Promotion to full professor

Daniel Drezner gets promoted to full professor at Tufts and opines on the many joys that it brings.

I would add that there are two other effects:

First, you start getting a lot of requests to write tenure letters. These are a lot of work as you have to basically read everything the person has written over a five or six year period. At times it is also pretty stressful in the sense that one or two negative letters (or even weakly positive letters) can doom a candidate. Some candidates deserve to be doomed but it is still hard to do. Of course, if it is someone that you think well of and whose work you are already reasonably familiar with, then it can be a pleasure. I've done a couple of those too.

Second, at some places, you start getting asked to serve on deeply boring university-wide or faculty/division/school-wide committies that do things like check on tenure decisions in fields you know nothing about. If have not had much of the second yet but I have had a lot of the first.

Hat tip: Don Hacherl