How to Become a College Professor

Please forgive the trip down memory lane here, but Matthew did ask, so here goes…

While not totally cognizant of it at the time, I started my career-change journey from hotshot marketing manager at a couple of consumer magazines to college professor while getting my master’s degree in marketing magazines. How? To help offset the costs of graduate school, I taught a number of journalism and communications courses. Little did I know it at the time, but that taste of being in the classroom on the other side of the desk started in motion a growing desire — and eventually consuming passion — to make a difference in people’s lives.

The teaching bug hit me again when I accepted an offer to teach an advertising class one night a week at a local community college. What began to puzzle me, though, was that I was beginning to spend much more time planning and looking forward to that one night a week than I did my day job. That set in motion the rough stage of career change for me. First, introspection and identification of my strengths and weaknesses and my career and job interests. Next, I conducted research on types of teaching jobs at various colleges and universities. I then realized that educating was my calling in life and that in an ideal world I would want to be a college professor full-time.

The last step was developing a plan to get from where I was to where I wanted to be. Luckily, I had a very supportive wife, and so we uprooted the entire family and moved to Tallahassee so I could enter the doctoral program at Florida State. All three of my degrees are related to marketing; if I had wanted to teach something else, my path would have been different; similarly if I had wanted to teach at a different level.

Of course, being a professor involves a lot more than teaching at the college level. In many ways, I wish that’s all it did include. Unfortunately, being a professor involves more than teaching; it also includes research and service. At the college at which I began teaching, professors have freedom to really define their research, and so I had the flexibility of combining my interests in marketing, career development, and job-hunting into one big research stream. The service component is spending lots of time serving the university, the discipline, the profession, and the community.

So, as my article states. Take your time in examining and evaluating your interests and desires. Then research and explore various career options. Talk with people in the careers you’re considering. Finally, choose a major. Just remember to take your time and really spend some time examining all your options.