EKU Day 2

Whew, another long day! EKU had me booked in half hour slots so I was all over the place. First thing in the morning I had a meeting with the whole hiring committee. They only had a few questions for me, so there were a lot of weird silences. And man had they studied my CV. They even brought up that I play flute and so I could play for the department picnic! Oh, and they said that they were very impressed with all of my service work - way more than most grad students. (Later the Dean said it was such an honor that I was a student member of faculty council - uh, ok.) So it went to some good! A lot of the meeting was me asking questions, but some of that stuff is better to just ask in passing (what journals do you get, is there a physics/astro club, etc).

Most of the day was individual meetings with the faculty members. That was a little bit silly because we didn't really have anything to say. A few of them had some questions for me, but a lot of the time we were stretching for things to talk about. One nice thing about the faculty here are that they are a range of ages and levels, 30, 10, 3 years there. They all seemed nice, with one or two personality quirks. There were two things that came up a lot. One is that I don't yet have my PhD and they are weary that I am just saying I'll get it. I understand that concern, but there are only so many times that I can tell them that everyone is on board with me getting out of there, and that they are going to stop paying me and essentially kick me out so I have to graduate. The other concern is that this is a physics department and I would have to teach physics, and since I'm coming from an astro-only department they are concerned that I will be able to teach physics. My argument to that was that anyone coming out of a PhD or postdoc in physics will be so specialized in their research area that they will have to relearn the basics of physics for teaching too. Though honestly I don't really want to teach physics.

I also met with a Lecturer and the demo set up guy. Both of those were pretty pointless. The demo guy clearly doesn't want to be there and sits there doing nothing all day (he has an undergrad working for him that actually sets things up).

I had the standard meeting with the Dean. He asked about my start up funds, undergrad involvement in my research, and when I'm getting the PhD. He also apparently had on the mind some new initiative to offer physics courses online, which he had not told the department yet. At some point he mentioned that the candidates for this position had all been really great and the department would have a tough choice. Thanks dude, that puts me at ease. I asked about salary and he said it would be $48K ($3K less without the PhD, though I had gotten the impression that a PhD was mandatory). He also said the tenured faculty average about $80-90K. We talked a little bit about tenure, but that is department specific so he referred me to the department chair. Since I'm from Virginia he mentioned that he went to Washington & Lee for undergrad. My cousin (of some removed sort) is a history professor there and it seems that everyone knows him - my step father even had him as a prof. Well it turns out that the Dean had him too! He definitely remembered him fondly and was glad to hear what's he's up to. Hopefully that gave him happy thoughts about me, though I don't know that the Dean has much to do with the choice, except to veto.

I had lunch with the faculty at a dining hall on campus in the faculty room. That was good, again idle chit chat. Oh, and there was a snow storm that we had to walk through to get there! Crazy snow! But apparently DC was unseasonably cold too and Austin had a record low for April, so I will grant KY one bad weather experience.

I met with an HR person who told me all about the benefits. It was nice that they did that actually, but their benefits aren't all that great. They have a standard insurance that is free, but you have to pay more to upgrade. You also have to pay for dental and vision, and it isn't cheap. I didn't think I would put much weight on that, but it would be annoying to be nickled and dimed like that.

The meeting with the Department Chair was mostly talking about tenure and promotion. I had the mistaken idea that promotion was a part of tenure, but apparently they are separate. So for example you can go from Assistant to Associate professor before tenure, and you can get tenure without being promoted to Associate professor. He gave me a big packet that explains it all, but it seems like they expect one or two papers, and they actually encourage you to keep up your previous collaborations, unlike New Paltz who said that papers with your dissertation advisor don't count toward tenure. Of course you have to be a great teacher and do service too. He said that start up would be about $5K (the Dean had said $1-$2K). He also told me about some money that you can apply for to help you get started (about $5K). He concurred that the salary would be in the mid to high 40s. I asked about raises and he looked really confused, so apparently it's not standard. They do get merit raises based on performance, too, but apparently they didn't last year because of the economy. He mentioned a new faculty mentor program that he created that seems to be cool - it sounds like they do a good job of welcoming new faculty.

There was supposed to be a tour of campus by a student, but that was cancelled due to the snow so instead the astronomy girl asked me if I would come talk to her astronomy class. I gave them a little mini version of my talk and let them ask me about astronomy and grad school. They were more engaged than I expected given what the faculty had been saying. I saw a bit of her lecture slides and she pointed out that she just used the powerpoints that come with the textbooks. Somehow I didn't know that textbooks gave you powerpoint slides to use. How handy! Of course I would ideally customize my lectures, but if I take the New Paltz job I will be creating all new astronomy classes which will take a lot of time and effort. Those powerpoints would make it start off much easier!

And then of course there was my talk. One of the professors gives extra credit to his students for coming, so there was actually a decent audience. Although the students seemed to be interested (more so than the faculty, one of which fell asleep!), they wouldn't interact with me when I asked questions. Somehow I ended up only talking for 40 minutes, even though the same talk took longer in New Paltz, and I thought I had talked more slowly. Then they had like barely any questions, again the opposite of New Paltz where they asked tons of stuff. So the talk ended way early. Hopefully they don't hold that against me.

I went to dinner with 3 faculty members and one of their babies. It was pleasant enough, but we were all exhausted and there wasn't much conversation. I kept trying to think up things to sound charming but eventually I just gave up. They are supposed to be impressing me too, right? Then I got to go home and crash.

There are two general things that seemed to come up. One is that they have this new studio format for physics in which they integrate the lectures with the labs so that the students do inquiry based and active learning. I think they liked that I have done a lot of workshops and things on that stuff. They are definitely very proud of this program. That also would make it more fun to teach physics, at least at the lower levels. The second is that they don't seem very impressed by their students. I guess EKU serves the eastern part of the state, which is the appalachian area, like western Virginia and West Virginia. As one faculty member put it, "they come out of the hills" to come to school. Nice. I tended to sympathize with the students that the faculty seem to just be writing them off. I think I wrote this before, but the faculty keep saying that the general ed students don't want to be there and don't care. Of course, that's what gen ed classes are! They just want the credit. Anyway, it is a bit of a red flag that the unmotivated students came up several times.

In general there were a lot of small things that seemed bad. For example, there is bad computer support, especially for macs and linux; they only have the AJ, not ApJ, and the astronomer can't get them to get it (she still does a lot of things by logging into her advisor's computers); the whole campus is behind a firewall that won't let you connect from home, and may make it tough for me to ssh out; although they travel to some conferences it seems that they have to scrape the money together from various places; and also the lesser benefits and start up funds.

On the plus side, I liked the city and campus a lot better than New Paltz. Once the snow cleared up I got a chance to go outside and take some pictures.

It's a nice campus that reminds me a bit of UVa in places, though it does have more than its fair share of ugly buildings from the 60s-70s (see the science building above lower left).

They said that they were going to meet today to talk it over, so hopefully I will hear soon. It will be a tough choice if I get it, but right now I think I'm leaning New York.