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| Louis Martin-Vega Dean, College of Engineering | Dan Solomon Dean, College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences |
New faculty members face some tough challenges. To succeed, they must:
- plan a research program, get it funded, recruit and manage new graduate students and possibly postdocs, do the research, get it published in first-rate journals, and deal with a bewildering variety of headaches that always arise in research.
- design course syllabi, learning objectives, and lesson plans, give effective and engaging classes and labs, create good homework assignments, projects, and exams, and deal with a bewildering variety of headaches that always arise in teaching.
- manage the competing demands on their time of research, teaching, service, and personal life, and integrate themselves into the cultures of their university, college, and department.
Unfortunately, most Ph.D. programs teach little or nothing about any of those things. The result is that it takes most new faculty 4-5 years to become as productive in research and effective in teaching as they can be. Since their getting tenure depends heavily on how well they do in their first 2-3 years, this is not a healthy situation for either them or their universities.
Our goal at N.C. State is for every new faculty member we hire to get tenure and promotion and to have a rewarding and enjoyable career. To this end, we hold an annual 4-day orientation workshop that presents basic strategies for doing exactly that. Between 2000 and 2007, 147 new faculty members from our two colleges participated. Although most of them initially had misgivings about spending four days at a workshop just before their first semester, they ended by agreeing that the time was well spent, giving the workshop 127 ratings of "excellent," 12 ratings of "good," and no "average," "fair," or "poor" ratings.
This website provides information about the workshop content and structure. Whether you are applying for a faculty position here or you have already accepted one, we hope that the information will be useful to you and that you will appear next year in pictures like the first three shown below (and maybe a few years later in a picture like the fourth one).
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| Working Session - 1 | Working Session -2 |
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| Break | Dean's Panel |
Click here to read an article about the NCSU College of Engineering faculty and graduate student development programs.
Click here to read an article describing the initial offering of the New Faculty Orientation Workshop.
For additional information about the workshop, contact Rebecca Brent at rbrent@mindspring.com