applying to teaching track positions
This is a guide to the professor job application process. It’s primarily aimed at teaching focused positions, like PUIs (primarily undergraduate institutions, where advising grad students is minimal or nonexistant), SLACs (small liberal arts colleges), or teaching-track positions (purely teaching focused positions alongside colleagues who may do more research).
Other People’s Guides
- Probably my favorite guide
- A good set of other people’s application material to use as a template. Also see this
- Blog with good mock interview questions.
- Even more resources
- Recommendations for departments hiring teaching track faculty
Building your resume
- Teaching experience is paramount! Teach classes at your university, volunteer to teach high schoolers, guest lecture, etc.
- Show a desire and ability to teach a variety of classes, including intro classes.
- Be well read on the theory of pedagogy.
- A PhD is usually necessary, but a master’s degree might be ok, especially in hot fields like cybersecurity or AI.
Finding relevant job postings
- Where to apply:
- higheredjobs.com
- PUI github (https://cs-pui.github.io/posting.html)
- SIGCSE jobs board
- the CRA jobs board
- the chronicles of higher ed
- inside higher ed careers.
- Small school applications tend to be looking for someone really specific (someone retired and they need a replacement) or teach very generally.
Putting together your application
Your application should address the following (in no particular order):
- Your interest and approach to teaching
- Why you want to go to that university specifically
- Are you ok moving to that area? Universities want you to put down roots, so having family or an interest in that area helps.
- Why do you want to teach at a PUI?
- The classes you could teach
- How your research affects your approach to teaching. Depending on the school, they may ask how you intend to get undergraduates involved in your research.
- How you would promote an inclusive classroom and make students (especially marginalized students) feel excited to enter your field.
Almost every school will ask for a cover letter and teaching statement. If they have a higher research focus, they’ll ask for a research statement, and might even ask for a diversity statement.
Diversity statements can be tricky. Don’t just talk about your identity, talk about the specific steps you’ve taken and things you’ve done to make people feel included. Some universities won’t outright ask for a diversity statement, instead they’ll ask for a “alignment of values statement” or “inclusivity statement”.
After writing general statements, I typically tailor my cover letter for each individual school. For some search committee members, the cover letter is all they read, so make sure everything is at least touched on.
Things I would tailor:
- What classes I’d teach at that university
- Why I’m interested in that university and that city
- Talk about my research more or less depending on the university’s research expectations
- Talk about diversity more if no diversity statement is required. (Talk about teaching more if they don’t want a teaching statement, or research if there is a research component but no research statement needed)
I don’t bother tailoring my teaching statement or research statement unless I’m applying to wildly different programs (professor of computer science vs data science vs game design)
Interviewing
You’ll get nothing back at all, and then suddenly they’ll move very quickly. That quickness can be a problem, since you might have to take or reject your second choice before your first choice has gotten back to you.
For each position, they’ll likely have hundreds of paper applicants. Of those, they’ll zoom interview 6-8, then invite 1-3 for on-campus interviews.
The on campus interviews are extremely exhausting. They tend to be 12 hours long, where you’re meeting with existing faculty, students, administrators, and getting meals with the department. You’ll probably give a teaching demo (where you teach a fake class to students or faculty. Use active learning!) and possibly a research talk. When you meet administrators you’re typically the one asking them questions as opposed to the other way around.
Mock interview questions:
- How would you deal with a classroom where half the students feel the class is too slow (and are bored) and the other half are overwhelmed.
- How would you increase participation and create an inclusive classroom?
- How would you modernize our curriculum?
- What ideas do you have for undergrad research projects?
- Are there initiatives you’d be interested in running?
- Give an instance of a successful classroom experience and one that was less successful.
- Thoughts on AI?
- How would you apply active learning?
- How do you get feedback? Do you use some sort of mid-semester feedback? Once you get feedback, do you implement it?
Potential Teaching Demo topics, in no particular order:
- bloom filters
- how vectors work under the hood
- how hashmaps work
- minima sets
- stable matching problem
- huffman coding
- k nearest neighbors
- page rank
- linear regression
- Inheritance
- Heaps
Making the decision
When they are interviewing you, you should be asking them questions as well to make sure it’s a good fit for you.
Negotiate with the university! Especially if you have other offers. You can negotiate salary, startup funding, travel funding, summer pay, reductions in workload (sabbatical or first year support)
Questions to ask:
- What is the teaching load?
- What are the service requirements?
- Serving on university committees, supporting student organizations, participating in faculty government.
- What’s the surrounding town like? Do you like living there?
- Job security? Is there a tenure process? Have people been laid off?
- How does your department make decisions?
- How do you determine chair and responsibilities?
- What is your relationship with administration?
- Do you get voting rights in faculty senate?
- Is there additional support during the first year?
- How is research conducted and funded? Do you have to get your own grants?
- What is the culture of community, retreats, going out to bars, covering each other’s classes when someone is out at a conference…
- Is the university financially sound?
- Have there been layoffs, or other cuts?
- What are the predicted levels of enrollment?
- Some things you could research yourself:
- Is the debt to revenue ratio bad? Like 5x debt?
- Moody’s credit rating
- CRA and TIAA publish salary information
- Do you get sabbatical
- Look at their AI statement. Are they full steam ahead or hesitant
- How are you evaluated on your effectiveness?
