Hey, so in increasing evidence of falling education standards, I’ve been promoted to Associate Professor. I’m genuinely surprised.

Some notes below on the promotion process, because sooner or later I’ll be sending the details to colleagues. First, of course, I should acknowledge the vast majority of people who:

  • sent me their own applications;
  • directly reviewed my application and gave me feedback; and
  • helped me do everything that ended up in the application form in the first place.

(One of the things that is slightly uncomfortable about the process is that we must write a document that effectively erases other people’s contributions.)

The College promotion matrix has n criteria in four areas. You have to choose x criteria in total, with at least y in each area. This was mildly frustrating for me because one of the areas is research, which, as a teaching-focused person, I don’t have allocated time for.

Each ‘thing’ you do (or can evidence) can only be used for one criterion in the application, even if it appears to match more than one criterion.

So, I treated this as a constraint satisfaction problem. (I didn’t. I wrote, like, four drafts I hated and then finally treated it as a constraint satisfaction problem.)

I wrote down everything I’d done since starting the role, and then I looked at the criteria and wrote down some more stuff. Then I made a spreadsheet that matched (with some help from AI) each piece of evidence with the appropriate criteria and level, as you can see below:

I worked out (by hand; I could easily have got distracted writing some code) an allocation of evidence to criteria (you can see the selected items highlighted on the spreadsheet) and wrote a paragraph for each one in the spreadsheet, before moving relevant sections into a document and giving the whole thing a polishing pass for narrative. The allocation was of course, super interesting and I ended up presenting projects differently to the way I thought of them.

After a polishing pass (again, it reads quite strangely after I’ve removed all of the “with help from X” or “supported by Y”) it looked like this: this, and I was pleased to get the congratulations email a few months later.