Achieve Academe

First, thank you to everyone for listening to my spiel!  Even more-so, thank you to everyone who expressed an interest in collaborating!!

To reiterate, the idea is to create a cohort of participants to come together and help each other prepare for the application process for academic positions.  My hope is that it will be a collaborative effort, and that there will be a number of stakeholders driving the direction of the group; in the mean time I've set up a couple of things to get it rolling, like a website.  It's run through Google sites, so anyone interested in coordinating will be added as an editor; no need to be onsite to collaborate.

My initial vision of the group would be to have it run both fall and spring semesters, with a (mostly) new cohort in each semester.  Activities could include an initial research presentation, an off-beat presentation (reading kids books?) to practice presenting to a different type of audience, a version of your research presentation targeted at middle school students, and a final presentation incorporating all the feedback.  In between these we could review each other's written materials for the application package, practice mock interviews, discuss the job hunt, etc.  My favorite activity currently proposed is a couple of panel discussions with young professors about their experiences in getting a position, and their experiences on search committees.  I've already got a half dozen or so of my friends who are profs to commit as volunteers, but I get the feeling that we'd have young (and old) profs coming out of the woodwork to do this if we started asking around.

There are some documents posted to the website, including a couple of handouts and, for those not violently opposed, a rubric for presentations.  My objective for the rubric is to move toward constructive criticism of our work, and away from emotional support.  All the documents are considered to be drafts of course.

You may have noticed that I used "my" often in this post... that's because I've been waiting for YOU to join in so that we can make OUR plans for the group.  Please email me if you're interested at johns80@vt.edu.  I'm very hopeful that this summer we can finish developing the content and dive into it in the fall.

Thank you!!

John