Tips for (pre-tenure) research leave?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:

I am newish assistant professor at a school with a medium-level teaching load, where I am fortunate to get a guaranteed pre-tenure research leave (one semester at full salary or two semesters at reduced salary). I would love to hear tips from readers about how to make the best use of this time. Here are some specific questions. Where might I look for funding to support the longer leave? And then, assuming I can swing that financially, what are the advantages and disadvantages of staying put vs. going somewhere else as a visiting scholar? At present I am slowly recovering from burnout related to making a number of demanding life transitions during the pandemic and I am instinctively resistant to any more upheaval. But I fear I might regret not taking the opportunity to travel, especially since I am not an a research-intensive institution and do not have much local accountability for my scholarship.

Good questions! As far as funding is concerned, visiting fellowships seem to me to be one obvious answer--but as the OP notes, moving for a fellowship could involve quite a bit of upheaval (moving to a new place). So, it could be good to hear from visiting fellows/scholars whether it is worth it. Grants are another obvious source of funding, though they can take a lot of time to apply for and be hard to get. So, I'm not sure what to recommend here, especially given that I've never had a research leave myself. Finally, in terms of making the best use of one's time, I guess I expect that a lot turns here on how one works best--but, in my case, I find it's usually a good idea to have an idea of which projects I want to write on before I have time set aside for it. My guess is that one way to "waste" a research leave is not to have any good idea what to work on, and then spend most of the leave reading and trying to come up with ideas. So, I guess I'd say: have a clear picture of which projects you want to work on and (roughly) how you think the projects should go. Then spend the research leave focusing on writing, etc.

But these are just my thoughts. What are yours? For obvious reasons, it would be great to hear tips from people who have had research leaves themselves (both tips on things to do, but also potentially things to avoid!). 

Comments

[mover]

I never had a pre-tenure leave, but I have had a number of sabbaticals. Each time I went somewhere special and better than the place I was teaching. I think the first two leaves were instrumental in me being able to move up and away from my last job, which was fine, except for the bad colleagues (colleagues who got even worse over time). So if you EVER want to be able to move, then I would suggest going somewhere that facilitates moving in the future.

[LH]

http://www.2018-2019.eurias-fp.eu/institutes - this is a list of institutes for advanced studies, many of which have junior fellowships. The list is not complete, and it looks like they don’t allow for the joint application procedure they had in the past any longer. The beauty of such fellowships is that you get help with resettling (the staff of the one’s I’ve been to are really nice and supportive).
Of course one risk here is that you might end up with a bunch of terribly interesting people but not in your field. But you can still get in touch with people in your field at the local universities.

[Mike Titelbaum]

One other thing to think about is how the timing of your leave interacts with tenure. If you are going to write a bunch of things during the leave, you want to get them out and hopefully published before your tenure case goes in!