New Year, New Goals: Research & Writing

Here at The Novice Professor (and everywhere else) academics are heading into a new school year. As "this" year comes to a close we are reflecting on the past year and setting goals for the upcoming year. To inspire you, and help hold ourselves accountable, we are sharing our goals with you in this week's posts, spanning several topics of academic life. 


​Research and Writing are important aspects of academic life, no matter your institution or position as evidenced by all four of us having goals in this area. 

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Brian

Collect data in my lab to be presented at poster sessions in the spring. I have four students returning to my lab from last year (in addition to four new students), where we focused on understanding the theoretical underpinnings of the approach I adopt when conducting research. This year I am excited to begin work in the lab where we are actually collecting and analyzing data. Accomplishing this goal will be beneficial both for myself and for my students, as I need to engage students in research activities as part of my job description, and many of my students wish to pursue graduate work and need research experience. On a related not, I hope to institute a system where my returning lab students’ mentor and teach the incoming lab students, which should help to create a continuously productive research lab.

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Ciara

This goal actually spans teaching and research. This year I am incorporating more informal student feedback to assess my teaching techniques and course design. To assess how student feedback within the course affects students’ perceptions of the course and their performance, I will be conducting research in two sections of a course I am teaching this fall. One section of the course will have two opportunities to provide feedback on the course broadly. The other section will have more frequent opportunities that will be geared specifically to course elements during the time period between evaluations. I will then compare student perceptions of the course overall using an informal student evaluation and the university’s formal student evaluation. I will also examine course assessment data.

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Jen

​One of my bigger goals for the upcoming year is to submit all of the manuscripts for my completed projects to journal for publication. If I’m able to do this, that would add upwards of 5 publications to my CV (assuming they all get accepted, of course). This isn’t even including the publications that could come out of my dissertation! 

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Karly

There are two manuscripts that I would like to get out this semester. I am also hoping to finish a collaborative project early this semester, and discuss next steps for study 2 and writing it up for publication. Another major research goal I have is to help one of my undergraduate researchers present at a small regional conference this fall. She is planning on doing a secondary data analysis on one of my projects that she put a lot of time and effort into. There are lots of questions that could be asked, so I am excited to work with her on this quick project.

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