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Stinkypuppy
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01 Jan 2009, 11:08 pm

Hi everybody,

I'll be finishing up graduate school sometime this year, and haven't yet finalized what I want to do next. During my time in this program I've enjoyed being a teaching assistant, thus making me consider becoming a high school or undergraduate instructor. I think I'd like to avoid a research position if at all possible. However since my teaching experience is limited to leading small discussion/lab sections for a couple of semesters, I have no first-hand experience in a full teaching position. So I was wondering, for those of you who've had full-time or even part-time teaching positions (not as an assistant), did you find your AS to be helpful or detrimental in any way? How difficult is it to go through all the hurdles to get that position and be good at it? Do you regret this career choice and would you have done anything differently? I know there are certification requirements for K-12 education but I don't really understand if there are similar requirements at the undergraduate level. As you could guess I'm pretty clueless about this field, and I don't know people personally who I could turn to for more info or guidance about this, particularly other Aspies.

Thanks very much for any comments and suggestions!! 8)


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Shiggily
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02 Jan 2009, 2:10 am

Stinkypuppy wrote:
Hi everybody,

I'll be finishing up graduate school sometime this year, and haven't yet finalized what I want to do next. During my time in this program I've enjoyed being a teaching assistant, thus making me consider becoming a high school or undergraduate instructor. I think I'd like to avoid a research position if at all possible. However since my teaching experience is limited to leading small discussion/lab sections for a couple of semesters, I have no first-hand experience in a full teaching position. So I was wondering, for those of you who've had full-time or even part-time teaching positions (not as an assistant), did you find your AS to be helpful or detrimental in any way? How difficult is it to go through all the hurdles to get that position and be good at it? Do you regret this career choice and would you have done anything differently? I know there are certification requirements for K-12 education but I don't really understand if there are similar requirements at the undergraduate level. As you could guess I'm pretty clueless about this field, and I don't know people personally who I could turn to for more info or guidance about this, particularly other Aspies.

Thanks very much for any comments and suggestions!! 8)


hmmm... you would have a hard time avoiding research at the university level. You need education classes and a certification test and a student teaching internship for the K-12th level. And I think a Masters in subject for the college level (even community college). And probably a PhD or working on one, for the higher university levels (like state universities).



Stinkypuppy
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02 Jan 2009, 2:47 am

Thanks for the response Shiggily! :)
I figure if I teach at a community college or be an adjunct or something at a 4-year school then I could get away from the research bit, although I acknowledge that doing no research disqualifies me from many faculty positions at the undergraduate level. :( Oh yeah I forgot to put it in my original post, but I'll be graduating with a PhD so the training in the teaching subject should not be too much of a problem. I'm lacking the education-specific training and appropriate certifications though.


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02 Jan 2009, 3:03 am

Stinkypuppy wrote:
Thanks for the response Shiggily! :)
I figure if I teach at a community college or be an adjunct or something at a 4-year school then I could get away from the research bit, although I acknowledge that doing no research disqualifies me from many faculty positions at the undergraduate level. :( Oh yeah I forgot to put it in my original post, but I'll be graduating with a PhD so the training in the teaching subject should not be too much of a problem. I'm lacking the education-specific training and appropriate certifications though.


what in so I can get an idea of what you are looking at?



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02 Jan 2009, 3:35 am

I got BS in chemistry and genetics, and I'll be getting my PhD in genetics. Ideally I'm hoping to teach biology or molecular biology or related field.


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02 Jan 2009, 7:43 am

Stinkypuppy wrote:
I got BS in chemistry and genetics, and I'll be getting my PhD in genetics. Ideally I'm hoping to teach biology or molecular biology or related field.


you are unlikely to find a good position that won't require research. Sorry. But publishing papers and conducting research is a requirement for most science and math university positions (in the US). I used to sit and talk to my professors about it. It has a lot to do with staying current in the field.

Lets say that you get a job teaching with no research requirement or paper publishing requirement. If you do not stay on top of the new developments in your field, then 5, 10, 15 years down the road your skills are obsolete. The field has moved on without you. And since your skills are not current, your knowledge might not be current, your teaching ability becomes a liability to the university. It is also an argument at the high school level. Teachers teaching subjects without any experience in that field. Most of them have only taken that class and no level higher.

Why not try out research? piggyback onto a few projects that peak your interest and expand your knowledge of the applicable field. Just find a good position that has a lower requirement of research and published papers... and maybe you will like it.

Start out as a part-time or assistant professor or some job that won't require papers or research and then try to work into helping out at a few studies. When I was an undergrad I almost got a chance to help out with a graduate research project in mathematical biology, concerned with cell signaling. I wouldn't have done much, but the experience would have been very good for me and I would have learned some computer programming and some new applications for chaos theory and fractals. Unfortunately I was taking too many credit hours, so I had no time to spare.



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02 Jan 2009, 6:52 pm

I can definitely understand the need to keep skills updated, though I'm not so sure whether actually publishing and conducting research myself are requirements to staying knowledgeable in recent developments in science. If I keep reading the scientific journals, then I should be able to stay afloat with the more theoretical aspects. There must be conferences or something for instructors for the more hands-on stuff, as there is stuff like that for medical doctors who want to gain experience in molecular biology methods in understanding the research into their favorite diseases.

For the past 5-6 years I've been doing research full-time as part of my dissertation/graduation requirements, so I'm pretty familiar with that route and I can't stand the thought of it. Additionally I think if I were to actually try to land a faculty position that involved or even allowed some amount of research, almost invariably would I be required to get a research postdoctoral position first. That would basically mean another 3-5 years (or even more) doing mostly research without much teaching at all, and again the research is already something I don't like. I found out from graduate school that I don't like having all my time consumed by lab; I want to have a life and have time to do other things. The teaching position doesn't necessarily have to be fantastic by any means, it simply has to be something that I can enjoy doing and that pays the bills at a rate better than the pittance we graduate students already get. Should the teaching position be an abjectly disastrous possibility, however, I would probably opt for working in industry instead, which was what I had done for three and a half years before starting graduate school anyway. I'm just trying to figure out if there are any unusual nasty surprises that I don't quite realize yet about fulltime teaching of which AS folks should be particularly aware. Hmm... perhaps another possibility would be to get an industry job and be an adjunct on the side or something like that? It's very scary, I guess because I don't personally know of anybody who has done this as well.

My thesis advisor knows about the traditional academia paradigm (grad student - postdoc - assistant professor), but when I told her that I was considering focusing on teaching, she didn't have a clue what to say. :roll: I thought your idea about trying to get a nonresearch position first and then dabble in research later on was a very good one, but then I realized my advisor said that once you leave research, it's very difficult to get back into it (from a hiring perspective). I think there's still a big stigma in academia on PhD people not going the postdoc and tenure-track faculty route. Once you stray from that route, you become "tainted." That's the feeling I got from talking to my professors at my undergraduate institution as well, ~10 years ago. It's weakening gradually these days due to a variety of reasons, including the terrible ratio of PhDs to available faculty positions; graduates are forced to look for other jobs. More and more people go into alternative careers like industry, but are still seen by a large proportion of tenured faculty as sell-outs. Heck, I was even considered a sell-out by other graduate students for having gotten industry experience, which is sad but by now unsurprising. So I am not too surprised if your professors had told you that research was the only way to get a "good" position.

Thanks for the input!! :)


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02 Jan 2009, 9:16 pm

Stinkypuppy wrote:
So I am not too surprised if your professors had told you that research was the only way to get a "good" position.

Thanks for the input!! :)


Well I did math, and before that molecular biology. Most of the professors will do side projects while they teach. Research does not mean lab work. And for math it does not mean publishing new theorems all the time. For the project I was talking about, they had 2 biochemists and 2 mathematicians and it was all theoretical work on computer The biochemists laid the foundation and the mathematicians build the computer program structure and did the hard core math calculations and they ran some sequences...

You can do that. You can do theoretical work which is more computer/paper stuff and less lab work. Sometimes a professor will take a sabbatical and do a research project for a year. There is a balance, and more options that lab junkie.

For example, I am studying to be a high school math teacher. That will guarantee that I will never use anything but my very first math class. So I plan on taking a few math classes on the side, and over the summer I want to intern at a few places to keep my knowledge of higher levels of math current. NSA, CIA, Boeing, JPL, anything. Even hop onto a few engineering projects for the military. That way if I end up pursuing a PhD in math I can transition easier to the program and to a research position at a university... or an applied route with a company.



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02 Jan 2009, 9:51 pm

Shiggily wrote:
Well I did math, and before that molecular biology. Most of the professors will do side projects while they teach. Research does not mean lab work. And for math it does not mean publishing new theorems all the time. For the project I was talking about, they had 2 biochemists and 2 mathematicians and it was all theoretical work on computer The biochemists laid the foundation and the mathematicians build the computer program structure and did the hard core math calculations and they ran some sequences...

You can do that. You can do theoretical work which is more computer/paper stuff and less lab work. Sometimes a professor will take a sabbatical and do a research project for a year. There is a balance, and more options that lab junkie.

For example, I am studying to be a high school math teacher. That will guarantee that I will never use anything but my very first math class. So I plan on taking a few math classes on the side, and over the summer I want to intern at a few places to keep my knowledge of higher levels of math current. NSA, CIA, Boeing, JPL, anything. Even hop onto a few engineering projects for the military. That way if I end up pursuing a PhD in math I can transition easier to the program and to a research position at a university... or an applied route with a company.


Interesting ideas... you're definitely right that there are more theoretical aspects of research than benchwork, and bioinformatics is definitely a part of that, although in the end it's still research and I see the bioinformatics guys here still putting in a lot of time. However there would still be some pressure to publish, just maybe not a lot, as well as doing all the grant writing and securing funding for the research (regardless of whether it's benchwork or on computer), which I'm not all that enthusiastic about.... though I'll have to think about it more. I am not sure I really want to even think about science when I get home at night, other than if I had to brush up on my skills (which I'd have to do in any profession really, though). I only know how it is at the schools I went to (UC Berkeley and Yale), and they're both the typical research-heavy publish-or-perish institutions, so I have a hard time understanding lab situations that are not quite as cutthroat as that. I can understand the idea of people pursuing research casually as a kind of pet project if it's not required to keep the teaching job, but casual research that is required by the job? I don't understand how that would work.


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