Boston’s liberal arts colleges are hiring young scientists as assistant professors. But these careers involve a lot more than just teaching.

Robin Orwant

Sipping coffee at a café at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Charlestown campus, Josef Kurtz looks like any other postdoc taking a break from bench work. But a cell phone call, in which he explains the details of an experimental protocol, reveals his other life: a full-time, tenure-track assistant professor at Emmanuel College in Boston. The caller is one of his “kids,” as he calls them, his undergraduate students.

For much of the summer and a substantial portion of the school year, Kurtz works as a research fellow in the Transplantation Biology Research Center at MGH. The rest of the time, he teaches biology and runs a small lab at Emmanuel. His double life shows how creative scientists at liberal arts colleges must be to combine research with teaching. It also shows how faculty at these colleges are increasingly expected to do top-notch research and publish, on top of their regular teaching duties. That means that young scientists hoping to find an assistant professor position at an undergraduate college not only need teaching experience but also an attractive research project and a good publication record.

“Students learn better hands on,” says Laura Muller, chair of the chemistry department at Wheaton College in Norton, MA. “We want to be able to give every student some kind of research experience.”

Learning to teach

Kurtz was an undergraduate biology student at MIT and earned his PhD in immunology at Harvard. He enjoyed those experiences, but he loved teaching and knew he wanted to be at a liberal arts college where he could work closely with undergraduates. While at MIT and Harvard, he worked as a teaching assistant whenever he could, a strategy that served him well when applying for a job at Emmanuel. “It’s amazing how important that teaching component is,” he says.

Those pursuing a career at an undergraduate college should get as much teaching experience as possible, even if it earns them a few frowns from advisors focused on research, says Rebecca Christianson, an assistant professor of applied physics at Olin College in Needham, MA. Christianson took on extra teaching as a graduate student at MIT and even taught during her postdoctoral training at Harvard, where teaching was not a priority for most of her peers.

For those who don’t have teaching opportunities in graduate school, there are still ways to gain the necessary experience. Teaching postdoctoral fellowships, while rare, can serve as a stepping-stone. Adjunct faculty positions can also help. These temporary, part-time jobs at liberal arts colleges not only provide teaching experience, says Christianson, but can also get your foot in the door.

Teaching experience doesn’t have to be in a classroom, says Muller. Experiences as a scout leader, swim coach, camp counselor, or leader in a community outreach program might also help you demonstrate teaching skills.

Add in the research

Teaching is only half of the story. College search committees are taking a closer look at applicants’ publication records and seeking scientists whose projects can be carried out mainly by undergraduates. That means the project must not require too many specialized skills, especially in the early stages.

Research projects can’t cost too much either. Because smaller colleges typically can’t offer huge start-up packages or compete with research universities for big grants, new faculty must either devise projects that are low cost or forge collaborations with scientists at large research institutions where expensive equipment and materials are readily available.

Kurtz opted for the latter strategy. For example, his research requires the use of mice, but Emmanuel College has no mouse facility. In collaboration with his graduate advisor, Kurtz does all the mouse work for his project at MGH, saving the less costly experiments for his tiny lab at Emmanuel.

Kurtz says it’s important to establish these kinds of collaborations with scientists before applying for faculty positions at teaching colleges so that you can sell yourself and your research project more effectively. “One of the reasons I was hired was because of my connections in the Boston area,” he says.

Doing it all

Perhaps the biggest challenge to keeping a research program afloat is the very thing that draws people like Kurtz to undergraduate colleges in the first place—the teaching. During the school year, he spends the bulk of his time teaching, grading papers, planning courses, creating course materials, and mentoring students. After adding in his research, he works about 65 to 70 hours a week. And it doesn’t get any easier when school is out.

“In the summer, you expect to work as hard or harder than you do throughout the year,” he says. The only difference during those few months is that you get to focus almost entirely on your research.

Indeed, no one should think that working at an undergraduate college is an easy career path or a fallback option, says Christianson. “You should never go into a career at a teaching university if you want to spend all your time doing research,” she says. (A typical starting salary for a tenure-track assistant professor at a teaching college is in the low to mid-$50,000 range.)

Though some people have moved from an undergraduate college to a big research university, Christianson says, the limitations on funding and research productivity at smaller colleges make it difficult to build up the kind of publication record needed to make the switch.

Kurtz, for one, can’t imagine moving to a research university and losing the close relationships he has fostered with his undergraduate students at Emmanuel. “They’re my kids,” he says affectionately. “If Harvard came knocking, there’s no way I would go.”

To learn more about other alternative careers, read this earlier NNB article about patent law.

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