Show Notes

Description

Dr. Tania Oberyszyn, Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs at The Ohio State University College of Medicine, visits the studio as we consider intentional planning for academic promotion. Many faculty get caught up in clinical duties, research projects, and teaching responsibilities only to realize they have not actively prepared for promotion. Understanding the process, tracking accomplishments, and building a strong dossier can propel them toward success. Tune in to learn more!

Topic

Intentional Planning for Academic Promotion

Guest

Dr Tania Oberyszyn
Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs
The Ohio State University College of Medicine

Links

Center for Faculty Advancement, Mentoring, and Engagement
Appointments, Reappointments, Promotion, and Tenure
Appointment, Promotion, and Tenure Toolbox
Office of Academic Affairs
Office of Faculty Affairs

Episode Transcript

[Dr Mike Patrick]
This episode of FAMEcast is brought to you by the Center for Faculty Advancement, Mentoring, and Engagement at The Ohio State University College of Medicine.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of FAMEcast. We are a faculty development podcast from The Ohio State University College of Medicine.

It’s episode four, and we are calling this one Preparing for Promotion, Intentional Planning. I want to welcome all of you to FAMEcast. So today we’re talking about something on the minds of many faculty, and that is promotion.

Advancing in academic medicine is not just about time served. It really does require intentional planning and a strategic approach. Many faculty get caught up in their clinical duties, research projects, teaching responsibilities, only to realize they have not been actively preparing for promotion.

And understanding the process, like right out of the gate, tracking accomplishments, and building a strong dossier are all essential for success. So today we’re going to break down what faculty need to do to prepare for promotion, including understanding your faculty appointment and promotion track, keeping track of accomplishments and crafting strong narratives, networking and gaining national recognition, common pitfalls and how to avoid them, and available resources to help you along the way. We do have a terrific guest joining us this week as we consider academic promotion and intentional planning for it.

That is Dr. Tania Oberyszyn. She is Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. So, if you’re on the path to promotion, even if you’re just starting to think about it, this episode is for you, and we will dive in shortly.

First, though, I do want to remind you the information presented in every episode of our podcast is for general educational purposes only. Your use of this audio program is subject to the FAMEcast Terms of Use Agreement, which you can find at famecast.org. So, let’s take a quick break.

We’ll get Dr. Tania Oberyszyn settled into the studio, and then we will be back to talk about intentional planning for academic promotion. It’s coming up right after this. Dr. Tania Oberyszyn is a Professor of Pathology and Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. She has a passion for supporting academic medical faculty as we journey along our career path. This includes overseeing appointments, reappointments, promotion, and tenure. The promotion and tenure process can be challenging to understand, but it’s also an essential process for faculty.

So important, in fact, that we are embarking on a three-part series on promotion, starting with today’s topic, intentional planning. Before we dive into that, let’s offer a warm FAMEcast welcome to our guest, Dr. Tania Oberyszyn. Thank you so much for visiting us today.

[Dr Tania Oberyszyn]
Oh, thank you so much for having me. I’m really looking forward to the conversation.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yes, I’m looking forward to it as well. Why don’t we start with just sort of what a faculty appointment is because of folks who are looking for a job for the first time. So, you know, maybe they’re a fellow and they’re going to be joining an academic faculty or even moving from one place to another because different institutions do things a little bit differently.

But here at Ohio State, it’s first important that you get on the right track. So, if you can talk a little bit about what a faculty appointment is and what the various options are for that right out of the gate.

[Dr Tania Oberyszyn]
Sure. So, faculty appointments have three different ranks in academic institutions. So, you have an assistant professor, associate professor, and full professor.

Assistant is brand new and then you move up through the ranks to finally be an associate and then full professor. There are also different tracks at different universities. In general, there are tenure track, clinical track, and then research track across different institutions.

For us, we have a tenure track, our clinical faculty, and then our research faculty. And at Ohio State University, our clinical faculty also are divided into three different pathways and their pathways towards promotion. So those include clinician scholar, clinician educator, and clinical excellence.

Now which track you end up on is based on your career and your career goals. So, tenure track faculty in general are really heavily interested in research. They run research laboratories.

They teach graduate and medical students. They have large grants that support their research mission. Our clinical faculty see clinical patients, but they also can be either scholar, clinician scholars involved in education of medical student residents and fellows, clinical educators.

And our clinical excellence faculty are our clinical faculty who are heavily skewed towards patient care. And for them, it’s really looking at improving patient care and how do we move the needle forward in terms of making our patients feel more comfortable, get treated more efficiently and more effectively, and also build a national reputation for the clinical work that we do.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. So, knowing what track you’re on is really important because you’re going to have a different set of rules for advancing from assistant professor to associate to full professor depending on what track you’re on. And so, getting the right track and knowing exactly what you need to be doing to advance right out of the gate is going to be important.

What if you don’t really know for sure where your career is going to lead? Is it possible to switch tracks if what’s important to you and your career has evolved?

[Dr Tania Oberyszyn]
Sure. So different institutions do things slightly differently. Here at Ohio State University, you can come in on the tenure track, clinical track or research track based on the department’s need and the department’s evaluation of your CV and where they feel you fit the best.

You can switch tracks for sure. You can switch from tenure track if you have clinical responsibilities to a clinical faculty position if along the way you realize your career goals have changed and you’re not as heavily focused perhaps on research as you initially thought you would be. You cannot at Ohio State University switch into the tenure track.

For us, that’s a brand-new hire and that would be a new position posted, and you need to be hired into that track. Now having said that, does that happen? Of course it does.

We have faculty who come in on the clinical faculty and start off on our clinician scholar pathway and over the years they’re very successful and during their research they’re getting funding and it only makes sense that now their career has aligned much better with being more heavily research intensive and to be able to have graduate students and continue on that path of research and so then they do get hired into the tenure track from the clinical faculty.

So, it’s all possible. It’s all conversations with your department chairs and really where your career is going. But it’s really important for you to know what the expectations are to your point on all of those different tracks and the way to do that is each department has a document called the appointments promotion and tenure document.

It’s readily available both at the university level at the office of academic affairs website but also each department has access to it. Many have it on their internal department webpage and really important that when you get here you look at that document and look at the section of the track and ranks to understand where you fit best.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, it would be easy once you get started you’re excited with your new role as a faculty member and you think well promotion is something I don’t really need to think about for a few years and so yes they’ve given me this document on how I advance and once I’m three or four years in I’ll get it out and take a look. It’s really better to take a look at that right from the get-go so that you have an idea of what you need to be doing and not wait until you get there and say oh, I forgot to do this or that or the other thing. So, we really do want to be proactive and understand what is required on our individual paths right out of the gate correct?

[Dr Tania Oberyszyn]
Thousand percent yeah you know I usually tell faculty to take nine months to figure out where the bathrooms are and where to eat lunch and where you park and get yourself going and then really that’s the time where you need to start thinking about yes promotion may seem far away but time flies and before you know it four years will have passed and to your point you think oh my colleagues are self-nominating for promotion I want to go out for promotion too and be an associate professor or full professor and then you look at the criteria in your department for that next rank and you realize oh I’m missing components so now I have to wait because I need to go back and make up those deficits and so really it’s really important that you take a look at those criteria and that you do something that people always kind of find funny but the best way to keep yourself on track is to set up quarterly meetings with yourself on your calendar. So, treat it as if it’s a meeting that you can’t cancel with somebody really important and don’t cancel on yourself.

So, pick a time quarterly where you can take the time and I’m asking for half an hour to meet with yourself and during that time there are a few things that you should be doing. One is reviewing the criteria for promotion and ask yourself in the last three months what have I done that is helping me move forward in meeting these criteria and there are going to be times when nothing you wouldn’t have done anything and that’s okay life happens work happens but that’s your opportunity to look at the criteria and say it says I need to have service on a national committee I have no idea how to do that so in the next three months my goal is going to be to talk to one of my mentors and figure out how do I get myself closer to getting nominated to serve on a committee at a national level and then you can re-evaluate that in the next four months.

It’s really important that you have that information that you know what you’re trying to accomplish because information is your superpower.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, yeah.

[Dr Tania Oberyszyn]
The other thing that you should do during that time is to make sure that you are compiling the information that you need for your ultimate dossier, right? So, you should be working on making sure that you have that information in folders. So one of the best ways to do this and this also will work well for something that we can touch on in a moment and that’s your annual review is to put information from July 1st of every year to June 30th of every year into a folder whether you’re old school like me and do it in a physical folder and you print stuff out or you save it as a folder and you’re on your computer desktop or wherever and any email that starts with can you, will you, thank you should automatically get into the habit of putting it into that folder because it will help you in remembering what you’ve done, what service have you done, what papers have you reviewed, what grants have you reviewed, what students have you mentored, what awards have you won in a yearly basis.

And so, that will help you in many different ways. It’ll save you hours of trying to go through Outlook which we all know is not often easy to search to try to remember what you did especially when you’re working on your dossier and you come to a section and you look at this title and you think I know I have stuff that I can put here but now I don’t remember when I did it, who I did it with, you know abstracts for meetings are a perfect example your middle author on an abstract that you’ve done with a colleague, colleague sends it to you says can you read this we want to submit it to this meeting you read through it you say excellent fine I’m good with it and it goes off and then you know comes to the point where you’re having to put abstracts on your cv or in your dossier and now you don’t remember what conference it was who else were the authors what was the title the final title if you have all of that saved really easy to find and put in you saved yourself a lot of time.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah and I think going through it once a quarter like you said also kind of reminds you then that especially once you’ve done it a few cycles to start putting that stuff in the folder so that when you get to your quarterly review that you’ve made an appointment with yourself you can go back and review what things are there and then maybe there’s something that comes to mind that you didn’t get an email for that you can you know make a little note to yourself that that that happened during that particular time period and I love the email thing the can you thank you emails and folks who don’t necessarily want to print out you can print and to a pdf so like if you open up an email a particular email and then say hey print it as a pdf and then you can just save it in your in your folder for that period of time and that’s such a great idea and I imagine that would really help with annual reviews as well you briefly mentioned those where do annual reviews fit into the promotion process and how can we make the best use out of that time with our division chief?

[Dr Tania Oberyszyn]
Sure, so annual reviews are a requirement and what happens is when you do go up for promotion those annual reviews that come from your department chair division director whoever is doing your annual reviews become part of their complete dossier which is the document that gets reviewed at multiple levels for your promotion and so committees look at those annual reviews to see what was going on in the department you know where how were you evaluated where were your strengths where were your weaknesses and how did you respond to any identified weaknesses or opportunities for improvement and so really important to go into those conversations thinking about all you’ve accomplished.

Usually departments provide a form you have to fill out you use your folders that you’ve collected to get that information into the document and then then there’s a conversation about what you’ve done well and often faculty treat annual reviews as if you’re going to see the principal being called to the principal’s office and you’re you know to be told what you’ve done poorly or not or and really it’s not it’s a conversation and it’s an opportunity for you to have about half an hour with a senior leader that you may not otherwise get to interact with.

And so, you should come prepared to talk about all the things you feel really importantly you’ve accomplished and also to consider and ask so you know there’s something that you’re really passionate about or you want to develop your career in a certain way not a bad thing to think about saying you know this is where I want to go this is what I want to accomplish because your senior leaders are often getting emails from the dean’s office from my office saying you know we have opportunities for attending this development workshop or we have these awards that we are looking for nominations from different departments chairs or division directors if your senior leaders aren’t aware that you are interested in working in a particular space or what your career goals are you may not get nominated in fact you won’t get nominated if they’re not aware that you are interested in doing that and so it’s your opportunity not only to listen from them about their perception of what you’ve done but also to really flesh out who you are to them so they’re aware of where your strengths are where you see yourself going so they can provide support so that you can get there and faster and more efficiently.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, you know this kind of meeting was really crucial for me in in my own career path because I was doing podcasts I really looked at it as more of providing education and when we got a new division chief a number of years ago during one of my annual reviews she’s like how can we use this what you’re interested in and make it scholarly and so that led to you know peer-reviewed journal articles that led to book chapters that led to national committee stuff and all of that really did come out of the annual review and I’m not sure that I would have been creative enough on the scholarly end to think about how to make that happen.

I just knew I was cruising along making podcasts and trying to educate folks in in sort of a novel way but you know and I only share this because everybody has their own niche that they’re passionate about and when you share those passions with your division leader they may you know resources that are available or ways that you may be able to make this into something that not only is it something you’re passionate about some but

[Dr Tania Oberyszyn]
something you can really hang a career on absolutely and I think sometimes faculty forget that your senior leaders can’t read your mind right you may think it’s super obvious that this is what I want to do but if you don’t say it then people may not pick up on that and so really advocating for yourself and just making it clear that I really want to teach more or I really want to you know do podcasts or I have this great idea for how we can improve resident education if you don’t say that to somebody then you’re never going to get the support that you really are looking for right you may but chances are people are not going to intuit that this is what you want to do and so just having an honest conversation and going into it just providing them with the information you may not get what you want immediately but the seed is planted

[Dr Mike Patrick]
and that’s the important part yeah sometimes you do have to ask year after year after year but that’s the squeaky wheel you know it just you just have to be persistent and the right time is not always now but that doesn’t mean that there’s never a right time we’ve talked about the dossier and this is really how we communicate with the college of medicine our accomplishments tell us a little more about that document when should folks start working on it and what makes up a complete promotion dossier?

[Dr Tania Oberyszyn]
Sure, so you should start working on your dossier probably about a year in we are in the process at Ohio state of transitioning from one system to a new online system which will hopefully be online by 2026-2027 but maybe 2027-2028 so at the moment we are still using a word template which you know you can get from your department and it’s not a bad idea to get that template regardless of what system you’ll use eventually so that you can see what it’ll the final product will look like because it’ll be the same as the word template just we’ll collect the information in an online system and it’ll generate the same document and so what complete dossier is made up of is what we call the core dossier which is the information that you as a faculty member will enter.

And that is really you can think of it as a CV on steroids so it has the information that you have on your cv but it’s a little more in depth it has several narratives that you need to write that are really key to successful promotion you have to think of those narratives as an opportunity for you to be having a conversation with those people who are reviewing you because you can’t have that conversation in person so the narratives are an opportunity for you to bring to light all the important things that you feel you’ve accomplished that may not come through from just a line of serving on a committee, right?

This is an opportunity for you and in many of the different narratives to really sell yourself and sell your accomplishments and in fact the first part of the complete dossier is your biographical narrative which really should be what who you are what you’ve accomplished where your area of focus is what you’re the most proud of so that by the time the reviewers are done reading that page and a half they have a good idea of what information is coming in the rest of their of the dossier and they’re excited to read and see what else you’ve accomplished besides the core dossier as I mentioned the five annual five years of annual reviews are also part of it your student and peer evaluations of teaching are part of it always a sticking point because a lot of our faculty tell me I don’t teach.

We use teaching very broadly in the college of medicine because we don’t have large undergraduate courses that we teach but faculty do often teach lectures and courses teaching is anywhere you’re imparting information to a learner so at the bedside in the or in the ED, at a microscope wherever you’re imparting information to a learner you are teaching and you have an opportunity to capture that and get some feedback on how you’re doing because ultimately that’s what the evaluations are for you to make you better at communicating whatever information you’re trying to communicate and then there’s some several letters external letters of evaluation different track and pathways require different numbers of those external letters of evaluation and then as you go through the process there are other letters from the committees that evaluate you that get added to your dossier until it gets up to the university and to the board of trustees I the uh the narrative

[Dr Mike Patrick]
as you mentioned the biographical narrative you know you said a page and a half do you find is it is it better to write paragraphs or provide bullet points?

[Dr Tania Oberyszyn]
sure, so faculty do it both ways a page and a half is mandatory from the university because our template is the same whether you’re in medicine or in dance or in social work so all faculty at the university use the same template so we have some restrictions on it so it depends on the faculty member some find it easier to break things down and bullet point them others find it better to tell a story right and that’s what those narratives are you’re really telling the story of you and so it’s easier for some faculty to just write the narrative it really is whatever feels right for you.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
And then it’s going to be important to avoid jargon that may be specific to your specialty correct because the promotion and tenure committee at the college level may not know a lot about your particular field of study and so you know for me saying AAP I mean American Academy of Pediatrics and everyone in my department knows what I mean but that may not be true for ENT doc on the committee right?

[Dr Tania Oberyszyn]
yeah absolutely and it gets even more complicated when it gets to the university level review because they really don’t know so yes one of the critical things about the narratives and why they take a while to write well is you have to take a step back and don’t use acronyms that are not well defined you know for me it’s ACS, American Cancer Society.

But it also can be American College of Surgeons or American Chemical Society so you know really important that you define very clearly what that acronym means but also you want to write all the narratives with a step back so you’re writing it as if you’re explaining it to your next door neighbor who’s not in the in medicine at all and asking them can you understand what I’m doing and why it’s important and what impact I’m having.

The word impact is really important so there are criteria in the apt documents for that slightly different for all the different tracks and pathways but the overall important part is what impact have you had it’s not a checklist so say there’s a requirement for 20 publications well if you have 15 but your other areas of service or education are really outstanding the overall impact that you are having on the department on the college on the university really balances out so you know I don’t want people to think about it being a checklist it’s really you portraying the overall impact that you’ve had since you’ve joined us or since you your last promotion how have you moved things forward and what have you done that really demonstrates your excellence and that’s really what committees are looking for yeah and the key

[Dr Mike Patrick]
is figuring out how to get that across in your dossier and in the narratives and that’s where I think your you know division chief or your department chair or someone who is appointed in your department who has experience with these things to really look it over and give you some constructive advice on how to perhaps make it better and I know in the department of pediatrics we have a very strong you know mechanism for making sure that these things are evaluated and said in a way that is understandable and so hopefully other departments do that as well because I think it’s really important before it ever gets to the college that it’s communicated in a way that is clear and makes sense and really does demonstrate impact speaking of all these different stages so your dossier really does go through many steps along the way and then finally ends up at the board of trustees can you talk a little bit about the its journey through the through the entire system yeah journey is a great word because it’s a

[Dr Tania Oberyszyn]
it’s a very long process and your work as a faculty member happens on the front end and then you have to wait for quite a while to let it move itself through the process and so your dossier is reviewed first at the department level your complete dossier usually in whatever year you’re going up for promotion in august or September we’re hesitating because we’re changing the timeline a little bit because of the scope of the number of dossiers that we’re getting and so the departments review it and the department has two votes so at the department level you are reviewed by what’s called the committee of eligible faculty and those are your colleagues in your department who are at your rank or at the higher rank.

They review your complete dossier discuss it and then vote on whether or not you should be promoted or not your department chair has a completely separate vote they write a letter also of either recommendation or non-recommendation and hopefully you’ve had several conversations at that point so the non-recommendation is really off the table and you are agreed by everybody that you’re good to go and they have a separate vote and those two votes do not have to match right so you can have a yes you can have a no yes you can have a yes once it’s reviewed by the department you as a faculty member will get those results and see those letters and you have 10 days to comment where you can comment on maybe items that were misunderstood or not clarified enough.

You can’t add new information but you certainly can say since I submitted this dossier since I submitted it several months ago before I got to you the grant that was not listed as pending has now been funded because that may make a difference in in some reviews right so you can you have 10 days to add that information and then it goes back to the committee or to the chair whoever that is relevant to you and they can change their vote or not it then comes to the college so it comes to the college on November first of every year and the college has a similar process where we have a college P&T committee which is made up of faculty from across the university across the college my apologies but nobody in your department who happens to be at the college P&T committee level will see your document because they’ve already voted on you once you can’t vote multiple times and that’s why it’s important to have all your narratives very clear because there’s no one in the room that can say oh wait that means this you know this is this is why this committee is really important.

You know this is why being giving a workshop at this at this national meeting is super prestigious right there’s nobody there that information has to be in your document so then you’re reviewed by the college P&T committee and the college P&T committee will generate a letter of either approval or non-approval and that letter is advisory to the dean so the dean then reviews the dossier reviews the committee’s letters and decides whether or not she agrees with the committee’s recommendation of approval or non-approval once that’s done the faculty member again will get copies of the committee’s letter and also a copy of the dean’s letter and the dean’s evaluation and vote and again there’s a 10-day common period where faculty can clarify things that perhaps were misunderstood or what they want to add a little extra information in terms of those manuscripts now again it’s been several more months those manuscripts now have been accepted you know there’s a concern about manuscript number well I meet it now and so again it can go back and votes can be changed.

The next step is it goes to the university so for the university between march and the beginning of May the university goes through the same process where the committee at the university level reviews the dossier the vice provost then reviews the dossier goes to the provost the provost then makes a recommendation to the board of trustees which meet at the end of my beginning of June every year depending on the year and then once it goes to the board of trustees the title changes the next day after the board of trustees meeting now faculty will get a notification from the provost once the provost has made a decision about what decision is moving forward to the to the board of trustees an important note is that the faculty member once the department at the department level once they reach out for external letters of evaluation the only person who can stop the dossier from moving all the way to the board of trustees is the faculty member themselves so it’s an important consideration to know that if any point you feel that you want to pull yourself out you can do that at any point but no one else can stop it only you yeah so it

[Dr Mike Patrick]
really I guess when I said the word journey I didn’t think about it being that complicated of a journey but it really is a year process of going through all of these different stages and I think that is really important for folks to understand and to have some patience with the process um in addition to the dossier you know having a national recognition is important for promotion to associate professor how do how does that get done like how do I become nationally recognized

[Dr Tania Oberyszyn]
in my field sure there are a number of different ways that that can be reflected in the dossier one is service on committees at the national level where clearly you’ve been nominated to serve on these committees serving on grant review panels at the national level in your area and I hold you know American Cancer Society whatever it is in your field that reviews grant applications is also reflective of a national reputation invited presentations is a big one so you know being recognized for your area of scholarship or education and being invited to come and speak about that at institutions outside of Ohio is also a key metric of national reputation and so all of those taken together are really what committees are looking for you’re looking to see that you are doing things outside of Ohio to garner that national reputation have you found

[Dr Mike Patrick]
that with social media and faculty members getting involved in engaging with their colleagues online in a form that has you know 10 years ago was not nearly as big as it is now you know getting invited to speak somewhere often does come down to personal relationships and if you engage with folks in your specialty in social media that can actually be helpful towards your national reputation even if it’s not oh I’ve got this big following it’s hey I’m getting invited here getting invited there and that all happened because of the relationships that I’m nurturing digitally

[Dr Tania Oberyszyn]
yeah absolutely and you know I think in the past getting invited presentations meant traveling right to an institution somewhere which then you know often you have to have somebody who could afford to get you there or for you had to pay with covid and our switch to online systems and social media we see a lot more invited presentations that are done via zoom or teams or another social platform that really are equally counted you don’t have to be there physically but also making those connections to get those invited presentations also used to be really you had to go to conferences and meet in person and really work the room or the poster sessions or you know give presentations and then have people say oh come up to you and say can you come to give a presentation and a lot of that now can be done through social media we do have faculty too who to in their dossier to give us an idea of right now that’s still not a hundred percent that can’t be your only mechanism of having a national reputation but it certainly is impactful when committees are looking at it so yeah absolutely we’re you know pivoting to make sure that what’s being considered in terms of that reputation moving forward really is moving along with the way we’re moving along in society of connecting with others yeah really

[Dr Mike Patrick]
important because as we know life is changing quickly and what now with the new ai stuff I think it’s going to change even more quickly moving forward and it’s sometimes difficult to keep up with that but we got to do our best um what are what are some common reasons why a faculty member might not get promoted like you really do think that you’ve measured up you have talked to your division chief and you’ve put in your dossier now you know it could be your department’s going to disagree and maybe the college will disagree or the university will disagree what are some reasons that are common for failure?

[Dr Tania Oberyszyn]
So, not taking the process seriously enough. Just the expectation that I’ve been here for five or six years I’m just you know going to get promoted does not work it goes back to our conversation about having knowing the criteria for promotion you really have to meet the criteria for promotion you need to know what they are and you need to be thoughtful about making sure over the years you are meeting those metrics often for faculty who are not on the tenure track where they have a set time that they have to go up for promotion and tenure our other faculty our research and clinical faculty self-nominate for promotion when they meet the criteria when they feel they’ve met the criteria but I see faculty who are self-nominating who don’t know what the criteria are and are shocked when they realize that they’re not meeting those criteria and so those faculty will not make it forward and departments are doing a much better job in the last several years of really mentoring their faculty and saying we’re not going to allow you to move forward because you’re not meeting the national reputation or you don’t have the publications or you don’t have the research grants that you need.

Whatever the criteria are that they’re not meeting or you’re not demonstrating impact in terms of clinical excellence that’s anything beyond just doing your job right and so we’re seeing fewer of those come forward but that definitely is an issue that faculty have and then going back to the narratives they’re not informative enough we have a tendency I think in medicine which is not a bad thing to talk about teams we did our group we accomplished and that’s wonderful but what you have to do in those narratives that take the next step and say our team worked on this I was responsible for xyz and this is how we move forward because of what I contributed and I don’t see those often enough where you really need to be so this is the time to sell yourself, right?

There are some people who do it extremely well and there are others of us who don’t do it well enough and this is the time to really step back and say okay this is great now what did I do and have make sure that that’s there and having said that though remember your colleagues will be reading this when they’re reviewing at the department so you certainly don’t want to take credit for something you did not do you want to be respectful of what the team did but really be thoughtful about what were your contributions and making sure that you highlight those contributions and the other thing is not putting enough effort into the dossier this is not something you can do in a month this is not something you can do in two months to do it well really takes time and doing it a little bit at a time keeps it from being overwhelming I mean some of it is just entering information from your from your CV which hopefully you have been keeping up to date because that’s also critically important.

And so putting that into the dossier template should be a little easier but the narratives take time and making sure that you haven’t missed anything takes time too because you want to make sure that all the things that you’ve done and we all work really hard that you should get credit for all the things you’ve done so often we say yes to things and we start doing them and we don’t write them down anywhere right so they’re not on your cv they’re not in your folder and you’re doing it and they take time and you should get credit for doing that so making sure that you give yourself the space to really think about what else have I been doing that I’m missing from my folder and making sure that you document that yeah it would seem that you really ought to keep the cv

[Dr Mike Patrick]
updated along with those quarterly meetings at a minimum in our particular division we do have something that goes out kind of like a survey monkey thing once a month where you do put the different things that you’ve done and so I think at least in in my division in pediatric emergency medicine we you know once a month have to are forced really to look at back at what we’ve done over the past month and then that’s a great opportunity to look through the folders and to make sure that all that stuff gets put in your CV as well so you’re really keeping up with everything.

[Dr Tania Oberyszyn]
That’s great system because I can tell you I read hundreds of dossiers and CV’s a year during the hiring process and uniformly they are not good I mean I will get CV’s and I’ll look at them and I’ll say well this individual it does no service they’re not a single committee at their institution or in a national level so you know what is going on and then I get the updated cv that has a patient half of service because they were not keeping their cv up to date and just sent this even for a job sent an incomplete cv so yeah really critical it makes and it also plays an important role for we’re talking about awards so often if you your chair wants to nominate you for award the turnaround time is usually pretty tight and if your cv isn’t updated that’s usually a mandatory first thing is cv of the candidate that you’re proposing you may lose out on an opportunity because your cv isn’t doesn’t reflect who you are and what you’re doing so super critical.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
I keep my CV actually on my desktop so it’s like staring at me and then you know whenever I give a talk or do something create a podcast it immediately goes on there because it’s staring at me literally right and of course then I also back it up because you know you know everything in one place and then poof it’s gone so keep extra copies that’s going to be really important we have talked a lot about some resources hopefully this podcast episode itself will be a resource but there’s really a lot more department and institutional resources that are available to help us with promotion what are some of those things that we can take advantage of

[Dr Tania Oberyszyn]
Sure, so you are not alone in this process. It can seem really daunting but you have support in your department chair or division chief departments some departments have vice chairs of academic affairs or faculty affairs whose role is to help faculty through the process help mentor them through the different steps and be a sounding board for them each department should have a P&T committee chair who runs the P&T committee or committee of eligible faculty and then also there is a P&T coordinator in each department who knows the process who understands the dossier templates themselves so may not be able to advise you on whether you’re meeting criteria but certainly can help you to guide you on what types of information go where.

We have online resources in the college if you google APT Toolbox and OSU it’ll pull you into a website that has all the information about all the things that you need for promotion and tenure all the different steps the university also has online resources if you go to oaa.osu.edu and play around on that website under faculty or faculty.osu.edu also will take you to a whole bunch of faculty development support links and then in the college of medicine we have fame which is the faculty advancement mentoring and engagement center which runs cohort programs for leadership development and also has a whole bunch of a one-off programs that you can come to or listen to most of them are online and focus on all different areas of faculty development.

But we specifically have a series on promotion and tenure the four-part series that goes on every single year and if you go to again if you just google fame and OSU it’ll take you to the fame website and you can look at and register for the different programs and I’d really recommend that for the promotion and tenure part you do listen to them a few times it’s really helpful the first time through it can seem like we’re talking gibberish and then you listen to it the second time and ask questions and really very helpful in terms of putting the dossier together writing narratives the process we have a mock college P&T committee a zoom meeting coming up so that you can see how committee members look at your dossier and discuss your dossier and vote on your dossier to give you a better idea of what people are looking for when they’re reading your dossier.

And so super helpful to do that we’re really working hard to demystify the process so that black box of I’m an assistant professor and then black box I’m an associate professor goes away and so this is our attempt to really try to make sure everyone has the information they need there are also two assistant deans in the college in my office so Dr Maya Iyer is an assistant dean for clinical faculty and Dr Darren Mays who’s assistant dean for tenure and research faculty and they are a wealth of information you can email them at their email addresses you can look them up and they were really responsive and they’re happy to read things they’re happy to advise you on whether or not accepting something for example you know is this real should I really go to this meeting if you want advice outside of your department they are there to help and then we also have Krista Marbly within my office who is the dossier guru and she is the person who is in charge of all the P&T coordinators in a different departments and you know Krista she used to work in pediatrics I kind of stole her away from nationwide she’s great is amazing this is her passion and she is really good at talking to faculty and helping them understand the process as well so a lot of resources that you can reach out to and get advice I’m always available shoot me an email I’m happy to answer any questions from anybody about any part of the process or concerns so really available.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
And we are going to have all those resources also available in the show notes for this episode which is episode four of FAMEcast and you can find it over at famecast.org so just go to famecast.org look for the show notes find episode four and we’ll have links to the center for faculty advancement mentoring and engagement at Ohio State also appointments reappointments promotion and tenure there’s kind of a landing page for all of that the apt toolbox that you had mentioned we’ll have a link to that as well and then the office of academic affairs and the office of faculty affairs we’ll have links to both of those places as well and lots of resources as you mentioned and this is just the first in a series of podcasts on promotion and tenure and so stay tuned for more information coming up but uh Dr Tania Oberyszyn thank you so much for stopping by today she’s the vice dean for faculty affairs and we really appreciate you coming in and uh sort of demystifying the process and helping us prepare to go through it. Thanks so much

[Dr Tania Oberyszyn]
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
we are back with just enough time to say thanks once again to all of you for taking time to make fame cast a part of your day really do appreciate that also thank you to our guests this week Dr Tania Oberyszyn vice dean for faculty affairs at the Ohio State University College of Medicine.

Don’t forget you can find fame cast wherever podcasts are found we’re in the apple podcast app Spotify iHeart radio amazon music audible and most other podcast apps for iOS and android our landing site is famecast.org you’ll find our archive of programs there all of them all four but many more to come show notes for each of the episodes our terms of use agreement and that handy contact page if you would like to suggest a future topic for the program reviews are helpful wherever you get your podcasts we always appreciate when you share your thoughts about the show and we do have some additional resources that you can find on our website if you head over to famecast.org up at the top of the page click on the resources tab and you’ll find two links there to faculty development modules on a site called scarlet canvas.

One of these is a whole series on advancing your clinical teaching and another one is called fd4me faculty development for medical education fd4me and there’s really scores of learning modules at both of these sites so be sure to check those links to find lots more useful information specifically targeting academic medical faculty.

I also want to tell you about a couple of other podcasts that I host PediaCast CME if you are a pediatric provider this podcast offers free continuing medical education credit for those who listen and that includes physicians of course but also nurse practitioners physician assistants nurses pharmacists psychologists social workers and dentists and it’s because nationwide children’s hospital is jointly accredited by all of those professional organizations that we can offer the credits you need to fulfill your state’s continuing medical education requirements if you are pediatric faculty shows and details are available at the landing site for that program PediaCast cme.org.

I also host plain PediaCast. It is an evidence-based podcast for moms and dads lots of pediatricians also tune in and other medical providers too if they see kids in any capacity because we do cover pediatric news we answer listener questions and interview lots of pediatric and parenting experts those shows are available at pediacast.org also wherever podcasts are found simply search for PediaCast.

Thanks again for stopping by and until next time this is Dr mike saying stay focused stay balanced and keep reaching for the stars! So long everybody.