Year Two Began Anew…
…and it’s kicking my ass, as you can probably tell from my lack of posting. Last October, I posted on how I was diving right into the deep end (see: What’s the difference between 18 and 27?) because my feeling was that academia is sink or swim and those that can cope will, and those that can’t cope won’t. I was most decidedly in the camp that thought they could cope and things would be easier once I got a grant or two under my belt. This led to a, shall we say, promiscuous year applying for any and all proposal solicitations that were remotely in my area (~10 NSF-length proposals, and ~10 smaller opportunities). I wanted to make sure I got some funding in the first year to get off to a good start. It turns out that when you get more than 1 or 2 grants under your belt,…
This class is a joke
Next week, I’ll be finalizing the syllabus for my fall classes. I am again teaching the university studies classes for the electrical engineers. My goal in teaching last year was to help my students develop good study skills and awareness about their learning preferences. I also attempted to teach them some STEM specific skills, like keeping a lab notebook and learning some basic programming, along with helping them try to understand what they were getting themselves into by pursuing a major in engineering. However, in the past two weeks, I’ve been inundated with requests from various people around campus. “Can I give a presentation on X?” where X may or may not be of interest to campus students, especially engineers. I have to admit that this is getting rather annoying as I have a mostly full curriculum. There are times here and there where maybe I have 15 minutes where…
Training Professors to be Educators
The Atlantic had an interesting article entitled The Forgotten Student: Has Higher Education Stiffed its Most Important Client? which parallels a recent Op-Ed in the NYTimes on why one former executive left Goldman Sachs because they lost sight of their client. I remember reading the NYTimes Op-Ed over breakfast and I thought to myself, “I really wouldn’t want to work in a place that wasn’t looking out for the best interests of their client.” After reading the article in The Atlantic, I think the veil has been completely lifted from my eyes. I guess I should explain that. This is not to say that everything in the article was totally foreign for me and that I have never thought about some of those things. However, I never really thought of it from the view that administrators might be failing their clients. For example, there’s discussions here and here on college…
ZOMG! I Haz Survived!
If you can’t tell from the title or the picture, the semester is over! I’ve made it through a 4-month whirlwind of activity, craziness, anxiety, and, not to toot my own horn, success. Going into this semester, I thought I had a good idea of what it took to be tenure track material (I mean, I got the job didn’t I?!?). That last month though, was a little rough at times. All in all, I think everything went about as well as it could go for my first semester teaching. I’ve read some of the comments from my class survey (I’ll discuss more in a later post) and many were of the flavor, “I was a little apprehensive about this class with a new prof and given that this was his first time teaching, it was a lot better than expected and things went well.” That’s encouraging for the future. While…
Open Ended Questions
One of the skills that engineers are required to have is critical thinking and the ability to quickly assess and analyze a situation. [Good] Engineers are often brought in to situations because they have a certain background or have worked on a particular topic before but this new situation is slightly different than their previous experience. However, the time to get immersed in a topic is limited and often, they’re asked for their opinion the same time that they’re learning about the new topic. This is difficult situation because the engineer often doesn’t have all of the pieces to put together a complete puzzle. However, they often have enough to get a clear picture of the situation to assess accordingly. Because this is a skill needed by engineers, one question for engineering educators is “how can this skill be taught?”. The best method that I can think of that can…
Losing your voice
In a couple weeks, I plan to spend some time with my students on writing lab reports. Both in science and engineering, students spend a pretty significant amount of time writing reports (or they should!). I decided this would be a part of my curriculum after remembering my experience teaching circuits labs the first time. I was amazed at how many students had made it that far without having a good understanding of how to write a lab report. I ended up spending a good chunk of lab time trying to teach this particular skill. The reason I think this is important is not only for academic success but for success in a job. As an engineer, you have to write a lot of reports. Your superiors have to explain why they’re paying you, so you need to be able to justify your existence. Education in this realm, however, has…
Soul Sucking Training
We all know there are plenty of issues with meetings in the workplace. And Allison Green over at Ask a Manager even did a piece on making sure your meetings are productive. But lately I’ve been thinking about another kind of work meeting: the training seminar. Whenever a procedure’s being changed ever poor engineer, planner, and specialist often has to sit through an hour of training to learn what the new process is. One of my major beefs is that often training is not customized. Sometimes you end up in the same room with individuals who use the software for hours every day to its full capabilities and others who are not familiar with it at all. The way a designer looks at software can be very different from the way someone in configuration or manufacturing might use that same software. One might be overly familiarized with a certain side…
The Economics of Academia (Part 2)
Last week, I started to respond to a reader’s question: Why, with the high cost of university tuition, can’t schools have teach-only professors? With a ratio of 20:1 in the classroom and a rate of 100/hour (roughly), why do professors still need to get research dollars? Is it economically feasible to have teaching-only professors? Why doesn’t this happen more? Why do universities have to rely on research funding to stay afloat? We were talking about the demands on researchers and how that prevents better teaching (because so much time is involved chasing funding) and were questioning why not just give up the research side of things? In Part 1, I answered the questions from the perspective of a community college and my estimated numbers simply did not add up to make this feasible. Cherish jumped in to the foray, essentially saying that research and teaching go hand-in-hand. I commented on how…
Why Research?
A couple days ago, GEARS decided to tackle the following set of questions: Why, with the high cost of university tuition, can’t schools have teach-only professors? With a ratio of 20:1 in the classroom and a rate of 100/hour (roughly), why do professors still need to get research dollars? Is it economically feasible to have teaching-only professors? Why doesn’t this happen more? Why do universities have to rely on research funding to stay afloat? We were talking about the demands on researchers and how that prevents better teaching (because so much time is involved chasing funding) and were questioning why not just give up the research side of things? There are a lot of ways to tackle these questions, but I’d like to make a few different points. (I’d also like to mention that GEARS discussed the teaching school alternatives, so I don’t plan on hitting that point again.) The…
The Economics of Academia (Part 1)
A question was posed my way on the economics of academia. The question(s) asked are as follows: Why, with the high cost of university tuition, can’t schools have teach-only professors? With a ratio of 20:1 in the classroom and a rate of 100/hour (roughly), why do professors still need to get research dollars? Is it economically feasible to have teaching-only professors? Why doesn’t this happen more? Why do universities have to rely on research funding to stay afloat? We were talking about the demands on researchers and how that prevents better teaching (because so much time is involved chasing funding) and were questioning why not just give up the research side of things? Wow, that’s a loaded set of questions. There is, actually, an easy answer to this. In short, we have institutes that do specialize in teaching. Community colleges and technical colleges specialize in teaching rather than research. If…