Karen Kossie Chernyshev

I attribute my success to a wonderful foundation at home with encouragement from my parents, my faith, and my support system including family. Having a general positive outlook has also been important to my success.

Don't be afraid to ask for help. Ask questions and listen. Pay attention. What I generally tell people who are literally in my profession who are on board as new historians is read the faculty manual. So whatever that guideline is, know how your industry operates. Really understand what your job description is and what that means. Read the manual - you can do that across the board.

The biggest challenges are really outside the institution - the political climate. Historians all over, depending on what they teach, and I would say regardless of what they teach, are having to rethink subject matter and how to approach it in class and in their writing. There are a lot of conversations right now about our national story. For those of us who do history, we're being asked to look at our syllabi. I'm in Texas, which is a conservative state, and we're in a transitional period of understanding how we should teach, what we should teach, and who should be featured. We're also having to think about the tenure structure that has been in place for decades. Faculty governance is being recalibrated - faculty used to have more of a voice in what happened on university campuses, but their position has been restructured. This is happening in a lot of places, particularly in the South and in Texas. Even in my husband's field of medicine, grant acquisition is being impacted by political language. In my 31 years, I've never experienced an inflection point like this. University professors are used to freedom that comes with thought, research, and intellectual inquiry, and to now have outside forces that are not in your classroom telling you to turn in your syllabus so they can see what you're teaching is really something we're not accustomed to at all. On the positive side, technologies like AI represent another major shift. I'm concerned about students using AI to auto-generate answers, but as a scholar working on the AI team for my institution, I really see the possibilities for increased performance - like having an editorial assistant helping you evaluate. The detailed feedback that students can get is beyond anything I would be able to do as one individual. I'm very hopeful they can use it to become better writers. Learning how to use AI in a way that's productive and not inhibited is important.

Doing my best is most important to me. Giving it my best shot is always important. I want to feel like I've done my absolute best.