As I’ve became more and more serious about pursuing teaching as a career, one of the people I’ve regularly turned to for advice is Dr.Lisa Auchincloss, who graduated from my graduate group at UC Davis last year. While at Davis, Dr. Auchincloss did her doctoral research on stress ecophysiology of cottonwood with professor Jim Richards. She also did a wide variety of teaching and science communication-related activities, including TAing for an innovative online course on global climate change. After graduating, she worked briefly as an adjunct professor at American River College and then accepted a position as a biology education postdoc with Dr. Erin Dolan at the University of Georgia. I had heard about “teaching postdocs” before, but didn’t know much about them, so I asked Dr. Auchincloss if I could interview her to find out more. Here’s the result: Continue reading
Interview
She got a teaching faculty position! An interview with Dr. Christine Palmer
Dr. Christine Palmer just got her dream job. It’s a faculty position at a small state college in Vermont, where her primary responsibility will be teaching biology to undergraduates. Since her dream job looks a lot like mine, I asked her if I could pick her brain about her journey.
For those of you who don’t know her:
Dr. Palmer is currently a post-doctoral scholar in the Maloof Lab in the Plant Biology Department at UC Davis. Even though her academic path reads like a who’s who of elite institutions (she has degrees from Williams, Penn, and Dartmouth), she is one of the least pretentious people I’ve met and is well-known in the department for being friendly and upbeat (her one stipulation for doing this interview was that I edit it if she said “Awesome!” too much). You can learn more about Dr. Palmer’s professional history at her snazzy website – I focused my interview on her recent experiences with the job search.
The Interview:
The Prospective Prof 