Allyson Jackson was in the first cohort of the GCCUT program in 2013. She completed the GCCUT program in 2015 and graduated from OSU with a PhD in Wildlife Sciences in 2017. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Environmental Students at State University of New York (SUNY) Purchase College.

Q&A with Allyson Jackson

Please briefly describe your new position and responsibilities at your job.

I'm a tenure-track assistant professor at a small state school. My job responsibilities are divided between teaching, research, and service with the most emphasis on quality teaching (which I really enjoy!). All of our senior students have to do research projects, so I mentor those students in research as well as develop my own research programs.

 

Did your participation in the GCCUT program impact any part of your job attainment process?

I won't directly know if the search committee made decisions based on the fact that I had the GCCUT certificate, but I will say that I was asked a lot of questions about it during my interview, which makes me think it was something they were interested in. Even if it wasn't having the certificate on my CV that got me the job, I know that because I took those classes, I felt like I had a much better vocabulary and understanding of teaching pedagogy. This literacy definitely helped me throughout the interview process because I felt like I could talk about teaching in a much more advanced way.

 

What specific aspects of your participation in the GCCUT program impacted your job attainment process?

I learned so much through GCCUT that I now find it so shocking that most professors aren't taught any of that before they start teaching. I think historically you would learn through trial and error and I'm really happy that I have training to help me right from the start. As crazy as the first semester of teaching was, I don't know how people do it without any teaching training (which I guess is a lot of the problem with undergrad science education - people just aren't trained). I basically have to develop new courses every semester for the first 2 years, but I'm really enjoying it. I'm friends with some of the other new faculty in other departments and they all have horror stories about assigning way too much grading or not knowing how to fill the lecture time and none of that felt like much of an issue for me because I got to think about that with the training wheels on during the GCCUT. The first few years are always going to be tough, but I'm so happy that I have those foundations from the GCCUT.

 

Is there anything else you would add about your GCCUT experience that you think would interest prospective students?

Although adding those 18 credits seemed like a lot of work at the time, now that I'm a professor, I feel like it's totally worth it because planning courses, syllabi and lectures are all easier for me. I really appreciate now that I got to think through what type of assignments I would want to give and what type of teacher I would want to be while I was still kind of in the protective bubble of grad school. Now that I'm actually working as a professor, I can lean on everything that I learned and it makes my job so much easier. I feel like this first year of teaching would have been so hard without the training that I got through GCCUT.