What should I be doing to secure a tenured faculty position?

[geekman]

Hi all,

 

I am in my second to last year (most likely graduating summer 2016) doing a PhD in Statistics. I am interested in going into academia - I'd like to be considered for tenure track positions. Not neccesarily R1, but maybe a happy medium between research and teaching.

 

What things should I be doing? The first two years of my program were not too productive due to classes / qualifying exams.

 

Obviously, the #1 thing is publications but I doubt any will actually be in print by the time I graduate. I assume I will have two papers submitted by this summer (2015) and I am working on an R package to go along with my research.

 

Any advice / feedback is appreciated! Thank you.

[iphi]

What a lot of people in psych try to do is take gather a ton of data during their graduate studies, then take a post doc for the year or two after graduation. Then they churn out a ton of publications during that time.

Edited February 8, 2015 by iphi

[MLHopeful]

This is really something you should be talking to your adviser about.

[cyberwulf]

Without publications, you're going to have trouble landing a TT position right out of grad school in the current job market. You should probably be thinking postdoc, so in addition to getting your papers out you should start trying to expand your professional network by talking to people at conferences, meeting with visiting seminar speakers, etc. It's also important to get your advisor on board; you need to be explicit that you want to pursue a tenure-track position, and ask how they can help you achieve that goal.