[thelist] employment question

Marc Seyon seyon at delime.com
Fri Jan 18 11:50:56 CST 2002


At 1/18/2002 10:22 AM, Luther, Ron typed:
>Hi Peter,
>
>Just to second Chris's remarks about the pay - it ain't much as an
>outside industry person as opposed to being a salaried faculty member.
>{Which usually makes the 'market' for this pretty good - since a
>department can save some budget funds and/or offer more classes and/or
>improve their federal/state 'headcount' compensation numbers ... by
>bringing in some industry folks.}  Try getting an appointment on the
>Department head's calendar.
>
>I did the "visiting guy from industry teaching a class" thing a few
>years ago.  [Taught a Statistics class at a State University. Many of
>the folks I used to work with taught Stat or Econ or things 'on the
>side' ... I figured it was my turn.]
>
>I will tell you that the first time you teach a class like this - it is
>an *enormous* amount of work.  [My understanding from other folks is
>that the more times you teach the class the 'easier' it gets for you -
>the University invited me to continue teaching - but I moved out of
>State and didn't get to do that.]

I'll second that.
But it does get easier. My personal theory is that you've got a brief 
window when teaching is really great - when you're familiar with the course 
structure and what not, and when you become *so* familiar that it starts to 
get boring (20-30 years, for example)

Of course this is less true with Internet-related courses where things 
evolve so rapidly.

>OTOH - It can also be a bit frustrating when you see how ridiculous the
>course syllabus is!

oh yes...
Preamble - "There are now 2,500 homepages on the Internet" (This is a 
CURRENT course)
Can you guess they're a little outdated?

But yes, teaching can be very psychologically rewarding. Getting to corrupt 
young minds :-)

regards.
-marc




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