New Faculty Members May Not Know How to Teach, but at Least They Know How to Do Research...right?

As these authors have observed on several occasions, college professors may be the only skilled professionals who do not routinely get training in the skills they need to succeed in their profession. Most universities either provide no orientation and mentoring for their new faculty members or they offer a campus-wide half-day orientation workshop consisting mainly of welcoming speeches and lectures on such things as health benefits and retirement packages. Most faculty members are consequently left on their own to learn what they will need to know about starting and building a research program and designing and teaching courses. The fact that most new faculty members have never been trained to teach is known throughout the academy, but a common assumption is that graduate and postdoctoral studies provide good preparation for independent research. Unfortunately, that assumption is generally wrong. Doctoral students and postdocs may learn to carry out a research project that someone else has defined and gotten funded, but few of them learn how to select research topics, write successful proposals, assemble an effective research team, and get papers published in top journals. While experienced faculty members may believe that their new colleagues have been adequately trained in research, the new colleagues know better. The authors recently led a conference workshop for faculty members in the first few years of their careers. They first had them list their career-related concerns, two-thirds of which involved research. In the remainder of this column, the authors summarize the faculty members' research-related questions and the responses, and cite publications containing the authors' responses to faculty members' questions about teaching and time management.