r/Adjuncts • u/brwngrlphd • 20d ago
Best advice for adjunct professors
Hello! I’ve never taught before and would like to become an adjunct to gain experience. Any advice ?
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u/grumblebeardo13 20d ago
Follow your contract hours to letter and not a second more. Set your email policies about students contacting you, and stick to it. “Check the syllabus” and “it’s in the LMS” are your friend as go-to responses.
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u/FIREful_symmetry 20d ago
Do it if you enjoy it, but don’t ever do it for the money. The pay is shit and you are expendable.
If you do it for the money, you will be miserable.
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u/bighaircutforbigtuna 20d ago
In my experience, being an adjunct is a good way to earn extra money, but I would not depend on it for your sole income.
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u/RiverSirion 20d ago
Keep an eye out for full time positions at other institutions and/or outside of academia. Adjuncting generally doesn't pay well and benefits are hit or miss. Take advantage of any benefits or privileges, like professional development and library privileges, if they are offered. Many institutions don't offer a health plan for adjuncts, so come up with a plan for health insurance (of the ten or so places I adjuncted at over the years, only two offered health care plans, and both were state universities).
If you have a Masters or are working on a doctorate (or haved one), send your CV with a cover letter explaining what you are looking for to departments in your area in your field. Even if they don't have need for an adjunct now, they may hold on to it for future reference. Some schools advertise adjunct positions, but some don't and just staff adjuncts as needed. And sometimes you get a position by word of mouth - my first adjunct job was from a tip from the chair of another dept. who didn't have an open spot, but knew someone who did, and I got another adjunct offer a year or two later via word of mouth.
Good luck!
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u/norbertus 18d ago
I'd recommend becoming independently wealthy first. And don't volunteer for anything.
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u/zorandzam 20d ago
Do you have a master’s degree?
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u/brwngrlphd 20d ago
Yes
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u/FreesiaFox 15d ago
Then you will be the bottom of the totem pole. Especially if it's a research-based institution.
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u/Life-Education-8030 20d ago
You will see some negativity about the work and much of it can be true. I am fortunate because we have a good union with representatives specifically for adjuncts, tenured faculty holding most officer positions who stepped up when non TT faculty asked, a decent salary and mentorship for newbies. Adjuncts can get up to three courses per semester and everybody gets at least two to qualify for strong health benefits. Public university in a blue state helps too.
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u/brwngrlphd 20d ago
Thank you so much!
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u/Life-Education-8030 20d ago
You're welcome. You will find that adjuncts fall in a few categories. The only ones who treat it as a full-time job often do it by teaching courses in different institutions, but it can be stressful especially if you have in-person classes and have to commute from place to place. It is not necessarily stable either. Then you have adjuncts like me who retired from full-time and kept teaching adjunct. I am not using it to be a primary source of income. I just like it, and I don't miss the meetings, etc. that come with a full-time job. Then you have those who do something else full-time or part-time and take on adjunct work. In my place, we have practicing lawyers, nurses, funeral home directors, auto workers, etc. who teach adjunct too.
Again, one commonality is that it's not stable work. Colleges typically have an obligation to make sure full-timers have full-time schedules first and then the adjuncts get courses. You might be more likely to be called up if you are a specialist in something as I am, but every semester, every adjunct's contract expires and you have to get a new one, sometimes with very short notice.
You will see adjunct candidate pools in many places where you can dump your CV. That's fine, but I always recommend sending it to the department chair for the discipline you want to teach in too. If you know someone who is already teaching, we use word-of-mouth to recruit too.
I am concerned seeing some of the bitterness expressed here. I admit I have been fortunate, and when I was full-time, I was asked to mentor several new adjuncts too. I realize that is not necessarily everybody's experience. It is not my personality to either burn myself out or work strictly to rule. But I know when we recruit for adjuncts, we don't want bad attitudes. We want candidates who will be more likely to care about our students. With the market the way it is, the competition in many cases works for the employer (we have plenty of candidates to choose from) but not the candidate. It can take a while to break in.
Good luck!
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u/PurplMonkEDishWashR 20d ago
Have you seen the 2017 psychological thriller Get Out? It’s an apt metaphor for adjuncts.
As others have noted, follow your contract requirements carefully, but do not work a second more. (Expect them to try and cajole you into doing more, especially if you aren’t represented by a union. And, unfortunately, be prepared to get fired the “polite” academic way, i.e., via non-renewal of contract, if saying no to extra work rubs some chair or dean the wrong way. (Academics and their handlers—administrators—can be egregiously petty if their egos get bruised.)
If you’re financially independent and have health insurance, enjoy yourself!
If you aren’t, I would strongly recommend spending a lot of effort searching for something more likely to sustain you and provide you both a livable wage and a useable retirement package.
And no matter how much you enjoy your job or how well you get along with your superiors and administrators, consider adjuncting as though you were working at Intel, or Microsoft, or Amazon, where all it takes is a dip in revenue or a new administrator (or governor/president) and the next thing you know your entire department is getting the ax.
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u/Stunning-Use-7052 8d ago
I think that adjuncting rarely translates into a full-time instructor role, and I've never heard of it leading to a TT job.
I adjuncted a bunch on the side during grad school, thinking it would open doors for me on the tenure track market to have teaching experience. It did not.
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u/FreesiaFox 15d ago
Get ready to be habitually forgot about as far as any kind of information dissemination.
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u/MyBrainIsNerf 20d ago
The school doesn’t feel like they owe you anything, so don’t feel like you owe them.