The run-up to tenure is so stressful that it can take years as an associate professor to shake off the fatigue and get going again.

For Vanessa U. Druskat, an associate professor of organizational behavior at the University of New Hampshire, becoming a tenured professor had been a goal nearly all her life. "I decided I wanted to be a professor when I was an undergrad,"...
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The run-up to tenure is so stressful that it can take years as an associate professor to shake off the fatigue and get going again.

For Vanessa U. Druskat, an associate professor of organizational behavior at the University of New Hampshire, becoming a tenured professor had been a goal nearly all her life. "I decided I wanted to be a professor when I was an undergrad," says Ms. Druskat, who is now 52.

"I was aiming at this, aiming at this, and then you get it and you wonder, What's the point anymore?" she says. "You're not prepared. There was only ever one goal: tenure."

Shortly before Ms. Druskat went up for tenure at Case Western Reserve University, in 2003, she realized, she says, that she would be unhappy if she stayed because of the demanding research workload. "For the first four years there, I never took a day off, even during the summer," she says.

So she moved to New Hampshire, closer to the mountains and the ocean, where she earned tenure and thought the pace would be slower. But her frenetic work life followed her. "I got here, and I found out it's the same story," she says, adding that she still found herself working 80-hour weeks, mostly on things other than her own research. "I no longer have doctoral students to help me grade here, and I'm in meetings all of the time because I'm on a ton of committees."

For a while, the fatigue leveled her. "I couldn't get out of bed," she recalls. "I was literally depressed."

But now that the academic year has ended once again, she is making time for her own work, including a less scholarly book on the role of emotional awareness in building effective work teams that she hopes will have broad public appeal.

"When it is good, it is great," she says of the job. "There is nothing like a summer day, writing in your office, looking at data with your shorts and a T-shirt on with the breeze in the window."
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