A (Pragmatic) Ode to Peer Support

In my recent posts, I talked about how my perspective has changed after I moved “to the other side” of the hiring process. It made me reflect on the importance of this perspective shifting for growth in academia. As an early career scholar, one often has to experience high-stakes situations for the first time, finding one’s way in the dark: submitting your first article for peer review, participating in a job interview, preparing a grant application. We have to do a lot of guessing and intuiting, as if navigating in the dark; but it doesn’t have to be this way.

In the past months, I had a couple of “a-ha” moments about some of these experiences: when I got to be the one who offers jobs and has to select candidates or when I participated in mock interviews to support my colleagues who were invited for the interview stage in their grant application process. These experiences made me think: Ha - now I think I know how to apply for postdoctoral positions; or: Ha - now I think I know what to prioritize and what to pay attention to when preparing for a grant interview.

In a way, this understanding does come from a perspective-shift: when you participate in peer review as a reviewer, you learn to think like a reviewer and thus, when in your author role, you know what reviewers might look for. Same goes for being a panel member or a hiring committee member: having acted as one, you may understand better what they might be interested in.

But this personal perspective-shift, thankfully, is not the only thing that can help us understand what others are looking for.

When I prepared for the ERC interview, I searched the internet for “crumbs:” first-hand posts and accounts of people’s experiences of going through this process. I appreciated these first-hand accounts a lot; I’m not sure why, but I didn’t find the generalized summaries and lists of recommendations from specialized academic advice companies and websites all that helpful. They do sound too general sometimes, and often don’t apply to your individual situation (yes, I think there is quite a lot of counter-productive advice out there).

But what I do find extremely helpful is engaging the academic “hivemind,” if you will. Or rather, creating and engaging networks of mutual support. This, I’d argue, is one of the best parts of academic life. I only recently started thinking about it systematically, when I requested a lot of help from my colleagues working on the ERC Starting Grant application. But when thinking about this post, I realized that, to varying degrees, these networks of mutual support have been a big part of my life since at least grad school.

During my PhD studies at CUNY Graduate Center, I was privileged to be part of a cohort that self-organized to provide peer feedback and prepare together for important milestones like qualifying exams or teaching for the first time). When I went to do my postdoc after getting a degree (during COVID), I lost these support systems for a couple of years, but when applying for assistant professor jobs, a friend reminded me that I could exchange job market materials (motivation letters, interview presentations) and organize mock interviews with peers. I went into full “feedback-maxxing” mode during the ERC starting grant application: I sought feedback on my application and interview presentation from multiple people with different backgrounds.

The role of these networks is sometimes to give you access to these different perspectives: of people who served in particular roles (have been part of panels and committees, reviewed articles and book proposals, and so on). But this is not the only role.

Even if you organize a mock panel or ask for feedback from people with a similar career level and experience as your own, what they can do is help you get out of your own head and see what your work looks like from the outside, through the eyes of a friendly peer. They can tell you what you communicate well, help you see where you omit important bits of information (maybe obvious to you, but crucial for people who are not you), or where you don’t sound convincing.

The good thing to remember about these peer feedback moments is that you don’t have to follow everything you hear blindly; these moments can give you important input to make your own judgements and decisions. Systematizing and prioritizing feedback, deciding what to act on and how can be a satisfying intellectual exercise - especially if you learn not to take critique as s personal attack.

The key word here is “mutual.” Asking for help is important - but so is providing it. You can learn a great deal from being on the other side, even if only in simulation.