Passion and Partnerships: Finding Success as Faculty

June 30, 2025

By Katya Hrichak

“How do you become a successful faculty member?”

Wayne Scales, Ph.D. ’88, asked the students, postdocs, and faculty attending the June 17 Future Professors Institute to ponder this question during the event’s keynote, “Fostering Strategic University Partnerships for Excellence and Innovation: A Practitioner’s Approach,” before offering his own answer.

“A lot of it has to do with passion,” he said.

Scales, associate vice provost for faculty affairs and J. Byron Maupin Professor of Engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Virginia State University, encouraged future faculty in the audience to pursue not only their research interests, but also the impact they want to have.

For Scales, this meant following an unlikely path to the professoriate and using his position to both educate and elevate other scholars. While he once considered dropping out of high school, he has since mentored the first Saudi Arabian woman to earn a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering and the first female full professor in electrical engineering at Fudan University in China.

“When things get tough, things don’t look good, always come back to that motivation—the big picture of how you can contribute to people’s lives, how you can contribute to higher education,” he said.

Following this passion also led Scales to form partnerships with other academic institutions. He has focused his efforts on historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), citing research that HBCU graduates contribute substantially to the workforce, particularly in medicine, law, and doctoral graduates, despite being historically underfunded. Creating partnerships and leveraging resources can advance the scholars and scholarship of both institutions.

Scales offered tips on how to make these connections, what not to do when forming partnerships, and examples from his own case studies to give aspiring faculty ideas for how they can pursue similar aims when established in their roles.

“There are uncertain times here, but be agile as a prospective faculty member, open-minded to pursue your career. Don’t be afraid because things are a bit different now than they were in the past. Continue to pursue your goals,” Scales said. “Again, if that passion is there, at least from my career, I can almost guarantee you’re going to be successful.”

The second day of the institute featured a panel discussion on exploring institutional fit, a fireside chat on navigating a rapidly changing academy as early career faculty, and concurrent, discipline-based panels on establishing a scholarship and research agenda as a new faculty member.

The biennial Future Professors Institute focuses on Cornell University graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, as well as invited scholars from partnering institutions, who are interested in faculty and academic careers and committed to advancing access to higher education and supporting inclusive learning, mentoring, and research environments.

The Future Professors Institute is organized by the Graduate School’s Office of Inclusion and Student Engagement, the Office of Career and Professional Development, and the Office of Postdoctoral Studies.