(448a) Manageable Teaching and Service Cheat Codes for Young Faculty

The paths that lead to a faculty position are filled with many valuable challenges and life lessons. This training focusses heavily on producing talented researchers, but to be a successful professor we are also expected to excel in areas of teaching and service. For many graduate and postdoctoral programs, however, there is relatively little focus on developing our skills as educators, administrators, leaders, and mentors. On-the-job training and trial-and-error is typically how new assistant faculty learn to effectively wear these multiple hats.

I now know that, when entering as an assistant professor over a decade ago, my graduate training had not prepared me well for the more human aspects of life in academia. Many hard-won lessons have since helped me find significant and rewarding success, from the departmental to the national level, specifically in those inter-personal facets of faculty life. In this talk I hope to give new faculty the teaching and service “cheat codes” that I wish I had to help prepare for my career in academia.

This talk will focus on employing small steps in teaching and service that I have found to have significant impact. Several key areas in both teaching and service will be addressed:

• Incorporating evidence-based pedagogy on a budget of time and money. Effective teaching is a large and complicated topic. But you can easily employ simple and proven teaching methods, particularly interactive and collaborative learning, from day-one in your lecture hall and laboratory.
• Fostering an inclusive classroom and department. If a student does not feel welcome in department culture, they are not as able to benefit from our teaching. How do we uphold our AIChE code of professional ethics in areas of diversity equality and inclusion in our classrooms? There are many steps faculty can take to set the stage for a welcoming climate; some of these take little effort but have significant impact.
• Engaging our communities. Universities can thrive by incorporating their surrounding communities, and outreach is a powerful tool of faculty service. How can we efficiently use department outreach to attract a diverse student body and strengthen departmental research programs?
• Being a human professor. Every faculty is faced with the type of human crises that I would have never anticipated as a new PhD, and our instinct to be “professorial” may be exactly the wrong response. I will end this talk with some tips on how to manage the human distress that is part of being involved with so many people in a very complicated phases of their lives. Being an effective teacher and mentor often means knowing when to stop being a professor and stop trying to engineer a solution to our students’ problems. In those times, there are simple things we can do to gauge when a student needs help beyond what we are qualified to offer.