John Gabrosek is a professor in the department of statistics at Grand Valley State University, where he has taught since earning his PhD from Iowa State University in 1999. From 2010–2012, he was editor of the Journal of Statistics Education.
Del Scott recently completed six years as chair of the department of statistics at Brigham Young University (BYU). He previously served as assistant academic vice president responsible for computing at BYU, and has also served as associate chair and on various departmental and college rank and status committees.
Before taking an academic position, it is important to have an understanding of the culture and expectations of the department, college, and university. Unless otherwise specified in the offer letter, a new faculty member is a candidate for a tenured position. In the third year (usually), a candidate submits a portfolio for review at the department, college, and university levels. After a successful third-year review, a candidate can look forward to the tenure and promotion review (usually in the sixth year) at the department, college, and university levels.
Different institutions and colleges or departments within an institution can have diverse expectations of faculty. Sometimes, the written expectations and the read-between-the-lines expectations differ. The best way to understand an institution’s expectations is a frank and open discussion with the department chair during the recruiting process.
Questions you might ask during the interview process include the following:
- What role do the faculty play in making major decisions on curriculum, research, teaching schedules, etc.?
- How does the institution value teaching, research, and service in tenure and promotion decisions? What is expected in the annual review?
- How are effective teaching, research, and service measured?
- What department, college, and university support systems and processes are in place to help with new faculty mentoring (e.g., grant writing, teaching improvement, etc.)?
- What is the success rate of faculty within the department and college on attaining tenure and promotion?
- Is the student body diverse in background, race, geography, etc.?
- What do graduates of the department and college do after graduation? What types of jobs do they receive or graduate schools do they attend?
The answers to these questions provide you with valuable knowledge about the prospective job. They also demonstrate to those doing the interviewing that you aren’t looking for just any job, but that you have thought about the type of position that interests you.
All academic job seekers are justifiably keen on salary negotiations. In addition, it is perfectly legitimate to negotiate items such as teaching assignments, lab space, TA/RA help (or undergraduate student help), computing equipment and software, books, and alternate assignment or release time. Many departments have flexibility in areas in which the school retains ownership and that do not imply a long-term commitment. Salary and benefit commitments are often less flexible because of the potential impact to the existing faculty salary/benefit structure.
General Expectations for New Faculty
At Grand Valley State University (GVSU), new faculty are expected to teach three three-credit courses each semester (a one class reduced load per semester) of the first year without service obligations. The “extra” time afforded the new faculty member is meant to help them acclimate to the institution. There is an expectation that faculty will engage in some scholarly activity (often working on papers arising from dissertation work).
At Brigham Young University (BYU), new faculty teach one class the first two or three semesters (a one class reduced load per semester) and engage in scholarly activities that complete or continue dissertation research. Prior to an assistant professor’s third-year review, they are expected to demonstrate that they can teach a full load (two classes per semester) and carry out a quality research program.
Successful candidates at either institution must demonstrate the ability to teach service, major, and graduate (at BYU) courses. There is a department, college, and university expectation that a candidate for continuing faculty status (tenure) and the rank of associate professor has created a portfolio that documents the candidate’s path toward being an independent researcher and an excellent teacher.
New faculty members at PhD-granting or research institutions are expected to demonstrate the ability to receive external grants that directly fund their research. This is especially true for biostatistics programs. Teaching is usually one class per year or semester, but primarily in direct support of the graduate program. This type of teaching load provides sufficient blocks of time for the new hire to devote to scholarly activities. The expected products from this research time are manuscripts and grants that are submitted to the appropriate publication venues and funding agencies.
During the ASA’s department chair meetings, academic representatives from research institutions often make statements such as, “It is important that a candidate for tenure be a good teacher, but they must demonstrate the ability to publish and receive adequate external funding to support their research or they will not be granted tenure!” What is important to realize about academic scholarship is that it is a continual process of research, writing, and review. If the major expectation is scholarly productivity, then external recognition of your research is a primary goal. This is usually accomplished through publication in top-tier journals and receipt of external funding that directly supports research. Teaching is an important task that you should learn how to do well, but you must demonstrate your ability to do first-class scholarship.
Surviving the First Semester
The first semester for any new faculty member can be challenging, especially if the person is coming straight from a PhD program. Having spent the past several years focused almost exclusively on theory and applications of thesis work, a new PhD is suddenly asked to take that intense focus and diffuse it over multiple activities. If the new PhD successfully defends in July, this gives her about one month to move, get her office set up (there are always computer and software issues), attend new faculty training, become familiar with a new work environment, and continue to work on research. That is enough to exhaust anyone. And we haven’t even mentioned the most important new aspect: preparing to teach!
Following are a few suggestions for surviving the first semester:
Set realistic expectations for yourself. In the first year, many institutions provide release time for acclimation. Use that time wisely. A reduced teaching load is meant to permit completion of thesis research and help you prepare for new teaching responsibilities. You need to get some of those almost-done manuscripts submitted. At the end of the semester, it is wise to report to your chair how you used this release time.
Minimize service. The most difficult thing for many new faculty members to do is to say “No.” If you find yourself unable to say no and are being asked to do too many service initiatives, talk to your department chair about what you should focus on. If permitted, use the chair as an excuse as to why you must say no.
Lean on your colleagues for research. Share your research with colleagues. You can use their comments to avoid mistakes that lengthen the manuscript review process and make external funding unlikely. Ask to visit some of your colleague’s research meetings. This will help you learn about the department research culture. It also will give you an opportunity to observe and learn from experienced faculty members. Colleagues can help you find quality students, funding opportunities, etc.
Lean on your colleagues for teaching. Most new PhDs enter situations in which existing faculty members have taught the courses they will be teaching. Faculty members are often happy to allow you to use and adapt their teaching materials. Ask the last person who taught the course if he would be willing to share teaching materials. There is no need to reinvent the wheel every time you teach a class. What you should do is add value to the materials you receive by creating new examples, test questions, assignments and homework, lecture notes, etc. Some departments have multi-section courses with common tests, labs, and other materials. These courses have you share the workload with seasoned veterans.
Set realistic expectations for students. A new PhD is coming out of an intensive, highly focused experience in which they were surrounded by extremely bright people who find statistics exhilarating. Guess what? Not all undergraduates share that focus or passion. As a new teacher, you can’t expect graduate-level work from a first-semester sophomore taking your class to fulfill a general education requirement. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have high expectations; you should. However, your expectations need to be tempered by reality.
Make sure you create a dialog with faculty members who have taught the class. They can help you avoid pitfalls and deal with problems that do arise. In setting expectations for students, a good syllabus that defines the rules as regards attendance, missed assignments, grading, when you answer email, office hours, and so on will minimize problems. Pay particular attention to setting a reasonable and enforceable policy on the use of new technologies such as mobile phones, tablets, and social media in the classroom.
Solicit feedback. In Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, author Ernest Boyer recommends the use of the word scholarship in all we do in the academy. He suggests attributes that all scholarship shares, including a clearly defined goal and peer review. These components are satisfied through the natural consequence of the journal review and grant application process.
However, peer review of teaching does not have a natural process, but must be explicitly coordinated through the department. Even though it is your first semester, evaluation of your teaching will occur. It is not wise to make end-of-semester student evaluations the only word on your teaching. It is good practice to seek preliminary student feedback at about the five-week point in the semester. This feedback serves the following three purposes:
- It conveys to the students that you care about their learning
- It conveys the message to students that you care about your teaching and you value their opinions
- It allows you to make small adjustments that might lead to a better experience for both you and the students (e.g., students might point out that you are using too many abbreviations or acronyms that are confusing them)
In addition, you should actively seek peer visitation of your classroom. The key to this evaluation is that it provides formative feedback. Often, the university’s faculty teaching center will offer to have someone from outside your department visit your classroom. This helps divorce the evaluation process for tenure from this early feedback on teaching.
Thriving in Semester Two and Onward
Toward the end of the first semester, take some time to reflect on all aspects of your career (scholarship, teaching, and service.) Some questions to ask yourself include the following:
- What went well?
- Where can I improve?
- How can I use my time more effectively?
- What would I change?
It is wise to schedule a meeting with your chair prior to the second semester. Report on the first semester and your goals and expectations for the next semester. Ask your chair to provide good formative feedback that you can incorporate into your improvement plans.
You will need to prepare for your second semester teaching assignment. Incorporate changes based on feedback from your mentors, students, and others that can be made realistically in the short time between semesters. Do not try to change everything at once! Incremental change is much more likely to be successful.
At year’s end, you should have a more extensive meeting with the chair to discuss the first year and to plan for the second. Build on the skills you brought to your position, new skills developed during the first year, and reflection on your experiences. The goal is to make the upcoming year an even better experience. Develop a plan to implement changes that will help you evolve into the scholar, researcher, teacher, professor, and colleague you wish to become.
We cannot make recommendations about the second year without a statement about summer activities. Take time to reflect, modify, adapt, and plan so your third semester on the job is your best yet. Your first summer on the job provides big blocks of time to develop teaching materials, engage in research, and participate in conferences and meetings. Engage in these activities, but be sure to take time to recharge yourself.
An important aspect of the third semester is that one year after the completion of the semester, you will submit an academic portfolio for your third-year review. The portfolio contains not only examples of your scholarship and teaching materials to date, but also demonstrates your potential to improve your teaching and publish quality manuscripts and receive external funding.
Words of Encouragement
The three main areas of an academic’s life are teaching, research, and service. We close with a few words of wisdom about each.
Teaching
Great teachers can be developed. It simply isn’t good enough to say, “Well, that’s how I was taught.” Sorry, you are a professional teacher as well as researcher. You have to do better than that. Fortunately, there are numerous resources available through the ASA and other organizations to assist the teacher of statistics. Just a few are the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education, the Journal of Statistics Education, and the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education.
There are additional helpful commercial resources. One that provides solutions to a variety of teaching questions is the Magna 20 Minute Mentor. The short 20-minute presentations cover topics such as learning student names, learning from student ratings, and practical strategies to help new faculty thrive. In addition, many universities have a faculty teaching center with helpful resources.
When you teach a new course, it will not go perfectly every class session. Guess what? Even after you have taught for 20 plus years, it still won’t go perfectly. You don’t have to be the perfect teacher/faculty member. You have the freedom to try, reflect, modify, and grow. That’s the beauty of the academic life: We get to experiment, collect data, and modify hypotheses.
Instead of making wholesale changes in your teaching approach, try incremental change. Maybe you want to include more active learning in your classes. You might begin with adding a couple group activities to one course. Reflect on how well those activities worked. Make changes as needed. Over time, you might find your entire approach to teaching changing.
Students have a role to play in evaluating teaching. After all, their tuition dollars help us to stay in business. But many student comments are not helpful. Read the evaluations, but don’t become prisoner to them. You may be a tough grader; that’s okay. As long as you reflect and have a reason for what you do that is based on sound teaching principles, continue the practice.
But, let’s be honest. Students do provide useful feedback. When students voice a common concern over a couple of semesters, it is your duty as a professional to reflect on what is being said. Maybe they have a good suggestion that will make the classroom a better experience for them and you. Just like research, scholarly writing, and consulting involve skills at which we become better with practice, so too does teaching. You owe it to yourself and your students to become the best teacher you can be.
Research
No matter where you take that academic position, there will be an expectation of scholarly activity that may include publishing papers, obtaining grants, presenting at conferences, etc. As mentioned previously, it is important for you to know the expectations for your institution before you take the job. Is there a paper number expectation? Does the institution require publications in top-tier statistics journals like JASA, Biometrics, etc.? Are papers published in non-statistics journals (perhaps from consulting projects) valued? Are papers about teaching and curriculum valued? It is not wise to invest time in scholarly work that will not be valued at tenure early in your career (even if you feel the work should be valued).
The first place to go for scholarly work is your thesis. You are a recognized expert in that area of statistics (at least expert enough to have obtained a PhD). Leverage that for publications, grants, and new directions in research. This should become part of your research agenda—a plan for your scholarly activity. It is wise to develop such a plan in conjunction with a mentor who has been successful in attaining tenure/promotion. Develop a plan with realistic goals and measurable benchmarks. Realize that you can branch out to new areas of research or applications. Clearly, if you are at an institution that grants a PhD in statistics or a related field, graduate students will help to spur your research agenda.
Service
Most academics want to please and try new things. We are curious people with a healthy dose of ego. We think we can add value to most causes. However, agreeing to do 20 things when you only have time for five means 20 things will be done poorly, including the five you really wanted to do. New faculty may feel pressured to say “yes” to all opportunities. Resist that pressure.
Find someone within the department (maybe the chair, maybe not) who you can speak with about time pressure issues. Certainly there are tasks that any department, college, and university needs done that aren’t particularly fun to do. You should contribute to these. But, you don’t have to do them all. When you feel that time pressure, have a conversation that is open and honest with your chair. Your department chair probably does not even know all the service activities you are doing. Educating that person is your responsibility.
One neat trick (if you can pull it off) is to find activities that touch on at least two of teaching, research, and service. Perhaps you can serve your university by being part of a sustainability committee. You might also teach an environmental statistics course. And, you may be doing research in the analysis of remote sensing data for the study of pollution problems and climate change. When these opportunities arise that allow you to combine multiple facets of a professor’s life, jump on them.
Summary
Don’t expect perfection from yourself in teaching, research, or anything else. The academic life can be a wonderful life. You get the opportunity to work with colleagues on exciting, cutting-edge research. You also have the opportunity to enrich the lives of your students. It is extremely satisfying to hear a student say, “I thought I was gonna’ hate this class, but I actually enjoyed it.” When that student decides to become a statistics major or minor, it brings you a justifiable sense of pride. While there can be times of stress, there are also times of great joy and satisfaction. Hopefully, this article has provided some useful tips on making the most of the early years of your academic career.
Leave a Reply