Career Profile: Jeremy Shakun
Earth and Environmental Sciences, Boston College
Boston College is a private university.
Click on a topic to read Jeremy's answer to an individual question, or scroll down to read the entire profile: Educational background and career path * Early teaching challenges * Research transition * Institutional fit * Balancing responsibilities * Advice for new faculty
Briefly describe your educational background and career path.
I have B.A., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Geology from Middlebury College, UMass-Amherst, and Oregon State University. After grad school, I was a postdoc for a couple years spending time between several institutions (WHOI, LDEO, Harvard, University of Vermont). This path exposed me to a range of academic environments from a private liberal arts college to large state universities to research institutions. In 2013, I started my current faculty position at Boston College, which lies somewhere in between as a medium-sized private university focused in roughly equal measure on teaching and research.
What were some of the challenges you faced in your early years of full-time teaching? Could you briefly describe how you overcame one of those challenges?
Dialing up my teaching was trial by fire. I had little pedagogical training before starting my faculty position and was unsure how to design courses, calibrate their level of difficulty, or know where to invest my time in preparation. I'm also an introvert and found teaching large lecture courses taxed my nerves and energy level. I am still learning the art of teaching, but I grew to see it more as a process and a performance to refine over the years than a technical task to complete this semester. Courses inevitably start as beta versions full of bugs – expect it and take a first shot viewing it as such. But if you can be observant, experimental, and flexible, you will steer your courses ever closer to the mark you want to hit with maximal efficiency and minimal heartache. It is similar with your teaching style and persona. Like a standup comedian refining their act, the more you do it and experiment, the better you get. As for nerves, use humor – nothing breaks the ice and connects you to an audience like laughter.
How did you make the transition from your Ph.D. research to your current research program?
It's a big jump from completing a set of narrowly-defined research projects under a Ph.D. advisor to developing your own open-ended research program. I tried to reframe my view on research, thinking about it in terms of questions rather than projects and seeing myself as a scientific entrepreneur rather than a student. I read the literature and attended conferences with more of an eye toward gaps in knowledge and data coverage, loose research threads that could be connected, and old scientific questions that might now be answerable with current understanding or technology. I tried to develop new lines of research that could fuel years' worth of work but be broken up into a series of graduate-level projects. And I sought to expand my network of collaborators, striking up conversations and sending off emails to other scientists I wanted to explore research possibilities with.
An essential component of achieving tenure is finding or making an alignment of your teaching/research goals with the goals of your institution.... How do your goals fit with those of your institution? Did you adjust your goals to achieve that fit? If so, how?
I was fortunate that my goals fit well with Boston College. During my education, I loved my teaching-focused college professors as well as my research-focused graduate advisors and could never decide which I wanted to emulate more. Boston College split the difference, valuing both dedicated teaching and dynamic research. I had to start explicitly seeing myself in this in-between space though and be careful not to get stretched too thin in either direction.
Many of the new faculty members in these workshops are interested in maintaining a modicum of balance while getting their careers off to a strong start. Please share a strategy or strategies that have helped you to balance teaching, research, and your other work responsibilities, OR balance work responsibilities with finding time for your personal life.
Maintaining balance is a perennial challenge. Be intentional with how you structure your time, otherwise it is easy to get pulled too far into something to the detriment of other responsibilities. Set aside a certain portion of time you will dedicate to tasks, then move on (e.g., 1 hour of writing each morning, 2 hours of class prep this afternoon, etc.). It can be difficult to let go, but as a senior colleague once told me, being an effective faculty member is learning how to switch from one thing to the next every 30 minutes.
What advice do you have for faculty beginning academic careers in geoscience? What do you know now that you wish you had known as you started your career in academia?
Give yourself some grace. People who become faculty often excelled when they were students, so they may be used to feeling accomplished. Keep in mind though that student life was often about developing mastery (of courses, subjects, research projects, etc.). Faculty life is different; you have to juggle lots of very different things with probably less time to devote to each than you feel they deserve (teaching, advising, grant writing, running a lab, etc.). That can sometimes leave you dissatisfied with how well you've done things. But don't make the perfect the enemy of the good or measure yourself against some impossible standard. Everyone in this business is human and a day has only 24 hours. Do the best you can do in the time you've got, focus on all the good things you're moving forward, and then clock out for the day feeling good about your effort.