Philip Smith
1. What is the name of your school and what is your title?
Texas State University and my title is Lecturer
2. Are you hired on a year to year basis or do you have a multiyear contract?
Currently I'm on a year contract but if a position opens up I will be hired on a multi-year contract as a "senior lecturer".
3. How many faculty members are in your department?
About 12 or so.
4. Do you consider your department to be more teaching oriented or research oriented?
I'd consider it more teaching oriented but pushing in a research direction.
5. Are you more interested in teaching classes or conducting research?
I'm a full time teacher although I will likely spend summers doing research.
6. Does your school have a graduate program in physics?
We have a master's program.
7. Does your department focus more on undergraduate students or graduate students?
Most of the focus is on undergrads.
8. What percentage of your time do you spend:
- Teaching? 100%
- Doing research?
- Other? (please explain what ?other? entails)
9. Describe your standard week.
I teach 4 classes and supervise the lab instructors for a given course. My work week includes 12 hours of lecturing, usually about two hours a day, and about two office hours a day (which aren't heavily used by the students). Any remaining time in the 8 hour day is spent prepping and typically my day runs longer than 8 hours.
10. Do you have any TAs or graders?
I usually have a grader when I really need one but it's not like I'm assigned a 20hr/wk graduate student. I can get help but I have been using online homework assignments (webassign) and multiple choice exams to cut down on grading. I'd prefer long form answers but I have 100 students per course and there is just no time for grading.
11. Do you collaborate with any other faculty regarding teaching? If so, in what ways do you collaborate?
I do speak with other faculty members from time to time regarding the details of teaching, sometimes generalities, and I have modified powerpoint files from others. For the most part I like to use them to bounce ideas off of regarding specific incidences in class and how to handle specific situations.
I think this semester I will work a little more closely with a couple other lecturers regarding the conceptual physics class I will be teaching because I find it particularly challenging reaching the students. I am interested in in-class assignments and other tools to keep the student's attention.
12. Do you collaborate with any other faculty regarding research? If so, in what ways do you collaborate?
Regrettably I'm not a researcher at this time.
13. To what extent are you able to teach what you want to teach? (Both in terms of choosing the courses you wish to teach and in structuring the courses you teach.)
I am free to structure the courses as I see fit and I can request certain classes, but I am low man on the totem pole and thus kind of get the scraps. Since I have an MS degree I am mainly here to teach the intro classes. That can include calculus based physics but usually doesn't.
Technically I'm qualified to teach higher division or even graduate courses but I'm pretty sure that will never happen.
14. How are teaching, research and "other" weighted when hiring and promotion decisions are made in your department?
For my job as a lecturer research is not really important. They are interested in me having the proper prerequisite graduate courses (the canonical ones) as well as teaching experience.
The tenure track faculty members are required to be strong teachers as well as bring in research grant money and pursue research. It seems to be a transitional time here at Texas State and they are shifting more focus to research whereas it used to be more teaching oriented. This can be a problem for new tenure track hires because the graduate program is limited to masters degrees with a limited pool of graduate students, as well as undergrads. It's difficult to produce results when your grad students only spend about a year on a project and undergrads are very inexperienced (as well as time constrained).
15. What kind of experience does your department expect when considering hiring new professors? (postdoc, previous professorship, visiting professorship, etc.)
For lecturers a masters degree in physics is the minimum requirement and they expect teaching experience.
For tenure track I believe they expect you to have postdoc experience and your research should be such that undergrads/masters students are capable of publishing results. Resources tend to be limited so you should be good at securing your own funding. Also, consider the research thrust of the university and what types of projects would mesh well with students seeking careers after they graduate. A very small fraction of students proceed to post graduate academic work here with the majority seeking employment in industry. It's not likely a string theorist would land a job here.
It would not be unreasonable to do a postdoc here and then be hired on as a tenure track faculty member if you make a strong impression. Several faculty members here did a postdoc at UT, one of which worked for Alan McDonald before and after he came to UT. I've heard that it's possible to transition from lecturer to tenure track but I have not seen it happen.