Preparing Future Faculty at UNL: Program Goals
The University of Nebraska’s Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program seeks to:
- Improve UNL doctoral students' readiness to assume faculty roles in a diverse set of academic institutions.
- Help fellows better understand faculty expectations at different types of institutions and act on this new understanding to improve UNL graduate education.
- Enhance placement of UNL graduates by fostering a better fit between graduate student goals and eventual academic employment.
Five specific purposes guide the UNL PFF project:
- Provide doctoral students with personal experiences at the diverse kinds of academic institutions that may become their professional homes. The program's formal structure should give students an orderly, continuous, and thoughtfully planned series of experiences.
- Help graduate students clearly understand the qualifications specific kinds of academic institutions are seeking in new faculty, and more particularly, how to obtain and document such qualifications.
- Give graduate students a clear understanding of the tenure and promotion requirements at specific types of academic institutions, and help them prepare to meet those requirements when they are appointed to a college faculty.
- Enrich departments' graduate teaching assistant orientation and training programs. What we learn from partner institutions should alter the way we train our graduate teaching assistants. Moreover, these experiences may well also influence choices in student coursework because we should develop a clearer idea of what is useful in academic preparation.
- Serve as a forum for discussing the changing nature of the professorate. The PFF Summer Seminar provides a place for graduate students to read and hear experts who have spent time reflecting on new challenges to higher education. These topics will include assessment, program goals, faculty ethics, student and faculty development and diversity.
