BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT: BUILDING CONFIDENCE, COMMUNITY, AND COURAGE IN THE TRANSITION FROM GRADUATE SCHOOL TO FACULTY LIFE

IT STARTED WITH RUMORS AMONG graduate students on the market and materialized in a job advertisement: a top-tier institution in my hometown was hiring. The cherry on top? They were looking for a scholar who used innovative teaching practices and had substantive expertise in research methods, social inequality, and scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL). This job had my name on it. The job description’s 338 carefully crafted words summarized my academic identity and entire graduate career, and I was terrified. The dilemma was obvious—I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t even on the market. Until that point, I had been