Any College Professors Here?

Parents Forum
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<p>I'm going to be attending NYU Steinhardt as an education major with the hope of becoming a college professor in the future. If you are/were a college professor, I have some questions that I would greatly appreciate answers to:</p>

<ul>
<li><p>Do you like your job? (Honest answers please. I'd like to hear both the positives and the negatives).</p></li>
<li><p>Are there any specific classes you had to take as an education major?</p></li>
<li><p>What do you teach and what should I teach? Math has always seemed to be my strongest subject, but having to take Calculus scares me since I'm terrible at it. Other options that I'm considering are Biology and English.</p></li>
<li><p>What should I do when I finish college? Should I "cut my teeth" by teaching at high school for a couple years, or should I be more ambitious and try and get a job at a college right away?</p></li>
<li><p>I've heard that educators don't get paid all that much, so I'm kind of concerned. Is this true at the college level? (Basically what I'm asking in an indirect manner is how is the pay? Again, be honest.)</p></li>
</ul>

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<p>I am not a professor. I'm wondering, though, about your prospective education major. College professors have advanced knowledge in their field, so it's generally that field they study as undergrads and in graduate school. Prospective college professors should look to earn a PhD in their field of study and should pursue, throughout all levels of education, research or significant work pertinent to that field. Becoming a professor is not a simple undertaking. The process is significantly different than becoming a high school teacher. The professor's goals are often as related to furthering their study and research as they are to teaching undergrads. I have doubts about whether you've thought you prospective career through enough.</p>

<p>Professors are paid significantly different amounts based on years teaching and, more importantly, the field. A gender studies professor, for example, is going to be paid less than an econ professor (not to mention a teacher in a law, business, or medical school) because the econ professor could easily take his knowledge into the nearest city and get a job, while the gender studies professor would have vastly fewer options for jobs while staying in the field.</p>

<p>Professors or others, please correct me if I'm wrong.</p>

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<p>Hepstar - college professors don't usually major in education - unless they are going to be college professors in Education. College professors major in their field of study..... Physics to become physics profs, etc.</p>

<p>oops. I see this is answered above already!</p>

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<p>You usually also do not major in education to teach high school either. Rather, you major in a specific subject area (history/math/science/English, etc.) and then take education courses in order to become certified to teach that specific subject at the high school level.</p>

<p>Here's a data sheet on careers in post-secondary (i.e., college) education that may answer many of your questions: <a href="http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos066.htm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos066.htm&lt;/a> If you do a search on the same website for "high school teacher" you will find a similar profile. By the way, if you want more information on salaries for faculty, click on my name to your left, then "see Carolyn's website." I just posted an article there about faculty salaries with links to a new research study.</p>

<p>Not to worry, though. You are just beginning college, and there is plenty of time to explore and gather information about your future career plans. When you get to college, be sure to sit down with your advisor as soon as possible, and discuss your future goals and major. It will all work out. Best of luck!</p>

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<p>In many areas, high school teachers don't need any education courses to be certified and instead just need to pass a test or two. Private schools often do not require certification.</p>

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<p>Well, I think 2 things could happen for you at Steinhardt. One is, you'll fall in love with courses about education and decide to pursue all the research, everything about learning styles, brain theory, multiple intelligences, group sociology in learning situations, how adults vs. children learn, special needs learners... It's very interesting. There's also a lot of research about how people can be taught to read and write. </p>

<p>If you become interested in education as a field, you actually never have to actually teach in a classroom to go on to masters, then PhD or EdD. You'd become a college professor in Education. For this route, you'd get an Master of Arts in Education (rather than a Master of Arts in Teaching). The M.A.E. degree is "on the way" to the PhD or EdD in Education. If you get an MAE degree, you are NOT equipped, trained or certified to walk in to teach in any public school, elementary or secondary. A private school, on the other hand, can always do whatever it pleases, although sometimes they prefer to hire certified teachers to satisfy their state requirements. </p>

<p>Another route you might take is to use Steinhardt to get many of the education courses you'll need towards the M.A.T. (Master of Arts in Teaching, with a Certification for teaching Secondary classrooms = middle and high school. </p>

<p>That's a more specific training about classroom management, adolescent psychology, "pedagogy" which means the study of how people learn, and working with the adminsitration and laws in the state of New York. </p>

<p>BUT...to get the M.A.T. and secondary education certification, you need to
major in a content subject, such as History, English or Math, or (check with your profs) have many course credits so the NY State counts it as if it were a major. </p>

<p>Soo..maybe you'll want to double major at NYU, once you decide which topic to take. If you can manage to overcome your concern about Math, you would be SCOOPED UP and HIRED as a h.s. math teacher. See if there are some special grants for female math teachers along the way. </p>

<p>To answer along the lines of your OP, both my parents were college professors and I taught in the public elementary schools. I have many cousins who are college professors now. My mom, especially, loved being a college professor because of the flexible hours so she could raise a family while staying dynamic intellectually. As he got older, my dad started to get a bit grumpy about the students but she didn't. Both concluded that students should have most professors within one generation (20 years) older than the students themselves. My dad never really learned all the warm-and-fuzzy ways of interacting with students, so they were awed by him and admired him, but didn't like him much. My mom was beloved because she blended in the "Mom" thing with her professorial style. </p>

<p>My young cousins (haha, young! They are in their early 40's so you won't think of them as young). They worked VERY HARD in their late 20's to finish their PhD's. Their big problem was that they had to move from campus to campus around the country in order to move up the ladder from assistant to associate and finally tenured professors. It is VERY hard to get tenure, and only 2 of my cousins have it so far, although about 6 of them work fulltime as teaching professors. Without tenure, the problem is you can always lose your job "next year" but they just keep working hard, preparing quality lectures,<br>
and relating to their students' questions so they get good evaluations at year's end and don't get fired. The ones that got tenure put in a ton of work writing books and getting research grant proposals in the Humanities. None of us are in the maths/sciences. </p>

<p>When you walk into their homes, they are lined with books on every wall. They are always interesting to talk with. They live "a life of the mind."
Of course they also fell in love with other scholars while in grad school, so that was a struggle, because the other scholars also had to chase left and right, working their way up the ladder and around the country. It was very hard because they really loved each other, so some years they had their significant others living in a different state or even on two coasts. But they looked at these as one-year stints, and each kept an eye out for a position
near the other. Consequently, they moved a lot, married late and had children quite late. Actually, one child since they started soo late; and the other couple is gay, with no kids or adoptions planned. Another cousin professor struck the family balance differently; he didn't aspire to the great universities where these others work. Rather, he fell in love with a doctor and settled down in her city of practice, then found the best work he could at community colleges in the same location. They have 2 young kids (also born when they were in their late 30's. He does a lot of the at-home care for the children because of her medical practice, but it also means he's economically
very secure.</p>

<p>They all like the fact that they can take as long as they choose to prepare their classes. They take tremendous pride in teaching well. Much of the time they reflect on how to make their complicated subject areas understandable to undergraduates. (See Al Gore's movie and there are scenes there where he
is on a plane, thinking about how to make the material understandable...that's important because you can't just know your material, you have to know how to get others to know it.) For that reason, any theory that you learn in Steinhardt about education will eventually become useful to you. So stay alert to theory, even though some student teachers get impatient with it in a classroom, asking for a "bag of tricks" to teach others. The best teachers combine many theories and techniques and do not get wedded to one school of thought about education. As my dad used to say, "Sometimes the most practical thing is a good theory."</p>

<p>The biggest problem for fulltime college teachers is the way the colleges are giving out courses to "adjunct professors" to teach. Then the college doesn't have to pay any benefits such as health insurance to them. Some adjuncts are fantastic teachers with valuable experience, but it makes it very hard to find a fulltime teaching job on a college. You have to either be willing to move around the country after your PhD, for perhaps 5-10 years grabbing onto fulltime opportunities...or perhaps live in a very big city with many institutions of higher education (NYC, for example) and rattle around among them if you hate to actually move.</p>

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<p>My cousins teach in a more modern way, building their lessons on the students' questions, while my parents used to lecture for 40 minutes straight, then ask for questions at the end. </p>

<p>All professors keep "office hours" determined by their contract with the college, so there's a time each week when they sit available to students on a walk-in basis to offer help with the course material or other academic guidance. If nobody happens to come in, they read or mark papers then, but most professors want students to come in for this kind of help. In fact, you should take advantage of these office hours yourself, when you're a college student. Realize you're not imposing on a prof but that this is part of his job to be there for you. You migth have to make appointments, of course.</p>

<p>All professors have to serve on faculty or college "committees" about many things: grading policies, academic coordination, whatever. They are asked to do this by the college administration, and if unwilling, well these are irritants that can lead to them not getting work the following year, so they kinda hafta. Or sometimes it's right in their contract to serve on one or two committees.</p>

<p>The best thing about it seems to be that it's the life of the mind and you can learn for the rest of your life, surrounded by others who also love to learn.</p>

<p>The worst thing they refer to is "the politics" on the faculty, all the elbowing and one-upmanship to impress the deans. Some schools or departments exert pressure on faculty to keep publishing articles in professional journals, while other schools put greater emphasis on "the teaching professor" so try to build in more freedom which is expected to be applied to the student and classroom. </p>

<p>Professors in university graduate schools have teaching assistants to help with some of the large numbers of undergraduate students enrolled in some of the classes, so they supervise the work of those teaching assistants. If the prof has written a proposal for a research grant, they might do the research themselves or have built in funding to hire a grad student as a RA (research assistant), in which case they'd supervise that work very closely and publish articles from the results together, with the prof's name first of course.</p>

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<p>I have a few family members who are and are former faculty.</p>

<p>In many, if not most areas, professors could likely be paid much more in a commercial setting than in teaching. This suggests, at least, that they are relatively satisfied with their jobs. Education politics are probably the biggest issue and can become very draining.</p>

<p>I'll also emphasize that you do not want to be an education major. Go for the area you want to teach in. A PhD can be used in a HS setting as well as in college, while an education major will have a hard time finding a job in an academic level above middle school (which is great if you want a job in elementary/middle school, but not so great with your career interests). I have had several HS teachers that do not have teaching certs (private school), but have advanced degrees in their fields, and have brought across the material better than anyone who was certified.</p>

<p>Your choice on what you want to teach - but you'll need to be way more advanced than calc if you want to teach math at a college level. You may have some issues getting a job with an English degree.</p>

<p>For grad school, try to go to a university that heavily uses T.A.'s. You can get some valuable classroom experience and be better equipped to teach at a college level. Probably better to go straight to teaching college.</p>

<p>Pay for college profs is better than other teachers, but its not great (although it depends on the discipline). Business is probably one of the best paid areas (average is probably 80k ish - don't know starting). You will sacrifice income by becoming a prof instead of going to industry.</p>

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<p>Great advice, paying.</p>

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<p>I am a professor at a community college, but I interact with colleagues in my discipline from a wide variety of universities on occasion. I have some idea of salaries in my discipline, a professional one, for a wide variety of schools as well. Entry level instructors at my school are paid around $38-40K per year, sometimes more if the discipline demands. CC instructors are required to have a masters degree with 18 hours in their teaching discipline to meet SACS accreditation requirements. My institution has generally required a masters with 24 hours above that in order to be considered for tenure by completion of the sixth contract year. I have never had an education class, but did participate in a mentoring program for new educators that explored teaching methods at the beginning of my career.</p>

<p>4 year institutions hiring PhD level faculty would be expected to pay around double that in my discipline and top level schools pay fully promoted individuals $100K+. Individuals with the capability of earning these academic credentials clearly don't do it for the money, but for the whole package - stimulating work environment, summers off, flexible hours, opportunity to interact with students, etc.</p>

<p>Personally, I love the classroom experience and the advising assignments I have. I detest many of the committee assignments, the frequent disconnect between administrators and faculty, and the required reporting that is now associated with the reaccreditation process (trying to measure learning with respect to outcomes, etc.). When my frustration level is high, I typically envision working for another institution, but not in another profession (and I do have the professional credentials to practice my discipline in a commercial setting). Although it can be tough to gain entrance into an advanced degree program, my discipline does not have sufficient PhD candidates enrolled nationwide to replace the expected number of faculty retiring in the next 5-10 years (or at least that's what was said at a professional meeting I attended last August). </p>

<p>It isn't always easy, but it can be a tremendously rewarding career. Good luck!</p>

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<p>If you are looking at being a professor in Education at the college level I really encourage you to actually teach in the classroom at a public or private k-12 school for a few years. </p>

<p>It is not that hard to spot education professors who had never really been out in the trenches. Sometimes they just don't understand the problems and issues facing educators out in the field and their solutions only would work in an "ideal world"</p>

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<p>I haven't been on here for a few days, so thanks for the responses.</p>