By: Dr. Shaun Lynch • September 1, 2026 • Read Time – 5 Minutes

I must have reread the same paragraph in the faculty handbook four times. I was sitting on the couch in a small hotel room, slowly working through the scholarship narrative for my academic promotion file. The publications, presentations, book chapters, and podcast were already sitting in a spreadsheet on my computer. The harder part was explaining what any of it meant. I was up for full professor, and somehow the section about where I planned to go next became the hardest part to write.

Outside the sliding glass door, the August afternoon was bright, hot, and humid. Every so often, I stepped onto the balcony and let the salt air pull me away from whatever sentence I’d been staring at. People were gathering near the pool below while families hauled chairs and boogie boards down toward the beach. A few minutes later, I was back inside with the handbook open again.

I had spent most of the summer planning how I would finish this dossier. I’d blocked off time for it, moved other work around, and still managed to put off several sections longer than I probably should have. Now the deadline was getting close.

My family usually comes with me to this conference, but fall activities started earlier than we expected this year. That meant no afternoons together at the pool, no long walks on the beach, and no dinners at our favorite seafood places. The room was quieter than I wanted it to be.

At some point that afternoon, staring at another unfinished section, I caught myself wondering: Was this even worth it?

I was at the conference because of work I still cared about. Several months earlier, my proposal to speak on dysautonomia had been accepted, and I had gone back and forth all summer about how much of my own experience to put in it. I still get those butterflies before speaking in large rooms, even after doing this for years, but this time I was nervous for a different reason.

I spent most of the hour teaching clinicians how to recognize the patterns. On one slide, I shared what it feels like to be the patient on the other side of that encounter. The one sitting in the chair while someone else decides whether to believe you. That was the part I’d been nervous about.

Before I left the room, an attendee came up to tell me about a close family member with the same thing, and we stood there talking while the room emptied around us. I left energized, went back upstairs, sat down on the same couch, and reopened the promotion file.

Academic promotion asks you to do a strange kind of writing. You collect several years of work and make an argument for why it mattered. Teaching evaluations, courses, publications, presentations, committees, program work, service, scholarship. Everything gets documented, and then you have to brag about your work the way your momma would.

The last time I went through this was about six or seven years ago, and at that time, your packet had to be printed and placed in a binder. Mine was 515 pages.

Thankfully, the current version is digital. Spending months documenting my own work and building an argument for why it should count still feels unnatural, especially when I’m not sure how much the next title means to me.

I tried to delay another year. My chair, who has also been a colleague and friend and one of the reasons I took this job, kept insisting that I submit. So I organized the folders, tracked down old documents, cross-referenced dates, fought with Microsoft Word, and slowly started building the case.

Somewhere in the folder from 2021, work that I’d forgotten about started turning up. There was a presentation I’d given to a local PA program on working in Occupational Medicine.

Then there was my program. My director and I had built that curriculum from scratch, twenty-two courses with outcomes and syllabi, governance documents, policies, handbooks, assessment plans, all of it assembled in a stretch of about two years while I was trying to maintain some balance in my life. At the time, it mostly felt like work that had to get done next.

More kept turning up after that. Three chapters I’d written for a board review book. Faculty development programs I’d helped with. Curriculum revisions that had taken months along with committee work that had quietly stretched across years.

The dossier grew one file at a time, and somewhere in there I started feeling proud of what I’d done. Some of those years had been difficult for reasons that had nothing to do with work. I remembered doing most of it. I’d forgotten how much life had been happening around it.

On the long drive home, I thought about sitting in a movie theater in Greenville, North Carolina. It was sometime in January of 2002, a matinee with maybe a dozen people in the room. I had recently graduated from college the month before and had very little idea what came next. I was twenty-two, working part time, and had applied to exactly one graduate program.

I went alone to see A Beautiful Mind. Near the end of the movie, John Nash is sitting in the Princeton faculty dining room when several professors approach him. One at a time, they place their pens on the table in front of him.

I’ve thought about that scene every few years since. Now I wondered if some part of me had always wanted that kind of recognition, or at least the feeling that the work counted. I still don’t know where to put that feeling.

The following week I was back in my home office after almost three weeks away. I added the final syllabi, evaluations, publications, presentations, and supporting documents, drafted the email, attached the packet, and hit send.

The relief reminded me of turning in my dissertation. I sat there for a few minutes looking at the confirmation email on my screen and realized the question from that hotel room hadn’t really gone away. I just wasn’t asking it about the same thing anymore.

I’m not sure how much becoming a full professor matters to me. The title doesn’t feel especially important. Looking back at the work did.

For a few months I had been trying to show someone else what the past several years had added up to. I ended up reminding myself.

What’s something you did during a hard season that you’d forgotten you did?

Most of us don’t stop to look at our own work unless something makes us. It took a deadline I resented to make me look at mine.

Until next time.