SIGCSE 2021 Pre-Symposium Event by the SIGCSE Committee on Computing Education in Liberal Arts Colleges
Contributed by Adam Poliak, apoliak@barnard.edu
Adam Poliak is a Roman Family Faculty Fellow at Barnard College. His research focuses on evaluating the reasoning capabilities and biases in natural language processing models, and applying natural language processing to other fields to glean insights from large amounts of text.
Many PhD students, primarily at R1 universities, believe that the only two options for academic careers in Computer Science are research focused positions (with limited teaching expectations) or teaching track positions (with limited research expectations and support). For PhD students who want to devote their efforts (more) equally to teaching and research, a faculty career at liberal arts colleges can be ideal. While many liberal arts colleges have decades-old and established Computer Science departments, many PhD students interested in an academic career are unaware of these opportunities.
Conferences like SIGCSE raise the awareness of faculty careers at liberal arts colleges. The bi-annual New Educators Workshop (2020, 2018) helps educate those who are unclear on the variety of career options available. However, many PhD students and postdocs are unaware of SIGCSE and educational focused venues.
SIGCSE and liberal arts Computer Science departments should partner with top-tier academic conferences to advertise what faculty careers at liberal arts colleges look like and entail. This could include co-organizing and co-sponsoring teaching and educational focused workshops at different top-tier research conferences. SIGCSE should also co-organize teaching focused workshops, e.g. the Teaching NLP Workshop hosted by the Association for Computational Linguistics, at top-tier conferences. Lastly, we should encourage our members from liberal arts colleges to volunteer on panels about research careers.
Liberal arts colleges that more equally value teaching and support faculty scholarships can be attractive to junior researchers who are currently not aware of the existence of such opportunities. Increasing awareness of Computer Science faculty careers at liberal arts colleges will increase the pool of applicants interested in faculty careers at liberal arts colleges.