Ferhan Sağın, Ege University Medical School, Izmir, Türkiye
FEBS Education Committee, Chair
‘Future teachers are those whom you see as your best students, whom you dream will get a PhD and then do what? Teach.
And they are those who are going to go into business and industry and will spend a great deal of their time mentoring other people in their work places as teachers; they too, are in the midst of a teaching environment.
If we don’t meet this challenge of taking the pedagogy seriously, I fear that fifty years from now people will look back on our era as the period in the late 1980s and early 1990s when we had the opportunity in less than a decade to educate two-thirds of the teachers who would teach for the next thirty-five years, the period when we had this extraordinary opportunity to make a difference in education.’
Lee S. Shulman (1989 National Conference of the American Association of Higher Education)
PhD graduates of today compete for the rarest and most competitive jobs in academia, a job market which is shrinking in many countries, specially after COVID-19. Yet most of the training in a PhD emphasizes research, above all, and the curriculums are designed according to the professional needs for a job at a research university.
PhD students are highly resourceful people; however, they may not be aware of the need to nurture their skills beyond research. Thus, as educators we should guide them in readjusting their mind-sets to recognize the different career pathways and equip themselves on their way to graduation.
The educators’ role is to unlock the PhD students’ creativity by broadening their vision while students’ responsibility is to nurture both practically and intellectually on the career pathway by beginning with the end in mind.
This can only take place if PhD training integrates other skills into the curriculum that students will need in different career paths afterwards. Thus, now is the time for educators’ and students’ to rethink career-diverse PhD’s and to readjust mind-sets for shaping one’s career also as an educator.
This talk is aimed to raise some awareness in young researchers and also in senior educators about the latest scientific research in teaching & learning with the hope that participants will continue to follow this interesting area besides their research field.