Who Else Is Gonna Toot It?
On nominating yourself and others for awards in academia.
People can’t be given awards that they have not been nominated for. The awards programs for both of the professional communities I consider myself a part of — ACM SIGCHI and IEEE VGTC — have explicit rules to only consider individuals who have been officially nominated. The problem is that not everyone who is deserving gets nominated.
So, what can we do about this? I see two concrete steps: promoting yourself and promoting others. Allow me to explain.
One of my formative moments as an assistant professor was in a faculty meeting when the chair for the internal awards committee stood up to say “if you don’t toot your own horn, who else is going to toot it?” He then went on to say essentially what I said above, that people who don’t get nominated don’t get awards, and that some of the responsibility is on the individual to stand for these awards.
Putting yourself forward is not something that comes natural to most people, but I would claim that it is part of the academic persona that you have to build up. This obviously does not mean bragging about your abilities any chance you get, but rather to be assertive and know the value of your achievements. Again, this typically does not come easy for most, but I think it is a necessary professional skill to cultivate.
Some of you may snort at this point and think something to the effect of “people of worth will get nominated and awarded for what they deserve.” And yes, brilliant people do tend to get nominated and awarded; after all, there are well-deserving awardees every year, right? However, these brilliant people tend to be part of a larger network of mentors and peers that are already fully aware of these programs and routinely nominate their colleagues for awards. They probably have a deep bench of endorsers and plenty of examples of past successful nominations to draw from. Recall how I said that my university had an internal award committee? That committee meets regularly to assess its own faculty and identify suitable awards to nominate them for. Knowing its impact on the department’s ranking, they take the number of IEEE and ACM Fellows among its faculty as a point of pride. And it works; of course it works when you have a full department behind you!
Most people, even brilliant ones, are not in departments such as these. They may be the only HCI person in their department, maybe even their university, or indeed their country. Their advisor may not be an HCI person, they don’t have a large mentor network of movers and shakers in the field, and they don’t even know how to start building these networks. Some are part of departments that don’t particularly care about awards due to institutional, cultural, or funding reasons. For these people, this kind of — shock! horror! — self-promotion may be the only way to get recognized for awards for which they are worthy. Make no mistake, not having to toot your own horn is a luxury for the privileged.
The second thing I said above was to boast about others. Hopefully this should come easier for most of you: you just have to nominate your peers! Only, you have to realize that (a) writing a good nomination takes time, and (b) you can’t just do it for your close colleagues. Yes, it is easy to remember the friend down the corridor who you see at the coffee machine every day, but — and maybe I am repeating myself here — what about the people who toil in isolation? I take it upon myself to write an award nomination for one person who I have an arm’s-length relationship with every year, and I think you should do the same. Try to think of the people in your professional community who are deserving of these awards, yet may not be in an institution where their efforts will be noticed, let alone rewarded. Nominate them.
