91–100 of 121 posts
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FYI you really don't need teaching experience to get a good academic job. The number one criteria is excellent publication record.
I’d presume that as a postdoc they have a pretty good handle on the academic job market and don’t need a one sentence FYI about how it’s important to publish.
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Most UK universities place a lot of value on teaching experience. If you have a PhD degree from Cambridge or Oxford, a decent publication track record and significant teaching experience, you will typically get lectureship (assistant professor) offers straight after you finish your doctoral studies. Some teaching experience will be valued more than having a stellar publication record, especially if you have a good re…
It depends on what kind of academic work you're looking for, right? If you're going for a teaching career, then yes, of course you need to have some teaching experience. If you're after a research career, e.g. a research fellowship like the ones from the Leverhulme Trust or the Royal Society of Engineering, then you really do need an astounding publication record and I don't reckon that having any teaching experience…
This is not true in general. In NZ, most academic positions are 40% research, 40% teaching, and 20% admin. Lecturers, distinguished professors, and everyone in between. Big research grants can provide temporary buy-out of some teaching, but it's explicitly part of the role, and not often reduced completely for long. Maybe 10% of academic roles at my university don't include research.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJEmE7IYoLk Summary: colleges are way too selective today at the high end. Boomers got into elite schools far more easily, although there were less schools. It's a bit of a disingenuous argument however, because the huge increase of schools down the long long LONG pecking order of school "eliteness". But the boomer thing is spot on.
> It's a bit of a disingenuous argument however, because the huge increase of schools down the long long LONG pecking order of school "eliteness" Ehn, it really doesn't. Harvard admits significantly less undergrads than Penn or Columbia, and in personal experience, the "Ivy" cachet doesn't really help that much in most industries outside of High Finance (which itself tends to targets Penn+Columbia instead of Harvard)…
Typo: Meant high level positions in the Tech industry.
HBS tends to do pretty well in PE/HF but the overlap isn't significant with Harvard College.
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It depends on what kind of academic work you're looking for, right? If you're going for a teaching career, then yes, of course you need to have some teaching experience. If you're after a research career, e.g. a research fellowship like the ones from the Leverhulme Trust or the Royal Society of Engineering, then you really do need an astounding publication record and I don't reckon that having any teaching experience…
> Not least because in academia, either you teach, or you do research. You can't do both. This is not true in general. In NZ, most academic positions are 40% research, 40% teaching, and 20% admin. Lecturers, distinguished professors, and everyone in between. Big research grants can provide temporary buy-out of some teaching, but it's explicitly part of the role, and not often reduced completely for long. Maybe 10% of…
A 40% teaching is the most research-intensive contract you can get at most universities.
Good departments will still let you enjoy a sane workload because they will allocate a realistic amount of that 40% for teaching preparation, marking duties, etc.
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> this sounds like every university in the US, which uses underpaid adjuncts to do most of the teaching and underpaid phd candidates and postdocs to do most of the research Pro tip to anyone going to university (or has kids going to university). Find a low ranked state school that has a high teacher to student ratio. Also look at the percentage of classes with under 20 students. I did my undergrad at one of those pla…
> Down side: Your peers aren't as smart, and your peers are really what push you to work on interesting projects. This outweighs pretty much everything else for me. Your ego either inflates to infinity because you're a big fish in a small pond, or you get depressed being around really incompetent people. Every lecture I have is booked for 300 people but only 20-40 people ever show up. And yet everyone complains that…
And, in my case, I found that the increased access to grad students and professors more than made up for any possible "weakness" in my peer group.
The Westinghouse engineers used to have a friendly rivalry because so many of them came from both CMU and Pitt. However, if you got both groups drunk, the CMU engineers would grudgingly admit that the primary difference between the two was an extra 10+ years to pay off their student loans.
is this news? this sounds like every university in the US, which uses underpaid adjuncts to do most of the teaching and underpaid phd candidates and postdocs to do most of the research not saying this is right -- adjuncts and postdocs absolutely need to be paid more commensurately with the value they provide -- but it has been the status quo for a long time; the bigger problem is that it used to be a temporary steppi…
> this sounds like every university in the US, which uses underpaid adjuncts to do most of the teaching and underpaid phd candidates and postdocs to do most of the research Pro tip to anyone going to university (or has kids going to university). Find a low ranked state school that has a high teacher to student ratio. Also look at the percentage of classes with under 20 students. I did my undergrad at one of those pla…
You also don't have access to those interesting research projects to begin with. To be that's the biggest downside (if you're in the sciences / engineering).
I do generally agree with your post -- but I think it only works if you 1) apply yourself sufficiently despite not having peers pushing you (have to be able and willing to buck the tide; not everyone is), and 2) go to a top grad school (as you did), which requires point 1 to get accepted
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> Holier than thou institution where everyone must pay the price for their product or be doomed as a person. One cannot place all of the blame at the foot of the university. Employers also play a role, when they demand accreditation. Students are also to blame, when they fail to do research on what type of training they need to enter a field. As for the clergy comparison, let's just say that a multitude of people wor…
I never said “professors” or “deans”. I mentioned higher education specifically, as an industry. It’s the same as the wedding industry, they don’t give a fuck that they sell so much stuff around the romanticism of weddings regardless of its true value. Behold the romanticization of the diamond ring. You just, I don’t know, you convince people in their vulnerability, in love, hey, this is what love really is, an expen…
At least with your two examples of businesses preying upon the vulnerabilities of people, those vulnerabilities are entirely optional. People can, and do, choose other ways of expressing their commitment to their partners. People can, and do, find simpler (and non-commercial) ways to find pleasure in life.
That said, I also think that people have to step back and look at what they hope to gain from their post-secondary education. Let's face it, universities are institutions that largely prepare people to work in institutions (may they be academic or business). For example: you don't need to go to university to become a scientist, but you do to work as a scientist in a university and many businesses. Granted, there are exceptions to that. Your chances of becoming a medical doctor are pretty much nil without attending university.
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If you really value faculty involvement etc, I might suggest focusing on finding out those statistics directly and getting a sense of what current student experiences are like. That's as opposed to relying on a proxy like student/faculty ratios, low rankings or being a state school. Each state runs its own state schools (and some cities like NY have their own) and have wildly different levels of funding and support f…
> I might suggest focusing on finding out those statistics directly and getting a sense of what current student experiences are like. And outside of liberal arts colleges, where are you going to get those statistics? The places that openly boast these things tend to be very expensive, and hard to get admission into. Certainly, if you have a shortlist already, you can email the department and ask for those stats direc…
and on the percentage of classes under 20 - that's the exact metric I'm talking about being easy to game. You'd want to figure out what the sizes of the classes you actually take are.
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Was about to say the same. Haven't PhD students usually done tutorials and supervised labs to undergraduates for the extra cash. Certainly was the case in my electronics undergrad course a few decades ago. > in 2023-24 one in five tutorials (20%) were taught by hourly-paid tutors – typically PhD students or academics at the start of their career.
Depends on the university. 25 years ago now but a number of the PhD students I worked with had mummy and daddy paying for everything. One enterprising guy had a side business selling cocaine. Most were slumming it in house shares and taking on casual work. Only the blessed had teaching appointments. I was blessed until I realised it was a curse.
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> I might suggest focusing on finding out those statistics directly and getting a sense of what current student experiences are like. And outside of liberal arts colleges, where are you going to get those statistics? The places that openly boast these things tend to be very expensive, and hard to get admission into. Certainly, if you have a shortlist already, you can email the department and ask for those stats direc…
> where Talk to current students/forum/visit etc. If you're gonna spend 3-6 years of your life there it's worth putting in the legwork. And figuring out the amount taught by adjuncts etc - you can just ask. and on the percentage of classes under 20 - that's the exact metric I'm talking about being easy to game. You'd want to figure out what the sizes of the classes you actually take are.
There are over 500 public universities/colleges. Your advice is great after you've made a shortlist. My advice is on making the shortlist to begin with.
> and on the percentage of classes under 20 - that's the exact metric I'm talking about being easy to game.
Technically true, and overly pedantic. I'd put money that 90% of the schools that have that metric actually will have fewer students in the classes in the major of your interest (likely engineering). In the real world, these kinds of counterexamples you speak of are, well, the exception.
Engineering is demanding, and many students drop out after the sophomore year. At least in my department, they had a very clear and open goal: If you don't do well enough in the introductory courses, you will simply be disallowed from taking junior level courses. You needed a B on a key (not easy) course, and a grade of at least 75% on that course's final exam.
I sincerely doubt there are many (if any) universities trying to game that metric. Letting professors teach small classes is expensive. Which is why I said that if a university really has a weird distribution where there are lots of courses with a tiny number of students - that in itself is a good omen!