Beginning Teaching Career - What Do You Wish You Had Known?

[writingprof]

How do you handle the inevitable moment when you are asked a question you are not prepared for and you don't want to lose credibility in the eyes of your students?

I've used the following more than once.  "That's such an important question that I'd like to cover it in greater detail at the beginning of our next class."

[Aster]

Find out what kinds of candy that the departmental secretaries like.

The departmental secretaries know how everything works, and where everything is. And they are also usually always available and findable during the work week.

[spork]

Uh, this might sound impolite but it is not intended that way. In five years you might not be marketable for a tenure-track position, should one exist. Is this a full-time lecturer position? What field? I can give you better advice with additional information.

I welcome advice! The field of academia has quite a few aspects that I don't understand regarding careers.

I am in the social sciences. I'm not able to relocate at the moment so I was limited in my job search to a small area. I felt fortunate to be offered a position at the local community college as an instructor. I thought this might be a good way to get some experience while I'm waiting to be able to relocate. In about five years, I will have much more flexibility in location and will be able to move wherever I get a job.

I am a little concerned that starting out at a community college might limit me in the future, but I was hoping universities might consider it a normal progression to go from grad school to a community college position temporarily until I gain some experience. Is this a mistake?

I'm going to assume that you were TAing while you were in a doctoral program and that you've completed a PhD in your field.

Long term considerations

1. If your five-year plan is to be in a tenure-track academic job in the USA, you will need to keep yourself as marketable as possible. Teaching is not going to make you marketable. Peer-reviewed publications make you marketable.

2. The general rule is that people generally land tenure-track jobs at institutions with prestige that is equivalent to or lower than the institution from which they obtained their PhD. If you have a PhD in economics from MIT or Chicago, you are competitive pretty much everywhere. If you have a PhD in anthropology from Karachi Online Institute of Social Sciences, you won't be competitive anywhere. It was recently mentioned on some other fora thread that graduates from six doctoral programs land sixty percent of the tenure-track jobs in some humanities field.

3. Your chances for a future tenure-track position are much stronger if your PhD is in a field with strong non-academic employment options (applicant pool is smaller); for example, if you're a psychologist who is ABA certified or an economist with a lot of programming abilities.

4. The number of tenure-track positions has been decreasing for decades. The standard business model used by most colleges and universities is unsustainable, and the pandemic has simply accelerated previously-existing trends. I do not recommend anyone in the social sciences plan on a full-time career in academia, unless, as mentioned above, you're in one of those special categories that is in high demand.

Medium term

1. Teaching part-time, or even full-time in a lecturer position, for more than a semester or two will not strengthen your application for a tenure-track position and may in fact weaken it. The more you teach in a given semester, the less time you will have to work on peer-reviewed publications. And in the minds of search committee members, the attractiveness of an applicant with a PhD who is not already in a tenure-track position goes down every year after the PhD is obtained.

Short term

1. Learn your community college's LMS. Design your fall courses as if they are 100% online, because if they aren't already, they very well could be by October. Make anything that happens in the classroom supplemental or optional to the actual guts of the course. At the bare minimum, your courses should be totally paperless.

2. Don't spend more time and effort grading a student's work than the student put into it. In fact you should spend far less. Rubrics are your friend.

3. Look for resources on good pedagogy, especially ones specific to your field. There is a very good chance that the professors in your doctoral program taught in the same way that their professors did and were quite ignorant of evidence-based teaching techniques.

4. Get copies of syllabi and talk with experienced instructors in your department about how they teach their courses so you have a general idea of what's expected. You might have seen while a TA that undergraduates at your alma mater had very different priorities and abilities than you had when you were in college. Community college students can be even more different -- many struggle with caring for family members, full-time jobs (or unemployment), language barriers, and/or inadequate academic preparation for college. 99.99% won't be going to grad school in your field. That raging theoretical debate in the literature when you were a doctoral student? Your students don't care about it and don't need to know about it.

[fishbrains]

Find out what kinds of candy that the departmental secretaries like.

The departmental secretaries know how everything works, and where everything is. And they are also usually always available and findable during the work week.

To piggyback onto this, don't openly piss and moan about the job. Keep a good public attitude about the college, the students, your peers, your job, and the support staff/administration even if you don't have a good internal attitude at times--and even if you think you are among friendly peers who share your gripes. People are listening, they will let you bellyache, and what they hear will come out and bite you in the butt. Also, at my CC, many departments are pretty tight with their sister departments at the public four-year school we feed into, and faculty reputations transfer just like our students.

And don't do stupid $hit on a college computer or on social media. Ever.

[Charlotte]

And don't do stupid $hit on a college computer or on social media. Ever.

Do you think it's necessary to have a social media presence? I am not active on the major social media websites at all (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) but I wonder if I should create some professional looking accounts with good content. Do you know what is generally preferred by universities? No social media at all or professional looking content on social media accounts?

[Charlotte]

I'm going to assume that you were TAing while you were in a doctoral program and that you've completed a PhD in your field.

Long term considerations

1. If your five-year plan is to be in a tenure-track academic job in the USA, you will need to keep yourself as marketable as possible. Teaching is not going to make you marketable. Peer-reviewed publications make you marketable.

2. The general rule is that people generally land tenure-track jobs at institutions with prestige that is equivalent to or lower than the institution from which they obtained their PhD. If you have a PhD in economics from MIT or Chicago, you are competitive pretty much everywhere. If you have a PhD in anthropology from Karachi Online Institute of Social Sciences, you won't be competitive anywhere. It was recently mentioned on some other fora thread that graduates from six doctoral programs land sixty percent of the tenure-track jobs in some humanities field.

3. Your chances for a future tenure-track position are much stronger if your PhD is in a field with strong non-academic employment options (applicant pool is smaller); for example, if you're a psychologist who is ABA certified or an economist with a lot of programming abilities.

4. The number of tenure-track positions has been decreasing for decades. The standard business model used by most colleges and universities is unsustainable, and the pandemic has simply accelerated previously-existing trends. I do not recommend anyone in the social sciences plan on a full-time career in academia, unless, as mentioned above, you're in one of those special categories that is in high demand.

Medium term

1. Teaching part-time, or even full-time in a lecturer position, for more than a semester or two will not strengthen your application for a tenure-track position and may in fact weaken it. The more you teach in a given semester, the less time you will have to work on peer-reviewed publications. And in the minds of search committee members, the attractiveness of an applicant with a PhD who is not already in a tenure-track position goes down every year after the PhD is obtained.

Short term

1. Learn your community college's LMS. Design your fall courses as if they are 100% online, because if they aren't already, they very well could be by October. Make anything that happens in the classroom supplemental or optional to the actual guts of the course. At the bare minimum, your courses should be totally paperless.

2. Don't spend more time and effort grading a student's work than the student put into it. In fact you should spend far less. Rubrics are your friend.

3. Look for resources on good pedagogy, especially ones specific to your field. There is a very good chance that the professors in your doctoral program taught in the same way that their professors did and were quite ignorant of evidence-based teaching techniques.

4. Get copies of syllabi and talk with experienced instructors in your department about how they teach their courses so you have a general idea of what's expected. You might have seen while a TA that undergraduates at your alma mater had very different priorities and abilities than you had when you were in college. Community college students can be even more different -- many struggle with caring for family members, full-time jobs (or unemployment), language barriers, and/or inadequate academic preparation for college. 99.99% won't be going to grad school in your field. That raging theoretical debate in the literature when you were a doctoral student? Your students don't care about it and don't need to know about it.

I very much appreciate you taking the time to reply! Could I pick your brain a little more?

Yes, I do have a PhD, but it is definitely not from a top program. My school isn't at the bottom on the list but I would probably describe it as a decent program with nothing to get excited about. I will never be a good candidate for a position at a top school.

With the job prospects looking so bleak, I have wondered if it might be more realistic to focus on positions at community colleges. The downside to me is lack of support for research, but I could always do that on my own. Not the ideal place for research but it is doable to some degree.

I really enjoy teaching and I did TA some courses at a community college so I have some limited experience with the students there. I initially was surprised by them, but I think I managed to get more realistic expectations of them after that first semester. (My first semester I was far too hard on them grading and my next semester I was far too easy! I leveled out a little after that!)

If I set my goals more towards teaching at a community college and researching on my own, do you think a full time career is possible?

I am getting graduate hours in another related area which makes me able to teach two disciplines. I was afraid that would make me look unfocused to universities, but thought it would strengthen my application to community colleges.

While of course I dream of getting a tenure track position at a nice university and being able to teach and research, I know that may not be possible. Do I work towards that with the knowledge that I may not reach it or should I lower my aim a little and make myself more marketable to a community college?

[polly_mer]

If you're really doing a CC career, then your research should be in teaching to the demographics served by the CCs you're targeting and how to best support those students.  Teaching at a CC is not a small fraction of your time if you're serious about it.

In your shoes plans planning for the future, I'd be putting a lot of effort into applying those research skills into getting a non-academic job where you would be doing the interesting enough research/analysis every day.  It may not be publishable in the academic journals, but it may be better to be paid acceptably well to do some other job than to keep resenting the teaching and the pay for teaching when your heart is elsewhere.

[fishbrains]

And don't do stupid $hit on a college computer or on social media. Ever.

Do you think it's necessary to have a social media presence? I am not active on the major social media websites at all (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) but I wonder if I should create some professional looking accounts with good content. Do you know what is generally preferred by universities? No social media at all or professional looking content on social media accounts?

I don't know what the universities want. I was speaking to the stupid things people--especially adjuncts who think they are working their way to a full-time position--have done to take themselves out of the picture:

• Posting excerpts from student work on Facebook to make fun of it
• Badmouthing administrators (once by name) over silly stuff
• Badmouthing the dean who assigns classes and chairs the search committees
• Suggesting that CC faculty just have no where else to go and are "stuck" at the CC level
• Suggesting CC students are stupid and shouldn't be in college at all

This kind of stupid stuff has affected some promotion and tenure discussions as well. It's rarely the political stuff that causes concern. Sorry if I'm taking the thread a little off-topic there.

And polly is correct. Teaching a 5/5 load while advising students, developing curriculum, and performing committee work tends to negate any research time you think you are going to enjoy at the CC level. And God forbid you are a one-person department.

[Vkw10]

And don't do stupid $hit on a college computer or on social media. Ever.

Do you think it's necessary to have a social media presence? I am not active on the major social media websites at all (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) but I wonder if I should create some professional looking accounts with good content. Do you know what is generally preferred by universities? No social media at all or professional looking content on social media accounts?

Universities generally don't care about faculty having social media presence, unless that social media presence creates controversy or reflects poorly on the university. Some faculty use social media effectively to  make professional connections and publicize their research. I wouldn't go to the effort of creating and maintaining social media presence just to appeal to university.

In your shoes plans planning for the future, I'd be putting a lot of effort into applying those research skills into getting a non-academic job where you would be doing the interesting enough research/analysis every day.  It may not be publishable in the academic journals, but it may be better to be paid acceptably well to do some other job than to keep resenting the teaching and the pay for teaching when your heart is elsewhere.

People differ on this issue. Polly spent some time in academia, but eventually left for a non-academic position  where she's well-compensated for doing the research she loves. I enjoy teaching and research equally, so I gave myself five years post-Ph.D. to find a long-term position. If I hadn't found the academic job I wanted within five years, I'd have gone back to high school teaching, because I like teaching.

As both Polly and fishbrains observed, teaching CC full-time is hard work. During your first year at your CC position (congratulations on landing full-time work!), try to do some research but also think about what will make you happy long-term. A stable CC teaching position with summers mostly free would be a nightmare for some and a joy for others. It's important to have a realistic view of what's feasible and what will make you happy, so you don't drift into a career path because you're too busy to think.

[spork]

I'm going to assume that you were TAing while you were in a doctoral program and that you've completed a PhD in your field.

Long term considerations

1. If your five-year plan is to be in a tenure-track academic job in the USA, you will need to keep yourself as marketable as possible. Teaching is not going to make you marketable. Peer-reviewed publications make you marketable.

2. The general rule is that people generally land tenure-track jobs at institutions with prestige that is equivalent to or lower than the institution from which they obtained their PhD. If you have a PhD in economics from MIT or Chicago, you are competitive pretty much everywhere. If you have a PhD in anthropology from Karachi Online Institute of Social Sciences, you won't be competitive anywhere. It was recently mentioned on some other fora thread that graduates from six doctoral programs land sixty percent of the tenure-track jobs in some humanities field.

3. Your chances for a future tenure-track position are much stronger if your PhD is in a field with strong non-academic employment options (applicant pool is smaller); for example, if you're a psychologist who is ABA certified or an economist with a lot of programming abilities.

4. The number of tenure-track positions has been decreasing for decades. The standard business model used by most colleges and universities is unsustainable, and the pandemic has simply accelerated previously-existing trends. I do not recommend anyone in the social sciences plan on a full-time career in academia, unless, as mentioned above, you're in one of those special categories that is in high demand.

Medium term

1. Teaching part-time, or even full-time in a lecturer position, for more than a semester or two will not strengthen your application for a tenure-track position and may in fact weaken it. The more you teach in a given semester, the less time you will have to work on peer-reviewed publications. And in the minds of search committee members, the attractiveness of an applicant with a PhD who is not already in a tenure-track position goes down every year after the PhD is obtained.

Short term

1. Learn your community college's LMS. Design your fall courses as if they are 100% online, because if they aren't already, they very well could be by October. Make anything that happens in the classroom supplemental or optional to the actual guts of the course. At the bare minimum, your courses should be totally paperless.

2. Don't spend more time and effort grading a student's work than the student put into it. In fact you should spend far less. Rubrics are your friend.

3. Look for resources on good pedagogy, especially ones specific to your field. There is a very good chance that the professors in your doctoral program taught in the same way that their professors did and were quite ignorant of evidence-based teaching techniques.

4. Get copies of syllabi and talk with experienced instructors in your department about how they teach their courses so you have a general idea of what's expected. You might have seen while a TA that undergraduates at your alma mater had very different priorities and abilities than you had when you were in college. Community college students can be even more different -- many struggle with caring for family members, full-time jobs (or unemployment), language barriers, and/or inadequate academic preparation for college. 99.99% won't be going to grad school in your field. That raging theoretical debate in the literature when you were a doctoral student? Your students don't care about it and don't need to know about it.

[. . .]

With the job prospects looking so bleak, I have wondered if it might be more realistic to focus on positions at community colleges. The downside to me is lack of support for research, but I could always do that on my own. Not the ideal place for research but it is doable to some degree.

[. . .]

While of course I dream of getting a tenure track position at a nice university and being able to teach and research, I know that may not be possible. Do I work towards that with the knowledge that I may not reach it or should I lower my aim a little and make myself more marketable to a community college?

There are actually two different questions here:

1. Where am I most competitive for a tenure-track position?
2. Will I be able to do research?

The answer to (1) is highly dependent on one's PhD program reputation, academic discipline, and publications; the job's geographic location; and the academic labor market. At a major state campus, not necessarily the flagship, say Arkansas State University, faculty are typically a mix of people who attended very top-tier PhD programs and well-regarded flagship state universities, often in the region where the job is located (because they are familiar with/like the area). For community colleges, the PhD program prestige level, publications, etc. is lower and the local-ness is higher among faculty.

While community colleges will probably be the sector of higher ed that is most resilient to the pandemic, they too will see their budgets gutted by state governments over the next couple of years. As for the private non-profits, an institution with less than 2,000 undergraduates is facing a very uphill battle for long-term survival, and any of them with less than 1,000 undergraduates and an endowment of less than ~ $1 billion probably won't be operating in another 5-10 years. This is all a long-winded statement of "the job market has been terrible for a long time, especially for people whose PhDs are not from a top 10 program in their field, and conditions will deteriorate even further because of the pandemic."

As for (2), I have worked at institutions with teaching loads ranging from 5-4 to 3-3 and -- I'm in the social sciences -- the only research I've been able to conduct is SoTL research. Any significantly-sized research project that requires lab space, recruitment of subjects outside the university, etc., whether in natural or social sciences, requires external grant money, which is harder and harder to get. Biology faculty teaching 3-3, 4-3, or possibly even 5-4 can sometimes get money and buy out of part of their teaching loads, but that's basically unheard of among, for example, political science faculty. The SoTL research you might be able to accomplish for free by meshing it with your teaching is almost certainly not going to make you a competitive applicant for any job other than one at a community college.

My ultimate advice? Think of your upcoming community college teaching job as something that pays the bills (maybe) while you look for a non-academic career that makes use of the research and writing skills you picked up in graduate school. For inspiration, look at Sarah Kendzior, who didn't land a tenure-track position after getting a PhD:

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/08/2012820102749246453.html

https://www.cosmopolitan.com/career/a8578596/sarah-kendzior-political-journalist-get-that-life/

[Morden]

The SoTL research you might be able to accomplish for free by meshing it with your teaching is almost certainly not going to make you a competitive applicant for any job other than one at a community college.

We're a public undergraduate university, and we've hired TT faculty with SoTL focused research agendas--esp. in sciences and health sciences because we don't have labs that support disciplinary-based research. SoTL research is a harder sell in Social Sciences and Humanities.

[spork]

The SoTL research you might be able to accomplish for free by meshing it with your teaching is almost certainly not going to make you a competitive applicant for any job other than one at a community college.

We're a public undergraduate university, and we've hired TT faculty with SoTL focused research agendas--esp. in sciences and health sciences because we don't have labs that support disciplinary-based research. SoTL research is a harder sell in Social Sciences and Humanities.

Flipping this on its head (paraphrasing): we can't hire people who do disciplinary research (as traditionally defined) in natural sciences because we don't have the necessary institutional infrastructure. That's why we hire people who do SoTL research. But this happens in natural and health sciences. Not in social sciences and humanities, which insist on disciplinary research.

More fundamental question: what's the budgetary outlook for hiring tenure-track faculty in the social sciences?

[mamselle]

Sorry, translation help?

What's SoTL?

I'm having trouble guessing....

M.

[polly_mer]

Sorry, translation help?

What's SoTL?

I'm having trouble guessing....

M.

Science of teaching and learning.  In the circles I visit, a related endeavor is discipline-based educational research.

[marshwiggle]

Sorry, translation help?

What's SoTL?

I'm having trouble guessing....

M.

Science of Teaching and Learning

In other words, evidence-based investigation of what pedagogical techniques are actually measurably effective.