DonorsChoose Payoff: Changing Categories

An anonymous donor asks a tricky question, namely:

how apparently successful research faculty ... can best make the transition to a small
teaching/research institution?

This is a tricky question not only because anything relating to academic jobs is tough, but also because I don't have a great deal of experience with it. I've been in on a bunch of job searches, but we've never hired anybody fitting this description. As a result, this is necessarily kind of hypothetical.

I think the key bit of advice is the same for faculty looking to switch instituions as for people looking for thier first academic job: We Are Not Your Safety School.

The very quickest way to get your application folder tossed aside is to mis-state the name of the college in your cover letter. The second quickest is to mis-state the nature of the position. If I'm reading applications for a one-year visiting position, and your cover letter starts off with "I am very excited to apply for the tenure-track job at Onion College," you're finished before I ever get to the CV.

The fastest substantive way to get your application put aside is to demonstrate that you'd really prefer to be at a "Reseach I" institution. This is a little more subtle, and shows up in a lot of little ways. If your teaching statement is one page, and your research statement ten, that's a hint. If your research statement talks about grad students and post-docs as an integral part of your plan, that's another. If your research program is described in terms that faculty members outside your immediate field can't follow, that's a third. If your CV lists lots of graduate seminars under "courses taught" but no intro courses, that's a fourth.

All of those are things that suggest to the person reading the application that you're not seeking the job, you're settling for it. And that suggests that you're not going to be a good fit for the college.

If you want to be considered seriously for a job at a small liberal arts college, whether you're coming to it as a newly minted Ph.D. or a research professor changing fields, you need to demonstrate that you know what the job is about, and you really want this sort of job. That involves lots of little things, including but not limited to:

A demonstrated committment to teaching. You don't have to have won awards, but you need to have taught something, preferably at a low level. If you're looking for your first job, you want to talk up any TA experience you have; if you're looking to change from a research institution to one more devoted to teaching, you need to show that you haven't been ducking students. We don't expect you to be teaching six lecture courses a year, but you need to have taught undergraduates at some point in there, preferably of your own free will and not because you had the least seniority and got stuck with it.

An understanding of undergraduate research. Student involvement in research is a big point of emphasis for us at the moment, and I think that's true for a lot of small colleges. If you want a job at a small college, you need to show that you're willing and able to work with undergraduates.

There are a few different elements to this. The most obvious is to have a track record-- if you've supervised summer research students, or undergraduate honors theses, talk that up. There's also the choice and presentation of proposed research projects-- if you're an experimentalist, you can't propose something that will take five grad students to make it work, and if you're a theorist, you can't propose something that requires three years of grad-level mathematics to comprehend. When you write your research statement, it should be comprehensible outside your immediate field (odds are, the hiring committee will include people from other subfields), and should include clear indications of where and how you will be able to involve students.

A lack of condescension. That's as good a term as I can think of for what I mean here, which is a little nebulous. What I mean is that it's easy to look at those first two items, and completely overdo it: not just to show willingness to teach introductory classes, but to appear to actively disdain advanced classes; not just to show an understanding of what can be done with undergraduates, but to aim too low with the research proposals.

The point of the previous two items is not to suggest that you abandon all ambition, but that you need to tailor your ambitions appropriately. You need to be willing to teach introductory classes, but if you have ideas for upper-level classes, that's great, too. If you've got ideas for good upper-level classes relating to your research field, you don't need to abandon them, you just need to convince us that you can make them work with our students. If you've got ambitious research goals, you don't need to abandon them, you just need to convince us that you can make them work here.

And you should be trying to stretch the limits as much as you can, here. Realistic ambition is a good thing-- I'd rather see a proposal that looks challenging but would be really cool if it works out than one that's sure to generate two completely boring papers a year.

Some external evidence of sincerity. This one's not entirely within your control, but it helps to have something in your recommendation letters that confirms that you're actively interested in this sort of job, and not just settling for what you think will be an easier life. In our last job search, we had a few candidates with what I think of as "head-scratcher" letters-- letters from graduate or post-doctoral advisors saying "Candidate X could get a faculty position at a major university, but for some reason insists on applying to these little liberal arts places, and I can't understand why." I think those are great, and they carry more weight with me than a lot of more conventional letters.

Obviously, you can't ask your references to write exactly that, but if you're serious about this sort of position, make sure to discuss it in detail with them. You want them to write you a letter that says "X really wants this job," and not "X is looking to move for family reasons" or "X isn't going to make it in the big time, but would be a fine hire for you."

Again, this is largely hypothetical, as I've never been part of a job search where we hired such a candidate. And there are ways around any of these items, just as there are for people looking for their first job. A lot of it comes down to personality and fit-- your ability to convince the people you're applying to that you would be the right person for their job.

But as far as the original question goes, that's what comes to mind.