A subset of students in computing Ph.D. programs aspire to become research-active faculty at universities. However, options are typically limited for students to learn about the work of faculty beyond the activities students personally witness. Additionally, while orientations and workshops are available to new faculty, these resources are ephemeral compared to the extended, years-long needs of junior faculty to assimilate professorial knowledge. The norms of independence and self-management distinguish university faculty from other career paths, and they further motivate creating supportive resources. I introduce a set of guides to help aspiring and new computing faculty learn the unwritten norms of the profession. I focus on creating materials to support pre-tenure faculty in positions with significant expectations for research, teaching, and service, motivated by the complexity of balancing those obligations. These materials target faculty in the United States, matching my positionality, although I write them to be as broadly applicable as possible. While similar materials exist, these guides contrast with others through their foci on day-to-day activities, sustainable effort, and understanding the significance of one’s work. I describe three guides from the full set, which is available to the public online at https://shomir.net/advice.html. These three selections consist of a glossary of faculty terminology, a case study of a faculty member’s experiences with grant proposals, and a experiential guide to tenure. Finally, I provide recommendations for others who are interested in creating similar materials to expand the available support for pre-tenure faculty.
Dr. Shomir Wilson is an associate professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in 2011 and held postdoctoral positions in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science and the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics.
Dr. Wilson directs the Human Language Technologies Lab, with research spanning natural language processing (NLP), privacy, security, and computational social science. A recent focus of his lab’s work is studying digital privacy practices and technology users’ privacy behaviors using methods from NLP. This work explores organizations’ data practices at a large scale, yielding knowledge about the state of consumer privacy, and also examines how and why people use technology to share personal information. Additionally, his lab has a broad portfolio of projects applying NLP to problems in a variety of sociotechnical systems.
Funding for Dr. Wilson’s research has come from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Funding highlights include an NSF CAREER award to apply NLP to consumer-oriented legal documents and a $1.2M NSF SaTC grant to build large-scale resources for analyzing texts about online privacy practices. His lab has received publication awards from EMNLP, CSCW, WebConf, PETS, DocEng, TeachNLP, and TrustNLP. His public outreach has included written testimony for a U.S. Senate hearing on AI-driven scams, serving for several years as a Grand Awards Judge for the International Science and Engineering Fair, and media appearances in NBC News, Yahoo News, Inside Higher Ed, and Scripps Media.
Dr. Wilson has performed research or teaching activities at several universities abroad, including the Future University of Egypt (a series of guest lectures on AI ethics, 2018), the University of Edinburgh (NSF International Research Fellow, 2013-2014), the National University of Singapore (NSF EAPSI Singapore Fellow, 2010), and Macquarie University (NSF EAPSI Australia Fellow, 2009).
Dr. Wilson maintains a collection of academic advice pages for students and faculty at https://shomir.net/advice.
