Who is Patrick? In many ways, he is me almost a decade ago. Viewed as a strong researcher in a tough, sought-after area (in my case pattern recognition), with publications and grants, doing a postdoc (in my case at Stanford Med School.) But having envisioned a faculty life that included students, and not just in auditoriums, 400 at a time. In Second Thoughts, Patrick's first article chronicling his faculty job search, he echoes what most faculty who care about teaching believe: that in higher education, you have to choose between research and teaching.
"Dear Patrick, there is a middle path ..." The thing about middle paths is, you don't follow them, you forge them.
I had tutored, TA'd, mentored, coached and supervised my way through the years right along with the research. In fact, I had researched along with the research, as it were - I had a couple of CS Education research articles, projects and grants scattered in and around the neural nets, genetic algorithms, collective automata, and feature analysis. On those rare occasions when I wasn't convinced the world would end before I finished my thesis, I would daydream about how I would run my lab.
I love research - no, that's not right, I live it, I do it reflexively, I can't help it, it just happens, left on my own I would do it 24/7/365 so it's a darn good thing I'm not left on my own because then I remember to eat, bathe, sleep, shop, etc. Teaching keeps me sane. My students keep me in the world. They contribute in other ways, but that's a topic for another post. Suffice it to say that, over the years (I solo parented my way through most of grad school) I have tried research w/o teaching several times and, while it's ok for short periods of time, it doesn't work over the long haul.
So when I was faced with Patrick's choice, I didn't. I consulted with several academics who had created unconventional situations for themselves. At the time (2000), the Bay Area was filled with CS programs, so I evaluated them all and tried to determine which offered the most fertile ground for someone who wanted to build a faculty career in computing which balanced and integrated research and teaching.
I settled on CSU, East Bay. During my interview, I was very clear about my vision with everyone I met. Remember, this is a middle path we're discussing - so my vision wasn't necessarily theirs, and so I was also clear that I was willing to meet their requirements. The position they were trying to fill was more classically teaching oriented; while some of the departments in the College of Science had very active research cultures, the CS program was scrambling just to keep up with growth. CSUEB's solution was to create a second tenure-track spot, just for me :-) At the time, I had no idea how extraordinary that was, which was probably a good thing, or I would have been insufferable.
Seven years later, I'm tenured, and have gone far beyond that initial vision. I'm the Director of the Laboratory for Adaptive Hypermedia and Assistive Technology (AHAT) and one of the PIs in CompCore, a shared research facility we're currently scaling up. The research project that consumes the biggest chunk of my time is a participatory design research project on Teaching Computing Research Methods (CRM). The CRM project is great because it combines so many of my interests, up to and including wallowing in code. Currently we're working on a scholar-produced digital resource to facilitate integrating teaching computing research methods across the computing curriculum. You can read about that in the December issue of the SIGCSE Bulletin. That's one of two journal papers from this year. The other is on unobtrusive user modeling, and appeared in the March issue of the International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence.
And I get to live that vision of professor as one-part pied piper, one part stage magician, one part coach, one part mad hatter, one part favorite aunt and one part slave driver in sheep's clothing. I never teach a class with more than 35 students, and I often teach classes with 5 to 15. I teach too many of them, and my research students and I survive by cobbling together lots of itty-bitty grants. I'm learning, though, forging a middle path for funding our research. In most sciences that isn't necessary because they have a rich set of funding sources. But that's another post, too :-)
This is opening week for us (we're on the quarter system, so we start late.) I'm heavily over committed, because we had the department version of "and your little dog, too" happen to us, and I ended up teaching an extra course at the last minute.
But you know what? I couldn't ask, really, for a better quarter. I'm teaching three classes I love (Human Computer Interaction, Research Methods, Programming Languages Concepts) and have taught many times. The only reason it takes any work is because I choose to work on them (I'm using two new textbooks this quarter.) I'm working on projects I love, I've got some funding in hand. I have terrific mentors, proteges, collaborators and research students.
Research shows us that the lives of female Computing professors at research universities has gotten so tough that it serves as a negative example to their female students. (<rant>Can you believe it? It's considered bad form to talk about that in public - as if female students are so gullible that, if we don't talk about it, somehow they won't notice it! Talk about patronizing, patriarchal, condescending - hey, fellas, we're not hot-house flowers here, and not talking about it is only going to marginalize all involved.</rant>)
Well, I am here to tell you that my life serves as the opposite - an example that has inspired a number of students from a variety of under-represented groups, not just women, to pursue faculty careers. A number of the students in question aren't my research students, didn't ask for letters of reference, have no vested interest in telling me what effect I've had on them. I've also had the pure joy of kibitzing when some colleagues at other institutions have been similarly inspired by my experience and asked for help transforming their careers. Again, because there's no vested interest, helping them is all gravy.
So, to all the Patricks and Patricias of the world, if your dreams include
- receiving email from someone you've never met saying that so-and-so suggested you take a look at their problem because you might be able to point them in the right direction
- holding forth at the coffee shop surrounded by students
- having to chase your research students out of the lab at all hours of the night over the break between spring and summer because the bags under their eyes have gotten larger than their eyes
