- #36
CrysPhys
Education Advisor
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CrysPhys said:Wow. With all the time and money you're expending on achieving your target position, you really should do your homework on understanding what your target position is.
Follow-up comment for OP. The key issue is that you really don't have a passion for teaching; in particular, a passion for teaching physics at a community college. In another one of your threads, I asked you why you are specifically targetting a teaching position at a community college. The answer was not that you had a personal mission to serve the student population that attend community colleges, but rather, you thought that a (tenured) position at a community college would be easier than other career options ... both easier to land the job and easier to perform the job. From all the feedback you've received, it's obvious you need to revisit these assumptions.Vanadium 50 said:Further, if your goal is to teach, your plan is to spend the next ~12 years doing what? Not teaching. When you say "Teaching is my passion, which is why I avoided it for more than a decade" what will they say?
All that aside ..... Now, you obviously have a lot of (and soon even more of) classroom experience as a student in a 4 yr or 4 yr+ college or university. But how much teaching experience did you have during your PhD program?
More particularly, do you have a realistic expectation of what life as a teacher in a community college classroom would be? If you haven't already, you should speak directly with teachers in a variety of community colleges to find out what their daily life is like, and you should arrange with them to audit classes in a variety of community colleges to discover for yourself what the classroom experience is like. They too may be different from what you've assumed. Do this sooner rather than later. Certainly don't wait until after completing a postdoc or a second PhD [especially given that you don't have a passion for research per se either, but are only hoping that a postdoc or a second PhD will give you a substantial advantage in landing a job as a tenured teacher at a community college].
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