The Philosophers' Cocoon

7 Years Later Excerpt #5: The Costs of Relocation

For those waiting for me to continue this series, I thank you for your patience. Now that I have completed my 2000-mile move from Ohio to Arizona and gotten somewhat settled into my new job, I will be continuing this series of snippets from my in-progress guide to graduate school in philosophy. Since the job hunting season is right around the corner, I'm going to focus my next few posts on the job market and related topics. This post focuses on the costs of relocation – something that graduate students and other early career philosophers should take into account with respect to the jobs they pursue and how long they stay on the market. I include this in the guide because this is one of the costs of the job market that I could not properly evaluate when I was going on the market for the first time.

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One of the costs of pursuing academic employment is that you will often have to relocate in pursuit of long-term employment. Looking back, I believe this is one of the hardest costs to explain and quantify to graduate students. In this post, I’m going to explain some of the challenges associated with relocation and reflect a little on them.

1. Relocation costs money. It’s expensive to move across the country (or potentially to a different country) whether you are physically moving your possessions from your current residence or selling/donating your possessions and buying new things. If you’re moving to a new apartment, there will also be security deposits and the first month’s rent to pay. Not only is this expensive, but you are also likely to have a gap in your pay. I officially graduated from the University of Tennessee in May 2017. I started my first post-graduate position in early August that summer, but because of the way pay cycles worked and the lag in getting all my information into the HR system, I did not receive my first paycheck for that position until the second week of September. That translates to over 3 months without any income. Depending on the distance you are moving, whether your new position comes with a moving allowance, and how long you have to sustain yourself with no income, you may well need more than $10,000 on hand to complete your move. During my 3 relocations (Tennessee to Florida, Florida to Ohio, Ohio to Arizona), the lowest amount of money I needed to cover costs without taking on debt was between $5000 and $6000.
2. Relocation requires a lot of paperwork. In the United States, moving states means changing vehicle registration and insurance agents. You’ve also got to update your address on all your financial and postal accounts and get a new driver’s license. You’ll have to start a new utilities account, get your home cable and/or internet installed, and make sure all the relevant utility accounts at your previous address were properly closed. There will also be a ton of things to complete as part of being a new hire. None of these items is all that daunting by itself, but the sheer quantity of it all can feel overwhelming.
3. Relocation is physically demanding. One component of moving is the actual process of putting new items inside your home, transporting books to your new office space, assembling the new furniture you purchased, organizing clothes and other household items in your personal space, and so on. This is not all that exhausting in most instances, but doing these sorts of things for several hours a day for a whole week will leave most people rather drained.
4. Relocation breaks routine. Everything you did in your previous place of residence has to be re-learned. Your drive to work is different, your grocery shopping is different, the campus layout is different, and your daily plans are different. Depending on where you moved, the weather and culture may also be very different. One of the things that allows us to focus our cognitive energy on our research and teaching is the fact that so much of what we do is practically automated – we have done it the same way so often that we do not have to think about it. Moving forces you to re-establish all those habits, and that makes the first several weeks after a move rather mentally taxing.
5. Relocation disrupts social networks. In some ways, it is easier now to maintain long-distance relationships than it has ever been. Nevertheless, moving somewhere else often puts a strain on relationships that were established with people in your former place of residence. Additionally, in your new location, it is highly unlikely that you will have enough established connections to replace the friends or family that you are leaving behind. (This is not true if you are moving to somewhere you previously lived, but philosophers rarely have much choice in where they get their first job – you’re very unlikely to be in this situation.) The result is that you have to rebuild your social support network, which can take a long time.
6. Relocation undercuts motivation. Because so many appointments in academic philosophy are short, temporary contracts (namely, 1–3 years), those who relocate often face the prospect of relocating again in short order. This makes it difficult to fully invest in your current community or university. What’s the point of becoming good friends with a bunch of people just to leave them behind in a year or two? What’s the point of doing a bunch of volunteer work for your department when you have no prospects for another contract? Some may be able to push these questions aside and stay motivated, but they are hard to dismiss.
7. Relocation alters one’s temporal perspective. One effect of repeatedly going on the job market and relocating is that your timeline becomes incredibly short-term. During my first appointment as a postdoc, my mentality at the outset was something like this: “What can I do in the next year to make myself a stronger candidate on the job market?” Since you’ve got to be job market ready by September (October 1st at the latest), you’ve only got about 1 year to improve your credentials if your job starts in August, and it's a 2-year position. But this kind of outlook narrows your focus to short-term goals – things that can be accomplished in a year or less. That makes it difficult to entertain bigger, grander projects, and it also places considerable pressure on you to produce during the shortened timetable you have. This problem is even more acute if your position is for only a single year: by the time you complete the moving process, you will already be contemplating your next move!
8. Relocation is demoralizing. Most people start settling down and carving out a stable life for themselves in their early 30s – some even earlier. If you’re an academic philosopher, the odds are that you will not be one of these people. You will watch your friends establish themselves where they live and solidify their jobs while you continue to travel across the country in hopes of permanent employment.
9. Relocation strains families. I am not married and have no children, but for those who have a spouse and/or children, frequent relocation multiplies some of the costs on this list. In some respects, it does make the move more bearable since you have people with you who are sharing that experience. But it also means that there will be much more to do to complete the moving process. Academic couples may also encounter the all-too-common scenario where they hold jobs at different institutions.

When I made my move from Kansas to Tennessee to start graduate school, I was excited to move and start something new. In some ways, I felt the same way after starting my first postdoc – I was ready to be done with graduate school and wanted to start new projects, teach new classes, and so on. But after a while, this enthusiasm fades. My recent relocation to Arizona marks my 4th state of residence in the last 6th years. That sounds extreme, but many in the profession have much more nomadic career trajectories than mine. If you’re considering a career in philosophy, it’s worth asking yourself how many times you’re willing to move while you’re on the market. How often are you willing to bear the costs of relocation?

7 Years Later Excerpt #4: Student Evaluations

Given that many of us have just had our semesters conclude, I thought it would be appropriate to share a snippet that focuses on how graduate students should assess the end-of-semester evaluations that they receive from their students. If you have additional or different advice on how to interpret or react to these evaluations, feel free to mention it in the comments.

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At the end of each semester, students will have an opportunity to evaluate their courses. In doing so, they will score you (usually on a 5-point scale) and the course on a wide range of metrics. There is some variance across institutions, but they are typically asked to rate things like how much they learned in the course, how much the instructor helped the students learn, how well the instructor knew the material, how organized the course was, and their perceptions of the course as a whole. If you’re a teaching assistant, the questions will be a little more specific to your interactions with students in discussion sections.

As you will learn after your first semester of teaching, reading these evaluations can be disheartening. Even if the numerical scores are reasonably good, there will almost always be some written comments that are not very complimentary. Sometimes, they will insult your character. Other times, they will disparage your course or your teaching style or make weird insinuations about your personal beliefs. What’s the appropriate reaction to student evaluations?

The first important piece of advice is not to overreact. Student evaluations are notoriously unreliable indicators of the quality of instruction. Here are a few of their documented shortcomings:

• The empirical literature on student evaluations generally shows that they do not correlate with student learning or teaching effectiveness.
• Course evaluations tend to correlate with students’ expected grades. Other things equal, an easier course – where a higher number of A grades are given – will result in more favorable evaluations than a more difficult course. As a result, some have argued that student evaluations contribute to grade inflation and encourage less rigorous teaching.
• Typically, all students enrolled in your course will be allowed to complete course evaluations, even if they do not regularly attend class. Thus, some students who complete evaluations may have a deeply inaccurate sense of what a typical class session is like.
• Student evaluations can be affected significantly by arbitrary factors, such as whether or not students have access to cookies when completing their evaluations.
• Student evaluations tend to be biased against female instructors. Overall, men are perceived as more knowledgeable and as having better leadership skills even though students appear to learn just as much from women as men. These biases may be more pronounced in large courses.
• Even assuming these evaluations are unbiased and reliable measures of student learning, they are still too imprecise to be an accurate way of assessing the quality of instructors’ teaching relative to their peers.

There are also other problems associated with interpreting student feedback even if we bracket these considerations. One common problem, especially in larger courses, is that written feedback on these assessments tends to be internally inconsistent. Sometimes you may see one comment that praises your passion for teaching while another laments that you are not enthusiastic about teaching. One student will regard your lectures as boring while another praises them as extremely interesting. The most recent example of this in my own teaching occurred when I received comments that said one of my courses contained too many readings and contained too much material while simultaneously receiving comments that said the course did not cover enough content. When you have directly contradictory feedback, it is often difficult to know which perspective is more accurate.

Another problem is that students sometimes base their assessments of your teaching on claims that are just plain false. Students will claim you do nothing but lecture even if you devote significant class time to discussion and other in-class activities. They may accuse you of grading short answer responses based solely on whether you agree with their opinion. In some cases, they will make remarks that demonstrate that they do not understand course policies. Written feedback based on demonstrably false claims should be disregarded.

As a teaching assistant, you will also sometimes be held accountable for things beyond your control. Students might comment on your evaluations that they did not like the exam formats or textbook choice, but as a teaching assistant, the primary instructor makes decisions about course content and assessment. You will usually have extremely limited – if any – influence on these choices. Students may also make direct comparisons between you and the instructor: a charismatic and experienced professor may indirectly cause you to be scored lower than you would be otherwise since you will look worse by comparison.

Overall, you should approach end-of-semester evaluations with a healthy skepticism. However, these evaluations do often play a role in tenure, promotion, and the distribution of teaching awards. They will also be an important component of your teaching portfolio if you elect to apply for academic jobs. Thus, they should not be ignored. As a general rule, you should strive to maintain about a 4/5 (or equivalent) on your numerical evaluation scores once you get a few years into graduate school. Evaluations with these scores will generally keep you competitive with other applicants: higher scores are obviously better, but most faculty are aware of the problems with student evaluations. Hiring decisions are unlikely to be made solely based on marginal differences in the numerical scores on student evaluations.

Use your initial teaching experiences as opportunities to define your teaching style and improve your weaknesses. Look for patterns in your student evaluations, and if you notice that you are persistently scoring low on a metric, then take some steps to address that in future courses. Most importantly, seek feedback from faculty in your department – especially those who observe your teaching directly – about ways in which you can improve. As you get better at teaching competently, your evaluations should improve (unless they were very high to begin with). Finally, remember that it will often be impossible to please everyone: some students, despite your best efforts, will not like you or your class. So do not lose sleep over occasional negative feedback. It’s a persistent feature of almost all evaluations, even those that are excellent overall.

7 Years Later Excerpt #3: Teaching Competently

In the previous post in this series, I discussed how to approach leading discussion sections. This time around, I'm broadening the scope to the fundamentals of teaching competently. I'll have at least one more post on teaching after this. Afterwards, I'll probably turn to some other aspects of graduate school, such as long-term planning or job market preparation. 

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When you first start teaching, you might think you should aspire to do it well. By teaching well, I mean teaching in ways that captivate students, educate them effectively, assess their mastery fairly and comprehensively, provide ample support to students in need, and respect university guidelines and regulations. In the abstract, this all sounds great, and it’s an admirable ambition to want to teach well. However, for those new to teaching, it’s not realistic. Teaching well requires a level of skill and expertise that early career teachers will almost never be able to achieve. Even the few newcomers to teaching who have the ability to teach well should probably not try to teach well at that stage of their careers. This notion might strike you as counterintuitive, so let me elaborate a bit.

Teaching well is difficult and requires a substantial amount of time if you aren’t an experienced instructor. I recall anecdotes of graduate students telling me about how they devoted 30-40 hours per week to teaching a single course of 25-30 students. Those courses may have been amazing, but this behavior is not admirable or prudent. As a graduate student, you must balance teaching responsibilities with a variety of other goals: making progress toward your degree, submitting papers to conferences and journals, participating in department events, and so on. Devoting 30-40 hours per week to teaching a single course does not leave enough time to adequately prioritize these other commitments – at least not if one wants to maintain good mental health and avoid burnout. Moreover, once you finish graduate school, you will never be able to devote that amount of time to a single course. If you obtain a faculty position, you will probably teach at least 3 courses per term, and they might all be different subjects: you definitely won’t be able to devote 30-40 hours to each one. That means you should aim to develop teaching strategies that can later be extended to contexts where your teaching load is significantly higher.

Here’s the general point: trying to be an exemplary teacher when you’re just getting started with solo teaching is not an appropriate goal. Instead, you should aim to teach competently. As I use this phrase, teaching competently means to teach in a satisfactory or acceptable, but not outstanding, way. Teaching competently involves the same general goals as teaching well but sets the standard for success a bit lower. You don’t need to captivate students to teach competently: it suffices to maintain the motivation of those who are engaged and avoid turning off the remaining students. Teaching competently does not require that you be a master of test design and assessment –  something that requires many courses’ worth of exam creation and refinement – it is enough to design your exams so that course content and exam material align and that students have clear expectations regarding exam content.

7 Years Later Excerpt #2: Leading Discussion Sections

By Trevor Hedberg

In the last entry, I discussed how to handle grade inquiries. This time around, I consider how to lead discussion sections -- one of the other core responsibilities of a typical teaching assistant.

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As a teaching assistant, one of your central responsibilities will usually be leading 1-3 discussion sections each week of the semester. Typically, you’ll have 20-30 students in each section, and they will last 50 minutes, but there is some variance across institutions. So what exactly do you do to lead a discussion section? To some extent, it will depend on the instructor. In some instances, the instructor wanted me to cover some new material during these discussion sections; in other cases, I was told to just get the students talking and not worry about presenting any new course content. Sometimes, I was asked to administer quizzes or conduct assignments; sometimes, I didn’t have to do that.

The one key aspect of a discussion section is that you are supposed to get the students to discuss aspects of the course content. This might seem pretty basic, but you may not receive much direct instruction on how to get the students talking productively. (Some faculty members seem to think that graduate students will just figure it out.) Moreover, if a discussion section is not going well – that is, if the students aren’t talking – then it can get very uncomfortable very quickly. Additionally, if students feel like discussion sections are boring or pointless, their disengagement will get more pronounced as the semester progresses. That’s an outcome you obviously want to avoid, so here are some pointers on having good discussion sections:

• Always present a bit of material to the students – even if it is not required. You might think that you can just come to class with a list of prepared questions about the week’s material, ask the students those questions, and see where the conversation goes. That might work sometimes, but it’s unreliable. Some students will not have done the assigned readings for the week, and some students probably missed at least one of the week’s lectures. That means a large portion of students may not be familiar enough with the material to respond to your questions productively. Thus, you should always present a little material to the students, even if it is only a few of some of the key ideas or themes that were already covered in the week’s main lectures.
• Don’t base all your questions on the reading material. Echoing an important point above, you cannot assume that everyone in class (or even most of the students in class) will have read and understood the assigned reading for the week. If you want to dig into a key idea from the reading, make sure you review this material with the students first. But in addition to that, make sure you have a few general questions on tap that students can respond to even if they have not read one word of the assigned reading.
• Use thought experiments. Students tend to respond well to thought experiments – the trolley problem, the experience machine, Mary the colorblind neuroscientist, the prisoner’s dilemma, and so on. While there’s a legitimate debate to be had about the usefulness of thought experiments as support for premises in philosophical arguments, they remain effective pedagogical tools for getting students to reflect on philosophical problems. If you can identify a thought experiment that’s relevant to what you’re covering, consider using it 
• Use real-world examples. Many students, especially in introductory level courses that they are taking to fulfill a general education requirement, struggle to see the relevance of philosophy to everyday life. You can diminish that skepticism by basing your discussion in part on real-world cases that illustrate the key concepts for that week’s course material. This strategy may be easier to employ in ethics courses (since ethical dilemmas manifest in the real world frequently), but if you’re creative and willing to do some digging online, you may be surprised what you can find.
• Use videos. Students nowadays read less frequently than students from several decades ago but consume far more visual media. A short, relevant video to get discussion rolling can be effective, especially with the wealth of free, easy-to-browse videos available on YouTube.
• Don’t allow only a few students to dominate discussion. Some students will obviously be more prone to participate in discussion than others, but you don’t want your discussion section of 30 students to consist of you talking exclusively with only a handful of them. If you have trouble getting others to participate, consider having them work in groups or write down an answer to a prompted question at the start of class. Some students will be more comfortable participating when they have written remarks they can read or otherwise use to form their answer.
• Get to know your students. Your discussion sections will usually be small: 20-25 students. Find a way to learn your students’ names – either via the creation of a seating chart, sheer memorization, or some other method. Part of making these discussion sections go well involves crafting a relationship with your students so that they are more willing to participate. Also be willing to talk to them before class officially starts. Be polite, and be approachable.

There are certainly other techniques that could be employed, but these are my starter strategies. Do you all have any others that graduate teaching assistants should employ?

7 Years Later Excerpt #1: Handling Grade Inquiries

By Trevor Hedberg

For the first few excerpts from 7 Years Later, I'm going to focus on teaching. Most do not have much preparation for undergraduate teaching prior to the start of graduate school, and I found it to be one of the more challenging aspects of graduate school when I was getting started.

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One of the more awkward aspects of being a grader, teaching assistant, or instructor is handling students who confront you about the grade they have received. Addressing grade inquiries is an inevitable part of being an instructor – it’s not a situation unique to being a graduate student. No matter how clear your grading criteria or how much class time you devote to recapping mistakes from the most recent exam, there will always be some students who ask you for more information about why they received their grade. However, as a graduate student, these interactions can be particularly vexing since you will have less experience dealing with them. There are at least three distinct types of grade inquiries, and different responses are appropriate to each one.

First, there are grade inquiries that boil down to grade entry errors. One type  involves the score on Canvas or Blackboard (or whatever learning platform your institution uses) not matching the score listed on the assignment itself. Another might involve too many (or too few) points being deducted on a particular question. Imagine a “-3” next to a 30-point question but a numbered score on the page of 25/30. Resolving these kinds of inquiries is straightforward: confirm that there’s a mistake in how the assignment was scored or how the grade was recorded, thank the student for reporting it to you, and correct the score. Obviously, You don’t want these grading errors to happen often – not all students will notice them, which means they sometimes result in inaccurate assessments of students’ knowledge, and persistent errors of this type will cause students to lose confidence in your professional competence. However, you will grade enough assignments that some mistakes of this type will happen. That’s okay; just correct them and move on.

The second type of grade inquiry, which is probably the most common, involves genuine misunderstanding. This is a case where a student sincerely does not understand why they received a particular score on a question or assignment. This could be because written comments given on the assignment were too minimal, they don’t know how to interpret the feedback, or they were absent when you went over the exam in class. Handling these inquiries in philosophy courses tends to be more challenging than doing so in courses like physics or calculus. In STEM courses, instructors can usually reference an answer key and explain how the student made an error in their calculation or defined some term incorrectly. But explaining why a student’s argument is not very strong can be trickier.

7 Years Later: An Introduction

By Trevor Hedberg

I spent a lot of time in graduate school digging up information about what I should expect during graduate school and what I should do to be competitive for academic employment when I finished my dissertation. Back then, information about these topics existed, but it was scattered across a random assemblage of online resources, and the the authors of these blog posts and short guides sometimes disagreed about the best methods for writing papers, finding a suitable work/life balance, teaching effectively, and so on. Things have definitely improved since that time. There are more avenues for graduate students to learn this information, and discussions of these topics have progressed enough that some points of consensus have emerged on these matters. But even now, the main thing I was looking for back in 2010 and 2011 has not been produced.

What I wanted as a graduate student was a single document that answered the many questions I had about graduate and professional life. How do I write a course syllabus? What is the proper conduct at academic conferences? How do I complete a revise-and-resubmit so that the paper gets published? How do I prepare for my first job search? You get the idea. And I did find answers to these questions eventually, but I wanted those answers all in one place and presented in a unified and cohesive voice. Ideally, this document would have also provided some additional resources related to the topics under discussion. The best I could find was typically a short guide that covered a small fraction of the relevant aspects of graduate school or focused on just one in particular (such as how to write publishable papers).

After a while, I decided it might be worth trying to write the guide that I had been unable to find as a graduate student. After working on it intermittently for many years, I am finally getting close to its completion. My plan is to release 7 Years Later: Surviving Graduate School in Philosophy sometime during the upcoming summer. The main title alludes to both the fact that 7 years is about the average length of time it takes a typical graduate student in the humanities to earn a PhD and the fact that my own time in graduate school (obtaining both an MA and PhD) took about 7 years. The broad framework for 7 Years has been outlined on my website for the last several months. Frankly, it has ballooned to a much larger size than I had originally envisioned: it may be about 60,000 words when it is complete.

Leading up to the guide’s full release, I’ll be publishing snippets of the guide here on the Philosophers’ Cocoon. Some of the guide’s content is based on blog posts I’ve written here in the past few years, but the content I will share in these snippets will be new. My hope is that I will get feedback on some of this content that I can then incorporate into the released version. I’m not sure yet how many of these snippets I will end up publishing here, but I’ll be starting with a few related to teaching as a graduate student. The first one of those will go up next week.