Glenda Flores

Associate Professor of Chicano/Latino Studies

There are two major items that I wish I would have known on the road to tenure. First, I’m a qualitative sociologist and I wanted a concrete number in terms of the number of journal articles I needed to publish. I found myself constantly asking different mentors, “What do I need for tenure?" I knew that the book was necessary for tenure but as a sociologist working in an interdisciplinary department, the number of articles needed wasn’t always crystal clear. The standard number I received was 5 articles in top journals in your disciplinary spine and 1 book. I wish I would have prioritized the book more when I started the clock. It would have saved me months of stress from preparing manuscripts for journals that go through the peer-review process which has slowed down considerably due to Covid. I can’t imagine how long junior faculty have to wait to receive a decision now. It would have also saved me time from trying to sift through reviewer comments to send a manuscript to a new journal to go through another review process with new reviewers. It wasn’t until a senior mentor told me to “save that for the book" that I realized I needed to tuck a certain manuscript away and move on to something else instead of agonizing over it. In the end, I was given the advice to stop publishing articles based off of the book (3 came from the book) because it might affect book sales.

The second piece of information that I wish to relay is that UCI now provides funds and grants so that faculty can take advantage of the National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity (NCFDD) program led by Kerry Ann Rockquemore. I wish I would have participated in this program in my second year of the TT so that I could have developed important critical skills early on such as time management and developing my mentor circle. As a result of participating in this program, I requested to have a faculty mentor that was outside of the School of Social Sciences because I wanted to have candid and open conversations with someone that would not vote on any of my cases or that I would have to worry about departmental politics. Your mentor network should span beyond the Social Sciences at UCI.