Reflecting on my first two years as faculty at CMU
Part 2: First year faculty

This is part 2 of a (hopefully) 3-part series reflecting on my three years since my faculty job search. You can find part 1, about my postdoc year, [here](./8-third-year-part-1-postdoc.html). # Part 2: Year 1 as faculty My first year was a lot of firsts, which I'll describe below. In the meantime, here's a high-level timeline of my first year (of events I remember). - *August 2022*: Gave my first pitch to funders who were visiting (CMU folks invited me to do this). I didn't know what to do, I don't think I did a great job; the funders told me day-off they were not interested. - *September 2022*: Got my first grant rejections; they didn't really give any feedback (industry grants tend to be like this), making in all the more confusing and devastating. It definitely re-triggered my rejection scars from not getting offers during the job search. - *September–December 2022*: Started working with my PhD students; learn how to be an advisor on the job; learn a lot of patience with myself and others. - *October 2022*: During a class planning meeting with my co-instructor, I have a panic attack and nearly faint thinking about the teaching I will have to do in the Spring. - *November 2022*: ChatGPT comes out, the entire field is in shambles. NLP PhD students become terrified that their research will be useless; I myself feel somewhat stressed about that. - *December 2022*: Went to EMNLP 2022, to present my last first-author paper. I didn't feel at all confident that I knew what I was doing as an advisor, so it was really hard when prospective students came to tell me they want to work with me. - *December 2022*: I go home to Switzerland & Belgium for winter break. It's really not a break, since I have to review PhD applications. I still feel like a fraud, as I feel that I have no idea how to select good PhD students. - *January 2023*: I had my first conference deadline as a professor. It was horrendously stressful. I had 4 paper submissions, all of which I was the lead senior author on, and 3 of which the first authors were very junior. It was a lot of stress learning how to let go of control, dreading that students might feel abandoned, etc. I learned a lot during that time, esp. w.r.t. time management. My one PhD student submits his first PhD first-author paper (YAY!). - *January 2023*: I start teaching for the first time ever. I felt incredibly down on myself before teaching, I felt scared that my students would not respect me and try to question my knowledge (again, scars from being on the job market and everything you say is evaluated and scrutinized). But the first lecture I gave went amazing (I had definitely prepped for it a LOT), it felt like I was meant to be doing this (finally). Meanwhile, I decided, I'm not going to write grant proposals because I'm focusing on teaching. - *February 2023*: I received what I consider my first grant, from Cisco (100k🤑). I had re-purposed some content from my AI2 grant and submitted it in the Fall. I was ecstatic, and felt so proud! - *February 2023*: I barely remember that month, to be honest. I was heads down in teaching mode, there were so many weeknights and weekends that I was making slides for lectures. I feel like I blacked out. - *March 2023*: Took Spring break off. I really needed it. Went to Florida and basically did not work. - *March 2023*: Had my first advising almost-conflict. It was stressful but we navigated it okay. Having my close group of first-year faculty friends really helped me through that one. - *March 2023*: Started focusing back onto grant writing. I had planned it such that I would mostly be done with lectures by end of March, which was really nice. - *April 2023*: I wrote a small grant proposal for an Amazon call. I also was brought into an effort that a colleague of mine was leading to write a proposal. Both get submitted. I do feel proud. - *May 2023*: Classes end, and we shift gears towards submitting papers to EMNLP (arXiv deadline). Most of my papers end up uploaded to arXiv on time. - *June 2023*: EMNLP deadline happens. I learned how to time manage better and how to communicate my availability to my mentees about when I could look over papers. The deadline passes: all three of my first-year PhD students had reached my goal of submitting a first-author publication by the end of their first year! 🥹 - *June 2023*: I move back to Seattle for the summer, to take interns at Ai2 again. This time, I only mentor senior students. - *July 2023*: I go to ACL 2023 (or as I called it, BeyCL 👑🐝), and brough each of my students (they were all on a paper that was being presented). I also ended up receiving an outstanding paper award. I felt like my year, though it started rough, ended on a really good note 🥰. ### Prioritizing my social life The move to Pittsburgh was hard; as I mentioned in my previous blog post, I had really found a chosen family in Seattle, and moving really uprooted that; I felt quite unmoored. I was thankful that my friend Jesse helped me move, and stayed with me for the first week and a half. He really helped with that first transitional period. My sister also came and visited for a couple of days, which also held me over. But still, I was restless and wanted to meet new people. I decided pretty much immediately to prioritize finding friends and community (if you know me in real-life this won't come as a surprise). I had already signed up for a queer kickball team, which only started at the end of September. It couldn't come fast enough. Joining that team and meeting people through Jesse made my social life really blossom. I met some of the folks I would still call my best friends in that time period. Meanwhile, I also regularly went back to Seattle during my first year, and several Seattle friends visited. I felt bad that I wasn't "moving on" from Pittsburgh, but as my therapist pointed out, it's okay to rely on the support of my friends in Seattle. I'm glad I went back. Having social support at work is also really important to me. I met my crew of "cool kids" (as we call ourselves) during new faculty orientation at CMU, and we became a wonderful crew. These folks became my support group as we all navigated first-year faculty life. I'm forever grateful for them. ### Discomfort in transition: Getting started at CMU The week that I started, I felt like I was immediately thrown into "regular" faculty responsibilities, without really knowing much. I felt immensely incompetent (I still somewhat feel that way, but much less 😅). At CMU, there are literally 100s of computer science faculty, and at least 50 that work on things that I could consider related to my research. While this means that there is a lot of positive and productive energy, it also means you feel like you have to keep up with the pace. One experience that was challenging was my second week, I was asked by our sponsorships office to give a talk about "my research" to a defense agency delegation from a foreign nation. Sidenote: this is apparently quite normal in many top-tier universities; funders will come visit and the sponsorship people organize a set of presentations from faculty, and the funders decide whether they want to pursue projects with certain faculty. I remember generally being worried about not knowing how to do this, but I also remember having immense stereotype threat about the defense agency of a not super gay friendly country coming to judge my work. I had my nails painted, and I worked on social biases in language, so I felt very exposed. For this funder visit, I ended up giving a presentation on some of the work I had done, tailoring it slightly to the interests I heard they had (made it less about social biases, and more about misinformation). Since the invitation to give this presentation came very short notice, I did the best I could with the time I had, and prepared a presentation, which ultimately I was proud of. But ultimately, I guess my research didn't appeal to them, as I received news that day from the CMU sponsorships office that the funders didn't see alignment with my research. While today I have more of a "abundance mindset" about funding opportunities, at the time, it seemed like my only shot, and I was *devastated* that I had "failed." And I definitely spiraled a bit, and the voices in my head telling me that I wouldn't be able to make it in this career got loud. (This would not be the last time, unfortunately that those voices crept up... They're still there today, but quieter.) Looking back, this was just yet-another awkward transition period. The issue was, *I* had research, but *my lab* did not. I could brainstorm ideas on what I wanted to work on, but it felt strange to propose anything now that I had a team of students. This definitely contributed to my early feelings of incompetence but realistically, it was more like "it's normal your lab isn't made up of senior students yet". Now that some of my students are more senior and have ideas on what they want to work on, I can more easily navigate that. ### Getting projects started with PhD students *Choosing Projects with First-year Students*. Getting started as an advisor can be challenging. It certainly was challenging for me. There is a tension that we have to navigate between giving projects to junior students vs. letting them discover their own project direction. Many junior students have a general idea of what they want to work on (and often more concrete ideas about what they don't want to work on). In my case, I tried to navigate this by making it clear to students that their first project does not have to be what their thesis is going to be about. The expectation that I set for my first year PhD students is to have a first-author submission paper by the end of their first year. To me, the first submission is almost less about the student's broader research direction as much as about learning all the many skills needed to submit a paper and learning to work with their advisor(s). The paper doesn't have to get into the conference, but just submitting satisfies the goal. I took three different approaches with each of my three first-year students. (1) *Pre-existing research collaboration*: the first one was already working with me on a project from before they started their PhD, so their first project was already chosen. (2) *Workshop-to-conference project*: with another first-year student, I pitched a project that a senior PhD student collaborator and I had worked on an submitted to a workshop, hoping my student would take it on and flesh it out. (3) *From my bank of ideas*: for my third student, I proposed a project that I had been thinking about for a while (one of many in my long list of "half-baked project ideas"). Initially, this student came in with an existing collaboration with other folks, which we first tried to work on together, but ended up not pursuing after a semester. On one hand, having students take on pre-established projects can be nice because the research question is somewhat set, the research team might already be established, and there might even be preliminary results. On the other hand, handing such a pre-established project to a student can make them feel less ownership on it, which typically students don't love. That's why framing it as a project to get acquainted as collaborators as opposed to the first project in their thesis is helpful. Besides, what's nice is that once my students had finished their first project, taken some classes, and gotten immersed in the university research environment, they definitely already had a better sense of projects they might want to work on, which in most cases made it easier to start a second project that they liked. *Change in Productivity.* One challenge with being a first-year professor is that in many cases, your first students are also first-years. This means that by definition, they are not yet that productive in research, and are likely still taking classes. (To be fair, you yourself are also not yet that productive either as a professor.) What's hard is that I came from being extremely productive in my last few years of grad school and my postdoc, and all of a sudden now you are no longer that productive. (Again, the unit of who is doing the research moves from you yourself to your lab). To be frank, I struggled with this difference in pace, and definitely felt impatient at times. I tried as hard as I could to not out those feelings with my students, since after all, I myself didn't publish until the spring of my second year during my PhD. I know I needed to be patient. But it was hard. Having ongoing collaborations with interns and senior students definitely helped here. I felt like even though my PhD students were still figuring out their research projects, I at least had some existing projects that were ongoing. Looking back, I think I could have just been more patient. *Letting Go of Control.* Another aspect that was challenging is making the transition to not being the driver of my research. While this is something I had already somewhat experienced while mentoring undergrads during my PhD, the feeling was very different as a professor. They essentially told us during new faculty orientation that you should become a "brand" and that we need to become leaders in our field. But the discrepancy is that you're no longer doing the day-to-day research, your students are. This duality is hard to navigate, because you simultaneously feel like you need to start building *your* research and *your* brand, and thus motivate students to publish, yet you need to work with students and their research preferences and pace, and remain patient with them. Letting go of the control of driving research was very challenging for me, but I just recognized that that was what was happening, and just had to live with that discomfort. I also just had to keep promoting my pre-professor research as if it was my lab's research, and keep writing grant proposals based on what I felt like I wanted to work on instead of being able to rely on students. Looking back, I think there just isn't a way out of this situation, until your students have more of their established research direction. ### When will my first grant arrive? Grant writing and my first grant rejection *My first grant rejections.* One particularly challenging but necessary step was receiving my first grant rejections. Two of them happened in September/October of my first year, and felt *absolutely terrible*. I had applied to the AI2050 fellowship, and made it to the final round (during the summer, they requested a virtual meeting). But yet, I did not receive it. It would have been \$300k. I had also applied to an Amazon call for \$70k. Both of these would have been few-strings-attached funding, which would definitely have made me feel more financially secure. It made me spiral. It re-opened my scars from not my job search rejection (note of course I am happy to be at CMU, but I did 9 faculty interviews, so I received many more rejections than offers, which I unfortunately internalized). Voices in my head told me this grant rejection was a sign that I was not cut out for this job, that my ideas aren't good, and that I am never going to make it. I wish I had realized that this was one in many rejection/acceptance decisions I was going to get, and that one or two datapoints don't make a trend, but my anxiety and mindset were not gracious to me at that time. Another recurring theme in the voices in my head was my perfectionism. Somehow, the fact that I "made it" by getting the job at CMU came to mean that I had to be immediately successful and good at every task I undertook. Of course that is ridiculous, but at the time, the contradictory signals of receiving praise for getting the job at CMU yet also not knowing how to do things successfully was very hard to navigate. This (albeit somewhat self-created) cognitive dissonance was a lot to handle. *My foray into grant writing*. The grant writing process is still something I struggle with sometimes, but I've come to actually enjoy parts of it! I enjoy the brainstorming what general directions to work towards, the planning of the details of the project, etc. I don't enjoy the framing/motivation parts as much, nor the parts where you have to get all the administrative documents together. For other grant writing efforts in my first year, I kept it light, aiming for small industry grant opportunities first. I also kept it mostly to the Fall semester, since in Spring I'd be teaching and decided to only learn one skill at a time. I wrote an extended version of my grant proposal that I wrote up for Ai2 for a call that Cisco had put out, for $100k. The format was similar (3-5 pages), and since I had already kind of drafted the ideas, it was somewhat easy to write up. I also wrote up two proposals on similar ideas for a Google and a Meta award, again on content moderation. Both of these were similar formatting requirements (i.e., short, which is nice). At this point I don't even remember how it was writing them, but I know I felt stressed about money so it probably felt like I needed to get these grants. In April 2023, to my great surprise, I actually received the Cisco grant! It came in as a gift, meaning essentially no strings attached, which was even more exciting! I felt very happy that I had received it; although it was definitely one piece of good news in what felt like a sea of bad news. I actually got to celebrate this one much more than my Meta grant from the year before; my friend Cole surreptitiously hijacked a movie night we had planned to celebrate the grant acceptance. They had streamers, a cake, etc. It was super heartwarming. And it really showcased the importance of having social connections. However, quickly the clouds appeared, as I received two more grant rejections from Google and Meta. I was back to feeling back and stressed. The double edge sword with these corporate small grant proposals is that you don't typically receive feedback; you just get an email that says "sorry you weren't selected." Not getting any feedback is incredibly frustrating because there's nothing to learn from, which makes it hit even harder. ### My first conferences as a professor *EMNLP 2022* December 2022, I traveled to Abu Dhabi for the EMNLP conference, to present my first-author poster on [Neural Theory of Mind](https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13312). The anxiety and feelings of not knowing what I was doing definitely got to me that conference. The discrepancy I felt about representing my lab but only having my own research to show for just yet were at an all time high. This made my encounters with prospective students very challenging, and since this was just around PhD applications time, I had many such encounters. Many prospective students came up to me asking if they could join my lab, and I really didn't receive that as a compliment, instead I just perceived it as incredibly stressful, not only because saying no to someone and denying them an opportunity is not easy, but also because the idea of having more students to fund at the time was so stressful. Many of my friends and colleagues wanted to catch up and see how I was doing, and I didn't know how to answer; I felt like I wasn't doing well due to all of the reasons above, but it was hard to give a concrete succinct answer. I would just sigh, give a distressed look, or just give them this face 😱. The truth is, I didn't want to answer, I didn't want to talk about it, and didn't want to deal with it. Looking back, I don't know what a better approach would have been; perhaps just saying "it's too early to tell how I feel" might have been a good answer. The conference also exacerbated the fears of not being productive. This is something I have struggled with since I was a PhD student, and still struggle with today: feeling like you're in a race with all the other researchers out there. I have a hard time seeing other people's work as exciting or interesting, instead, I feel like I should be doing / have been doing their work. It's getting harder and harder to navigate this, as more and more people enter the field of AI and research on AI is democratized. One thing that did come out of the EMNLP conference was that I started networking a little bit more. I met someone who was a lead of research at one of the big companies, who I nonchalantly told that I was looking for money to fund my lab. They immediately mentioned "Just put my name on the application" which turns out, might have worked, as I definitely got the grant once I did that. Turns out, being somewhat shameless about asking for money paid off in this case! After the conference, a couple of friends and I decided to explore Dubai for a couple of days, and that was a wonderful and welcome break for me! *ACL 2023*. My second conference as a professor was a complete 180 from the first. By July 2023, I felt much better about where I was in my career. Not only had I successfully made it through my first year, but I also had several things that I was actively proud of or happy with. For example, one of my papers with my Ai2 intern had gotten an outstanding paper award! Perhaps even more importantly, all three of my PhD students were also presenting or helping present some work at that conference. And even more importantly, all three had successfully submitted a first-author paper during that year, which was literally the bar I had set. This made me incredibly proud! I had a lot more fun at the conference because my mindset was very different, and it made everything so much easier. Plus, it helped that I got to see Beyoncé ;) ### My first conference deadlines as a professor *Jan 15 ARR*. January 15th was my first ACL rolling review deadline as a professor. Back then, we still had an "arXiv deadline" which would have been Dec 15th, but since I was at my conference, there really wasn't any chance we'd get any papers ready by then. This particular deadline was hard, because I was the senior author (i.e., to some extent, the authority on what is acceptable and/or submittable) on 4 out of 5 of the papers. And three out of those four were projects led by junior authors. (This is where I was grateful to have had senior collaborators, who I could trust to get things done without relying on me too much.) I had never been senior author on that many papers—up to this point, I had been senior author on one project during my postdoc. This was different, I felt thrown into the deep end of the pool without having any resources. The biggest challenge was not working on my own timeline, and just feeling like I was at the mercy of others' timelines. And when students are junior (and also for some senior folks still), their timelines tend to be incredibly last-minute. But the challenge was that I didn't know how to communicate my own time commitments. Most of the stressful work happened between Jan 2nd and 15th, but I had other things to do during that time (like preparing for/stressing out about teaching), I couldn't just sit idly waiting for a paper draft to come my way (which is how I felt). Once again, my feelings of impatience and lack of control were prominent. Another challenge is that writing papers with junior students on a tight timeline is incredible hard. Despite it being last minute, I didn't want to write the papers myself, because it is paramount for me that students learn to write papers with their own words, and that they feel ownership of their work. But this makes the feedback loops much more frequent. I also didn't want to provide abstract or high-level feedback only (e.g., "this paragraph needs rewriting"); especially with junior students, I try to be as constructive and concrete as possible, which means the feedback has to be in-depth and provide concrete suggestions. This is very mentally taxing, but I find it very important, and I've been told that people appreciate how I give feedback. Finally, I didn't want to be the advisor that pulls the plug on papers because they are too last minute. I might do that someday, but for now I am too worried that it'd be too discouraging for the students. For one of the papers, I distinctly remember telling my student that I was logging off around 6pm, despite the deadline being around 7am. I had made social plans at 6:30pm, so I very much had to practice work-life balance. After the deadline we debriefed about how things went, and the student told me that at first they felt like I abandoned them, but then realized that my leaving it up to them to finish the draft was me empowering and believing in them. I'm glad that's ultimately how they perceived my boundary. *May 15 and June 15 ARR*. My second deadline as a professor was for EMNLP 2023, which occurred by the end of the year. I was senior author on 4 out of my 6 submissions, and essentially the lead senior NLP author on a fifth one. I had sworn after the 5 papers from January that I'd never submit this many papers at once, but I guess I never learn LOL. At that point, I had received the advice from my colleague LP Morency to tell students about my own time commitments. I started telling students which days they should send me drafts by (because I kept certain days—Mondays and Wednesdays—free from meetings and teaching, for grant writing and paper reviewing etc.). This changed *everything*. Students realized that even though the deadline was 2 weeks away, they only had 4 "checkpoints" left where I could give feedback. In debriefs after deadlines, students told me they really appreciated the transparency in my own timelines, and felt like the checkpoints really helped with their own timelines. Yes, they're not perfect at respecting these, but it does really help for me to show them what my workload looks like so they can also help me help them. Despite my new deadline timeline system, I definitely was still very stressed; there were still papers that were last-minute where I wished I could have dealt with better. Getting a paper last minute makes my adrenaline spike; it becomes a fire that has to be put out. It's really hard for me to distance myself and realize that some papers might not follow my desired timeline for them; but it's also hard to not push students because it's important for them to submit as well. ### Teaching for the first time Based on the wealth of advice I got, I decided to take a leave of teaching in my first semester. This was quite a good idea because it gave me extra time to get adjusted to faculty life, living in Pittsburgh, etc. For example, if you're not completely overwhelmed at work, you have time to get a primary care physician, find out where to get your contacts, etc. The downside for me was that, because I am a "pre-crastinator" (a word I think I invented which basically means I feel the need to do all my tasks ASAP), this means this impending "new" role I was going to have to play gave me a lot of anxiety. In Spring 2023, I was slated to co-teach "Computational Ethics" with my lovely colleague Emma Strubell who has taught it the year before. However, I was already starting to feel nervous about teaching in October; I had never gone through this process, and it gave me a lot of anxiety. In fact, I requested a meeting with Emma in October to chat about plans for the class. It was supposed to be a chill catch up / planning meeting: we went to get drinks at a local bar to chat. As we started talking, I realized I felt super nervous about teaching, and ended up nearly fainting; I had to get up and go lay down on a bench outside. I realized afterwards I had experienced a panic attack. I was so nervous about this unknown that I quite literally almost passed out. The anxiety kept going as I was preparing to give a guest lecture in my friend's class. Besides the generalized fear of the unknown and not being good at something (ahem... perfectionism... ahem), I realized that I was terrified that students would try to grill me and realize that I was teaching them something that I didn't know. This imposter syndrome, and fear of being grilled by the audience in my talks, definitely were scars that I had accrued during my job search. There, every talk is a performance, and every audience member is a judge; if you don't perform well, you don't get the job offer. I had somehow internalized that fear and decided that students would similarly try to judge me, and I was terrified they'd find out I was a fraud. The anxiety stayed as I was preparing my lectures for my class. However, something nearly-mystical happened when I taught my first class. I had spent many hours preparing my first lecture, reading up on ethical philosophies, finding examples, making beautiful slides, etc. On my first day of teaching, I was actually having a terrible day, I had slept poorly and was not in a good mood. But then I got to teach my class and it just 180-ed my day. Students were engaged, listening and learning, not critiquing what I was saying. In this age of AI taking over many sectors of life yet being developed and deployed quite recklessly, I felt like I was doing something meaningful by teaching students about ethical aspects of technology. I left the classroom elated, energized; I felt like all of a sudden I was where I was meant to be. To this day, I know my love of teaching is partly what keeps me in academia. Besides how much I just enjoy educating people and teaching them things, making them realize things, etc., there's something nice about knowing that if my research career were to fail (I don't plan on letting it obvi) I can still teach and be happy. ### Navigating department, school, and research community service requests When I started at CMU, they told us repeatedly that they want to set up junior faculty for success. Somehow I took that to heart in only the service load aspect of this career: I decided early on that I was going to say no to almost all service requests because starting as a first-year faculty is hard enough. Of course, I still did (meta-)reviewing in some conferences. But for the most part, I told myself that if CMU really wanted me to be successful, they should not overburden me with service requests. I declined requests with a request for empathy and perspective taking: "*Thanks for thinking of me. Unfortunately I cannot commit to this as I am in my first-year as a professor and am teaching for the first time. Hope you understand.*" I mostly received positive responses (e.g., people wishing me luck on teaching, etc.). In a culture where we're constantly made to feel bad when you say no, this was an empowering move I'm very proud of. Another consideration of navigating service in your first year is that you don't know how things work yet because you are new to the university. It was important of me to not come in with preconceived notions of "this is how it should be done" without first learning more about how things worked. This was especially important to also show deference towards how things were done; yes many processes are stuck in their ways and could be made more efficient, but it's also important to learn and listen to how people are doing things and why. In many occasions, I realized that something inefficient was part of a much more complicated system and it wouldn't be easy to fix it. While I was learning about how things were set up, I took many mental notes and explored which parts I felt were worth fighting for vs. not. For example, I was on the DEI committee in my first year, but mostly just to shadow it, not to do anything. I learned how things were done, what I liked about it vs. didn't, etc. I also learned how people in our department perceived the committee: just like many organizations, the DEI committee was mostly an afterthought, not something that valued, and a committee that essentially was asked to solve the problems that it surfaced (which is ridiculous). By the end of my first year, after being asked to lead the committee in my second year, I decided that I wanted to shift the committee's role to be mostly documenting. I had learned in my many years on such committees during graduate school that a DEI committee with no teeth cannot cause change; people responsible for various processes should be the ones enacting change within their own process. So my co-lead and I wrote up a charter to change the committee's mission to predominantly be that of documenting issues and recommending solutions; it would be up to whoever is responsible to change things (e.g., if we find DEI issues within the PhD admissions process, it is up to the PhD admissions committee to change their process). Of course, the committee would help enact change, but buy-in from those who have the power to change is crucial. Reframing my thinking in this way, and clearly delineating what is and is not within my responsibility helped me not feel as frustrated with things, and helped me focus on what was more within my control, i.e., my research, teaching, and grant writing. ### My first stressful interaction with a student In March 2022, I had my first experience realizing the possible brittleness of the advisor-advisee relationship. I won't go into the details to preserve the privacy of the student, but I realized they were interpreting some of my actions (e.g., a joke I made, me knitting in meetings) in a way I hadn’t intended, which seemed influenced by their own personal context. I felt immediately re-triggered by the anxieties I had around not being able to advise all students, influenced by the past mentoring experiences I had in my earlier years (see my [postdoc blog post](./08-third-year-part-1-postdoc.html)). I worried that I wouldn't be able to make things work with this student, and that would mean I was a bad advisor, etc. Since I was in my first-year, it definitely shook my confidence for a bit. I also was worried due to my own personal trauma. Slight tangent, but less than 2 years before, my mother decided that me staying in a contact with my father after their divorce was a personal attack on her, and therefore decided that I had ill-will towards her. This over-reaction was completely informed by her own trauma from the divorce, which she projected onto me. Nothing I could do could make her change her mind after she had made it up. The situation with the student re-triggered that trauma for me because it echoed a deep fear: that no matter my intentions, I might be seen as having ill will, with no way to change that perception. Nevertheless, I immediately thanked them for letting me know, and asked for a chance to discuss things. I listened to their concerns, told them I would not re-do things they felt were hurtful, and promised them I wanted nothing but their success. I also shared something I’ve reflected on in my own life—that once we believe someone has ill-will toward us, it can be easy to interpret all their actions through that lens, even if that wasn't their intent; our mind can frequently lie to us. While the whole thing shook my confidence for a couple of days, I ultimately feel like we navigated things pretty well. We checked in later, and I was relieved to see that things had smoothed out. To this day, our relationship remains intact, which reassures me about my ability to navigate these challenges. ### Post-first-year reflections: Here are some of my reflections about things I am glad happened and things I am sad happened. - Glad I... - Glad I made finding social connections outside of CMU a priority in my first couple of months. They helped me get away from work stress, celebrate good news, and just generally have fun outside of work. - Glad I found the cool kids group at CMU. Having this crew as my social support as we all navigated all our first-year faculty troubles was definitely a saving grace. - Glad I didn't listen to the voice in my head that told me I should "move on" from Seattle and instead had friend visiting or went to visit Seattle multiple times. It is always really nice to visit/see those folks. - Glad I was shameless about asking for money, it sometimes paid off. - Glad I was able to celebrate some of my grant accomplishments, and thankful that I was able to celebrate with friends. - Glad I felt so much better by the end of the year, and that I was able to have all three of my students at the ACL conference. - Glad I figured out a better system for navigating conference deadlines and communicating my timelines to students. They don't always respect the timelines, and I still have to learn how to better navigate things, but that was a really nice step. - Glad I took time off in various moments, e.g., after EMNLP, or during Spring break. I wish I had less anxiety about taking time off now, because I do need it but feel stressed about not taking it. - Glad I enjoy teaching! It's a big part of the job and I'm happy that I like it and that it brings me meaning. - Glad I took it easy on grant writing in the first half of spring to focus on teaching. Learning one skill at a time was hard enough. - Glad I felt emboldened to act somewhat entitled so I could say no to various service requests. I wish I still felt that way but I cannot use the "first year" excuse anymore. - Glad I built good relationships with my students, with open communication (e.g., debriefing after conference deadlines, regular advising meetings). - Sad I... - Sad that my grant rejections affected me so much and made me spiral so much. Today when I get a grant rejection, it still hurts a little bit, which is normal, but I'm less upset by it. - Sad that my confidence levels were so low that I felt like an imposter during funder visits or at my first conference. I wish I had believed in myself more and embraced the discomfort of transition. I wish I felt more comfortable with not knowing how I was doing yet and just saying that, and I wish I had been able to enjoy the conference more. - Sad that my first conference deadline as a professor was so stressful. Looking back, it feels like growing pains that were necessary, but I still wish it hadn't made me as stressed as it did. - Sad that I struggle(d) to deal with the loss of "control" over my research; this was growing pains, and I definitely sometimes still struggle with it, but it was a hard lesson to learn. - Sad that my personal trauma influenced how I felt during hard situations with mentees. I'm in a better place about my personal life thanks to therapy, but those wounds can still be re-opened sometimes. - Sad my perfectionist mindset made my life much harder. I feel less like a perfectionist these days, but I still have high standards for myself and put pressure on myself. But I wish that back then I didn't fall for some of the voices in my head that told me I should already know how to do this job, or that one grant rejection means I'm not cut out for the job. Therapy helped, but my brain is mean to me sometimes. - Sad that my scars from the job search affected my relationship to teaching so much and that it made me fear being judged by students. Most students are wonderful and excited to learn, and I wish I had internalized that earlier. - Sad that I was so nervous about teaching that I had a panic attack. That was not necessary.