I'm a tenure track professor at a predominately undergraduate institution (PUI). Current grad students often ask me what's the most important thing I've learned about my job. In my opinion, the most helpful thing I've learned in my first two years here is to adjust expectations.
I've adjusted my expectations about scholarship. With my undergraduates only spending four to six hours a week on research, I have had to recalibrate with respect to research productivity. Research tasks that would take me a week to accomplish might take my students all semester. I don't anticipate submitting a paper before June.
I have also lowered my expectations about the strength of incoming students. I've found that I can't take for granted that my freshmen are coming into college with the math and writing skills that I would expect. More time is taken in the first semester to bring all students up to speed on written communication and problem solving. Would it be awesome to just teach to the top 10% of my class? Of course. Would it get me tenure? I doubt it.
Perhaps the biggest adjustment is to the state of funding. My start up funds were not too terrible, but I can't bank them for next year. I have to spend everything up and just hope I can get enough preliminary results to warrant a Big Funding Agency to decide that I deserve to be in the special top 13% group (or whatever the funding line is). There are essentially no internal funds here, so I have to get outside funding. This is a daunting enough of a task at a research institution, let alone at a PUI. And so I've learned to not be surprised by the lack of internal and external funds here. What if I run out of money next year? Me stressing about the worst case scenario certainly won't help my undergrads be more productive. All I can do is keep truckin'.
Now, should I passively accept subpar students or a paucity of funding? Of course not.
But it certainly helps me maintain my sanity if I can adjust my expectations for the time being.
3 comments:
I have to admit that I've sometimes gotten frustrated with the pace of some of the undergrads, that I just simply spend a few days in the lab and get done whatever was taking them the whole semester to do. That being said, I'm now very picky about the undergraduates I let into my lab, so now the pace definitely improved.
I have been meaning to post a book review for a while now for the book "Lives in Science: How Institutions Affect Academic Careers" by Joseph Hermanowitz. It's a longitudinal study (tracks a group of 60 physicists over 10 years) and studies how the level of institutional support for research correlates with the faculty personal fulfillment. The divides the universities into elite (strongly focused on research, famous private unis), pluralist (emphasize teaching and research, large state universities) and communitarian (strong emphasis on teaching, most PUI's fall under this category). Besides being a serious sociological study, it is a good read. It explores how people's expectations of themselves and their institutions change over time. Many people at PUI describe what you are facing -- a serious adjustment in personal and professional goals. On the upside, people at PUI they are the happiest of the lot once they retire (elites are the most miserable)!
The funding is indeed the most depressing aspect of our job. I really admire people who are successful at getting funding and work with undergrads alone. Kudos to you!
Memo to UR: I see four spammers in this thread. Time to put those new blogger comment tools to work. I think they work well, but I've also tightened the time window before comments become moderated so junk doesn't slip into older posts.
Regarding "I have also lowered my expectations about the strength of incoming students. I've found that I can't take for granted that my freshmen are coming into college with the math and writing skills that I would expect."
Were those expectations based on the median SAT scores for your PUI, or based on past experiences at other schools? If it was based on their test scores, you could be seeing something I have come to expect: students who have been taught to take placement tests in HS but can't think or solve actual problems. And since our fields are about thinking and solving problems, this is a BIG problem.
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