Tenure track faculty members often find that the tenure process is very time consuming. This means that the successful tenure-track faculty member must find ways of balancing one's career with one's personal life. This paper presents perspectives for three new faculty members currently going through the tenure process at Texas A&M University. It concludes by summarizing some of the common issues facing new faculty and proposing solutions.

Engineering technology programs at Texas A&M University are housed within a College of Engineering that enjoys ever-increasing success in research productivity. Faculty across the country who serve in engineering technology programs are often attracted to those programs primarily because of their desire to devote most of their time working with students in the classroom and laboratory, while minimizing the time devoted to research. An important question that must be continuously addressed is: how do engineering technology faculty, who live in an environment of research expectation, combine their classroom and laboratory teaching interests with research interests? This paper will discuss a process for bringing together what many faculty feel is a dichotomy between teaching and research. How engineering technology faculty might develop a rewarding career in both teaching and research will be outlined.

In order to be successful, tenure-track faculty members strive to develop distinct research programs that lead to funded work and publications. To be sure, faculty must also be successful in other areas such as teaching effectiveness and service to their university and profession. It is in the pursuit of a distinct research area that tenure-track faculty often overlook, or even purposefully avoid, opportunities to collaborate with other faculty members in their department. Their appears to be a blind notion that such interactions can lead to a reduced level of recognition for one's unique contributions. In contrast, tenured faculty members are less aggressive in avoiding research interactions and, in many instances, often seek out such opportunities. This team-friendly environment allows synergistic activities to evolve and be capitalized on, leading to stronger research programs. From an external perspective, funding agencies are placing a growing emphasis on interdisciplinary research projects. This trend has led to increased pressure on faculty to collaborate. In the case of industry-funded research, where projects tend to follow a multidisciplinary model, it is almost always the case that multiple investigators are involved. This paper addresses the issue of collaboration among tenure-track faculty members and describes several benefits that have resulted from a collaborative atmosphere created by tenure-track faculty members within the Electronics Engineering Technology Program at Texas A&M University.