Career Advice

Teresa Mangum offers perspective on the job search -- having launched hers during a previous economic downturn.

What, exactly, are CC faculty supposed to do that substantially distinguishes them from high school teachers? I don't mean this in a derogatory manner, I was a high school teacher and found the job incredibly fulfilling. Similarly, I was a full-time CC instructor on the tenure-track. In order to be approved for tenure I was expected to teach classes (actually semester hours) to a reasonable standard of competency. I was also expected to take part in the organizational structure of the college by serving on committees. It was expected that I keep current in the methods of pedagogy in my field and demonstrate that I was attempting to improve my instruction (note that this is pre-tenure).

I will be graduating from a smaller campus of a Big 10 University this May with a degree in Interdisciplinary Humanities. I have some definite concerns as I enter into the job market, being especially considerate of our economic situation right now. From the time that I began grad school two years ago, I knew that I wanted to teach.I will happily take a job anywhere I can get one! My first concern is that my degree is actually in Humanities, even though I concentrated in English Lit and Rhet/Comp. ( I have 6 credits of Rhet/Comp Theory and 15 in Lit, along with some theory classes and the typical research methods/thesis writing courses). I know I will be applying to many different schools, from community colleges to state universities and smaller liberal arts colleges. Do I tailor my CV, and for that matter, my cover letter to fit in with each "type" of school? How do I emphasize my competence in the Rhet Comp/English Lit area, especially since I have no real teaching experience?

I'm away from school working on my thesis at another institution. I noticed the other day that there was a letter to the editor in the local newspaper where some guy was mis-paraphrasing the Pope mis-quoting the recent Benotti et al. pharmaceuticals in drinking water study to say that the Pill is giving all men girl cooties and destroying society and should be banned immediately, by his Highly Scientific Viewpoint. So I wrote a replying letter to the editor, politely, with inline references and just a little snark, to refute it line by line. I was shooting for the tone used in LTEs in Nature or Science. My letter was never published, and today there's another missive of anti-choice wingnuttery from the same person, a week later. Apparently our local editor has granted this person's oppinions pride of place on the editorial pages. I would be slightly less freaked out if this wasn't the local rag for a town dominated by a major research institution-we're supposed to be scientifically minded here.

After recently reading Stanley Fish's NY Times blog on education, I felt moved to write in. I recently attended a talk about curriculum and program design where large university decided to roll out a new undergraduate program (let's call it "computer science lite") since enrollments were collapsing in a related discipline ("traditional computer science."). As part of the planning process at this university, the committee asked for consultations from professionals in the IT industry (and presumably other educators). The IT sector said that graduates were clearly weak in professional skills (defined to be skills such as communications, project management etc). Industry feedback seemingly played a major, possibly decisive, role in the design of this new undergraduate program. This focus on employer input as central strikes me as interesting and rather unusual in higher education.

Any advice if you have a crappy advisor? I am going for my PhD and although I thought I asked him some good questions, and received solid responses, in our interview, my advisor turns out that he is not a good mentor and not much of a help. He is mainly, at best, a time-suck with all the meetings he wants to make sure things are "going well" but doesn't actually want to help me with anything and gets petulant if I ask for help or advice. I don't know that many other people with a PhD so I thought I'd ask just in case you wanted to share some words of wisdom. I had a crappy master's advisor but that was two years and another year of not being around him, but writing while working full time. I finished though and it was worth it. Now the funding my new advisor said I'd have is virtually non-existent, he thinks the fact that I'm getting a stipend is enough for me to praise him daily and kiss his ass while running errands for him and taking care of all of his tech problems (i'm not doing that anymore). One semester and it's already an enormous headache. You can't get far in my field without a PhD. But I'm starting to get sick of the attitudes in my field...and yet I've been working towards this for 15 years so I have no idea what else I'd even do and it took me 4 years just to get in to a program.

After six years of teaching and academic administration at two proprietary schools (neither one being your Proprietary U unless you've disguised it incredibly well), I am applying for a position at a local community college. As someone who has made the transition, what concerns do you think I should be prepared to address on the off chance I get an interview? I know I have no experience working with a faculty union, but I have worked at an R1, so I am at least familiar with the concepts and structures of faculty governance. I'm a little more concerned about what assumptions, groundless or otherwise, they'll have about my background. As ever, advice from wise and worldly readers is welcome. Having done this myself, I agree that there are both fair and unfair barriers you'll need to be prepared to address.

The letter about the horrible adjunct struck a cord for me, but for a very different reason. I am an adjunct at a local community college and it while I have enjoyed it, and learned a lot about what works and what doesn't in the CC classroom, I can't help but wonder if there aren't more 'horrible adjuncts' out there. I can imagine there are, because although I believe I am competent and capable, I have never had an official evaluation (in fact, no one has ever come to watch me teach), nor are there official student evaluations of courses. And that doesn't even begin to address the issues with the dean, who has told instructors that students shouldn't be called out for texting in class and has accused others of racism for questioning the removal of basic English language competency requirements, or for failing students who stop showing up to class. So I guess my question is, where does one go when it seems the whole college is one giant lump of incompetence? And yes, this is partly selfish, because the school I'm teaching at is on the brink of losing its accreditation, and how does that look on a CV? But more than that, I worry about the students who pay good money, and think that they are getting an education, when what they are getting may or may not be.