The ‘secretly awesome’ side of a teaching career

During her postdoctoral work at Columbia University, Suzanne Wood loved organizing journal clubs and teaching her peers how to code. “I was often focused on things that were more adjacent to teaching than research,” she says. So when she saw a job ad for a teaching professor position at the University of Toronto, she jumped at the opportunity. Wood, associate professor, teaching stream, at the University of Toronto, now applies her research on learning and memory in education to inspire the next generation of scientists.  

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The Transmitter: What do you love about teaching?

Suzanne Wood: Developing a new course can be really exciting and invigorating. Asking, “What resources am I going to bring into this class? What texts? What new research do I want to learn about so the students learn about it, too, and we can all talk about it?” I also really enjoy getting students to talk in class, and that’s getting harder to do. Coming up with creative ways to keep students engaged and help them grow their confidence in public speaking is a fun challenge. I also find a lot of joy in helping students connect what they’re learning to real life. 

TT: What’s a typical work week for you?

SW: In a typical semester, I teach a second-year course on learning and plasticity with about 200 students, a third-year course on the neurochemical basis of behavior with about 50 students, and a fourth-year seminar with about 20 students. Most recently, I taught a seminar on addiction that pulled together basic and clinical neuroscience. Teaching typically makes up about 80 percent of a teaching professor’s workload; service, such as committee work inside and outside the university, makes up the rest. Right now, I’m an associate dean, so I have a reduced teaching load. I spend four days a week in the dean’s office and the other day in the psychology department teaching my seminar. 

TT: Were you always interested in teaching?

SW: I did my undergraduate degree in classical languages—Latin and Greek—at the University of California, Berkeley. It was a winding road to my Ph.D. in psychology at the University of California, San Diego. But during graduate school, I ended up teaching Latin to kids for an hour each week at the elementary school I went to in the Bay Area. I guess that was a sign that I was interested in teaching. 

My Ph.D. work was on the effects of stimulants on learning and memory in mice. I really enjoyed research but didn’t want to continue in an animal lab. I did my postdoc at Columbia University, looking at the effects of low-dose stimulants on learning in humans. During that time, I found myself getting groups of postdocs and research assistants together to talk about papers or learn MATLAB, a computer program we used for coding at the time. When I think about how I was spending my time, I was often focused on things that were more adjacent to teaching than to research. 

TT: When did you start looking for teaching professor positions?

SW: I thought my choice was to either go down the principal investigator path and split my time between research and teaching or teach full-time at a small liberal arts college. I visited a couple liberal arts colleges, and they really didn’t resonate with me. I knew I would miss having a heavy rotation of researchers coming through to give presentations on the research they’re doing and other hallmarks of research-intensive institutions. 

When I saw this position at the University of Toronto, I had to ask around to figure out whether it was a real, permanent professor position. It was called “lecturer” in the job ad, and sometimes that can mean contract work for a term or year at a time. But once I talked to some people and understood what it was, I was so excited. The thought of having a job where I could focus on teaching rather than trying to fit it into spare time outside of the lab really resonated with me. I was like, “This is how I want to spend my time.”

TT: Do you miss research?

SW: One thing that’s secretly awesome about teaching positions is you can do whatever wacky research project an undergrad proposes if it requires limited resources and you feel comfortable supervising them. For instance, an undergrad who took several courses with me linked prediction error—a topic covered in my learning and plasticity course—with gaslighting in romantic relationships. This was a new and fun topic to dive into. I never thought I would co-author a paper published in a social psychology journal, but here we are. 

I’ve worked with undergrad students on questionnaire and focus-group studies related to the use of stimulants in university, which relates back to both my Ph.D. and postdoc work. And there’s space for pure pedagogical research, too, in which you’re trying to understand the impact of a teaching practice on student learning. Getting to do research that interests you is definitely a perk of the teaching stream.

TT: What advice do you have for graduate students and early-career researchers who are curious about the teaching stream?

SW: Being a teaching assistant, or TA, in grad school is great, and I would definitely encourage that because you’ll build relevant skills. But TA positions can definitely vary. Sometimes being a TA can include running tutorials, teaching a room full of students. Other times, being a TA is just grading with no teaching. Either way, being a TA is very different from being an instructor. Instructors have to think about what students are learning, how they’re learning it and how they’re showing what they know. It’s also a lot like being a manager, making sure things are running smoothly for students and your TAs. A lot of the work happens up front in planning the course and all the assessments and predicting and issues that could arise. And then, of course, you have to be comfortable speaking to large groups of students. 

Talk to people in teaching stream positions to figure out if it feels like a good fit for you. The University of Toronto has a Centre for Teaching Support and Innovation that runs courses and workshops on course design that are open to grad students and postdocs. These sorts of courses are also great for thinking about what’s involved in teaching. 

If you’re serious about a teaching position, you’ll need experience to be a competitive applicant. It can be challenging to get time away from research in grad school or during a postdoc, but there may be opportunities to guest lecture or teach over the summer if your PI is open to it. 

And remember: Teaching is not going to go perfectly the first time. But ask yourself, “How did I feel after giving a lecture? What was it like interacting with students?” If you can’t wait for the class or course to be over and you never want to do it again, that’s really good data to have. But if there are moments of joy, if you feel proud of what you’re doing, if you have a connection with your students—even if you’re looking forward to the end of the semester—that’s really good feedback, too.