Programs Postdoc in Particle Physics with a PhD in Nanoscience Nanotechnology

[Vanadium 50]

Agreed.

Further, if your goal is to teach, your plan is to spend the next ~12 years doing what? Not teaching. When you say "Teaching is my passion, which is why I avoided it for more than a decade" what will they say?

 

[Vanadium 50]

Have you seen this?...I guess it is clear you haven't.

I am going to chalk up the tone to a lack of facility with English and not anything to do with your character.

But let's assume this data point is typical. I'm sure it was cherry-picked, but we'll call it typical. San Mateo College has one full-time physics professor per 2500 students. There are about 5 million community college students in the US, so that makes 2000 or so full-time faculty. There are about 1500 community colleges in the US, so the average number of full time faculty is about 1.3.

And what have we been saying? "it's about 1". Your own example confirms it.

Further, how many positions open per year? Well, 5M students means 2000 faculty. Assuming a 25 year career for faculty, that gives about 80.

That's how competitive this is. And your strategy of "ignore what they are looking for and spend 12 more years not teaching" is not likely to beat the competition. You want a job like this? Take the entry-level jobs of part-time instructor and work your way up like everybody else. Don't count on a fistful of degrees impressing anyone. Or get a certificate and teach high school and build up your experience.

 

[jtbell]

You want a job like this? Take the entry-level jobs of part-time instructor and work your way up like everybody else.

When I finished grad school in the mid 1980s, I wasn't looking for community-college positions, but rather for positions at 4-year colleges where teaching was the main focus, like the college where I had been an undergraduate. Back then (don't know about now), "visiting assistant professor" positions were fairly common, usually for one year, filling in for faculty who were on sabbatical. In my first job search, I focused on those. I got lucky and landed a two-year position, filling in for two consecutive sabbaticals. It was a full-time position, with health insurance and a retirement plan, which you don't usually get with adjunct positions.

In my next job search, I focused on tenure-track positions, with visiting positions as a fallback, and got lucky again, at the college where I ended up retiring from.

In both searches, the competition was stiff, on the order of 100 applications per position. (The same was true for a search that I supervised as department chairman, in the mid 1990s, at my non-elite college). So I took it for granted that I would need to move, and I wouldn't have much control over where to. I ended up moving from Michigan to upstate New York to South Carolina.

So I wouldn't expect to be able to stay in California for a tenure-track position, even though California is big enough to be almost a separate country.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Caifornia has 10% or so of the US population, so instead of 80 target positions per year it will be more like 8.

 

[jtbell]

In both searches, the competition was stiff, on the order of 100 applications per position.

Schools normally interview three candidates per position. In each search, I was invited for two interviews, and received one offer. So I had no choice in location, unless I decided to look for a different kind of job instead.

 

[CrysPhys]

Wow. With all the time and money you're expending on achieving your target position, you really should do your homework on understanding what your target position is.

Further, if your goal is to teach, your plan is to spend the next ~12 years doing what? Not teaching. When you say "Teaching is my passion, which is why I avoided it for more than a decade" what will they say?

Follow-up comment for OP. The key issue is that you really don't have a passion for teaching; in particular, a passion for teaching physics at a community college. In another one of your threads, I asked you why you are specifically targetting a teaching position at a community college. The answer was not that you had a personal mission to serve the student population that attend community colleges, but rather, you thought that a (tenured) position at a community college would be easier than other career options ... both easier to land the job and easier to perform the job. From all the feedback you've received, it's obvious you need to revisit these assumptions.

All that aside ..... Now, you obviously have a lot of (and soon even more of) classroom experience as a student in a 4 yr or 4 yr+ college or university. But how much teaching experience did you have during your PhD program?

More particularly, do you have a realistic expectation of what life as a teacher in a community college classroom would be? If you haven't already, you should speak directly with teachers in a variety of community colleges to find out what their daily life is like, and you should arrange with them to audit classes in a variety of community colleges to discover for yourself what the classroom experience is like. They too may be different from what you've assumed. Do this sooner rather than later. Certainly don't wait until after completing a postdoc or a second PhD [especially given that you don't have a passion for research per se either, but are only hoping that a postdoc or a second PhD will give you a substantial advantage in landing a job as a tenured teacher at a community college].

 

[Fernando Rios]

I am going to chalk up the tone to a lack of facility with English and not anything to do with your character.

But let's assume this data point is typical. I'm sure it was cherry-picked, but we'll call it typical. San Mateo College has one full-time physics professor per 2500 students. There are about 5 million community college students in the US, so that makes 2000 or so full-time faculty. There are about 1500 community colleges in the US, so the average number of full time faculty is about 1.3.

And what have we been saying? "it's about 1". Your own example confirms it.

Further, how many positions open per year? Well, 5M students means 2000 faculty. Assuming a 25 year career for faculty, that gives about 80.

That's how competitive this is. And your strategy of "ignore what they are looking for and spend 12 more years not teaching" is not likely to beat the competition. You want a job like this? Take the entry-level jobs of part-time instructor and work your way up like everybody else. Don't count on a fistful of degrees impressing anyone. Or get a certificate and teach high school and build up your experience.

Forgive me if I sounded rude, I didn't mean to do that. It's probably due to my English level. I just wanted you to see how there is more that one full-time professor at a community college. On the other hand, it may be hard for me to find an entry-level job as an instructor right now due to my immigration status (I am not allowed to work off-campus) and the fact that I have to be a full-time student at SJSU (9 semester units per semester). However, I will try to talk to my graduate advisor an see if I can somehow get a position like this or maybe at least be a teaching assistant.

 

[eudaimonia]

As people already pointed out, the OP is not that passionate about pursuing such goals. I feel like (and from reading OP's other posts on similar topics), that OP is missing out some information about their motivation.

A lot of things doesn't make sense.

Is OP's goal to immigrate to the US? Then there're easier ways to achieve that.