I started this blog back in August 2012, when I was finishing up my dissertation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 269 posts and nearly 100,000 on-site page views later (as well as the normal research, teaching, and service activities), the beginning of 2018 means that I will be submitting my tenure packet later this year (gasp!). Assuming everything goes well, I will not be a junior faculty member for much longer.
One of the best parts of my job is the interactions with doctoral students, postdocs, and newly-minted assistant professors. Through serving on search committees, being a discussant at conferences, and participating in conversations on social media, I’m thoroughly impressed by the cohorts of scholars who are beginning to enter research and policy discussions. And from being on search committees…it’s amazing how qualified job market candidates are today. I doubt I would have been able to get my current job today with the CV I had back in 2012!
This post is inspired by a nice tweet I received from Roman Ruiz, a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania. He just launched a new personal website that is both visually appealing and a reminder of how old I am rapidly becoming.
I would like to begin 2018 by highlighting some of the great new higher education policy voices out there like Roman. If you are a doctoral student or very early-career scholar who does public-facing higher ed policy work and has an active Twitter presence and/or blog, I’d love to feature your work. (Senior faculty: you’re encouraged to highlight some of your tremendous students!)
Just fill out this very short form and I will share the list in a future blog post. I would also love to publish guest blog posts from new scholars, so please let me know if you are interested in sharing your work with a broader audience.
Robert Kelchen 
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