​I’ve just wrapped up my third year as an assistant professor. Can you believe it? I almost can’t. I work at William Peace University in Raleigh, NC. We’re in the heart of downtown; campus is a gorgeous tree-filled oasis. It’s a small school; about 800 students, which was the size of my high school. Over the last few years, I’ve had some good and some less than desirable experiences. I thought I would take a moment to reflect on my time at WPU thus far and generate a list of pros and cons of working at a small, private liberal arts university.

​The fall 2018 semester is quickly coming to a close, and all of us at TNP team want to take a moment to reflect on it.
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Earlier this semester we set some lofty goals for ourselves. If you don’t remember, each of TNP members outlined three goals for the upcoming academic year in a series of posts back in August. The goals revolved around research and writing, teaching, professional development, and productivity.  ​

​The first week is a difficult one for many reasons. It is especially difficult on my campus because students can add/drop until the end of the week…great for students, but difficult for professors. Every semester I end up with three or four new students at the beginning of the second week who are starting the semester behind. Each semester, I struggle with what to do. Mostly I question whether I should start covering content that first week and hope that the students who come in late are able to make it up without getting further behind. Last academic year, I pushed back the content coverage into the second week and now spend the first couple of days orienting students to my teaching style, expectations, and the course. Yes, I said DAYS, sometimes the entire first week. I could write a lot discussing the things I do and why but I want to focus on a conversation I have with students about student success.

​When I first started teaching as a graduate student, I was assigned courses that students notoriously dreaded. First, I taught a writing lab for our research methods course, where students learned about APA formatting and wrote a research paper. After that, I taught Statistical Methods. In both courses, students routinely complained that the skills taught in these courses didn’t apply to them. They didn’t want to be researchers that conducted experiments, ran data analyses, and then wrote up findings in a manuscript. So why should they take these classes seriously?

Here at The Novice Professor (and everywhere else) academics are heading into a new school year. As "this" year comes to a close we are reflecting on the past year and setting goals for the upcoming year. To inspire you, and help hold ourselves accountable, we are sharing our goals with you in this week's posts, spanning several topics of academic life. 

We at The Novice Professor are still working on developing habits that will increase our Productivity and tweaking our work-life balance. Three of us share our goals in this area.

​Here at The Novice Professor (and everywhere else) academics are heading into a new school year. As "this" year comes to a close we are reflecting on the past year and setting goals for the upcoming year. To inspire you, and help hold ourselves accountable, we are sharing our goals with you in this week's posts, spanning several topics of academic life.