"They’re really happy if you can involve students in your research.” --Sarah
Titus
One day during his postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for
Infection Biology in Tübingen, Germany, microbiologist Jay Mellies realized that
something was missing. The research was good, but where were the people? Maybe,
he jokes, he ate too much Zwiebelkuchen, the German onion pastry. Whatever the
reason, he was alone in the lab. It was students he missed.
When he returned to the United States to take a second postdoc at the Center for
Vaccine Development at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in
Baltimore, he also took a second job, teaching microbiology in the evenings, at
nearby Anne Arundel Community College.
This two-pronged approach--and grueling schedule--was excellent preparation for
the professional life of a faculty member at Reed
College in Portland, Oregon, where Mellies landed in 1999. Known for
small classes and a focus on undergraduate education, most such colleges also
require--from their younger, newer faculty members, at least--substantial
research activity. Faculty members are expected to balance heavy teaching with
research that involves research-inexperienced undergraduate students
and--typically--to publish the results of that research in peer-reviewed
journals.
Carving a research niche
Although many research universities care about teaching, faculty
members there always know that research is the key to getting
tenure. But faculty members at liberal arts colleges face a constant
challenge to find the elusive sweet spot that combines innovative
and successful teaching with modest but productive research.
The particular balance between teaching and research varies widely
from one liberal arts college to another. Faculty members at some
colleges teach eight courses per year, leaving no time for research
during the school year and offering little or no research support.
At others, professors teach just three courses per year and have
research resources--and tenure requirements--comparable to those at
some research universities.
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Sarah Titus with her one of her
classes.
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Because of the time constraints, and because they don't have graduate
students to keep experiments moving, developing a research program
"usually means finding a niche that isn’t super-cutting-edge,” says
Thomas Moore, a physicist at Pomona College in Claremont, California. “You can
work on important areas that are being neglected by other people and
get serious work done. It just takes creativity.” Several
publications in well-respected journals should be sufficient to meet
the research requirements for tenure at Pomona, he says.
“Teaching really is the number-one goal,” says Sarah Titus, a
second-year faculty member in the geology department at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Many
schools, including Carleton, emphasize the educational benefit of
research to their students. "They’re really happy if you can involve
students in your research,” she says.
But involving students in research isn't easy if the college doesn't
offer the resources. Ryan Haaland, who works in the physics and
engineering department at Fort Lewis
College in Durango, Colorado, feels pressure to engage
students in meaningful research, but the instrumentation doesn't
exist and it's hard to find the money to buy it. Furthermore, with a
teaching load of three classes per term, he says that “there is zero
time budgeted [for research] during the academic year," so his
research often gets shoved into the summer months. Fortunately, he
recently won U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) funding that
will allow him to take students into the field this summer to study
sprites associated with lightning storms.
With the right infrastructure and a niche field, a few faculty
members achieve nearly as much in the research realm as their
colleagues at much larger universities. Mark Goldman, a
computational neuroscientist, earned an R01 grant while at Wellesley College, a small liberal arts college in
Massachusetts. “Wellesley is a wonderful and special place in terms
of the quality of research,” Goldman says, and Wellesley's
neuroscience department has a track record of high-level funding.
Goldman's R01 grant allowed him to hire a postdoc.
Goldman's undergraduate research assistants, however, often hadn’t
taken neuroscience, computer programming, physics, or advanced math.
Wellesley provided some excellent role models, but “I wanted to do a
little more research,” he says, so he moved to the University of
California, Davis, earlier this year.
At Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, Laura
Katz has published more than 30 peer-reviewed papers about
eukaryotic microbiology since 1997, supported by NSF, the National
Institutes of Health, and other external funders. She mentors
undergraduates, postdocs, and graduate students from nearby
University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She also teaches two courses
each semester--usually an intro course to 30 to 50 students and an
upper-level microbiology seminar to 10 or so students.
Despite her productivity, Katz says, her small-college appointment
comes with a stigma. “When I was first starting out, I think people
were quick to discount me,” she says. “I had to do even more ... to
demonstrate that I was serious about my scholarship. The culture is
changing, but slowly, and it can be really frustrating.”
Preparing for the job
Although all liberal arts institutions value both teaching and
research experience, they weigh their importance differently in
hiring and in the tenure decision. Highly competitive schools such
as Smith, Wellesley, and Pomona want new faculty members who are
prepared to be productive researchers. “You used to be able to apply
for jobs here without a postdoc, and I think that’s really
changing,” Katz says.
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Loretta Jackson Hayes (center)
with research students in the
lab.
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But with teaching such an important part of the job, such
institutions want to hire scientists with teaching experience beyond
the normal graduate assistantship. Scientists who have taught their
own courses can get interviews--and sometimes win tenure-track
positions--without postdoctoral experience. As Loretta Jackson-Hayes
was finishing her Ph.D. in pharmacology at the University of
Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, she was planning a
postdoc at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Then she
discovered that she was pregnant.
“I realized that I might not have 70 hours [per week] to put in the
lab,” she says. Looking for a more flexible schedule, she applied
for teaching positions at 2-year and 4-year colleges in the area. In
2003, she was hired by Rhodes
College in Memphis as a William Randolph Hearst teaching
fellow, a 1-year program that supports minority candidates
interested in teaching careers. After a year focused on teaching
general chemistry, she moved into a tenure-track position in the
same department.
More flexible doesn’t necessarily mean less grueling, though. “I just
put my head down and get it done somehow,” says Katz, who’s often up
late working on lectures. “It works for me because I love what I
do.”
At institutions like Oglethorpe
University in Atlanta, Georgia, the teaching load can
approach that maintained by faculty members at community colleges:
12 hours in the classroom or teaching lab and up to eight scheduled
office hours. Members of the Oglethorpe faculty prepare and teach
all the courses and labs, and they do all the grading. Because the
balance is weighted heavily toward teaching, says Oglethorpe
biologist Charlie Baube, hiring committees look for candidates who
emphasize instructional experience. A postdoc or a history of grant
funding can help an application, Baube says, but letters and
curricula vitae should reflect an emphasis on teaching, "both in
their experience and how they structure their application.”
Making a difference
Whether these schools draw students from around the country or just
from their regions, the opportunities to make an impact on their
students’ lives, and to watch motivated students achieve, is one of
the job's key rewards. Recently, Baube got a phone call from a 2002
graduate who had just defended his master’s degree. Baube was the
second person he called following his defense--after his mother.
“You need to enjoy students who are willing and want to come by and
talk with you at any time, outside office hours,” Haaland says,
whether it’s to talk about physics, personal problems, or their
future plans. “We’re a small department, and we know all our majors
really well.”
Scientists at liberal arts colleges feel pulled in many directions.
“Because I’m ambitious about ... what I want to achieve in terms of
writing, research, or classes, I never seem to have enough time,”
Moore says. But those time pressures really are the flip side of
what Moore most enjoys: “[You want] to do a good job because you
have lots of relationships with students that you care about and
other faculty that you care about.”
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First paragraph updated, 30 June 2007.
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Sarah Webb has a Ph.D. in bioorganic
chemistry. She writes from Brooklyn, New
York.
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Comments, suggestions? Please send your
feedback to our editor.
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Photos courtesy of the subjects.
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DOI: 10.1126/science.caredit.a0800096
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