<p>Actually, I don’t really care about engineering. I will be applying for grad schools in either Computer Science, Applied Math, or something related to them such as Robotics. While the discussion has been interesting, I hope it can proceed with respect to my field(s) of interest.</p>
<p>Many thanks</p>
<p>Just to chime in, I did a year of TA as a senior in EE (sorry ccpsux!), and it was mentioned not once by any professor during any interview. No one cared. Conversely, one Ivy League professor asked on my motivation for grad school and my intentions in academia - when I mentioned I had enjoyed both research and teaching, he flat-out told me that teaching was a non-issue, foisted on the bad researchers and avoided by the good.</p>
<p>As for RA/TA preferences, it varies between schools and individuals - some people enjoy the experience, for others it is an annoyance and a distraction. Some schools prefer TA experience in new Prof’s since it suggests someone more ready to assume teaching duties (foisted on the new guy), while others seem to think it shows a weakness - that you were unable to obtain “desirable” funding and had to settle for a TA gig. I personally think it is valuable even if you never intend to teach - as Zoo noted, teaching others really forces you to learn the material far better than the students!</p>
<p>@Brahmin - A few schools (EECS at MIT notably) actually require some amount of TA time, but most don’t. In general, your funding could come from RA, TA, fellowship, pockets, parents, or some motley combination. You might experience only 1 funding source, or it might change from year to year (or faster). You might be guaranteed funding for a set period of time (I had a 5-year offer and a 4-year at one point) or it might be set only for the semester!</p>
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Did you mention teaching in your SOP? I did, I and I wonder if my interviewers will bring that up as a result. I actually made a mini-argument of how teaching sustains research (hence my interest in it) - we’ll see if that stirs up any remarks. :P</p>
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<p>O Rly? Sure about that? </p>
<p>*Members of the ** [Princeton] ** faculty were clear about which factor was most important in tenure decisions.</p>
<p>“Research is it,” molecular biology and Wilson School professor Lee Silver said. “Teaching is a tiny little bit. **A brilliant teacher who’s just ok would never get tenure. And … a brilliant researcher who’s just a mediocre teacher could get tenure. Unless you’re on the edge, teaching’s irrelevant. **”</p>
<p>Tilghman defended the focus on research over performance in the classroom.</p>
<p>“We are one of the most distinguished research universities in the world,” Tilghman said. “And we got there by setting very, very high standards for the quality of research and scholarship that is conducted by our faculty.”</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>[Tenure</a> road rough for professors - The Daily Princetonian](<a href=“http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2008/05/16/21215/]Tenure”>http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2008/05/16/21215/)</p>
<p>* One of the ways to describe this disparity is to focus on the process and method. One professor explained: “It is also a lot easier to evaluate research. Students have lower response rates in the tenure process. There’s a problem with how it’s done. On the other hand, there’s a 90% response for research evaluations from o/s scholars.” Simply in terms of reliability and numbers, scholarly work takes precedent over other areas like teaching and student interaction. This is perhaps one of the reasons why Dartmouth’s past is full of times when popular, well-liked, student-focused professors have been denied tenure. There just isn’t an effective means to judge or evaluate teaching and student interaction.</p>
<p>However, not all would agree that the attempt to evenly consider teaching and research is even made. One professor commented regarding the question of whether teaching and research were treated equally in the tenure process: “Absolutely not. You’re tenured on your scholarly work. You are not tenured on your teaching. You have to be an okay to good teacher and that’s about it.” Once again, comments similar to this came up again and again.*</p>
<p>[The</a> Soul of Dartmouth: The Academic Direction of Dartmouth College | Student Assembly Online](<a href=“http://sa.dartmouth.edu/sao/sa/soul-dartmouth-academic-direction-dartmouth-college]The”>http://sa.dartmouth.edu/sao/sa/soul-dartmouth-academic-direction-dartmouth-college)</p>
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<p>Well, not unless you have a time machine. He was placed in 2009, with his first teaching semester being this one (Spring 2010), and that is the semester which he was advised to ‘sabotage’, if necessary.</p>
<p>Sakky, you misunderstood. I never said that teaching trumps research, but rather that teaching is also valued at those institutions. It’s never enough to be an excellent teacher – you must also be a top-rate scholar. At the institutions I named, lousy teachers rarely get tenure. Princeton and others like itthat pride themselves on their attention to undergraduates cannot afford to be known as institutions with ineffective teaching. </p>
<p>Also, I hope someone has advised your MIT assistant professor not to listen to the nonsense that you have to sabotage your teaching in order to get tenure. You have to perform excellent, publishable and grant-worthy research, but that ability does not naturally exclude good teaching. In fact, the package of both will enhance an assistant professor’s tenure case.</p>
<p>hey Mom, since you work in academia, can you comment on this? "Most PhDs (including engineers) enter academic positions "</p>
<p>how much percentage of PhD students actually go into academia? (maybe not directly, still need to go thru post-doc)</p>
<p>Well, I’m in the humanities/arts, while my husband is in the sciences. I speak as the spouse of an engineer/computer scientist who has worked in both academia and industry.</p>
<p>The percentage who go into academia and industry tends to fluctuate somewhat with the condition of the economy and the specific kind of engineering. When my husband got his PhD, it was usual for about half of newly minted PhDs at top programs to go into industry research because the money was significantly better. The economy was flush, and many engineers could even get venture capital funds to start up their own businesses based on their dissertation work. The other half went right into tenure-track academia, without postdocs, because postdocs were rare for engineers and computer scientists. The competition was stiff, and academic programs needed to grow to meet the demands of students. </p>
<p>Certain engineering fields have a higher percentage of new PhDs going into industry, but that also depends on the strength of the economy. Oil companies hire a lot of chemical engineers, but if the industry is hurting, then those opportunities diminish. Automobile makers hire a lot of mechanical engineers, but if that industry is hurting (as it is now), then those jobs dry up. </p>
<p>There is some mobility between industry and academia even later in an engineer’s career, as long as the engineer has been involved in publishable research. I personally know of eight PhDs who switched from industry to academia when Bell Labs went into freefall and the dotcom bubble burst. At the time, universities were poised to snap these individuals up; now, of course, even universities are hurting.</p>
<p>I have no direct answer to your question. “Engineering” is such a broad term, and the economy has changed everything – although no one yet knows just how different the environment will be long-term. I suspect that more bioengineers go into academia than do mechanical engineers. Overall, however,I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s still a 50/50 divide between the academia and industry, depending on how theoretical the program/student’s research is.</p>
<p>As a science prof, I have to say that an individual with horrible teaching skills but outstanding research skills (read high level of funding and high level of citations in high impact journals) will always get tenure at Princeton, Stanford, Dartmouth and others.</p>
<p>The reverse is certainly not true. Sadly, teaching is rather undervalued and is viewed as a required time drain at most first tier universities. That is why the small liberal arts colleges are so valuable for undergraduate learning-the profs are primarily there as teachers and are researchers only second.</p>
<p>^^ This may be true for more for the sciences than for the humanities.</p>
<p>I will say that I never had a subpar teacher at Dartmouth, nor did my husband. Yeah – there were better teachers than others, but none were bad. Without going into too much detail about our backgrounds, I will say that both of us are familiar with other universities, and that some are much more tolerant of bad teaching than others.</p>
<p>Researchers who publish in prestigious journals and who are often cited are also often those who are good teachers, primarily because they are adept at communicating complex ideas. The problem is that famous researchers have much lighter teaching loads than do those who are less productive, so the undergraduates rarely have a chance to take classes from them.</p>
<p>I do concur with your comments-that successful researchers are by definition effective communicators. However, I also note that not all place the same effort in their teaching undergrad courses as they do for research communications with their colleagues!</p>
<p>I also have colleagues at Dartmouth who are fabulous researchers but who have been characterized at best as somewhat “impatient teachers”. They are “graded” by the system not on their teaching but on their research and their funding success. However, the best teaching at these schools is often not in the classroom, but in the many research and training opportunities with world class researchers (in any field) outside the classroom.</p>
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<p>Absolutely! </p>
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<p>LOL. I’m sure that’s true. </p>
<p>In the sciences, sometimes “bad teaching” comes from non-native speakers who can communicate more effectively in writing than orally, in a lecture hall. This kind of disconnect is unavoidable since not all brilliant researchers speak English well.</p>
<p>of course, when my youngest was majoring in history/poly sci he commented that the sciences weren’t the only fields with non-native profs.</p>
<p>I actually think that non-native english speakers are not the issue at the prof level (again-they’ve learned to communicate to their colleagues in their field in English at field-specific conferences). Instead, I think that at least in the sciences, the issue of having difficult to understand and inexperienced non-native english teachers is only a significant issue at the level of Teaching Assists (TAs). This is a result of depending on graduate students teach who are still struggling to figure out the basics for themselves!</p>
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<p>But the question is how much is it valued, and the answer seems to be: ‘not much’. What that means is that, given a choice between spending more time on research or on teaching, a junior faculty member is well-advised to choose the former. </p>
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<p>Well, the fact is, junior faculty at those institutions will rarely be tenured no matter how strong their research and/or teaching is. The real question is, relatively speaking, how much can bad teaching hurt you, and evidently the answer is ‘not that much’. </p>
<p>A brilliant teacher whos just ok would never get tenure. And … a brilliant researcher whos just a mediocre teacher could get tenure. Unless youre on the edge, teachings irrelevant.</p>
<p>[Tenure</a> road rough for professors - The Daily Princetonian](<a href=“http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2008/05/16/21215/]Tenure”>http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2008/05/16/21215/)</p>
<p>You’re tenured on your scholarly work. You are not tenured on your teaching. You have to be an okay to good teacher and that’s about it." Once again, comments similar to this came up again and again.</p>
<p>[The</a> Soul of Dartmouth: The Academic Direction of Dartmouth College | Student Assembly Online](<a href=“http://sa.dartmouth.edu/sao/sa/soul-dartmouth-academic-direction-dartmouth-college]The”>http://sa.dartmouth.edu/sao/sa/soul-dartmouth-academic-direction-dartmouth-college)</p>
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<p>Well, unfortunately, it probably does exclude good teaching. Again, the question is a matter of signaling. As a junior faculty member, nobody really knows exactly how you choose to allocate your time, and whether you choose to emphasize research - which is apparently what they prefer - is your call. Signals that indicate that you are not emphasizing research are therefore often times not well-received. </p>
<p>The Baker Award, designed to promote undergraduate education, is now seen by many as the “kiss of death” – any professor recognized for his or her excellent teaching is suspected of shirking research responsibilities and might be denied tenure,</p>
<p>[Undergraduate</a> Teaching at Institute Must Be Emphasized - The Tech](<a href=“http://tech.mit.edu/V113/N54/stevenson.54o.html]Undergraduate”>http://tech.mit.edu/V113/N54/stevenson.54o.html)</p>
<p>At MIT, for example, the teaching award "is frequently referred to as the ‘kiss of death’</p>
<p>[Inside</a> American education: the … - Google Books](<a href=“http://books.google.com/books?id=aAq35mBOV_UC&pg=PA205&lpg=PA205&dq=“kiss+of+death”+teaching+award+sowell&source=bl&ots=GpG9sYDI9C&sig=udQoN3Kjl2qDVWMQgu847ujPfao&hl=en&ei=XVxBS620O8LAlAfrweSRBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=&f=false]Inside”>http://books.google.com/books?id=aAq35mBOV_UC&pg=PA205&lpg=PA205&dq=“kiss+of+death”+teaching+award+sowell&source=bl&ots=GpG9sYDI9C&sig=udQoN3Kjl2qDVWMQgu847ujPfao&hl=en&ei=XVxBS620O8LAlAfrweSRBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=&f=false)</p>
<p>The link provided by Sakky on the
The Soul of Dartmouth: The Academic Direction of Dartmouth College | Student Assembly Online</p>
<p>is quite telling and accurately reflects academic discussions on the conflict and tension between research and teaching at liberal arts and mid-sized institutions. At larger institutions there is little tension-its all about research!</p>
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<p>The other problem, that I had mentioned previously, is that even if some top schools do emphasize teaching as opposed to (or perhaps concurrently with) research, the fact is, most other top schools don’t. Hence, if you’ve chosen to invest your time into better teaching because your school does emphasize teaching, but you nevertheless fail to win tenure - as most junior faculty at top schools fail to achieve - you now lack a portable credential with which to transfer to the other schools who care little for teaching. The risk-averse career strategy is therefore to concentrate on research for that is what the bulk of schools desire.</p>
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<p>I don’t know that the phenomenon breaks cleanly with size of the institution. Caltech is a Lilliputian school - smaller even than many LAC’s - that is also infamous for subpar teaching.</p>
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<p>“Better teaching” in itself is not a flaw, and it will not get in the way of tenure unless the junior faculty member devotes most of his time to it. The tension between education and scholarship arises because of the time required of each, and if scholarship is important (it always has been, hence the “publish or perish” advice that has been around for generations), then the answer is to properly manage the time devoted to each. For this reason, junior faculty members usually work really, really hard. However, just because your time is stretched to the max, it doesn’t mean that you will necessarily be an ineffective instructor. </p>
<p>An institution can maximize quality instruction by lessening the course load, as it is much easier to teach one or two courses a semester (depending on funding) than three or four. Consistency also helps maintain quality teaching; the first time you teach a course, it takes a lot of preparation, and each time after that, it requires a little less attention. If a department plugs junior faculty into a variety of courses over their first five years, then the time drain on those faculty members makes it difficult for them to adequately pursue research.</p>
<p>Poor instruction cannot possibly take much less time than good instruction. Weak instructors still have to know the material and still have to show up for class. Yeah, maybe they spend less time constructing good exams, and maybe they lecture directly from the text – but they still spend the time. If you know the material well, it doesn’t take much time to prepare for the lecture, particularly if you’ve taught the course before. Really, good teaching has more to do with style and with a willingness to listen to students’ questions and then answer them. And to ask thought-provoking questions – something that takes no time at all. </p>
<p>I still maintain that, although quality research is essential for tenure, quality instruction does not detract from it.</p>
<p>Job interviews in academia generally require talks which give a glimpse into the person’s communication skills. If a person is a poor presenter, he probably won’t get the position since competition is fierce for academic jobs. Of course, the quality of the talk is more important for junior faculty candidates than for recruited big names, although the big names rarely fail to deliver.</p>
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<p>I agree that it should not be a flaw, and indeed should be a boon towards your tenure decision, and probably is if you are truly not neglecting your research in favor of teaching. The problem is there’s no way for schools to know that that isn’t happening. Schools have no way to monitor exactly how much time any given faculty member is spending on research vs. teaching. Hence, strong teaching is often taken as a negative signal that somebody isn’t spending enough time on research. To be fair, one can disabuse the school of that notion by simply presenting an impressive CV strewn with highly-cited publications. But let’s be honest: most junior faculty will not be able to do that, given the difficulties of the publication process. Hence, they have to worry constantly about the perception they are presenting to the school.</p>
<p>*Proven skill in teaching is ignored or even stigmatized during [Harvard] FAS performance reviews, according to the report.</p>
<p>“**Every teaching award earns a warning **of how I should not wander off research,” the report quotes an anonymous Ph.D. candidate as saying.</p>
<p>Senior professors quoted in the report voiced the same concerns, worrying that a focus on teaching may prove detrimental to their younger colleagues’ careers.</p>
<p>“…winning the Levenson award for teaching as a junior faculty member is considered the kiss of death with respect to promotion,” the report quotes one anonymous senior professor as saying. *</p>
<p>[Report:</a> Faculty Pay Should Be Linked to Teaching | The Harvard Crimson](<a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2007/1/24/report-faculty-pay-should-be-linked/]Report:”>Report: Faculty Pay Should Be Linked to Teaching | News | The Harvard Crimson)</p>
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<p>Or the optimal strategy is to not have to teach any courses at all (in any given term), a structure that is highly prevalent amongst many top schools which either frontload or backload all teaching requirements of junior faculty into a single term, leaving the other terms free to be devoted to research. In fact, the perk of being provided terms completely free for only research is considered to be one of the most desirable reasons for choosing to work for a particular school.</p>
<p>For example, speaking of that MIT guy, his faculty contract started in the summer of 2009, but he won’t start teaching until the upcoming spring semester, which means that he had the entire last fall (and summer) devoted to nothing but research. He’s also unlikely to be scheduled to teach in the 2010 fall semester. Hence, he basically has to carry a teaching load only 4 months out of the entire year. I know a Portuguese guy who finished his PhD at MIT in 2008 and took a faculty position in Portugal where his teaching responsibilities were frontloaded : he spent the fall of 2008 teaching in Portugal, but then spent much of the spring and summer of 2009 in Boston with his girlfriend who is finishing at Harvard. He returned to teach last fall, and I suspect he’ll be back in Boston in a few weeks. Granted, he has to return to Portugal every so often for the occasional department-wide faculty meeting, but other than that, he has no compelling reason to be there. </p>
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<p>That is, if they want to teach the course well. See below. </p>
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<p>But you just mentioned the key: you have to know the material well. What if you don’t? One of the dirty little secrets of academia is that faculty members - particularly junior faculty - are often times stuck teaching subjects that they don’t know particularly well. </p>
<p>With the names changed to protect the innocent, I know a chemical engineering professor who as a junior faculty member taught the ‘separations processes’ course - where students learn the engineering theory behind distillation and refining processes of chemical mixtures into pure compounds - who years later, after winning tenure, freely admitted that he didn’t really understand the material himself. That course was the very first time he had ever seen that material in his life. In fact, he doesn’t even hold an engineering degree at all, not even a bachelor’s. His BS and PhD are in chemistry. His research has to do with spectroscopy and materials chemistry. Basically, he knew nothing about separations engineering and he was learning along with the students. </p>
<p>Granted, perhaps his is an extreme case. Nevertheless if, as you say, you are teaching 4 courses at once, and/or being assigned a variety of courses over a number of years, then odds are that you are eventually going to find yourself teaching a subject that you don’t know particularly well yourself. One is then presented with a choice: either take the time to learn the material beforehand - but that absorbs time you could spend on your research - or simply don’t do so, which then consigns the students to an unilluminating teaching experience. {I remember one woman, upon learning that he she might be assigned to teach the chemical thermodynamics course, joked that she would first have to learn that material herself - chemical thermo being a notoriously recondite topic.} </p>
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<p>Well, I don’t know about that. The actual presentation style of job talks are, frankly, not that important. What really matters are the research results of your job talk paper. You are far more likely to garner an offer with a job talk that has strong and intriguing research results that just happens to be poorly presented than a slickly produced presentation but whose research results are poor. </p>
<p>Allow me to provide a famous historical example. The mathematician Ted Kaczynski - the future Unabomber - had a reputation as a young man for both sheer mathematical brilliance and for notoriously poor social and communication skills. But the latter didn’t seem to matter as far as his academic career was concerned: as a PhD student at Michigan, he solved a mathematics problem that was so difficult that even some of the best math professors at Michigan freely admitted that they couldn’t completely understand it, became the youngest professor in the history of Berkeley and was well on his way to tenure. On the other hand, he also earned frequent complaints at Berkeley for his terrible teaching ability and utter lack of social skills.</p>
<p>*“He was intensely introverted,” said Patrick McIntosh, who was one of six students to share a suite with Mr. Kaczynski in Eliot House at Harvard. “He would almost run to his room to avoid a conversation if one of us tried to approach him.”</p>
<p>…“Kaczynski seemed almost pathologically shy and as far as I know he made no close friends in the department. Efforts to bring him more into the swing of things had failed.”*</p>
<p>[ON</a> THE SUSPECT’S TRAIL: THE SUSPECT - ON THE SUSPECT’S TRAIL: THE SUSPECT;Memories of His Brilliance, And Shyness, but Little Else - NYTimes.com](<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/05/us/suspect-s-trail-suspect-memories-his-brilliance-shyness-but-little-else.html?pagewanted=all]ON”>http://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/05/us/suspect-s-trail-suspect-memories-his-brilliance-shyness-but-little-else.html?pagewanted=all)</p>
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<p>I’m running off, so I don’t have time to read your whole post (I’ll get to that later), but I felt compelled to answer the above. First, faculty members, even junior ones, are pretty much unsupervised. Next, there is only one way to determine whether a junior faculty member has done enough research: publications. An assistant prof can spend 60 hours a week in the lab, but if he doesn’t have the published results to support the work, he won’t get tenure. You are measured by your output, both in quantity and in prestige, not by the time you devote. (I know someone who was denied tenure despite bringing in grant money because his papers were published in what was considered low-impact journals.) </p>
<p>But since I’m not a scientist, perhaps ParAlum will respond more accurately.</p>