TA TALK Issue #13
February 2003

Welcome to TA TALK! TA TALK is an on-line newsletter published by the Center for Teaching Effectiveness at UT. Its goal is to provide timely information for TAs and AIs regarding teaching, learning, and university resources. If this is the first edition of TA TALK that you've received and you'd like to receive future installments, you may subscribe to receive three electronic copies of TA TALK each semester by following the directions at the end of the newsletter.

Please e-mail Michelle Achacoso, Ph.D., (mvachacoso@mail.utexas.edu) if you have suggestions for topics for future articles. Thanks to Stephanie Corliss and Steve Knoll for their help with Web design and HTML.

In this issue, we bring you the Keynote address given by Dr. JoyLynn Reed from the 3rd Annual Experienced TA/AI Seminar "Expanding Your Tools for Teaching." Dr. Reed is a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Dallas and has a wealth of academic and private sector experience. Dr. Reed gave a very inspiring talk at the seminar and has graciously allowed us to publish it on the TA Talk Newsletter. Enjoy!

Spring 2003 Experienced TA/AI Seminar Keynote Address
"Marketing Your Skills for Today's Job Market"
January 25, 2003
JoyLynn Reed, Ph.D.

It is a great privilege and pleasure to be talking with you today. As TAs at UT, you are the cream of the crop across the U.S. As a former TA at UT, I can promise you that your experiences in your positions will provide you with excellent opportunities and training to pursue and excel at many career paths. The resource you have here in the Center for Teaching Effectiveness is the best of its kind in the world. Dr. Svinicki, Dr. Lewis, Dr. Achacoso, and Dr. Kozuh are noted leaders in their field. You've made a wise choice to attend this Experienced TA Conference.

Many of you have goals of being mainstream academics--getting an assistant professor position, maybe after a post-doc, and advancing through the ranks to become full professors (or as my non-academic brother calls them, full of it professors). Others of you do not quite know exactly which career path you'd like to pursue but you want to know about options. I once had the goal of being an assistant professor and advancing with tenure to full professor, however my career path has led me in other directions because I've learned that I like being an entrepreneur within academics. Today, I'd like to talk with you about what I've learned from pursuing a non-traditional academic career path. My hope is that this information can help you regardless of what you decide to do in the future.

First, let me tell you about my non-traditional career so you can better understand the perspective I'm speaking from today. I entered my Ph.D. program with the goal of working in industry. I decided that my M.A. in Communication Studies coupled with a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology would help me get a position in industry that would take advantage of my knowledge in research methods, statistics, cognitive psychology, and communication systems. However, along the way, I became enthralled with academic research and teaching. I decided that the academic life was the one for me. As a new Ph.D., I sought the dream of tenured-professordom and got a job as an assistant professor at St. Edward's University. The expectation was that I would become a tenured faculty member at St. Ed's, keep up my research interests with colleagues here at UT, and live a nice academic life. It didn't work out that way. Once at St. Ed's, I learned that I was the ONLY communication faculty member which meant I had 127 undergraduate students and no communication program for them. This was when I learned how to build academic programs and developed a communication major for the students. After that was finished, I transferred to the business and education graduate programs and started another new program: an M.A. in Conflict Resolution. This was an exciting project that confirmed for me that my goal of being a tenured professor was the wrong one--I liked building things and charting new territory. While I was at St. Ed's I was also teaching Comm 398T here at UT Austin--a course I taught for almost 10 years.

After I had been at St. Ed's for 6 years, a businesswoman approached me about a new start-up consulting company and made me VP of Marketing. I stayed with that group for a while and realized that I could start my own company so a colleague and I started MacDermott & Reed as a consulting company specializing in teambuilding and communication effectiveness consulting. We were very successful from the beginning. In fact, the week after we incorporated, we secured a major year-long contract with Applied Materials that was so large we had to hire people to help us. A year later, I was invited to work here at UT with the Center for Teaching Effectiveness and to be on the ground floor of the new Graduate Professional Development program. A few years before I'd had an idea for teaching graduate students how to become good professionals by communicating effectively, writing well, and learning to consult. Dean Cherwitz and I had many conversations about how to do that at UT. In 1997, this idea was brought to fruition with the arrival on campus of the GRS courses. I taught GRS courses and co-coordinated that program until 2000 when someone from 3M called and recruited me to work for large corporate America. At 3M, I was instructional development manager for their online technical university in telecommunications. It was an exciting job because the project was entrepreneurial and a very different thing for 3M to do. After a year 3M cut the project because of an executive change in direction. Even though they offered me another position, I decided to leave. Currently, I'm at UT Dallas starting what my dean calls "an initiative"--teaching graduate students to communicate, teaching science Ph.D. students to write, and teaching a dissertation writing seminar. From this brief career history, you can see that while I've mostly been in academics, my career has been anything but traditional.

Given the perspective of my professional background, I'd like to discuss with you five principles that the successful academics I've known have followed whether they made their careers in the academy or outside of it. Passion, self-promotion, transferability, addressing cluelessness, and profiling for success are ways that these people sell themselves and make lasting impressions on those around them.

Just the other day, someone who wants to hire me to run a business asked me what I want to be when I grow up. He said that he would structure his business to accommodate me and what I'd like to do for it. That was an amazing offer but in answer to his question about what to be when I grow up, I had to say, "I don't ever intend to grow up!" This is because often we believe that adults can't and shouldn't be passionate about what they do.

The first principle of selling yourself is to be passionate about what you like to do and what you want to do. Often we don't know what we want to do but we usually know what we're passionate about doing. The most successful people I've known are passionate and have figured out how to get paid for their passions. For example, do you love seeing the lightbulbs go on when you explain a concept to your students? Are you excited beyond words when an experiment in your lab yields interesting results? What would you continue doing if you won the lottery and never had to work for a salary again?

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to give a workshop for the Texas Lottery Commission for all of the $million plus lottery winners. I got the chance to ask all of them what they were doing currently. Only one of them had quit his job and was doing nothing--he had been a meter reader in West Texas. All of the others had quit their jobs and started businesses or other occupations that followed their passions. They did what they had always wanted to do.

Often when pursuing a graduate degree, especially a Ph.D., you're socialized to do research and teach. Are those things your passion? If not, how can you apply your skills, talents, and knowledge, to something you'd love to do? Start a non-profit. Start a private school. Become a popular author. Become a consultant.

A wise friend once asked me what I'd like to spend every day doing. It's an interesting question. Think about it. When you wake up in the morning, what would you like to do tomorrow? Do you want to spend your day in the library? Do you want to spend your day talking with students? Do you want to spend your day in business meetings making things happen? By answering these kinds of questions, you can discover your passions and how they apply to work.

A second principle of success is, self-promote your talents. This sounds obvious but many TAs don't think about how to do it. My first job interview after I had been a TA and when I was about to finish my M.A. was with a high-level executive with the Texas Railroad Commission. He asked me to tell him what job I'd like to do, what my skills for doing it would be, and what difference I could make in his agency. Essentially, he gave me an invitation to design my dream job. The problem was that I did not yet know how to promote my talents so all he could do was offer me a job as an administrative assistant because all I could do was say that I had an M.A. in Communication Studies. He did not know what that meant and how it could help his agency and I didn't know how to tell him what I could contribute. In hindsight, what I needed to do was list what I learned in graduate school and from being a TA--we all have excellent analytical skills, the ability to work intensely on a goal and achieve it, research skills, management skills, effective feedback skills, conflict resolution skills, and more. What is on your list of skills that you have from your TA experience? What is on your list of skills you had BEFORE coming to grad school? How can you combine those skills to promote yourself? These are important questions to answer BEFORE looking for positions and talking to people.

How can you relate your passion, skills, and talents to many fields? This is the third principle--Focus on transferability. If you moved to a town where the main industry was healthcare, how could you fit into that segment of industry? You should be able to answer questions like this. For example, with my graduate degrees in Educational Psychology and communication, I could promote myself within healthcare as a person in training and development, an organizational researcher, a statistician, or even a PR specialist. Not long ago, 3M recruited me to be in their telecommunication systems division to do technical telecom training. When I got the position, I knew nothing at all about telecom except how to use a telephone. But, I am an expert in online learning and explaining complex concepts and these skills are what attracted 3M to me. As is true with any graduate student, being an expert learner helped me develop quickly my expertise in areas like wireless communication and fiber optic theory. It is true most of the time that you can apply your talents and pursue your passion against the backdrop of many different industrial settings. So here's a game to play tonight: List three industries you think are far from your knowledge base. Write down ways you could work in those fields. You will be surprised at how transferable your skills really are.

One thing to realize about the people in various industrial or even other academic settings is that they will not necessarily appreciate or understand your specific academic background. This is the fourth principle that is sometimes difficult for us all--we have to deal with others' cluelessness about what we know and what we do. When I was working on my dissertation, I talked to my father on the phone one night. Before retiring, my father was a top executive for a Fortune 100 company so he was highly successful and accustomed to making things happen. He asked me, "what's a dissertation?" I told him it is a 200 or so page document that reports an original research project. I didn't think he would understand much more than that. His reply was that he didn't understand why it could possibly take many months to write a dissertation since he could call a couple of his marketing people and have them crank out 200 pages in about two weeks. Most people do not understand what it takes to earn a Ph.D. or what it means to be a researcher or university-level teacher. Sometimes at parties, I've had people introduce me to preschool teachers by saying, "you both do the same kind of job so you have a lot in common." Actually, our college students MIGHT be more similar to 4 and 5 year-olds than we imagine, but the point is people outside of academics do not necessarily understand what we know and what we can do.

On a related note realize that people, even other academics, who are not experts in your discipline might not appreciate the theories and intricacies of your disciplinary knowledge. Research in expert/novice differences tells us that novices under-estimate the importance and complexity of unfamiliar domain knowledge. This means that when I interviewed with my manager at 3M and told him that I'm an expert at developing courses, he did not understand that it meant I was able to do things like target different types of knowledge learners need, sequence that knowledge, develop learning goals and objectives, write and execute learning assessment plans, and harness learners' motivational and affective processes. These are areas of expertise from my discipline that are complex but that seem simple from a non-expert's perspective. What are these complexities in your field? What do non-experts typically mis-judge in your field? Once you know these things, you can develop effective ways to represent yourself and your field to non-experts.

Finally, find role models so you can have profiles for success. These people might or might not be mentors. Can you find people in different areas or fields who embody the kind of success you want? Think broadly. For example, one person I've recently profiled for success is a space science engineer who has patented a way to make professional-level golf clubs. I'm not an engineer and I don't want to make golf clubs, but he's shown me how I could be a successful entrepreneur in the way he conducts business and also in the way he took physics and applied it to something like golf clubs. Another person I've profiled for success was my own dissertation advisor, Diane Schallert. She's shown me how to help graduate students succeed as well as how to be an effective researcher. Dr. Marilla Svinicki has been a model of success with her passion and work toward promoting teaching effectiveness on this campus. Dr. Austin Cunningham, my dean at UTD, has shown me how a physicist can become a skilled academic administrator by being forthright and compassionate. Cast your net wide and you can find good people who will give you profiles for success. When you find them, let them know the positive influence they've had on you.

These five principles may seem like common-sense ideas. However, how many of you can give examples from your careers of each of these principles? If you do not have these stories and examples for yourselves, you have a challenge. But realize that this challenge is ongoing. Anyone good at selling him or herself is always developing a new passion, always thinking of new ways to promote him or herself, always learning new ways to transfer skills, always addressing others' cluelessness, and continually finding new people to profile for success.

Even if you package yourself beautifully and know exactly how to sell yourself in a situation, you still might not be successful in closing the sale. Think of different products you might buy. Some products, like a luxury car, are things that everyone knows about but few can afford to buy. Other products like paper towels, are commonplace and everyone buys them. You might know exactly what kind of product you need to be in a given situation--believe me, I've been a Rolls Royce before AND I've also been a roll of Bounty. BUT, if the person who might be buying you doesn't know what she wants or maybe thinks she can get the product on sale somewhere else, you might not succeed even with your best efforts. Usually people aren't looking for a sale on a Rolls Royce but a lot of people go around looking to see whether they can buy Bounty for a few dollars less at Target than at Wal-Mart. The moral is that you should look at how you market yourself and critique your strategy, but always remember that sometimes the buyer is the issue and you can't always do anything about her so just go on and don't feel badly about yourself.

Thank you for inviting me here today. It's been a pleasure to see you all. Have an excellent semester and my best wishes to all of you as you pursue your careers.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Services for TAs at the Center for Teaching Effectiveness

Seminars: On January 25th, 2003, CTE and UTLC cosponsored a seminar for experienced TAs to help them hone and develop their skills as instructors.

Departmental Consultations: Would you like to see changes in the TA experience in your department? Would you like more feedback on your own teaching? Contact Michelle Achacoso, Ph.D., Interim TA Program Coordinator at the CTE. (mvachacoso@mail.utexas.edu) She would be happy to reply to your e-mail questions or concerns, or to meet with you or a group of TAs to brainstorm ways to enhance your teaching or to improve student learning.

Do you want additional ideas on teaching and learning? Check out the CTE web site at http://www.utexas.edu/academic/cte/. Here you'll find suggestions on everything from how to encourage student participation to methods for assigning grades.

Finally, do something for yourself. Check out the self-help opportunities through the Counseling Center's Food for Thought groups: http://www.utexas.edu/student/cmhc/outreach/ffttops.html