Using a critical ethnography approach, this manuscript seeks to explore and analyze the authors' experiences at their institutions when they began their tenure-track journey at their teaching institutions. This manuscript seeks to provide specific strategies that tenure-track faculty trained at research intensive universities have used to negotiate the requirements of teaching, scholarship, and service at undergraduate and master's-granting institutions. Initially, we suggested four themes were salient in our experiences: Contracts and criteria; access to resources; interacting with students; and the importance of finding balance. After our discussion at the TALS 2020 conference, two themes emerged as being important to the audience: interactions with students and finding balance. With the experiences from this research, it can inform practices for academic institutional practices and preparation of doctoral students, with a research-intensive background, to enter academia at a teaching-focused institution. As well, it provides future recommendations for continued research in this area.