In this week's episode, guest expert Jeanne Zaino, Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Iona College, joins us to talk about raising your profile on campus, self-promotion, networking, and promoting the work of others. We wrap up with our best tips and advice for helping you get more comfortable with raising your profile on campus and at the end we'll have an assignment for our listeners- speak up or amplify something a colleague says in a meeting or in a public setting and share your story on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook and tag us @university_of_venus on IG and @UVenus on Twitter or post it on our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/UVenus/ and we will share, retweet, and amplify! Find University of Venus on Instagram @university_of_venus , Twitter @UVenus , and Facebook http://www.facebook.com/UVenus/
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Resources Discussed in this Episode:
Music Credits: Magic by Six Umbrellas
View from Venus Episode 3
Mary Churchill: [00:00:00] Hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of the View from Venus. Today's co-host are Mary Churchill, Meg Palladino, and Leanne Doherty and today's guest expert is Jeanne Zaino, Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Iona College. In today's episode, we'll be talking with Jeanne about raising your profile on campus, self-promotion, networking, and promoting the work of others.
[00:00:28] You will walk away with our best tips and advice for getting more comfortable with self-promotion, building your network, and finding ways to support other women on campus and at the end we'll have an assignment for you.
[00:00:40] Hi Jeanne, welcome and thanks for joining us.
[00:00:43] Jeanne is a Professor of Political Science at Iona College where she teaches courses in American politics including Mass Media and Politics. She is regarded as one of the world's leading experts on electoral politics and her ideas have been widely used in governments, industries, and organizations throughout the world.
[00:01:01] Jeanne is a frequent contributor on MSNBC, Headline News and CNN. She is also a regular contributor at our University of Venus blog at Inside Higher Ed. Earlier this summer over at the UVenus blog, we asked our contributors to suggest methods for raising your profile on campus and Jeanne had some fantastic recommendations.
[00:01:22] Welcome.
[00:01:23] Meg Palladino: [00:01:23] Okay. Well, let's start with something fun. I'd like to know from all of you as a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
[00:01:32] Jeanne Zaino: [00:01:32] You know, it's funny, because I wanted to be a lawyer because my father was a lawyer and so I thought very many, many years, I wanted to go to law school and I'm a political scientist and I am pretty certain that that's why I chose political science and then quickly realized I didn't want to go to law school, I wanted to get my PhD. But you know, it's not very exciting though. I wish I said like astronaut or something very cool. I wanted to be a lawyer.
[00:02:00] Leanne Doherty Mason: [00:02:00] Well, I'm a political scientist too, but I wanted to do musical theater. And I thought for sure - or be a professional basketball player. I had to choose between those two things, and I'm not kidding either. So
[00:02:11] I fell into Political Science because I too thought I was going to be a lawyer, but I didn't have anyone in the profession in my family. My father just wanted me to have a good job with a pension, so I thought I was going to get a graduate degree so that I could work for the state of Massachusetts. And that was my goal.
[00:02:28] So, I've taken a lot of paths. It's great for advising students who don't know what they want to major in. I'm like listen, it's fine. Don't worry about it. You don't have to be an astronaut from day one, right? And as an undergrad,
[00:02:40] Meg Palladino: [00:02:40] My mother was a public high school teacher and I always thought I never want to get into education. That's the worst. I wanted to be a housewife and now, I know for sure, I would never want to be a housewife and I do like education.
[00:02:52] So, it's funny how the tables turned.
[00:02:55] Mary Churchill: [00:02:55] So I wanted - I was in love with all the animal shows that were around when we were children: Lassie, Flipper Gentle Ben -and I really loved Flipper and I love Jacques Cousteau. I somehow came upon Jacques Cousteau through some PBS specials, and I really wanted to be an oceanographer.
[00:03:16] And I was dead set on that. I loved science. In high school, I was advised out of math classes and into home ec classes and I ended up taking a year where I didn't take math at all and really got me off track and I was not encouraged to go into science and math. But when I was young, I really wanted to be a scientist and I now think back, you know, there were not a lot of female role models. Jacques Cousteau was my role model.
[00:03:48] I think in a different time, I would have ended up in a very different profession. So, I didn't mean to end on a sad note but it really leads us into this conversation around promoting yourself on campus.
[00:04:00] Meg Palladino: [00:04:00] So, Jeanne, this summer you provided some really specific recommendations for how women specifically can raise their profiles on campus including promoting and celebrating one another through networks of women.
[00:04:11] Can you tell us a little bit more about this?
[00:04:13] Jeanne Zaino: [00:04:13] I think for all people quite frankly self-promotion - for many people, I should say - self-promotion can feel a little bit like bragging unnecessarily and you know feel very uncomfortable in a way and I think that's particularly true for women and I think there's a lot of reasons for that.
[00:04:33] But I also think that it's incredibly important and I was so excited when you all put that out there because I think for it's particularly important today that women and faculty, quite frankly generally, promote the work that we're doing for a variety of reasons. I mean, you can just go down the list from the way in which the university and academia is viewed today around the world and certainly in the United States, from the changes that were all experiencing, from the decrease in funding that's coming from our biggest funders particularly the federal government. For all of those reasons, I think we all do ourselves a disservice when we don't go out and talk about the work that we're doing.
[00:05:20] So, I think we can all do a better job in that and I also firmly believe because I do a lot of consulting on this that we think about self-promotion and even the term self is as if it's just us. Oh gosh, I, Jeannie now I have to go out and talk about myself and you know, that's incredibly uncomfortable. And it's also not the reality. The people who self-promote well or not self-promoting at all.
[00:05:44] They are part of a larger group institution that understands the global benefits of doing that and they help them do that. And that's where I think our institutions bear huge responsibility in this. I think we have to stop talking about and thinking about it as something I do just for myself and it's my personal gain but something that is done as a part of a larger group and for the betterment of your institution, of your students, of incoming students, and of society as a whole. I think we all have a tendency to think, you know, I'll do my work and somebody will come and recognize it and somebody will find it.
[00:06:23] You know, my work is enough. And the truth is, it's not. You have to do the work and you have to talk about and write about and share that work.
[00:06:34] Leanne Doherty Mason: [00:06:34] It's really interesting you should talk about, I mean what you're talking about is community building right?
[00:06:37] I mean that sometimes when we're trained in academia, we're trained so much to be alone, right? To do your research alone, to make sure you're promoting yourself alone. Don't try to make you know, your cohort is kind of this fake group of folks that you're lucky enough to become friends with but you're not really supposed to engage in a way that's not competitive. And so what struck me while you were speaking was about this idea of community. And so what do you think are advantages to other advantages to promoting ourselves as part of a community, you know, the way we do here at University of Venus?
[00:07:10] It's kind of unique, right? Women coming together, especially Gen-X women or whatever we're calling ourselves now age wise. But I find community harder to build in you know, this world where we have other avenues now, whether we all have kids or we are all engaged in some other activities. Could you talk a little bit more about how you engage community in the academic world?
[00:07:31] Jeanne Zaino: [00:07:31] Yeah, and you're absolutely right and it is a challenge and it's something that's why you know the work that you do at University of Venus and now congratulations, by the way on the podcast is you expand that which is terrific.
[00:07:42] I'm a big pod cast fan, you know, it's an important way to you know, share and celebrate the work that we're doing. And so I think the example I used this summer was in our field this group Women Also Know. They've done a great job of taking women who they don't know personally, but who are out there and sharing and promoting that work and you know, it's such a small example not to say the work they're doing is small the work they're doing is great.
[00:08:15] But it's a small example of you know, celebrating other women and other faculty quite frankly in their respective field. And I think part of the challenge I think we face at universities and colleges is that I think it's institutional in that these things as much as I would love to say, they grow organically right that you just find people to celebrate with and to share with. It really is something that you have to structure and plan and work on and I think a lot of this starts at the top. It starts with a really devoted Dean or a devoted Provost or a devoted chair of your department who sets up a structure in which that celebration, recognition, and sharing is both encouraged and something that you take young faculty and you walk them through that process and I don't think we do that very well at most institutions.
[00:09:12] That's, I'm not speaking for all of them. But I think people are so consumed by their day-to-day activities, that’s finding the opportunities and time to do that is tough for all of us. And so I think the more it becomes embedded in this institution and that's why I wish always to talk about the institution's responsibility in all of this. You know, as people go up for tenure, we celebrate certain things.
[00:09:37] We celebrate and recognize publications or grants and teaching and those things. We also need to celebrate there are publications that may not be peer reviewed, that maybe you know an article in the newspaper column in the newspaper, a podcast, other modes of promoting the work we're doing in the academy that quite frankly reach much larger numbers of people than a peer-reviewed journal and most institutions still don't do that.
[00:10:04] So, you know, it's just a small example, but the kinds of things the institution can do to help encourage this type of sharing which again, really does benefit the institution, you know as much if not more than it benefits the individual and the academy as a whole. So I think there's a host of ways in which people in positions of responsibility and power can encourage this type of behavior.
[00:10:29] Otherwise to wait and see if it grows organically. We're really really lucky if it does but most often it doesn't. To your point, people are busy researching, teaching. They have families. They have lives. This is sort of an add-on that people takes time to do.
[00:10:45] Mary Churchill: [00:10:45] So along those lines, do you have examples of institutions that are doing this? That we could look to, maybe copy what they're doing? I think at Boston University we have a relationship with The Conversation. And that started I believe that started in Australia and we actually have op-ed training for the campus this next week. We offer it regularly, but it is about getting some of our more mainstream work into The Conversation.
[00:11:14] So I know that that is one model, but I think you're absolutely right and what I've seen is even when there are big institution wide pushes, the culture within departments and programs can really stifle that particularly with the junior faculty.
[00:11:32] Jeanne Zaino: [00:11:32] Yeah, absolutely. And I think those are two very good examples.
[00:11:37] And as we know speaking of women vastly underrepresented in op-eds and opinion writing in big newspapers across the country not necessarily staffing wise, but in terms of you know people who are coming in just to write a singular piece. It's hard to find placement. So, you know, I think number one institutions that are bringing in people to do training both for faculty, but also quite frankly for their PR teams. So I do think bringing in outside training, consulting. You're talking about consulting in terms of editorial writing. You know just as an example, there are some institutions who either in-house or externally when you say have like Meg is going to do an interview.
[00:12:27] Most of these things come up very last minute, you know, and that's something you have to get used to but they come up last minute and Meg just might want to run by, you know have somebody on standby that she could call or be in touch with to say, you know, this is the interview I'm doing on this podcast or this show, can we just walk through the major points? That's something an institution can offer whether they offer external help doing that or they have it in house. It's a recognition that Meg doesn't know until you know, if it's breaking news, you might not know till an hour or two before and you know, you do have to plan to do these things. People, you know, believe firmly that it's off the cuff.
[00:13:12] So, you know trying to find a way to sort of bridge that gap, get yourself out there, and institutions simply having a sort of what I call fast response help. That can be incredibly incredibly useful either again internally who have been trained or externally who are on call. It's not a huge expense for a big institution, but it's not something they think of and I know several moving in that direction. Again, it's a question of resources. And one of the things that I think we can help the institutions do is recognize that Meg doing a 30 second interview, what becomes a 30-second, which is a good interview, on CBS radio is worth x amount of money, right? We can actually, we know because we get that data that it says that when you do 10 seconds on X station that to do a paid ad there would cost this much.
[00:14:11] So, there is an investment but that investment pays off in spades. If you look at the actual data, but somebody's got to be there collecting the data and making the case to the institution.
[00:14:25] Meg Palladino: [00:14:25] Thank you. So I think we've touched on this one, but what do you think do women leaders on campus make women more comfortable with self-promotion? And is there a need for a critical mass of women in leadership positions?
[00:14:36] Jeanne Zaino: [00:14:36] I think so from almost every perspective and I think the data bears this out just from the perspective of seeing yourself as a leader on campus. It's very helpful to see that another woman has done this. I served as interim dean of my school several years ago and I was the first female to do so and as you walk down that line of pictures male, male, male, male, male, male, and there I was. I didn't have a good model and I think that -there was many many women in universities across the country: deans, provosts, presidents - and but I think not having somebody in my institution made it very difficult for me. And I think I made mistakes as a result and I think the more women you get in positions of leadership, they can really help because they understand what it's taken to get there and the self-promotion involved and they can serve as a leg up to other women.
[00:15:40] And one of the really astounding figures still is that women in the classroom do incredibly well, they are leaders at most colleges and universities, and yet they graduate they're still making less money than their male counterparts who by the way weren't as good in the classroom for the most part and they are still not becoming the leaders that they were on the college campus.
[00:16:02] Now, there are a lot of reasons for that but, you know, we see that over and over. So, I think, you know, hopefully this new generation is going to you know, bust through that wall in a way that we weren't able to. But I think the more we talk about the need to do that and the more we see people doing that and women doing that, the better we all will be.
[00:16:21] Mary Churchill: [00:16:21] This has been fantastic and I want to wrap up with kind of our top tips for getting women to be more comfortable with raising their profile on campus both at the individual level and at the group level. So who wants to start with a top tip?
[00:16:40] Jeanne Zaino: [00:16:40] I will start. I think it's really important. I always start with telling people you need to do a diagnostic of yourself, really. You need to do a diagnostic. You need to say, what are my goals? And you need to be comfortable verbalizing those goals. Start writing them down and start sharing them and then you can figure out a plan to get there. We're talking about incredibly smart women, faculty members, PhDs. They know how to do stuff but I think a lot of it starts with. What do I want to do? What are my goals short and long term and how do I get there? And I think that really opens up a plethora of opportunities and I find once you ask somebody that they say this is what I want, this is my goal and here's how I can get there. So I would say that's really really important to do a diagnostic of yourself.
[00:17:31] Meg Palladino: [00:17:31] I agree. I think one of the things I always try to do is find a strong female mentor to kind of guide me a little bit at times when I don't know what to do.
[00:17:41] Mary Churchill: [00:17:41] No, that's a great idea.
[00:17:42] Leanne Doherty Mason: [00:17:42] I try to remind folks that you are an expert. I mean you wouldn't have been here if you know that we do have a system that provides expertise, right? And I think sometimes myself included, you know, we forget about that and you know, we take different paths and you know something can knock you off your track and all the sudden you feel like. Oh geez that didn't go the way we are the experts here. And I think we need to claim that role and with that ownership, you know, get your power back.
[00:18:09] Mary Churchill: [00:18:09] For me, it's about it's a group effect, right? So, building community, joining a network, taking people along, following other people, but really feeling that amplifying through the group effort has always been very successful for me. I'm an extrovert though. So it comes very easily and very naturally, but I feel much more comfortable when it's a strategic group effort to get more voices out there and amplify.
[00:18:36] So that is my, that's my MO.
[00:18:40] So any final comments before we wrap up?
[00:18:43] Jeanne Zaino: [00:18:43] I would just add that it has been such a pleasure to talk to all of you and such a pleasure to talk to a group of wonderful women and I would just you know say that, you know, we have to get over this idea that the work is enough.
[00:18:54] We're going to do good work and somebody’s going to identify it. You have to talk about and share your work in a way that you can be proud of and comfortable with.
[00:19:04] Mary Churchill: [00:19:04] I completely agree. Thank you so much and thanks for joining us.
[00:19:10] Okay listeners. Here's this week's assignment speak up or amplify something a colleague says in a meeting or in a public setting. Share your story on IG Twitter or Facebook and tagged us at @UVenus and we'll retweet, share on our story and post on Facebook.
[00:19:25] As always, thanks for joining us and we'll be back next week with tips for time management and productivity.