Smoothing the Pipeline: A Strategy to Match Graduate Training With the Professional Demands of Professorship

Abstract

Faculty recruitment and PhD student placement have become increasingly competitive over the past decade. The emphasis of graduate student training—research above all else—often means a difficult transition into the professoriate, where expectations for faculty are broadened to include teaching and service. In response, we offer a model of an organizational structure for research in which (1) graduate students gain opportunities to collaborate on research with faculty, (2) teach in their areas of expertise, and (3) begin their mentoring careers. We argue that these structures will help “smooth the pipeline” between graduate school and academic jobs and will be particularly helpful in supporting graduate students from historically underrepresented groups.

Keywords:

• Graduate students
• junior faculty
• mentoring
• diversity

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank J. Benjamin Wu for excellent research assistance, as well as Benjamin Graham, Jonathan Markowitz, and student researchers in the USC Security and Political Economy Lab with whom we have developed our model for collaborative research. We would also like to thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Political Science Education for valuable comments on earlier drafts. This article was previously presented at the 2018 American Political Science Association Teaching and Learning Conference.

Notes

Notes

1 For more information on the lab, please visit http://uscspec.org.

2 This is not meant to be an indictment of faculty at PhD-granting institutions; faculty as mentors tend to generalize from their own experience. We also do not mean to say that faculty should not train their graduate students to pursue publishable research projects, but we will argue that a more well-rounded approach that includes experiences teaching and mentoring before students graduate will both help them transition to junior faculty more efficiently and effectively and need not negatively impact their research activities.

3 A recent paper by Josiah Marineau (2018) enumerates some of the differences between teaching-oriented institutions and research-oriented institutions and how new junior faculty might navigate transitioning between the two.

4 We do not mean to imply that we are the only scholars in political science to have a research lab or the only ones to use the structure of a lab to support graduate training. For example, Druckman, Howat, and Mullinix (2018) make a strong case for research labs in experimental political science; however, we contend that this type of structure may be beneficial irrespective of research approach. Readers might also be interested in the research strategies detailed in Bolsen et al. (2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the Office of the Provost at the University of Southern California in the form of a Zumberge Diversity and Inclusion Grant and the Provost’s Fellowship in the Social Sciences. In addition, this material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE-1418060. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of University of Southern California or the National Science Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Megan Becker

Megan Becker is an Assistant (Teaching) Professor in the School of International Relations (SIR) at the University of Southern California (USC). She is a principal investigator in the USC Security and Political Lab (https://dornsife.usc.edu/spec) and the founder and director of the USC SIR Undergraduate Research Program. Her pedagogy research engages with matters related to undergraduate research, data literacy, and the teaching of research methods. She is the 2017 recipient of the APSA’s Craig L. Brians Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research and Mentoring.

Kelebogile Zvobgo

Kelebogile Zvobgo is Provost's Fellow in the Social Sciences, a PhD Candidate in Political Science and International Relations, and former Director of the Security and Political Economy Lab at the University of Southern California.