Wednesday, July 4, 2012

How To Become a College Professor. From WikiHow.


  1. Complete your compulsory education.
  2. Get a bachelor's degree in the discipline you'd like to teach.
  3. Apply for Ph.D. programs.
  4. Do postdoctoral research.
  5. As a graduate student, apply to become a teaching assistant for a full-time professor.
  6. Consider a position as adjunct professor.
  7. When searching for a full-fledged professor position, apply everywhere.
  8. Aim for earning tenure.
  9. Stay on top of the latest research in your field and attend business conferences.

8 comments:

  1. EC1July 4, 2012 at 7:42 AM

    ....which was apparently written by somebody with half of an Ed.D...

    http://www.linkedin.com/in/thurmond

    ReplyDelete
  2. Aware and ScaredJuly 4, 2012 at 7:53 AM

    And less than half a clue ...

    Remember that the teaching rewards will be great. Teaching in a college environment means that your students want to be where they are, where as normally in elementary through high school classrooms, students are there because they have to be, not because they want to be.

    Really? Has she been to college?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Frog and ToadJuly 4, 2012 at 9:23 AM

    Uh, OK. Sure do wish I'd had this "College Teaching Careers for Morons" how-to when I was applying to grad school!

    ReplyDelete
  4. marginalia84July 4, 2012 at 10:54 AM

    Under the Things You'll Need section:
    - A PhD
    - Finances
    - Motivation
    - Confidence

    Seems a bit incomplete to me. Here are a few more things you'll need:

    - INTELLIGENCE, FOR CHRIST'S SAKE
    - Actual teaching skills. Funny how often those get overlooked.
    - Hard liquor

    Others?

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousJuly 4, 2012 at 12:41 PM

    This reminds me of Monty Python's sketch "How to Do It," including How to Play the Flute: "Blow in one end, and move your fingers up and down on the other end."

    Here's another one I liked:

    "Remain humble. Don't succumb to 'professor's disease.' Just because you spend your days in front of students who, by definition, have a lot to learn, doesn't mean you are omniscient or have an exalted place in the universe."

    UNIVERSE SHOULD BE CAPITALIZED, GOD-FREAKING-DAMMIT!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Defunct AdjunctJuly 4, 2012 at 1:29 PM

    I love this warning:

    Don't base your decision on where to teach solely by prestige of university. Some smaller universities can be top-notch niches in certain fields, and others can have excellent faculty and resources to work with.

    I completely agree. I'm tossing up right now between Princeton, Duke, Stanford, Swarthmore, and an adjunct position at my local community college.

    What percentage of faculty actually gets to make an active decision about where to teach? Would it be greater or less than one tenth of one percent?

    ReplyDelete
  7. ProffieinaHearseJuly 4, 2012 at 2:06 PM

    They forgot these steps (in no particular order):
    Drink heavily.
    Turn down the advances of your dissertation director.
    Have to get a new director when you realize he's never going to let you finish because you wouldn't sleep with him.
    PUBLISH.
    Don't be a mouth-breathing idiot.
    Take the GRE.
    Doubt yourself. A lot.
    Consider leaving academia.
    Decide to never ever be like YOUR professors if you get graduate students.
    And so on.

    ReplyDelete

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