Timeline for an engineering Ph.D. teaching math in college
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
16 events
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| Sep 26, 2010 at 4:38 | comment | added | Ben Webster♦ | @Victor- In the case of MIT, there are big lectures, but then the sections are also often taught by professors or postdocs (though sometimes by graduate students). | |
| Sep 10, 2010 at 16:07 | comment | added | Tom LaGatta | +1 for your advice: "you should always apply for a job for which you think you are qualified." | |
| Sep 9, 2010 at 21:51 | comment | added | sleepless in beantown | I have reviewed what I've typed so far in this question's threads and I really do not see where I have "betrayed" or (knowing my own mind and mental state) applied any emotional judgment whatsoever. What you see in it as an emotional judgment might simply be "projection" from the reader's side, of a non-mathematical kind. I have no dog in this fight, to use a metaphor that won't travel well out of the south-eastern the United States. It is simply a fact that different schools use their faculty and pseudo-faculty teachers in different ways. | |
| Sep 9, 2010 at 21:41 | comment | added | sleepless in beantown | The question asked whether it is a "deal breaker" not having a Ph.D. in the field for the department in which his friend wishes to work. I replied with personal verified experience; anecdotal, but verified, which is a single datum. As for this other commentary, well it's not about the question at all, is it? I addressed the question directly in the answer above. This commentary is all responding to the penultimate paragraph in my answer: replacing a permanent qualified professor with part-time poorly paid adjuncts. That is a dispassionate fact based on the PhD being in a different field :) | |
| Sep 9, 2010 at 20:55 | comment | added | Victor Protsak | Just to clarify: I assume that at MIT and Berkeley Calculus courses are taught in large lectures. At the universities where it's taught in small sections the teaching is often split between faculty and graduate students (this was true at Yale when I was a graduate student), but that's not always the case (Cornell is an exception, although they rely more on visiting faculty). As Felipe remarked, the plural of anecdote is not data, so we won't be able to settle it one way or another, but it does appear that you are making an emotional judgment (with which I empathize, by the way). | |
| Sep 9, 2010 at 18:28 | comment | added | Felipe Voloch | Some of my senior colleagues like to teach calculus and do so on a regular basis, others do not. We always ask our tenure-track assistant professors to teach calculus a few times as it looks good on their promotion files. We cannot possibly cover all our classes with our tenure-track/tenured faculty so we hire lots of adjuncts and some of them have PhDs in other disciplines and a few don't have a PhD. These adjuncts naturally mostly teach introductory courses. We also have three people in our permanent faculty whose PhD is in Physics. The plural of anecdote is not data, but UT is a big place. | |
| Sep 9, 2010 at 16:32 | comment | added | dvitek | @KConrad/sleepless There is a gentle gradient, in that some schools have prominent math professors teaching upper-level undergraduate courses. (This is true at Duke, at the very least.) Most schools will shove off the calculus sequence for engineers and the like to assistants though. | |
| Sep 9, 2010 at 12:25 | history | edited | sleepless in beantown | CC BY-SA 2.5 |
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| Sep 9, 2010 at 5:13 | comment | added | sleepless in beantown | @KConrad, that's good to hear about MIT, Berkeley, and Harvard still having the research profs teaching undergrads. However, that's probably not the case at the majority of schools, which hire Adjuncts or "Lecturers" to teach the undergrads. I'm not making an emotional judgment here; I'm only pointing out the facts. | |
| Sep 9, 2010 at 5:04 | comment | added | KConrad | sleepless: what anomaly? Last year at Harvard Dick Gross and Dennis Gaitsory taught first-year calculus, this semester at MIT Paul Seidel is teaching freshman calc. and Mike Artin is teaching undergraduate algebra, and at Berkeley tenured faculty are the primary instructors in all the single-variable calculus courses. | |
| Sep 9, 2010 at 4:37 | comment | added | sleepless in beantown | @Pete Clark, Franklin & Marshall abuses the title of "Visiting Assistant Professor" by using it as a standing position with a one-to-two year limit, but it's not really a "visiting" position taking the place of an actual tenured professor temporarily on leave or sabbatical. That's how they get around using the title "Adjunct" for their temporary non-tenure track teaching hires. | |
| Sep 9, 2010 at 4:27 | comment | added | sleepless in beantown | All of the adjuncts I'm referring to have Ph.D.s, at least for those which I have seen at the 4-year universities in the USA, either private teaching oriented schools like Oberlin or Franklin and Marshall (which do not have graduate programs), or at research level institutions including the state university systems. At M.I.T. back in the day, you had Rota teaching undergraduate Differential Equations (18.03? 18.03_x?), Kleppner teaching Physics (8.013) to undergraduates, Al Drake probability (6.043?). But seeing high level research profs teaching undergrads and frosh seems to be an anomaly. | |
| Sep 9, 2010 at 3:34 | comment | added | Pete L. Clark | @sleepless: you have my sympathies for what sounds like a difficult and unfair situation. When you say that the majority of courses are taught by adjuncts, do you mean adjuncts with PhDs in math or without? (I find that either answer will make me angry, just in different ways!) | |
| Sep 9, 2010 at 2:47 | comment | added | Thierry Zell | I'm sorry to learn about that. Accreditation was first on my mind as soon as I read the original question, but as I mentioned in my answer, most accrediting bodies will offer an out if you can make a convincing case for the faculty member's appropriateness. It's disappointing that the school would see making the case as such a burden. | |
| Sep 9, 2010 at 2:47 | history | edited | sleepless in beantown | CC BY-SA 2.5 |
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| Sep 9, 2010 at 2:32 | history | answered | sleepless in beantown | CC BY-SA 2.5 |