Title :
Industry meets academia: my year of retooling from practicing professional to tenure-track professor
Author_Institution :
Dept. of English, Bentley Coll., Waltham, MA, USA
Abstract :
The ultimate industry-academia partnership is when a member of one group joins the other. I left an 18-year career in industry to become a professor. The initial reaction from my friends and colleagues in industry ranged from insulting to encouraging: “You´ll have to take a pay cut,” “You´ll be great with students,” “They don´t do any real work there.” The feedback from academic colleagues has been similarly diverse. This paper explores the real challenges and rewards I experienced as a practicing professional turned professor. Specifically, it explores how my industry experience affected the job search, classroom teaching, service and research agenda, as well as my general response to the academic environment
Keywords :
employment; professional aspects; teaching; academic environment; career change; classroom teaching; colleague reactions; feedback; industry experience; industry-academia partnership; job search; practicing professional; research agenda; service; tenure-track professor; Aging; Call conference; Education; Educational institutions; Engineering profession; Prototypes; Publishing; Scholarships; Seminars; Shape;
Conference_Titel :
Professional Communication Conference, 1999. IPCC 99. Communication Jazz: Improvising the New International Communication Culture. Proceedings. 1999 IEEE International
Conference_Location :
New Orleans, LA
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-5709-4
DOI :
10.1109/IPCC.1999.799135
