That is, the safest route to tenure is to take a robust research topic that already has lots of interest and then outwork your peers. If you want to innovate, wait until later in your career. In his famed “Last Lecture,” the late Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Randy Pausch captured this reality well when he quipped, “Junior faculty members used to come up to me and say, ‘Wow, you got tenure early; what’s your secret?’ I said, ‘It’s pretty simple, call me any Friday night in my office at ten o’clock and I’ll tell you.’
