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Wednesday, October 30, 2002
An E-Mail List for Tomorrow's Professor
By JENNIFER JACOBSON
Richard M. Reis's electronic mailing list is called
"Tomorrow's Professor," but it's helping many would-be
professors today.
About 15,000 graduate students and faculty members subscribe
to the free service, which distributes biweekly e-mail
messages with career tips and information on issues of
interest in higher education.
"It's sort of billed as desktop faculty development," says Mr.
Reis, a consulting professor in the electrical and mechanical
engineering departments at Stanford University. Besides
running the e-mail list, sponsored by a $15,000 grant from
Stanford's Center for Teaching and Learning, Mr. Reis is also
executive director of the university's Alliance for Innovative
Manufacturing.
Mr. Reis started the e-mail list in 1998, after he wrote
Tomorrow's Professor: Preparing for Academic Careers in
Science and Engineering (Wiley-IEEE Press, 1997), based on
seminars he ran for graduate students at Stanford. Once the
book was published, he began receiving e-mail messages from
faculty members and graduate students who wanted career
advice. At the same time, publishers started sending him
copies of books related to academic careers and higher
education. He decided "it might be nice" to offer excerpts
from those books in the form of an e-mail list.
Of the 500 people he initially subscribed to his service, 100
unsubscribed. "About 400 didn't say anything," he recalls. So
he kept sending the excerpts, and the e-mail list simply grew
from there. "People would send other articles to other people
and some would subscribe," Mr. Reis says. "It was almost like
a virus. I would get a subscriber from New Zealand, and a few
days later I would have 20 subscribers from New Zealand."
Today, about 40 percent of his 15,000 subscribers are graduate
students or postdocs, 50 percent are faculty members or
administrators, and the rest are professionals who work for
higher-education associations or government agencies. The
e-mail service is aimed at Ph.D.'s in a variety of
disciplines, not just those in science and engineering.
About 100 to 110 people join the list every week, and 10 to 15
unsubscribe. He has readers in at least 110 countries,
including the United States (9,252), Canada (799), United
Kingdom (177), Sweden (171), Australia (162), Germany (153),
Kuwait (150), South Africa (121), Jordan (110), and New
Zealand (102).
Mr. Reis, who maintains the list with the help of a graduate
student, has an arrangement with several publishers: They send
him their higher education books -- many of them career guides
on topics like coping with faculty stress, others on broader
issues like cost containment in academe. He uses 1,000- to
1,250-word excerpts in his e-mails, and includes the
publisher's URL, appropriate attribution to the author, and
copyright information. Once in a while professors will write
something for the e-mail list or will ask him to use an
article they've published elsewhere.
A typical message begins like this one did in August, with a
quote: "At a time when university resources are stretched and
demands upon staff are increasing, it [peer learning] offers
students the opportunity to learn from each other." Then Mr.
Reis addresses the readers: "Folks: The posting below looks at
a still-underutilized resource, students learning from other
students. It is from Chapter 1, Introduction: Making the move
to peer learning, in Peer Learning in Higher Education:
Learning From & With Each Other, edited by David Boud, Ruth
Cohen & Jane Sampson."
Mr. Reis could have just set up a Web site with this sort of
information. But after surveying his subscribers, he found
that that was not what they wanted. No one wanted to have to
retrieve the information from a Web site, he says. They
preferred to have the material "pushed" at them in the form of
e-mail messages. However, previous messages -- all 435 of them
so far -- are available online.
This past summer, Mr. Reis announced that he would be taking a
short break, from June through September, to revamp the e-mail
list, redesign the Web site, and offer some new features, such
as a searchable database of previous postings. The list was up
and running as of October 1. Mr. Reis is also planning to
create a registration system that will allow him to send
subscribers supplementary information on topics of interest to
them.
Vicky J. Meretsky, an assistant professor of conservation
biology and applied ecology at Indiana University, has been a
subscriber since August 19, 1999 (she's kept the very first
e-mail she received.) "It really is a pleasure to be able to
put some of these things in front of students," she says,
"because your own experience is your own experience. This
gives them a broader perspective on how people who are in the
arena they're entering think about the arena they're in."
Mr. Reis, who used to write about careers in science for the
Catalyst column on this site, started the e-mail list because
he wanted to make a difference in helping up-and-coming
faculty members. And he has, according to Victor P. Seidel.
A Ph.D. candidate in the management science and engineering
program at Stanford, Mr. Seidel expects to earn his degree in
June and has already landed a job -- the equivalent of an
assistant professorship -- at Oxford University. He enjoys the
e-mail messages from Mr. Reis that deal with the early stages
of what it will be like to be a faculty member -- for example,
how to collaborate on a book and how to prepare for a tenure
review, he says.
The list "kind of serves as an additional adviser," Mr. Seidel
says. "It answers a lot of questions I don't know to ask yet.
It's kind of neat that way."
To subscribe to Mr. Reis's e-mail list, send the following
message in the body of the test-- "subscribe
tomorrows-professor" -- to majordomo@lists.stanford.edu
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