I (Brandon) haven't posted anything on the blog in forever. Meredith has been much better about doing this than me. I thought I would give you a little update on things here at Georgia Tech. I have gotten my lab up and running and currently have 3 great students and a postdoc who will be joining us in June. We have a lab webpage so I will be brief here and refer you to the website if you want more details about the research. For those of you that have your own blogs and like to post random nuggets of science, feel free to post a link to our website as it will increase the site's Google page rank. Thanks in advance! We are in the middle of recruiting season for next year's grad students, so I have been out clocking these kids 40 times and trying to convince them to come to Tech. I am hoping to take 2-3 more students in the fall. I taught Introduction to Fluid Mechanics last fall and will be teaching it again this next semester and then in the Spring of 2011 I will teach a graduate course in Biotransport.
Just a side note - At major research universities such as Georgia Tech, one's research program is of primary importance, and I would say teaching comes second to this. The emphasis essentially is placed where the money is. Believe it or not, the tuition dollars you sent to the university (especially public universities) doesn't even come close to paying the bills. The largest source of money for these universities is the research dollars brought in by the faculty. This is why it is ultimately research that determines tenure and hiring decisions.
Well its been fun blogging - see you in about 6 months!
2 comments:
I love Biotransport . . . er s'um.
While you are the first person "on the inside" to give me the scoop on teaching vs. research, I've had that hunch all along. Unfortunately, I also have a problem with "the way things are," and I suspect you do, too.
We both had profs at A&M who were worthless as teachers but probably world-renowned researchers in their chosen field. So who gets the shaft? The students. Isn't teaching at least 50% of what a university should be about? If not, why not just call yourself a non-profit research facility? So there's got to be some better balance between research and teaching--large universities must find a way to incentivize attention to teaching even when the research dollars drive the bottom line. That is what will separate the great large universities--from the students' perspective, anyway--from the rest.
I don't worry about the Dr. J. Brandon Dixon's of the world--I know they'll always enjoy teaching students and therefore attend to their teaching skills. I worry about the rest, and I think there are too many in that group.
hey, i'm one of meredith's friends from high school. i encountered a similar conversation with my thesis supervisor when we talked about my options for teaching at the university level. i always felt that after a career in advertising, i would want to come back and teach. a lot of my professors were great researchers, but then not able to translate their work to something digestible for students.
she suggested to me that if i want to enjoy teaching and not focus on research, then i wouldn't need to get a phd and just come in as a lecturer. the pay is much lower and there's no such thing as tenure for lecturers, but it gives you more freedom than professors.
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