Errors on the Way to Tenure Posted on February 15, 2006 Kenneth Dodge (bio) suggests that developing an interest in a problem should drive a career.

Another kind of error is being too concerned with one's own career path rather than the research problems themselves. Yes, it's important to have one's head out of the sand and be concerned about one's vitae and what one looks like and how one's positioned in the world strategically, but in the long run, that won't be sustaining either.

What will be sustaining is to develop a genuine interest in a problem, because that will drive the next study and the next study and the policy implication and the basic research question, and it will move in different directions, and it will be sustaining in the long run.

I think that in order to have a long term career, it's really essential for the investigator to develop an interest in a problem and have that drive the decisions, not tenure, not the local university requirements, but rather the problem itself.

« Back to Article