Doctoral programs prepare you best for a career at a research university. We all know this. Which is why the first year in a faculty job at a liberal-arts college can be so challenging for new Ph.D.s.
Having spent much of our careers in this sector of higher education, we have some advice about the transition from graduate student to faculty member — whether you are a new hire this fall or are applying for tenure-track openings now. The academic-job market remains competitive, with too many candidates and too few tenure-track openings. It’s in your interest to expand your options, even if you never envisioned yourself working at a small liberal-arts college. We can’t imagine a better place for you to grow and learn as a scholar, a teacher, and a community member.
But it will necessitate a shift in mindset.
Some of the habits you acquired in your Ph.D. program — identifying worthy research questions, reading carefully, completing significant scholarly projects — will continue to serve you in a faculty role at a liberal-arts institution. But other aspects of graduate-school culture — the tendency toward perfectionism, the hyper-competitiveness around research productivity, the fixation on work to the detriment of self — are better left there. Working at a liberal-arts college will allow you to embrace new ways of thinking and being that will serve you well in the long term.
In place of perfectionism, cultivate curiosity. The first few years on the tenure track are hard enough without holding yourself to unrealistic standards of teaching, research, and service. Especially if you are new to a small-college setting, there is much to learn, and no one expects you to grasp it all in your first semester or even in your first year.
What to keep in mind in your initial semesters:
- Give yourself permission to learn the ropes. As educators, we regularly remind students that failure is inevitable when learning something new — only to turn around and forget that lesson in our own careers. Cut yourself some slack when you inevitably make a mistake.
- Find shortcuts to accomplish tasks efficiently without making things harder for yourself. For example, to propose a new class, you usually have to write a proposal to be reviewed by a curriculum committee. Ask your chair for an example or two to help prevent you from overthinking the task.
- It takes time and experience to find an equilibrium among teaching, scholarship, and service. Many seasoned academics struggle to allocate their time, and end up feeling scattered, overwhelmed, or even guilty. Be curious about how you manage your commitments, and tweak the schedule until you find what works for you.
- Ask for advice. How do your new colleagues make time for both teaching and research? What are their tips for dealing with challenging students? What’s been their experience submitting grant proposals? You might find that your struggles are pretty common.
Develop a “growth mindset” toward teaching. No doubt you spent the last few years of graduate school homing in on a narrow facet of a large discipline. That expertise will continue to serve you well in your scholarship. But in our slice of academe, teaching is highly valued and will occupy the majority of your time.
Liberal-arts colleges are filled with faculty members who pride themselves on being excellent teachers. Few of them started that way but they are a resource for you now. Your new colleagues will want to talk about teaching and how to get better at it. Your campus teaching center or technological services can also help you design courses and create small-group exercises and other active-learning assignments to engage your students.
Get to know your students — not just as writers or discussion participants but as people. Why did they select this college? Why are they taking your course? What are their lives like outside of class? Developing a deep and authentic understanding of who your students are will position you to truly engage them.
At small colleges, there is a deep recognition that learning occurs both in, and outside of, the classroom. Educating students is everyone’s job and relationships matter to a great extent. You can and should rely on the expertise of your staff colleagues, especially when it comes to students’ mental-health, academic-success, advising, career-counseling, and accessibility needs.
View teaching as a team sport. Play your part, and give your colleagues a chance to play theirs.
Yet don’t let a devotion to teaching consume you. A common misunderstanding about teaching-focused institutions is that you need to give yourself over to your classroom obligations 100 percent. While students will crave your full attention, that does not mean you’re on call 24/7.
It does mean that you must build and maintain consistent expectations with students (and colleagues, for that matter). Identify times when you will be available for consultations and reasonable turnarounds for things like email inquiries or graded assignments.
Faculty members from demographic backgrounds not historically represented on small campuses often face extra demands from students seeking academic help, encouragement, understanding, or advice. Such conversations can be valuable to those students and personally fulfilling for you — but they also diminish your time for work and may exert a heavy emotional toll. If you find yourself on the receiving end of extra student attention, you may need to set limits and close your office door, both physically and metaphorically.
Practice give and take: Accept help and make contributions. Liberal-arts colleges have an abiding commitment to community. While many large universities can feel impersonal and decentralized, the scale and intimacy of a small college means that each individual truly matters. Some of your new colleagues will rightly caution you to “protect your time,” but recognize that building too many walls around yourself may reinforce feelings of isolation and stress. Find a balance between making a contribution to the collective whole and benefiting from it.
In your first months on the job, you will have to take the lead in building networks of support, connection, and mentorship. Your department chair is an important player in this network but should not be your only source of information or encouragement. Not only do you not want to overwhelm the chair, but others may be better positioned to help.
Look first to your department colleagues — remember: They were once “new” hires, too. Also consider approaching folks outside of your department, such as those who volunteered to speak on panels during new-faculty orientation. If that feels too intimidating, extend an invitation to other new (or newish) faculty members. Like you, they have recently moved to the area and are figuring things out. “Being lonely together” over a coffee or a meal can bring comfort and spark lifelong friendships.
And how can you contribute? Set a goal to identify one or two things that you can do for your new department and campus. You might: Teach in the first-year-seminar program, join a committee on a topic you care about, or show up at an event hosted by an interdisciplinary program.
See the possibilities in being a big fish in a small pond. Recognize that the way things are in your first year is not necessarily how they will be forever. Liberal-arts colleges are dynamic places and fertile ground for curricular, pedagogical, and cultural change — all of which tend to be initiated and shepherded by people just like you who asked “Why?” or “What if?” or even, “Huh?”
When you are a new person in an unfamiliar place, fitting in presents an undeniable allure. However, assimilation should not be the end goal. Instead of trying to change who you are to be like everyone else at your new college, ask yourself periodically: “How can I transform this place as an instructor, as a scholar, or as a whole person?” Being attentive to those early insights will help you shape your teaching and service, and perhaps even your eventual contributions as a campus leader.
Your college hired you for a reason. Out of hundreds of applicants, it saw the potential in you to deliver and evolve the core commitments of teaching, scholarship, and service. Consider yourself fortunate to have landed in a place where bureaucracies are human-sized, where experimentation is rewarded, where individuals matter, where you can color outside of the disciplinary lines, and where leaders are generally accessible to you.
Your college will depend on your input to become more innovative and inclusive in the coming years. You can make a real difference here, and your first year on the job is not too soon to see yourself as part of that future.
