[NotOscarWilde]

The author writes about himself:

> Hi! I'm a PhD student studying computer science at Rice University.

This means that we are on the same career path (I am currently an assistant professor in theoretical CS in Europe). I wish you of course best of luck!

Here is the harshest truth about teaching I learned during my PhD:

If you are focusing on teaching too much, you are setting yourself up for failure.

This sounds cruel, and in fact I am much like you, I love teaching and I love self-improvement and it is quite easy for me to invest time into my teaching prep, presentation, and more and see measurable results in class quality and usually also student feedback.

However, at least in my neck of the woods (i.e. Europe), almost all gates and gatekeepers for you as a PhD student, and later postdoc, are checking your research. At some places they really do expect you to have K publications in the top 3 CS conferences or you will not be considered at all -- and it seems these thresholds are only getting higher. Here I mean for example invitation-only workshops, postdoc positions with top advisors, and later also permanent positions.

On the other hand, if you are a talented scientist, they usually only care that your teaching skills are at the bare minimum -- have you taught something? Yes? Great.

Now orator/presentation skills are critical and presenting a coherent lecture plan might be useful for a final presentation at an interview for a permanent position. But even there, it is more about you knowing what you want to teach and how it complements the department than about your past achievements (i.e., how much you have put in a course previously).

My PhD advisor usually said that he likes to dig into teaching when research is not going well. I agree with that -- teaching really is fulfilling to me and I love to improve my class and see people happy with it, and research is all about global ranking (which is tough on anyone's psyche) and generating progress which is the fun part but sometimes takes a long time. However, at your stage of your career, the research really can't go slow.

---

PS: If the author reads this, since it is a self-post, your class sounds really nice and it is actually one I would have loved to attend. My research is in online algorithms -- a field which you can rephrase as seeing some theoretical problems as two player games between a solver and an adversary -- and among other things I would like to consider utilizing all the techniques of chess solvers (which cannot evaluate the game fully, but "almost") and transfer it to other areas of online algorithms.

[kettleballroll]

Just as a counterpoint: this very much depends. I probably spent at least a year (probably more) of my PhD (in Europe) just teaching a class I built up from the ground up myself. I barely got any research done the first year I gave that class, and every subsequent year it still took a large chunk of my time. It's part of the reason I spent a total of 7 years doing a PhD (which is long, considering I already had an MSc), during 5 of which I taught my class, and grew it from 10 students in the first year to 200 in my last. But I don't consider that time wasted. I had a blast and found that teaching helped me understand the fundamentals of my fields at an extremely deep level that I'd never reached otherwise. It didn't improve my research output, but I feel that the soft skills and understanding of fundamentals was a real advantage. My future career also didn't suffer, I'm now working as researcher at a FAANG AI lab.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

> I had a blast and found that teaching helped me understand the fundamentals of my fields at an extremely deep level that I'd never reached otherwise

You spent 5 years teaching a class that, judging from your words, you probably prepared and improved very thoroughly. That is a lot of hours of work. Are you sure if you devoted all those hours to reading textbooks, papers, doing experiments, etc. on your field, you wouldn't have achieved an even deeper understanding?

Maybe yes, but if so, I honestly think you're in a minority. As an academic myself, I like teaching and I do learn things from it, but it's far from the most efficient way to learn a scientific field. If I had a pure research position I'm pretty sure that my research productivity would be better.

[yodsanklai]

> If you are focusing on teaching too much, you are setting yourself up for failure.

This is good advice. And this is true even once you become a professor. All time spent on teaching will go against your career progression. Even if you're tenured and don't care about promotion, you'll feel like an imposter in your department if you're not somewhat competitive research wise.

Generally speaking, there's no recognition in teaching in general, and at university level it's often not even considered as a job by itself.

Maybe it's different in Asia, but that was my experience in the western countries where I worked.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

> However, at least in my neck of the woods (i.e. Europe), almost all gates and gatekeepers for you as a PhD student, and later postdoc, are checking your research.

While I'm also in Europe, my bet is that this is universal and won't change in the foreseeable future.

The reason is that teaching is practically impossible to evaluate. How do you quantitatively measure which professors provide high-quality teaching? By grades? No, easiest course wins. By employability? No, it depends a lot on the field, a philosophy professor can be amazing but that won't create jobs in philosophy. Student polls? Correlation with actual quality is really weak, and I say this as someone who has good polls - there is a strong influence of difficulty as well as the subject itself (a CS student will almost always prefer programming to physics, and it's not the physics professor's fault), apart from gender bias.

In my country they try to give an equal weight to teaching equally with respect to research in applications for positiosn and tenure, but since there is no realistic metric, the bulk of the score ends up being about "years teaching" or "number of hours taught" which is the only objective number that they can come up with. So it becomes basically a seniority factor and since your seniority is what it is and preparing high-quality lectures won't give you more hours or years, the outcome is still that focusing too much on teaching is bad for your career.

[denton-scratch]

Bret Deveraux[0] did a really good blogpost on the difference between the tenure track and the teaching track for postgrad students.

[0] https://acoup.blog/2023/04/28/collections-academic-ranks-exp...

/me not an academic at all. I had no idea it was such a struggle.

[althea_tx]

There are different types of universities. While R1 institutions are more focused on research than teaching, there are smaller liberal arts universities which revolve around the undergraduate student experience. These universities still have research expectations as part of tenure and promotion, but faculty aren’t required to crank out research publications. Teaching is hugely important at these schools, both during the hiring process and when evaluating candidates for tenure and promotion.

I have been fortunate enough to work at such a university for the past 20 years. We have a deep endowment, small class sizes, and extensive support for our faculty research projects. Undergraduates at our school are often engaged in research projects as well.

For me, this is like an academic utopia: a blend of teaching and research with a primary focus on teaching. There are many other universities like mine.

Keep it up, OP. This is a wonderful post!

[claytonwramsey]

Thanks for the kind words!

Yes, I'm fully aware of the fact that teaching isn't really a priority in academia - for that reason, I probably won't be reviving my class in the near future. I really do like teaching, but it doesn't get me much closer to any of my current goals.