Thursday, April 10, 2008

My Primary Job Activity

Every once in awhile when filling out an online registration form, I am asked to select My Primary Job Activity from a pull-down menu of options. I get to select one item, and I have to choose between Research and Teaching.

I am employed at a research university, so I suppose I should choose Research. A major part of my job, however, is Teaching. Depending on my teaching load, it can be the primary activity of my job. In real life, I do research and I teach: they are both my primary job activities.

It doesn't really matter what I select from these lists, but if I could, I would select both Research and Teaching and not choose between them.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

I also struggle with this choice. Even if one were to try to make an either/or decision by hours per week on each activity, how does one count advising undergraduate and graduate student researchers? Serving on grad student thesis committees? I think giving a good seminar is a form of teaching. The whole point of a R1 univeristy is that good scholarship and teaching go hand in hand.

At our university we also have to fill out a form once a year where we proportionally divide our time in a more detailed way--teaching, research administrative, clerical. I am often tempted to make my job 80% clerical, which given the staff support we get and the amount of paperwork involved in research sometimes seems realistic.

Mark P

Janus Professor said...

If "education" was an option, I would select that. The act of research will educate post-docs, students, as well as yourself. But if "professing" was an option, that might win out!

Anonymous said...

If you happen to ever discover some way of filling out such online registration forms that minimizes the number of salespeople cold-calling you to "check in with you about your current -insert-their-product-line- needs", please write a post about that--I think I could be more strategic with those forms, myself.

Anonymous said...

I struggle with the Education completed drop-down lists. They go something like this:
High school
Some college
BA/BS
MS
PhD

Where's the some grad school option? Guess everyone can't fit in the box...or drop-down menus. How boring life would be if everyone fit rigid categories and bell curves....

Anonymous said...

ever try ctrl-clicking? sometimes that will let you highlight two things.

Anonymous said...

On this blog we mainly have an occasion to hear about the teaching side. I'd love to hear more about your research. I understand that you cannot describe it in detail if you want to stay anonymous. I think it would be very interesting. After all there's a lot of Female Something Teachers and much less Female Scientists.

Anonymous said...

I hate university-related questionnaires that don't have 'post-doc' as an option. It bugs me to have to classify myself as "other" since I don't fit into any of the faculty/ staff/ student /alumni categories.

Anonymous said...

Just out of curiosity-
Does the number of obscence/harrassment type comments
diminish significantly with these less volatile topics?

Female Science Professor said...

Jill,
Yes, definitely.