Professerror: Recent Episodes
Steven K. Ayer and Bryan Franz
This podcast is aimed at providing honest experiences about challenges, failures, and possibly a few success stories related to life in academia.
Bryan and Steve discuss their plans for the upcoming summer and how their summer work experience differs from the rest of the academic year.
Bryan discusses his new position as a PhD Program Director and challenges and lessons learned in this administration role. Enjoy!
Bryan and Steve discuss how generative AI is impacting processes for generating and reviewing research manuscripts. They also offer some food for thought for what a future might look like where academics remain relevant in a world with AI. Enjoy!
In this episode, Bryan and Steve discuss their experiences in teaching courses that are new to them. They talk about the moments that were especially challenging, the failures they experienced during the process, and a few lessons learned from surviving it. Enjoy!
Fred Sherratt joins us to discuss her experiences in struggling to get academic funding and surviving as a qualitative researchers in a quantitative world. Enjoy!
Professor John Gambatese (Oregon State University) joins us to discuss taking risks in academia and some that he took that worked out, and some that did not.
Bryan discusses his sabbatical and shares what went well and what could have been better. Enjoy!
Professor Daniel Hall (TU Delft) joins Bryan and Steve to discuss his experience of growing up and studying in the US, but deciding to launch his academic career in Europe.
Bryan and Steve discuss successes and failures in developing graphics in academia. An audio discussion about visual communication - maybe this wasn't our brightest move??
Dr. Burcu Akinci, a full Professor and Department Head at Carnegie Mellon University, a National Academy of Construction member, and most recently a Peurifoy Construction Research Awardee, talks about how she still experiences imposter syndrome despite her many successes. Enjoy!
Steve's moving - and we're talking about it. We discuss what went well in the job application, interview, and moving processes and what didn't. Enjoy!
Bryan and Steve discuss their typical days as academics. They talk about the fun and not-so-fun parts of their professional lives. Enjoy!
Bryan and Steve discuss their struggles with serving in leadership positions - especially when leading individuals who do not directly report to them. Enjoy!
Kieren McCord joins us to discuss her experience in transitioning from a PhD student to a full time researcher in a national lab. Enjoy!
Bryan, Steve, and guest Professor Rob Leicht (Penn State) discuss sabbatical do's and don't's. Hopefully you enjoy learning from Rob's experience as much as we did.
Bryan and Steve discuss "tropes", or common patterns of behavior in pop culture storytelling, within academic settings. We talk about these patterns and also how faculty who fall into these patterns can be received by others. This was a fun discussion that may be followed up with a "part II" or more sometime in the future. Enjoy!
Professor Jennifer Lather (University of Nebraska) stops by to discuss her experience in creating, delivering, and learning from a new course that she taught in her first year as a professor. Enjoy!
Bryan and Steve discuss their experiences and lessons learned in trying to attract top PhD students for their respective research groups.
Bryan and Steve discuss academic freedom and how various social and political shifts to impact this freedom can potentially impact students' educational experiences as well as our professional fulfillment as faculty.
Bryan and Steve discuss their experiences and struggles with helping students succeed in their courses now that most have returned to post-COVID modes of traditional in-person learning.
Prof. Kasey Faust (University of Texas, Austin) stops by to talk about finding balance between home life and work life. She offers several practical strategies that have helped her to find fulfillment personally and also professionally. Enjoy!
Bryan and Steve discuss their positive and negative experiences with social media in academia. Enjoy!
Bryan and Steve discuss their experiences (and their hesitancy) with spending their startup funding when they began their faculty careers.
Steve and Bryan discuss their experiences serving on faculty search committees. They share the types of concerns, debates, and challenges that may emerge when serving on a search committee. Hopefully this helps to offer insight if you find yourself on a committee, or perhaps it will offer insights on what may be discussed behind the scenes by search committees if you are currently applying for faculty positions.
Dr. Masoud Gheisari and our own Dr. Bryan Franz discuss their experiences (and challenges) with pursuing and successfully achieving tenure.
Professor Robert LiKamWa (Arizona State University) discusses struggles related to mentoring students and facing rejections on the way to ultimately succeeding in building a large, externally-funded, research team.
Logan Perry (University of Nebraska) joins us to discuss his experience in shifting from a traditional Civil Engineering domain to Engineering Education and some of the lessons he learned related to conducting research in this field.
Bryan and Steve discuss their failures, and occasional successes, with challenging their undergraduate students to address poorly structured problems. While these types of problems can support the kinds of learning necessary for the students' long-term success, they can also be a major challenge (and change) from what the students are used to, which leads to some unexpected difficulties in teaching.
After a pause in podcasting, Steve discusses his (admittedly brief) experience with becoming a father during the break. He and Bryan discuss successes, failures, joys, and headaches experienced in his journey thus far.
Bryan and Steve discuss their first major in-person conference since the pandemic began. They discuss various uncomfortable experiences, and how some may only be relevant in the short-term, while others may be around for much longer. Then they define a wish list for the conference of the future. Enjoy!
John Messner (Penn State) discusses his experience in working in the construction industry for seven years, pausing his research during this time, and then the challenges associated with returning to academia, shifting his research focus, and taking over an existing research group. Enjoy!
Bryan and Steve discuss experiences and challenges in explaining their academic lives to those outside of academia. Hopefully what it lacks in practicality, it makes up for in relatability. Enjoy!
Bryan and Steve talk about some of the reasons they have observed, and experienced through their own failures, that led to rejected journal papers. Enjoy!
Bryan and Steve discuss lessons learned related to building professional networks at conferences. Enjoy!
Bryan and Steve discuss what to expect during and after academic conference presentations. Hopefully it helps you avoid some of our mistakes for your first conference!
Bryan and Steve discuss academic conferences, what to expect, what to do, and what to avoid when attending. Enjoy!
Bryan and Steve discuss their experiences with Imposter Syndrome in academia and strategies for dealing with it.
Bryan and Steve chat about the process of developing and submitting their promotion and tenure packages. They discuss what worked well and where they might have done things differently with the benefit of hindsight.
Sinem Mollaoglu (Michigan State University) joins Bryan and Steve to discuss her experiences and challenges in building, sustaining, and growing industry collaborations to support her research.
Carrie Sturts Dossick (University of Washington) stops by to discuss lessons she learned when balancing family and work responsibilities.
Wei Wu (Fresno State University) talks about his experience in transitioning from an Associate Professor to Fresno's Construction Management Department Chair.
Dr. Jad Chalhoub talks about his experience as Steve's PhD student to highlight some of the good (and not so good) aspects of their working relationship.
Bryan and Steve discuss successes and failures from their first academic year of recording Professerror. Also, they welcome your feedback on how to improve the podcast moving forward. We look forward to hearing from you!
Fernanda Leite (University of Texas, Austin) discusses some of the strategies she has employed to effectively communicate with students, colleagues, and others in order to maximize her impact.
Professor Andrea Richa (Arizona State University) joins us to discuss some of the challenges female professors face in engineering.
Prof. Matt Hallowell (University of Colorado, Boulder) discusses lessons learned related to managing work responsibilities with the rest of life's responsibilities.
Dr. Jeremi London (Virginia Tech) discusses her recently awarded NSF CAREER grant, but also some of the challenges she experienced leading up to this success.
Professor Mikhail Chester (Arizona State University) discusses how to maximize impact while reducing time spent doing non-value-added tasks.
We discuss on-campus interviews and share some experiences of what to do (and not do) during this process.
Katherine Madson (Iowa State University) joins us again to discuss challenges and lessons learned associated with starting up a research group during the first semester of a first faculty position.
Professor Katherine Madson (Iowa State University) stops in to share some of her successes and failures that she experienced in teaching during her first semester as a faculty member.
We discuss the process of phone interviews for faculty positions and share some of our own lessons learned related to this.
Prof. Anne Anderson joins in for the discussion to cover lessons learned when she transitioned from her industry career to one in academia.
We discuss the process of preparing your materials for applying to faculty positions. Hopefully you avoid some of the mistakes we made!
Bryan and Steve cover lessons learned, as well as continued struggles, with time management in academic careers.
Bryan and Steve discuss lessons learned through the feedback that their proposals have received.
Bryan and Steve discuss lessons learned related to generating research proposals to secure external funding. We hope you enjoy it.