Tips for new professors regarding the promotion and tenure dossier

I spent the past few weekends compiling and polishing my promotion and tenure dossier.  Here are a few overall suggestions I have for new professors so that creating this document is an easy process when it comes time for them to do the same. 

1.  Know what information is required.  On day 1, ask to see a recent successful tenure dossier from your department so that you know what you need to keep track of.  Some universities require a lot more information than what you would include on a standard CV.  For example, does your university require you to just list the names of journals you review for, or do they want to know the number of times you’ve reviewed and the dates of each review you submitted? 

1A.  Know what time-sensitive information is required.  For example, my department requires student teaching evaluations and at least one faculty teaching evaluation for every year on the tenure track.  If you don’t have this for years 1-5, there’s no way to make up for it in year 6. 

1B.  Make sure you know the unwritten requirements of the department and university.  Do you need 2 R01s?  Do you need to serve on study sections?  Do you need a Nature paper? How many papers do you need to be seen as highly productive?  Might lower impact papers actually count against you?  Do you need to be on a national committee?  Do you need to be an editor of a journal?  Do you need to have graduated a PhD student?  Do you need to have won a fancy new investigator award?  Do you need to have given invited talks at universities?  Do you need to give talks at conferences, and do they need to be keynote lectures or just short talks chosen from abstracts?  Knowing what is expected will help you to make it happen before it's too late.  

1C.  Know the format of the information that is required.  You can get this from the sample dossiers you’ve collected in point 1 above.  Use this exact formatting when you’re keeping track of your accomplishments (see next point).  

2.  Keep a running list of everything you do and update it religiously. It will be nearly impossible to remember every committee meeting, every seminar, every poster session you’ve judged, every study section, etc. after you’ve been a professor for six years, not to mention trying to remember the dates of the things you’ve done.  I kept great records of everything during my first 4 years and it made my 4^th year review document incredibly easy to prepare.  I, unfortunately, became less diligent after that and had to spend a huge amount of time finding and formatting all the info for the past two years when preparing my final dossier. 

3.  Be creative when thinking of ways in which you can demonstrate national/international reputation.  Early on, I started keeping track of who was asking me for reagents.  Now I have a list of people from around the world who have requested DNA expression constructs generated by laboratory.  I’m including this as an appendix to my dossier because I think it demonstrates the importance of our work and also “international reputation” in my field.