Tenure portfolio: submitted!

[steuard]

I'm up for tenure this year, and as part of that process I'm required to submit a portfolio that "makes the case" that I've fulfilled the college's requirements for tenure and promotion. That's been hanging over my head for months, but at long last it's finally finished! I turned it in on Tuesday, which means that my part of the process is

Comments

[beth_leonard]

Any college that does not give you tenure doesn't deserve to have you. I know it's high stress and lots of work anyway. Good luck!

How is your physics department doing in general? Do you have more students now?

--Beth

[steuard]

The department is doing reasonably well, though the student count each year still seems to be a random variable with a mean around 2.5. (That's not altogether atypical for liberal arts college physics departments, though.) We've recently hired an additional person in a combined teaching/administrative position as a "pre-engineering coordinator": we're hoping to get some 3-2 engineering programs (re-)established, which our admissions staff tells us is one of the most-requested career paths from prospective students that they've had to say, "Sorry, no" to. I'm also working on a redesign of the courses in the major to make it possible for students to decide to switch in to physics after their first semester, which could help us out an awful lot. (That proposed redesign was covered in depth in my portfolio, of course. :) ) We'll see how it goes.

[kirinn]

Wait, am I reading that wrong, or do you have to decide a major before actually taking any classes, and many of them are difficult or impossible to switch into later? That sounds... distressing.

Meanwhile, congrats on finishing off a big stressful thing, and those assessment quotes are indeed killer.

[steuard]

The issue is that if you aren't taking intro physics and basic calculus in your first semester in college, it is essentially impossible to finish the physics major in four years. We have a two-year intro sequence (much like Mudd did while we were there, in fact, if you count the core elective), and then you have to take five upper-level physics classes, most or all of which have the full intro sequence as prerequisites and most of which are only offered every other year.

So there's no requirement to declare a major before you arrive, but physics is one of a handful of majors where you more or less have to have "kept that option open" from the very start. Mudd's common core meant that we never had to worry about that, of course, and it's less of an issue in non-science disciplines where the courses aren't so sequential. It would also be less of an issue if students had space in their first-semester schedule to take the entry-level courses for every discipline that interested them, but (as at most schools) our students tend to take

[ukelele]

Woohoo! Great quotes, too :)