In mid-September we started a new series, “Office Hours: Year One”, where four first-year tenure-track professors from different institutions reflect on their experiences throughout the first year. See Part 1 here. We are back with Part, checking how the first couple months have been, and looking back at some of the thoughts our cohort had in their first reflection.
Thank you again to Dr. Polina Beliakova (American University – School of International Service), Dr. Jennifer Ostojski (Indiana State University), Dr. Brooklyn Walker (University of Tennessee-Knoxville), and Dr. Charmaine Willis (Old Dominion University) for contributing and letting us get a glimpse at the first-year life.
Question: Dr. Walker – How is navigating a large institution going for you? Has it become easier? How about your new schedule and the projects you are working on?
Brooklyn Walker: It’s hard to believe that we are already halfway through the semester. But the leaves are turning — both on the trees and in my syllabus schedule. It feels like the family is starting to hit its stride, and my work is following suit. I’m writing daily, just acquired a new dataset that’s yielding some interesting results, and have a couple of R&Rs to work on. Although never at a pace that’s fast enough, it finally feels like I’m moving forward.
I’m also starting to feel more acclimated to UTK. I’ve made some connections with other departments, especially with people who share my interest in the social science of religion. My department staff have been so, so patient and helpful. I’m hoping to field a survey of my own for the first time this winter, and I’m a little nervous about shepherding the proposal through IRB. Figuring out how to navigate the research bureaucracy at UTK is one of my goals for the year. I’m sure there’ll be hiccups along the way, all of which will help me get a sense of how to do it better in the future.
A high point came this week. I was curious if my developed-for-community-college-student lesson plans would resonate with UTK students. I asked students for feedback and was thrilled to hear that they were enjoying the activities we were doing and felt they were learning a lot. One even declared PoliSci as a major!
That feedback buoyed my mood after what had been a challenging few weeks. The murder of Charlie Kirk was yet another reminder that the country is experiencing rising levels of political violence with real loss of life and human impact. Moreover, UTK placed a professor on leave in reaction to a comment she made on Facebook. While our provost indicated that he would defend our academic freedom, he conceded that the situation raised hard questions about the university’s interest in faculty’s private speech. In our current volatile political environment, I find myself oscillating between sad and seething and scared.
I still have moments where the move and the job seem hazy, not quite real, like the fog that settles in the valleys around my neighborhood. But, with time, there have been more moments when the fog lifts and I get a clearer vision of what my life here in Knoxville will look like. So far, I’m enjoying the view.
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Question: Dr. Willis – How is your graduate class going? Similar to Dr. Walker, how is the managing of the work-life balance been so far?
Charmaine Willis: It’s hard to believe both that we are over halfway through the semester and that it is not December already! This semester has been exhausting though the past few semesters have also been that way, having been on the job market last year as a visiting assistant professor. My husband and I FINALLY finished moving ourselves to Virginia (and our stuff will hopefully join us next week), though we still need to sell our house in New York. That said, I think the work-life balance has been ok; while I would like more down time, I have focused as much on life (my move) as on my job demands. I hope to catch up on grading this weekend, after taking a day off to relax!
My graduate class is going well, I think. The challenge for this class, as for any class, is balancing what students want/don’t want with covering content and informed pedagogy. I find myself having more empathy for my graduate school professor as I hear students complain about the reading load (which is less than what I was assigned as a graduate student!). I sometimes feel like students (in general) will complain about any amount of reading, so it is best to assign them what I think is necessary for them to gain expertise in the topic. At the same time, it is important to recognize that graduate students are very busy. In our program, and many other programs, graduate students are working full time in addition to being either part-time or full-time students, which is true of some undergraduates as well.
My graduate class is modeled after not only similar graduate classes offered at my PhD-granting institution (the Comparative Politics seminar) but also the same class offered by my predecessor here. The class is structured as a seminar in which students guide us through the readings and discussion (different students each week), which is what my grad school professors and my predecessor did. I typically start the class with a brief overview of the week’s readings (for about 20 minutes), but I find myself wondering if I should lecture more to make sure the students are on the same page. On the one hand, I think it’s important for students to have their own perspectives on readings (especially as they take comprehensive exams in this area) but on the other, I want to make sure that they understand the basics of the readings (i.e., what’s the argument, etc.) That said, I think the student leaders have done a great job so far covering the readings (which involves them disseminating outlines of the readings to the class), so I am not sure if more lectures are actually necessary.
A common lament about graduate education in political science is that few programs offer training about how to teach given how integral teaching is to traditional academic careers in higher education (and in many cases, graduate courses on teaching are often optional and not part of the required curriculum). While, in my view, the discipline has done a better job in recent years offering resources about how to teach (from roundtables and other sessions at conferences like APSA and ISA to handbooks to online resources like APSA Educate and ALPS!), undergraduate education seems to get much more focus than teaching graduate students. That said, I have been thinking more about the need in the discipline for more training and resources on graduate education. There are some, including the book Teaching Graduate Political Methodology, for which my colleagues and I contributed a chapter, but I hope to see even more resources and discussions about teaching political science to graduate students in the near future.
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Question: Dr. Ostojski – How is the teaching/writing/researching balance working out for you so far? Has the prep for the three new classes subsided?
Jennifer Ostojski: Echoing the bi-annual amazement about time progressing way too quickly during an academic semester. My last few weeks have been going so-so when it comes to finding my utopian balance of reading, writing, and teaching. Frankly, class prep, grading, and oh-so-much admin have taken over my life. I have made a turn for the better in the last week, writing again and feeling better because I am writing (and thus being more creative). But I hesitate to say that now everything is fixed in terms of having it “all”. On the upside, two of my three on-going projects stem directly from teaching/problems in IR I have lectured about in my classes this semester. I am thus harvesting my teaching for writing material.
Institutionally, I was busy compiling and submitting my first year tenure review documents, which were due in mid-October. I wonder how other institutions deal with that, but here it seems quite early, given the fact that I just learned where the good parking spots are on campus. My understanding is that this to establish a baseline of sorts and see how I progress over time. It’s daunting to be reviewed quite so early on the job, but it is also a good reminder that the clock is ever so slowly ticking away. I am curious to see how the administrative side of that looks like on the backend. In terms of the reflections we provide here for the readers and each other, it is the admin portion that sucks away time. This is not a brand new revelation that I am bringing to you, my people, but in my previous role as VAP I experienced significantly less of that. This is not just in relation to compiling documents, but also keeping track of students (i.e., warning systems, personal crises, advisors in the mix, etc.), attending meetings of all sorts, and doing (required) professional development. It eats away at the balance, and it is certainly a new experience on how to juggle the job requirements.
I have thrown myself into a bit of departmental service by becoming an advisor to a Political Science student club in our department (which is probably why I lack balance). For the longest, at previous institutions as well, I have been trying to foster community for students who are interested in politics/the science beyond just the classroom. During graduate school, such a club was a lifeline in forming community and a network with peers, who loved to discuss and debate issues of our times. So far, attendance in my institution’s club has been great, and I look forward to see how the students will use the club in the future. My goal is to make it eventually self-running, but in the meantime I find it rewarding to connect with the Political Science community. Currently, I only teach one designated Political Science class; my other two are in the gen ed pool, which have no or very little social science majors. The club is rectifying it in a certain way. I am certainly banking my involvement with this club as an early highlight of my time here at my institution.