Rise with Clarity Podcast

For today’s episode, I want to open up a discussion on some of the unique challenges that foreign-born faculty, in particular women faculty, face in universities and colleges in the United States. 

I come from a place of seeing and knowing former classmates, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances who have gone through different hurdles than what I have experienced as an Asian American who was raised in the United States by immigrant parents from South Korea. 

And I also come from a place of deep curiosity, because I know that there is a wide spectrum of experiences that we don’t hear very much about.

So I’d like to invite you to share your own stories, experiences, and challenges with me or more publicly if you prefer. 

I think that people in higher education—especially in the US context—can really benefit from hearing more of your candid stories and your experiences.

You can find the full transcript for today’s episode at RisewithClarity.com/23 along with all of my previous podcast episodes and other resources for women of color faculty.

Dr. Katherine Lee is a Higher Ed Coach and Career Strategist and a former tenured professor at an R1 university. She helps women of color faculty to manage the tenure track, navigate politics, and take the next steps to advance their careers. To find more resources or to work with Katherine, check out her website at: Rise with Clarity.

Are you in a toxic higher ed work environment?

Should you stay or should you leave? 

There’s no easy answer to these questions…especially if you have invested a lot of time and energy in landing a tenure track position in today’s higher ed job market. 

Deciding whether to stay or leave entails a lot of reflection, some soul searching, the weighing of pros and cons, and if you do end up leaving--planning out your next moves. And unfortunately, this is often a decision that you can’t speak that openly about. 

In today’s episode, I discuss questions you may want to ask yourself if you want to leave your toxic work environment. I’ll be introducing the concept of “Change Talk” as a way to engage more concretely in your thinking and any next steps that you may want to take.

Find the full transcript for this episode, along with other resources for women of color faculty at RisewithClarity.com/22.

Dr. Katherine Lee is a Higher Ed Coach and Career Strategist and a former tenured professor at an R1 university. She helps women of color faculty to manage the tenure track, navigate politics, and take the next steps to advance their careers. To find more resources or to work with Katherine, check out her website at: Rise with Clarity.

It’s one thing to identify and acknowledge that you are in a toxic higher ed workplace, and another thing to figure out what you’re going to do about it. 

What are your next steps?

In this 21st episode of the Rise with Clarity Podcast, I’m going to be offering  6 questions that you can ask yourself if you want to stay at your current institution.

Find the full transcript for this episode as well as additional resources that I’ll include in the transcript at RisewithClarity.com/21.

Dr. Katherine Lee is a Higher Ed Coach and Career Strategist and a former tenured professor at an R1 university. She helps women of color faculty to manage the tenure track, navigate politics, and take the next steps to advance their careers. To find more resources or to work with Katherine, check out her website at: Rise with Clarity.

How do you respond to your various deadlines and projects in higher education? In my case, I wasn’t very skilled at managing my deadlines at the beginning of my academic career. Over the years, I’ve had to learn how to cultivate time management skills, prioritize, and create systems to support my various projects. 

Most importantly, I’ve become more aware of how I personally approach and handle deadlines that involve research and writing.

In this 20th episode of the Rise with Clarity Podcast, I want to talk about deadlines in higher ed. Because this is something that all academics have to deal with on a regular basis. And I’d like to offer you some insights on how to manage your deadlines with more ease and even grace. 

Find the full transcript for this episode, as well as links to additional resources that I will include at the end of the transcript at RisewithClarity.com/20.

Dr. Katherine Lee is a Higher Ed Coach and Career Strategist and a former tenured professor at an R1 university. She helps women of color faculty to manage the tenure track, navigate politics, and take the next steps to advance their careers. To find more resources or to work with Katherine, check out her website at: Rise with Clarity.

If someone were to ask you today about your core values, would you be able to articulate them out loud? Have you ever spent the time to think about your values, especially as they relate to your professional work?

When I asked these questions to a former client of mine in our very first session, she was stumped. She was at a crossroads in her life, where she had essentially come to the decision to leave her job. But she was full of fear and unsure of what to do next. 

The only thing that she was sure about was that she could not stay where she was. It was no longer tenable for her.

In our next few sessions, we decided that she would work on identifying what her core values were. Because by gaining clarity on her core values, she would then be able to make intentional decisions about what her next steps would be. 

In this 19th episode of the Rise with Clarity Podcast, I’m going to be discussing 4 tips on how to uncover and clarify your core values as they relate to your professional work goals.

You can find the full transcript for this episode, along with other useful resources for women of color faculty at RisewithClarity.com/19.

Dr. Katherine Lee is a Higher Ed Coach and Career Strategist and a former tenured professor at an R1 university. She helps women of color faculty to manage the tenure track, navigate politics, and take the next steps to advance their careers. To find more resources or to work with Katherine, check out her website at: Rise with Clarity.

Are you currently in a toxic work environment in higher education? What are the telltale signs?

Sometimes, you may not want to pay attention to certain red flags, even if you know deep down inside, things seem “off” in your department or institution.

In this encore broadcast (and one of Rise with Clarity Podcast's most downloaded episodes last year), I will be addressing the topic of toxic work environments in academia. I’ll be presenting a series of prompts that will help you to clarify whether you are in a truly unhealthy work environment. 

Find the full transcript at RisewithClarity.com/8 or RisewithClarity.com/18 where you can find links to all of the articles mentioned in this episode, along with other useful resources for WOC faculty. 

Dr. Katherine Lee is a Higher Ed Coach and Career Strategist and a former tenured professor at an R1 university. She helps women of color faculty to manage the tenure track, navigate politics, and take the next steps to advance their careers. To find more resources or to work with Katherine, check out her website at: Rise with Clarity.

Do you find yourself looking forward to the summer but you’re also concerned about having the bandwidth to get your research and writing done in the next 3-4 months? In this 17th Rise with Clarity Podcast episode, I’m going to share some observations on the necessity of rest and also offer some questions that will help you to reframe the relationship to your research. I hope that this reframing of your research can be something that you move forward with, even beyond the summer break.

Find the full transcript for this episode at RisewithClarity.com/17, along with my previous podcast episodes and other resources for women of color faculty in higher education.

Dr. Katherine Lee is a Higher Ed Coach and Career Strategist and a former tenured professor at an R1 university. She helps women of color faculty to manage the tenure track, navigate politics, and take the next steps to advance their careers. To find more resources or to work with Katherine, check out her website at: Rise with Clarity.

Dr. Katherine Lee offers some brief reflections since she launched Rise with Clarity (her business and podcast) seven months ago. This is also an encore broadcast of the first and most downloaded episode of the Rise with Clarity Podcast. The episode introduces host Dr. Katherine Lee; she explains what she learned on the tenure track as a woman of color professor. She also discusses why she decided to let go of a tenured faculty position and launch Rise with Clarity to help other WOC faculty in higher ed.

The full transcript for this episode and other useful resources for WOC faculty can be found at RisewithClarity.com/16.

Dr. Katherine Lee is a Higher Ed Coach and Career Strategist and a former tenured professor at an R1 university. She helps women of color faculty to manage the tenure track, navigate politics, and take the next steps to advance their careers. To find more resources or to work with Katherine, check out her website at: Rise with Clarity.

Do you have your own stories to share of when you were mistaken for a graduate student or an undergraduate on campus? Or were you simply told that “you just don’t look like a professor.” 

In this 15th episode of the Rise with Clarity Podcast, I’m going to try and unpack what it means when you are told that you don’t look the part of a professor as well as the professional implications for you. This topic follows some of the themes discussed in my 14th podcast episode, where I talked about Leading Graduate Seminars for Your First Time.

Find the full transcript at RisewithClarity.com/15, along with links to all of my other previous podcast episodes and helpful resources for women of color faculty.

Dr. Katherine Lee is a Higher Ed Coach and Career Strategist and a former tenured professor at an R1 university. She helps women of color faculty to manage the tenure track, navigate politics, and take the next steps to advance their careers. To find more resources or to work with Katherine, check out her website at: Rise with Clarity.

Prior to starting your first job, how many of you were trained to lead an effective graduate seminar? Was your first experience with facilitating a graduate seminar during your first year on the tenure track? And do you remember how that went?

In this episode of the Rise with Clarity Podcast, I’ll be talking about some of the challenges with leading graduate seminars for your first time. And I want to offer you some strategies on how to avoid over-preparing and stressing out about teaching your first graduate seminars.

Find the full transcript for this episode at RisewithClarity.com/14, as well as other resources and links to other podcast episodes for women of color faculty in higher education.

Dr. Katherine Lee is a Higher Ed Coach and Career Strategist and a former tenured professor at an R1 university. She helps women of color faculty to manage the tenure track, navigate politics, and take the next steps to advance their careers. To find more resources or to work with Katherine, check out her website at: Rise with Clarity.