Early Career Faculty

Award Ladders 

Often times, honorific awards follow a “ladder” approach, where receiving one award often  increases the likelihood of success in reaching the next. 

The best way to build a path to your honorifics success, is to show growth and achievement along the way. Internal Awards at DU or External Awards both serve that purpose and are wonderful avenues to honor your academic journey.

As an early career faculty member, it’s best to look for entry-level awards, such as:

* Denotes a Limited Submission opportunity, requiring a special University process to apply. 

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Looking for other honorific awards?

Award Opportunities

Honorifics Planning Guide

  • Plan for the future.
    • Plan ahead by mapping out the short, medium and long-term honorific awards you would like to achieve.

     

    • Those awards might require a membership to their society for a certain length of time. If so, build that into your timeframe in advance. 

     

    • Research previous recipients to determine which awards they achieved leading up to your goal. Honorifics often follow a “ladder” approach where receiving one award often leads to increasing the likelihood of success in reaching the next.
  • Touch base annually.
    • Consider discussing your honorific award goals with your department chair during your annual review.

     

    • Having this line of communication open may help keep your goals in sight and provide an opportunity to get valuable feedback on your path to achieving them. 
  • Practice peer review.
    • One way of keeping in touch with awards and/or society memberships that might fit your path would be checking out what others are doing in similar trajectories to yours. 

     

    • Consider starting with those individuals you’ve collaborated with or met at a conference that seemed to jive as similar to your work. It’s possible that you would be eligible for awards they have won or would be interested in joining similar professional societies. 
  • Reach out to past DU recipients. 
    • If an award you are interested in has already been received by another faculty member at DU, contact them for insights they might be willing to share. 

     

    • As an added bonus, they might be willing to advise if they believe it’s a good fit at this time or if maybe there is an area you could improve upon first. 

     

    • Past recipients also make great references!
  • Join or Create an Awards Committee.
    • One way to develop a stronger award submission is to help review others. Consider finding a group either within your department or across the University to work together this process.

General Awards Process

Each and every award is varied in terms of the awarding organization, the requirements you must fulfill to be considered, how many references you will need, who will submit the nomination packet, etc. 

That being said, this is the standard process awards go through:

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Identify

An award is identified as being an opportunity that matches the career duration and experience of the faculty member in question.

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Research

Take the time to double check the suitability of the award, such as: researching the recent awardees and their projects; and reviewing the specifics of the award language. 

 

 

 

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Network

Potential nominators and references are selected from peers, collaborators, and/or mentors.

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Reach Out

The faculty member (or their department head) contacts those identified individuals to ask if they will support this nomination and its process.

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Submit

A packet of nomination materials will need to be compiled and put in the proper format the award has requested and is submitted by the due date.

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Exercise Patience

It will usually take a few months to hear back on the status of the award submission.