We have had a wave of new hires, so we now have well over a dozen assistant professors. This is great for the department.

When I was hired, I was alone. No one for two years ahead of me and for several years after me. There were two people hired at the same time as me, but one was an awful person whose contract wasn’t extended after year three, and the other left after a year to take a job at a university in Europe.

I had two senior people assigned as department mentors, but they were both clear about not wanting to be bothered, so I didn’t bother them. One was a senior man I was afraid of, being that he struck me as someone who’d vote against my tenure if I ever showed any weakness. The other was a superstar woman who was in principle friendly and available, but in practice it would take her weeks to respond to my emails (by which time I had already acted on whatever the problem was) and she always treated me with a veneer of pleasantness over a clear undercurrent of annoyance, so I quickly stopped asking her for stuff. I did receive most advice from a couple of collaborators outside the department.

As for commiseration, there was no one. I met two people from a related department during orientation and initially hung out with them, but they were both single yet immediately became strangely attached to one another in a way they insisted was platonic but that seemed weirdly codependent to me (they eventually married and remain), so I was a third wheel there, and, again, didn’t feel I was really needed.

I honestly felt, most of the time, that nobody gave a shit what I did and how and that I was most definitely on my own.

These days, I am a mentor to one junior faculty who I believe comes and talks to me whenever he likes (I see him multiple times per week, as he’s across the hall from me). He’s doing great, going up for early tenure. I don’t think I have much of a role in his success other than to generally try and provide a welcoming environment and be a sounding board. I’ve recently received my second mentoring assignment.

Other than mentoring, there is so much more that we as a department collectively do for these junior folks that didn’t happen when I was on the tenure track. For example, they have teaching relief built into their tenure track — not just a lower load, but an option to have a semester without any teaching; that would have come in handy when I had kid No 2 on the tenure track. Moreover, there are so many assistant professors that they can find a friendly cohort and do some peer mentoring. There is much more and much better mentoring than I had as an assistant professor (I never had a meeting with department chair and both my mentors, which we now do once every semester).

I am happy that the new folks are having an easier time than I did, but I must admit that I have other feelings mixed in:

a) I feel sad for my tenure-track self. It felt so lonely.  I wonder if it would have been easier if someone had given a little bit of help or a pat on the back.

b) I don’t know that I can offer the mentoring that they need to these junior folks. They are all much more ballsy than I ever was, seem like they have their shit together, and command much greater resources from the outset.

I feel like a dinosaur, like my experiences are from another era. The era with no help and nobody giving a shit. What a difference a decade-and-a-half makes! Also none of the junior faculty have children. My experience on the tenure track was colored in every way imaginable by having kids (one in grad school, one midway through the tenure track, one post tenure)—the inability to go to the social gatherings and orientations and whatnot after work and on weekends; the never-ending exhaustion.

I feel like I ended up being depleted by everything — work, life — before I ever really reached my full potential. Even when I worked my hardest, there were weights around my ankles that prevented takeoff.

I believe DrugMonkey writes about this sometimes, that Gen X scientists haven’t reached their full potential. I can definitely see my tiny cohort being completely outnumbered into irrelevance by  the junior people.