New Engineering Faculty For The New Millennium

Three new faculty members team up to relate their experiences moving from industry to academia. Major topics include teaching, laboratory development, service, publishing, and the balancing of time among these areas. The teaching area includes incorporating industrial experiences into classroom preparation and making the transition from industrial presentations to academic teaching. Bloom’s taxonomy is used to prepare for teaching and also to assess learning. Laboratory development includes making that first contact with prospective industrial partners and writing a grant proposal. The service area includes not just the committee work upon which academia thrives, but also outreach activities to the community. This outreach includes both working as a consultant and reaching out to possible new students. Publishing includes the research and preparation of a first paper for conference presentation along with the relative worth of different venues for a published paper. Finally, the fourth member of the team, one who made the move from industry eight years ago, describes how to put these activities into a winning promotion and tenure document. Insights are given into the promotion and tenure process and the various committees that are involved in this process. This document and process are important because it is necessary to not only to become active in all the areas listed above, but also to document these activities in order to achieve tenure and stay in academia.