Faculty Searching

I'm missing SCOPE for two weeks in a row to go on grad school visits to New York City...twice. (Yes, I probably should have planned this a little better.) As I won't have any SCOPE stories this week or next, I thought I'd say a little bit about something else I've been spending time on: Olin's faculty search.

Olin's calls for faculty applicants are here. It's a very broad search, which makes it really exciting to interact with all the candidates who come to campus. I've gotten to hear about a huge variety of topics over the past month or so just by going to the faculty candidate talks.

Going to the talks is the simplest way for students to be involved in the process. They're scheduled at lunch, which hasn't been a great time for me in the past but has worked really well this semester. The candidates give a 25-ish minute talk, and then there are another 25-ish minutes of questions. Some of those are questions about the material of the talk, but the Q&A periods are also opportunities to get an idea for what classes the candidates envision themselves teaching and what research projects they would like to work on with students.

Students can be involved in four other parts of the visit. First, each candidate is given a campus tour by a student. After the talk, a few students usually get lunch in the dining hall with the candidate, which allows for more informal conversation. (A couple of us ended up talking about grad school and engineering ethics with a candidate over lunch earlier this week.)

But my favorite parts of the visits are the sessions on the second day. First, there's a discussion about the Olin Self Study requirement. The candidate is given background information on the requirement and some of the discussion around it. At the session, the candidate gives a ten or so minute presentation about their thoughts and recommendations, and then the rest of the hour is a conversation with a couple of students and faculty about the ideas in the presentation. Because of my class schedule, I haven't been involved in this session at all, but I really like the idea of it.

The session I have been involved in several times (Tuesday will be my fifth) is the course co-design. There are 2-4 students and a few faculty present, and candidates propose courses they would like to teach and then we all talk about and, at a high level, design the course together. Some of the feedback from students and faculty gives candidates a better idea of Olin's current curriculum and atmosphere. (With one person we had a conversation about the rise of computing and robotics at Olin over the past few years.) The conversation often gives us a pretty good idea of the candidates' teaching philosophies, how they give and take feedback, how they interact with students and collaborate with students/faculty, and how well their teaching and research interests fit into Olin. This session tends to be a lot of fun, which is why I keep helping with it.

After each visit, a survey goes out about the candidate. The survey involves rating the candidate on scales like how they would collaborate with others at Olin and potential for impact outside Olin, as well as a general rating for how excited you would be to see the candidate at Olin. Then there's a survey for written comments with some prompts on what questions to consider, and that's the part I put a lot of time into, especially if I've gone to lunch or done a course co-design with the candidate.

I didn't expect to be this involved in faculty search this year, but the first candidate of this semester was someone I know quite well, so I wanted to participate. Then the next candidate was a mathematician, which I was really excited about, and after next week I'll have been involved to some degree with eight of the nine visits this semester...