What kind of skills will you need to succeed as a faculty member at a teaching-focused college? There are three duties associated with a faculty position: teaching, research and community service. As a graduate student, you’re typically trained to do . . . none of these things, in their entirety. What can you do to prepare yourself now for your faculty future?

There are several activities beyond the bench I am glad I was involved in while still in grad school. These include serving on committees, networking, and outreach. Of course, there are others I wish I had done in grad school like taking statistics. Below I describe in greater detail a few more activities that can help develop skills that you will find tested once you land a job.

Hopefully, you have opportunities to act as a teaching assistant as part of your graduate training. Working as a TA can be a very valuable teaching experience if you spend the effort to make it one, providing opportunities to prepare and deliver lectures (in your section if not in the lecture proper), manage a classroom, grade, write study questions, and work with students.

If you aren’t required to TA, see if you can anyway. Talk to your program chair about opportunities at your institution, or at other institutions if you are doing your graduate work at a research institute or medical school that does not teach undergraduate biology courses.

. . . but running a course is different than assisting with one.

As useful as TAing can be, it usually doesn’t give you exposure to the full range of duties involved in teaching your own course. The biggest missing skill is course/syllabus design: deciding what you will cover, when you will cover it, and how you will cover it. I never realized how much work goes into that single sheet of paper distributed on the first day of class . . . until I had to write a syllabus myself. What lab activities and other assignments will you give? Upper division subjects at large schools often have separate, uncoordinated lecture and lab courses, but at small teaching colleges, lecture and lab are usually combined in the same course. What textbook will you choose and what reading will you assign? Writing exams is another important challenge. As every teacher (and many a student) knows, it is not trivial to write a good test.

Although there are some useful tips that can be given to aid with these tasks, I think the only way to gain solid competence at teaching your own class is to teach your own class. It would be wonderful if all grad students had the opportunity to do this, but this is not usually the case. One attractive mechanism to provide this venue is to give grad students the opportunity to teach a seminar course, which can be on a field closely related to their thesis research. This can be an excellent mechanism to provide a valuable, culminating teaching experience for senior graduate students and to enrich the undergraduate curriculum with high-level, interactive courses on diverse subjects.

Depending on your research ambitions, writing grants may be critical to your success. Even if you are currently hoping for minimal reliance on extramural funds (maybe this is one of your reasons for choosing the small college route), your goals may change once you start your job and begin developing new ideas about what you want to do. This includes new initiatives in teaching or outreach activities in addition to research. It helps to know the kinds of grants that are available, and how you can get them. Everything takes money, and if money is the barrier between you and execution of your cool idea, you’ll want to know how to conceptualize your project, appreciate its practicalities, and package it.

Get exposed to grant writing as a grad student. Talk to your PI about it and offer to contribute to her grant writing efforts. Talk to grant writing staff at your institution about the process, and to PIs at teaching colleges about their funding situations. Grant writing workshops held by your institution or by funding agencies are a great way to learn about the system. You can also find lots of useful information on the web. A little demystification of the system can go a long way toward helping you realize your projects.

All grad students appreciate the importance of a PI who manages the lab well. Now your management skills will be put to the test. Even if you only have a small lab of a few undergraduates, being able to mentor your charges effectively will strongly affect the productivity and enjoyment of everyone in the operation. There are many challenges. Undergraduates need a lot of help if they are to generate quality data. They must learn the system, gain competence at thinking scientifically, and acquire technical skills all before their short tenure is complete. You must help them develop as researchers and get useful work out of them, two goals which can often be at odds. You will need to ensure that your workers behave responsibly toward their duties and each other.

Like teaching, this is probably something that is best done by doing (although I recommend At the Helm by Kathy Barker as a source of sound advice). Get involved in managing others as a student. Supervise undergrads and accept lab management duties. It may seem like a waste of your time to mentor the latest green undergrad or to design (and enforce compliance with) a plasmid storage organization scheme, but the experience can help you when you become the PI. Also, see how other labs besides your own are managed. Sit in on other lab meetings and talk to other PIs about management issues. Getting exposure to labs with similar personnel makeup to your future lab would be especially useful.

Mentoring is a big part of the service faculty provide to their college community. Because classes are small, faculty often work closely with individual students. Faculty serve as academic advisors, and mentor students in the lab. As a mentor/advisor, you should strive to serve not just the academic needs of the student, but the whole student. Often academic performance cannot be separated from the rest of life. Faculty serve important roles as de facto personal counselors and form a first line of defense for troubled students. Yes, students will come to you worried about their low grade on the latest Physics exam, and you will need to explain how to develop good study habits and which History courses count for a General Education requirement. But they may also tell you that they are planning to drop out, that they are the victims of domestic violence, that they have an unplanned pregnancy or are contemplating suicide. You’re an authority figure – how you respond can make a big difference to the student.

Counseling training would be useful, and this is something that could be learned in a course. It would be helpful to learn how to talk about sensitive issues and how to counsel effectively. This kind of training might be more appropriately provided by the college for its faculty, rather than for grad students, but there are things you can do to ready yourself. It is always hard to find time to escape from the bench, but make sure to stay social, with your colleagues, friends, and family. Spending 5+ years conversing with a pipetteman can erode your people skills, so make sure you make time to stay grounded in the human world.