Teaching and Research

There was a really great article Thursday on the general topic of post docs and their view of what a PI does. It links to several articles that are also worth reading. See them here, here, and here. The last one, by MsPhd, got me into this thread. She also is writing some interesting things about the differences between different levels of R1 programs from the perspective of someone in the bio-med area.

Writing as someone who has done both a long-term soft-money gig (with all of the grants etc that go with that) and the big-time teaching gig (now), I think Prof in Training only left out the service part. Many of the points made in that article were made in the tenure at an R1 article I wrote a few years ago, as well as in a more recent set of comments about an IHE advice article, not to mention another one, commenting on an IHE article about a bad tenure-seeking experience.

And if you want to read even more from me ...

I'll just add one little thing that falls in the dark void between service and teaching: service related to academics when accreditation "reaffirmation" time rolls around. Not only do you have to do all of the things mentioned under teaching (hours of prep for each lecture, evaluating how each lecture worked, writing exams as well as grading them and evaluating how well they did what they were supposed to do), and continue to do them even after 5 or 10 years, but you might have to develop "learning outcomes" and "learning assessments" for courses you and others teach, written like you were a frigging Ed.D bureaucrat. If the words "quality enhancement" don't mean anything to you, ask around. (Oh crap. I just googled "Quality Enhancement Program" and got 3.8 MILLION hits.) Just don't whisper those words (quality enhancement) quietly while standing behind an administrator. Might kill them. Learning Outcomes are going to be the big thing the next time around. We are starting to work on them and we aren't up again for quite a few more years.

We'll see if I can get the posting software to work so I can add them as a comment on PiT's blog. I've also added a version of these remarks to the old articles of mine linked above.