Faculty Interview

We selected individual faculty members to interview for the Teaching in Higher Education Class ALS 6015 in order to develop our teaching identity and prepare for the teaching, research and service trifecta. I chose a particular faculty member because I hoped to learn a little about how he seems to expertly balance department service, research, teaching and mentoring. All the while, he never appears to be overwhelmed and also stays available most days with his door open. Unfortunately, I came almost no closer to understanding how he achieves this balance than when I started the interview. This faculty member's best explanation for how he does so much is that he enjoys it and does not count being a professor as work. He also told me that grad students and postdocs are useful in ensuring progress on research while one has to take care of the many other responsibilities.

What I did take away from the meeting was some of the additional ways that we can make introductory astronomy relevant to students: we use the interesting subject matter of planets, stars and galaxies to demonstrate that the world can be studied in a quantitative way - we can ask interesting questions and calculate how the world will behave. This should be transferrable to any kind of discipline or workplace as long as we can make those skills and their applicability clear to students.

Faculty Interview Summary