created for continuous learning and actionable insights for faculty. I'm your host, Eric Magrum, inviting you to join us in conversation with dedicated educators who share their experiences, challenges and effective solutions. Today, we have a special episode on tap for you.

It is a compilation of JMU folks and their response to the question, if you could go back in time and give yourself advice before your first day at JMU, what would it be? We hope you enjoy.

This is going to sound somewhat generic, but I think this is what I would say. I would really tell myself to do your best to be present in your environment, whether it's the classroom, whether it's your researching or doing service engagements, don't get bogged down with tenure, don't get bogged down with an award, with titles, with the prestige of the publication. It's like, well, yeah, if you don't do those things, then you need to do those things to get tenure.

It's like, sure, you want to get tenure, but I think enjoy the journey and just be present for it. And stuff will fall into place as it should, if you're putting in your honest effort. And if it doesn't, then you need to go put your honest effort somewhere else.

And I think that's what I would tell myself.

Oh, I love that question. I would say, yeah, if I went back, I want to meet more people. There are a lot of great faculties in my department, in the college, at JMU.

I want to learn from the other colleagues. So I want to build more like a network with my colleagues and meet more people at JMU. So at the beginning of the semester, so I remember that when I first came here, and the CFI helped me a lot.

Now you have all the frequent workshops. I attended the workshops and I meet a lot of great faculty members at JMU. We had the frequent discussion, a conversation on some teaching topics.

I love it. But then after we are done with the first year, and there are no workshops for the faculties who stay here for a longer time. And I really miss all the workshops, all the connections with the other faculties.

So if I'm going to tell myself, I will say go to meet more people.

I kind of hid for many years. I will say I enjoyed hiding in the math department. It was much quieter.

My life was easier. But part of that was because I thought I needed to hide. I only have my masters, and that's the way I always say it.

I only have my masters. There are a few other people with just their masters, and I can use these words for myself, right? While most people have PhDs.

So I'm pretty sure I always had that true imposter syndrome for many years. Even though I did tell them when they hired me, I'm not interested in research, but I'm in the math department. So I never really realized, probably until Maddy Stem, that no, just being organized is a skill that maybe everybody doesn't have.

I truly, and I'm not, I am being, I did not know that. So I've come to realize there are a lot of skills I do have, maybe not the research sense, that can add though to the math department. So I think understanding that, that it is okay, you don't have your PhD, you don't have to keep your head down.

No one, I mean, no one has ever made me feel less than this was me doing it to myself, but that I could put myself out there and nobody was going to bat an eye. They would be happy for my help with whatever. So I think that was probably the biggest thing.

I would tell myself to love myself. You are going to do some amazing things, you're going to do some challenging things and it's going to feel hard at times, but it is always worth it. So I would tell myself to get out there and conquer, which is what I tell myself most mornings.

I try to say every morning, get out there and conquer the world, girl, because it's right there for you. So I think I would give myself that advice before my first day. I think I would also tell myself to slow down before my first day here.

Things take time and I am not a patient person all the time, and so I need to cultivate more patience. So I think I would tell myself that. I would think I would tell myself that this community that we have at JMU is enormously helpful, is very engaged in teamwork, is very supportive of all the things that you want to do.

So don't be afraid to ask for help. So first of all, I would say make a practice of systematic reflection at the week and semester and year level, if not more. So the week level is important because after that, you forget what happened, right?

Oh, I wasn't effective on Sunday. Why was I not effective on Sunday? Oh, because I let this family member who's a complicated person invite me to breakfast and I went for it, which I didn't have a plan.

So you'd forget that kind of granularity if you waited too long. You'd just think, ah, it didn't work.

Systematic reflection and planning also is a check-in because there is a lot that comes at us every day in our email. Think about how much this work has changed since the 80s when there was no email. Then if you wanted a faculty member, you had to go to their office hours.

Right now, all kinds of people on campus can send you an email and they have an expectation of a response. So that can eat a lot of time. Like half an hour a day, that's a lot of time out of the week, actually.

So I guess the other piece of advice I would give is that there will never be an end of worthwhile projects that could use someone's time and attention. That is an infinite bucket. So choose wisely.

I think first and foremost, I'd say keep being yourself. I think particularly when you're a new faculty member, it can feel like there's a lot of varying expectations for who you're going to be to a lot of different people, whether it's your students or your peers or the administration. And I think being yourself, staying true to yourself no matter what the context is really important.

I tell myself keep being enthusiastic, because I've found that that just always pays dividends. Keep taking collaborative opportunities that present themselves, because that really is kind of the lifeblood of at least what I do in the school of music. And just to continue to value and support the people in your community.

Because at the end of the day, a lot of what we're doing is community building. Within the school and when the students go off and to whatever path they're going to follow in life and their careers, they're going to take what they learned here in our community and use that to build their next community too. So yeah, those are all things I value a lot.

Breathe, breathe, because I'm telling you now when I walked in for the first time, like I was I was happy to be back. I was excited to be back, but it was overwhelming. This is a this is a JMU and really just higher education in general.

When you're transitioning from K-12 education or public school education to this, it's a totally different world. And so take it all in and breathe and release, breathe and release, because again, I got here and I was just overwhelmed. Articles, scholarship, I have to actually do this?

What? Like that's what I have to do? Like I thought it was just teaching, right?

Like I thought that it was just this. And I understood service, but my lord, I have to get these things done, you know, and turn in, like, just breathe. Breathe and realize that you are on a journey that most people have not experienced.

But the people who have experienced are right there. So don't just not, not only do you, Leonard, the first day at your first day at your job need to breathe, but you also need to be willing and able to reach out to experts. Because clearly this is a new space.

And there are some people that know how to do some really good navigation in this new space. You just got the map. All these other people have built houses.

So try to start learning how they were able to construct these houses, right? How they were able to construct their pathways and roads to be successful and grow their gardens and have their landscape so that they can thrive. And connect with those individuals.

Don't be afraid to connect. And so that is what I've done more now than what I did when I first got here. Because again, I was just more so in shock.

So I would definitely tell myself that again. Breathe, take it all in. Seek help when you need it.

Yeah.

Run away. He said, it's a scam.

I'm kidding.

I'm just kidding.

I'm telling you. I came to JMU straight from clinical practice as a travel nurse for some years. I work in the cath lab where we do procedures like cardiovascular coronary interventions, where we do stands, where we deal with life-threatening conditions.

People come in, they're having a heart attack in layman's terms, that you have to fix it now. You have a time limit of 30 minutes. The person has to be fixed or do something to make sure whatever the problem that brought that person here is fixed or something, you work into was fixing that.

That is high pressure work environment. So I came to JMU and then they say, okay, you got to teach this class, you got to teach this class. Okay.

I'm like, okay, let's go, let's go people, let's go. I got this, let's go, let's go. Okay, calm down, calm down.

There's nobody's having a heart attack. Nobody's dying now. Calm down.

You just have to be able to teach a class, be able to instill whatever passion you have, whatever energy you have, you have to instill into the students. So if I have to go back and talk to myself, I will tell myself, you will be okay. You will be okay.

Protect your energy, protect your energy. You have energy, you have the passion, the passion that you have will carry you through. Just relax, embrace every opportunity that you can for growth and collaboration, because I like feedback.

I live by feedback. I like collaboration. I like working with people.

So that, I would tell myself, those things will come. You have a passion. You have a way of showing your passion.

The right people that will collaborate with you to make this impactful experiences for the students will come.

I spent a while trying to think of the perfect piece of advice for this question. And I think what I came up with was to take advantage of the many amazing resources that we have at JMU for professional development. I think when I first came to JMU, I was not a new faculty.

I had been at Appalachian State for five years prior to my position here. But I think that I tried to learn a lot of things on my own. And I wish I had taken more time to, for example, attend more of the CFI workshops.

I think I would have gotten to develop my network earlier and gotten to know more people developing that network. I think I probably would have learned a lot more and save myself some time in the process because sometimes it's great to be a self-starter and it's great to learn things on your own, but sometimes taking advantage of the Hive mind is useful and is more efficient. So yeah, I think I would tell myself, don't spend so much time in your office, get out into the campus community and go to the workshops and go to the workshops and go to the lectures and become more enmeshed in the community earlier on.

I think I would just say that mainly to breathe, it's going to seem overwhelming, but all jobs are. So I really have to look at this job a lot and say, I went to school for a very long time because I wanted to do this, and there's so many benefits compared to any type of negatives. So if I get overwhelmed with all the work, I think, well, I do have the luxury, like I said, to sleep till 10 AM.

Calling my brother who's the high school teacher is good for that too, because he reminds me not to complain because I have the best life in the world, the best job in the world. But I think I would tell myself also to say no. Saying no, again, my AUH and Dean would agree that I struggle with saying no.

But being able to prioritize what's really important, what I really want to work on, I think has been a big thing.

Coming to this university, coming to Communication Studies, and the thing that struck me and will always stay with me is colleagues who freely gave me, it's like, here's our syllabus. You're not familiar with this class. Here's some activities that I use.

That has always struck me as a way in which JMU is different from other universities that I've either taught at or attended as a student. It's the caring.

So the general collegiality, I also would say that I felt that in my own home department immediately, that there was a large amount of care between individual faculty, not just a couple of people that are friends, but as the entire unit, there was care and I think, correct me if you don't believe this, if you will. But I also feel like that might be connected to JMU's mission for teaching. That brought me personally to JMU, which was, it was a larger institution that had resources, but it cared about teaching first, because there's not a lot of institutions out there that, they might say they care about teaching because they have to, but JMU actually backs that up.

I think that's true because JMU was established at the Teachers College. I actually remember when I was at Washington State University, and Karen DePauw, who was then an associate dean in the graduate school, but she was in charge of the interdisciplinary program. So when I was at Washington State, the Communication Department didn't have a stand alone, they didn't have Ph.D.

programs, they didn't have the 700, 800 level classes. So I designed an interdisciplinary program. But I remember Karen DePauw, who became the dean of the graduate school at Virginia Tech, she asked me about, so what do you want to do?

And I said, I know the one thing that I don't want to do is, I don't want to teach at an R1 institution. And by then Washington State was an R1.

Yeah.

And so, I had a sense that JMU was going to be where I was going to fit in, but I didn't think I would be here as long as I have been. So, it is the collegiality, it is the caring. My department is, we have 45 full-time faculty members.

Holy smokes.

So, I mean, we are the biggest department in the College of Arts and Letters. We have grown tremendously, but there is still that caring new faculty members. We still, hey, if you'd like, I could send you the syllabus, you can look at it, you can adapt it, you can say, no, that's not for me, but it still happens.

As always, thanks again for tuning in to the CFI Faculty Lounge Podcast. And remember, if you or someone you know would like to be a part of the podcast, go ahead and contact us. We'd love to hear from you.

Have a great day. Go Dukes.