Don't Get Into Political Battles Posted on March 19, 2007 Ruth Chao (bio) advises early career researchers to avoid departmental politics and focus on publishing.

Lay low, keep your head down, don't get pulled into political battles. Everyone always talks about trying as best you can to focus on publications. Getting the publications, so, and that requires too, your file, they'll look at your application, your file in terms of, do you have new data, your own data, your own program, broader research program and actual data to support that that you've collected since you've come to the university. And that you've demonstrated that, you can publish this research in the top tier journals. So it's kind of like this cycling you go through to collect the data, analyze the data, publish and then start over again. And to know how to do that, it's a really, you've got to think of all the steps ahead of time and plan them out in a way that, into a timeline in a sense so that you make sure you have a set of, a good enough set of publications in, in strong enough journals that you can get tenure.

And a lot of times what happens as a junior faculty, you may get pulled into different issues or problems that the department's facing and different, I don't know, contention, you know, sometimes contentious atmosphere and you just really have to try to be respectful and listening to your colleagues, but to really lay low and focus on, have your eyes on the prize and what it is that you're trying to do.

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