All Professors Are Not Created Equal
As college students, we have a lot of freedom and flexibility when it comes to picking our classes. Maybe even a little too much freedom. Choosing classes for the upcoming semester is nerve-wracking. Though we have the privilege of attending such an accredited university, there is no guarantee that the corresponding names we select when choosing our course schedule will be good professors, and our whole upcoming semester depends on a decision we make halfway through the current semester.
Three main factors make a class good: the time and days that the class meets, the subject itself, and the professor who teaches it. All of these are important if you want to have a good semester, but one matters a little more than the rest.
The professor who teaches your class can make it or break your experience. The time can be perfect, and the class can be exactly what you need for your major, but if you get stuck with a bad professor, you're going to have a hard time doing well in the class and on your exams. How a professor teaches the material can shape each student's experiences. Two students can take the same course and have two completely different experiences with different professors.
When we are picking our classes and choosing our professors, there is only so much information we can use to inform our decisions. We can take classes that our peers have taken and recommend. We can look at all the biased reviews on Rate My Professors, and we can roll the dice and decide based on the first day of syllabus week.
Image Courtesy: Fine Art America
There is never going to be a foolproof way to pick the perfect college class, but there is a piece of information about our professors that we are ignoring as students: the type of professors who are teaching our classes. There are different kinds of college teachers, and not all of them are technically professors. Here is a summary of the likely types of teachers you will have teaching your classes:
PhD candidates/students
If your Professor looks only a couple of years older than you and knows how to use Instagram, they're more than likely a Ph.D. student or candidate. This means that they are in a Ph.D. program and are either still taking classes or are done with them and just waiting to defend their dissertation. They are getting paid a stipend to either teach during their program or serve as research assistants. They are teaching your class as a requirement to finish their program and earn their Ph.D.
Specialized/teaching faculty
This is a faculty member that gets hired just to teach college classes. They usually have a requirement of 3 to 4 classes each semester and have no requirement to conduct any research. That does not mean that they don't research in some way, it just means that the university does not require them to as part of their position and their focus should be teaching classes.
Tenure track
The next positions are all tenure track professor positions. Tenure means that the university cannot fire them (for anything short of murder) and it is one of the highest positions that can be reached in Academia. All of these positions come with a research requirement along with a teaching one. Usually, the Professors are required to teach 2 classes per semester but that varies and can be negotiated with the college.
Assistant Professor
There are three steps to becoming a full tenured professor and moving up is a process. The starting position is Assistant Professor. After getting hired for this position, the Professor usually stays here for six years and works on being the sole author of a published book to be considered to move up to the next position.
Associate Professor
After the six years and the first book, that person can be promoted to Associate Professor. This position always comes with tenure (and a raise) but it is not the highest level of tenure. During the time in this position, another book will probably be published, and the college will decide when to promote to the next position.
Full Professor
This is the highest tenure track position. This person has full tenure and is considered an internationally recognized professor by the university.
Knowing who our professors are is interesting and it gives them some more context. Maybe you realize that you love classes who are taught by Ph.D. students. Or maybe you find out that you prefer when your class is taught by a full tenured professor who has deep knowledge about the subject and conducts research.
Finding out what type of professor will be teaching your class isn't obvious, but it also isn't hard. Tenure track professors and teaching faculty will be listed on your major's webpage, (example) and if they aren't, then it is most likely a Ph.D. student who will be teaching the course. This information isn't well known for some reason, but it can be helpful in a college world full of options and uncertainty.
Strike Out,
Writer: Ana Monticelli
Editors: Giselle Parks and Savannah Tindall
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