OOS 8-2 - Making an Ecological Career at a Community College

If you spent time in graduate school as a Teaching Assistant and thought, hey, I think this is way more fun than research, than this talk is for you! Because that’s the bottom line, to make a career at a community college, you’ve got to love to teach. The typical teaching load is 15 credit hours each semester, which for me ends up being 15-20 hours a week in lecture and lab. It’s long hours and can be a challenging job, but it’s also fun, rewarding, and high impact. You serve not only as a teacher, but also as a mentor to your students, many of which are first-generation and/or persons traditionally excluded from STEM because of their ethnicity, race, or socioeconomic status. Community college is a place where you can make a real difference as an educator, and for me, that’s the motivation. In this talk, I’ll discuss my career pathway from graduate school, to working at two small private universities, to my current job teaching first year biology at a community college. I’ll share lessons learned over 15 years in the classroom, including how teaching at a community college differs from teaching at a four-year school, the pros and cons of working at a community college, and what you can do as a graduate student or postdoc to prepare for an academic career on the teaching track.