John Walkup
Electrical Engineering (Emeritus)
Texas Tech University
Where to send our Ph.D. students when they leave the “academic nest” is a challenge.
Recommending that they accept a job at university A, B, or C is a matter for prayer, wise counsel from fellow believers, plus a fair amount of due diligence both by us and our students.
I vividly recall my own job search while finishing my Ph.D. at Stanford. I started by striking out with most of the West Coast universities I wrote to! This was after asking the Lord to show my wife and me where He wanted us to serve.
Wasting My Life
Three weeks later, I responded to a hand-written note deposited in my mailbox one afternoon by the department chairman at Texas Tech University. The rest, as they say, is history.
Before taking the position, one of my Stanford professors asked me if Tech was one of the top 20 EE departments in the nation. When I told him that I thought it had potential, he commented that working at such an unknown institution would be wasting my life.
In the ensuing years I discovered that God really did know what was best. My students and I were able to produce high quality research by working closely with a team of professors, several of which were fellow believers. Some of my students went on to academic positions at universities more prestigious than my own.
I worked at a university where I could enjoy both a distinguished career and some balance in my life. I had time to be with my family and to have a ministry on campus and in my church. Several times I turned down offers of full professorships at more prestigious universities because either it would have been bad timing for one of our children or I knew that realistically I would not have been able to take my team of researchers with me.
Pressures On The Academic Ladder
Over the years I have had many opportunities to observe the differences in the pressure levels at various places on the academic ladder. I experienced this in my own career, but it is even more apparent now I work with professors at universities in the San Francisco Bay area as a faculty representative with CLM.
Frankly, at the top 10 to 20 universities, the pressure to produce considerable quantities of top quality research (and, in many fields, the extramural funding required to finance that research) can be incredible. Some of these pressures can make one’s years in graduate school look like child’s play.
I share these things because I firmly believe that there are some distorted theories circulating out there as to where we should be sending our Ph.D. graduates. Many times in my career I saw that if I was willing to put Christ first and really seek Him, the “other things” in life were taken care of, just as the Bible says. Like all of God’s other promises, that’s one we can “take to the bank”!
My suggested summer reading list:
1. Schaefer, Henry F. “Science and Christianity: Conflict or Coherence” [The Apollos Trust]
2. C.P. Snow, “The Masters” [House of Stratus] — One of his best; relates to ego clashes and politics in the English university.
3. John Piper, “Don’t Waste Your Life” [Crossway Books]
© 2007 John Walkup Used by permission of Faculty Commons