They said no program wants to hear how I want to teach and that absolutely no one will hire me, then I won’t get published, and I’ll end up (if I’m lucky!) teaching at an expensive boarding school in a place I don’t get to choose.
I’m not saying I would’ve gotten into even a decent program. Hell I may have been a mediocre at best teacher. But it never felt right to me that teaching at colleges isn’t a viable career path. It was so odd to learn that my dream was simply not allowed, especially when it seemed so reasonable.
These institutions are usually on the small side and don’t make money in grants because they don’t do research, so they don’t spend millions in advertising or in sending out interviewers to thousands of high schools. So there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of even the ones you live near to.
These schools tend to produce both better experiences (less reliance on the painful “weed-out course” degree plan architecture of huge school) and somewhat better outcomes. I will almost certainly be sending my kids to be PUI and not a megaversity when they’re older.
The two I can think of are Harvey Mudd and Rose Hulman.
Loyola Marymount University, in LA, fits the description. The STEM program wasn't the most competitive out there (but that's in comparison to nearby schools like UCLA, Cal Poly, etc), but the teaching quality was top-notch and there was a pretty direct pipeline from the engineering school to the big aerospace/defense contractors in the surrounding area.
I don't know anybody from any of my programs who isn't either gainfully employed in their field of study, or at some competitive grad school, and we graduated in the middle of COVID.
Of course it seems to be in a competition with USC to be the most expensive stickerprice university in the country, but the dirty little secret of private schools is that almost no one pays that price. To keep diversity up they shower disadvantaged students with scholarships, to keep academic standards up they shower academically competitive students with scholarships, and that's all paid for by charging the obscenely rich an elevated tuition, who in exchange are put in a situation where they're rubbing shoulders with a mix of talented students and a much higher than average concentration of other rich kids, leading to networking opportunities for everyone involved.
Disclosure: my alma mater is on that list.
This is related to the HN person yesterday asking whether going $180K in debt for MIT would be worth it?
I got an Associate's degree at a community college, and one of the most refreshing things about it was how un-focused the professors were on research. Teaching was their Number One, and I attribute much of my overall enjoyment to their attitudes.
I then transferred to a 4-year school and received my Bachelor's in two years. The professors at this university did research, but they were also committed to teaching and interpersonal relationships with students. I'd been given the option to transfer to a large (40k+ university), and although it was more well-known I knew that I'd be in gigantic class sizes with research-heavy instructors.
IME many aren't technically professors either, instead they're instructors. It's a weird distinction but academics huff and puff about it a lot.
My work has always had me “tech-adjacent.” Especially the way I operate. It’s kind of hard to explain in solid terms but yeah, a few years ago I found myself here and I’ve liked it ever since. A lot of the stuff is over my head, but that’s where I learn best. You never know where you’re going to find relevant information from seemingly irrelevant posts.
HN is also great for some of my hobbies. I like messing with computers, video games, modding, etc. and love reading about other hobbies and sub cultures. Also get a lot of great tech history content here.
They introduced this well after I graduated but I did take classes with some professors who became teaching professors. They were research professors when I took them.
I found the experienced professors competent even if some were uninspired. On the other hand, I generally had negative experiences with the graduate assistants and new professors.
The graduate students and new professors didn't know the material as well and didn't have much experience teaching. The older professors mostly knew the material much better and had an established process.
I had Stuart Russell, Raimund Seidel, Randy Katz, John Wawryznek, and others.
I also had a math class taught by a well meaning fresh professor. It was on the fast Fourier transform and related techniques leading to it. Great topic choice but very awkwardly and confusingly taught. It is actually hugely relevant to video compression and decompression.
My first semester teaching a lab I was told "No one is remembered for being a good TA" and encouraged to do the absolute bare minimum to get paid so that I could focus on research.
It's all about the money.
If you study for a PhD in the UK then the academic and research work is what you are there for and all that you do. And that means you get it done in much less time.
I'm not going to ban you right now, but please stop doing this so we don't end up having to.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
At the time, I was struggling to keep up with the marking demands of a new (i.e. This was the first year it was taught) course I was TA'ing. I had around a hundred students and each one was generating 10-20 pages of handwritten lab reports per week. Student writing varied from human typewriter to medical prescription from a meth-addicted doctor. I tried to grade everything fairly and provide feedback about mistakes so students could learn.
My fellow TA's complained to the department that we were well over the hours we were supposed to be spending by a factor of at least 3. We were told to do less. Just to be clear, I wasn't worried about how much I was being paid. The problem was that I had my own research and coursework to do. We simply needed more TA's in that course due to the way lab assignments were designed. The prof teaching the course was apologetic and furnished me with the above quote.
This is teaching at a research focused university in a nutshell. There is no shortage of people who want to do a good job teaching, but the system is designed to force them to spend their time on other things.
Why is an institution of higher learning so hostile to those who want to put an honest effort into teaching? Just as nobody has ever won a Nobel prize for having happy students, no research focused university ranks well if they aren't churning out a lot of papers. Teaching competes with that priority.
If we want better educational outcomes for students, we need to do a better job of aligning the incentives governing universities with that goal.