Adjunct Teaching as a Data Scientist for a University
Teaching college courses can be a rewarding side-hustle for a data scientist.
I teach a course on deep learning for a university located in my home town. This teaching gig is in addition to my primary job as a vice president of data science for a large insurance company. A part-time instructor at a university is usually called an adjunct instructor. Enough people have asked me about my adjunct instructor position that I decided to write an article about why and how I became an adjunct instructor.
Whenever you read an article that contains career advice and reflection, you must always consider how closely the author’s situation mirrors your direction. Such consideration reveals which portions of the material are applicable and which you should probably ignore altogether. There are many reasons that people choose to join the adjunct faculty at a college. For me, the teaching job is entirely a part-time venture. I do not seek to enter academia full-time and become a professor or lecturer. Instead, I became an adjunct professor to enhance my brand as a data science thought leader, for recruiting/networking possibilities, and also for my communication development. There are other side benefits, as well. I get an education discount on a variety of products that run the gamut from laptops to movie tickets. I have access to both the electronic and physical university library systems. The electronic library gives me access to paywalled academic papers whose publishers are not open access. As a data scientist, access to such documents has proven valuable numerous times.
What Qualifications are Needed to be an Adjunct
Are you qualified to become an adjunct instructor? The credentials and experience required to become an adjunct instructor will vary significantly by the institution. At the three different schools that I’ve worked for, I’ve seen a variety of requirements. Most likely, a degree of some sort is needed to enter the adjunct ranks at any level of academia. During the last part of my undergraduate schooling, I was approached by a community college to teach a Java course. Even though I was already working as a software engineer, I was a bit nervous to talk to them as I was still a few months from earning my bachelor’s. Further, I had no teaching experience at that time. Despite these reservations, I ended up teaching at that school, part-time, for nearly seven years. The school considered my user group presentations to be teaching experience and valued my industry experience.
Community colleges may accept a candidate with only a bachelor’s degree. Most universities will want a minimum of a master’s degree, at least in my experience. Once I had attained my master’s degree, I applied to become an adjunct at a university. I liked the idea of teaching for a “university,” and this school happened to be very close to my house. I taught technical programming courses for a few years. I left mainly due to getting married and seeing a shift in both my priorities and free time availability. I’ve always enjoyed teaching and would later return.
A Ph.D. is undoubtedly a valuable qualification at the university level; however, not all adjuncts have doctorate level degrees. I have a Ph.D. in computer science from what I consider a good school, but it is not a top-ranked university. As an adjunct, I would say that your qualifications are a combination of your education, work experience, teaching experience, publications, and other considerations. Activities such as your GitHub activity, conference presentations, YouTube videos, and MeetUp experience, and blog articles, such as Medium, are also important. No one of these factors alone will necessarily get you the job. The complete combination of these becomes your brand as a data scientist. Nobody is an expert in every one of these aspects. However, hopefully, your strengths offset areas of less experience.
Why Become an Adjunct Instructor
There are many reasons why I chose to become an adjunct faculty member. As you read articles about data science career advice, you will see that there are many activities that good data scientists should pursue. This same advice also holds for aspiring data scientists. My job as an adjunct instructor has become a core activity that encourages several valuable side benefits. I must stay up to date on deep learning so that my course material is current and relevant. I keep all of my course material in Jupyter notebooks that I store on GitHub. I now have nearly 2K GitHub followers and 1.3K stars for my class repository. I deliver my course in a hybrid format, meaning that I provide instruction through a combination of in-class meetings, prerecorded video, and Zoom meetings. My prerecorded videos have become popular on YouTube, resulting in a channel that currently has 24K subscribers. Individually, I would not have time for these projects if I pursued them as individual disjoint activities. I did not set out to become a YouTuber or social media influencer.
Be prepared for the amount of work that a course will add to your life. There is the weekly time commitment of lecturing in class at the school. It takes time to prepare course material and assignments. Grading assignments and answering questions from students also take considerable time. However, for me, these all contribute to my value as a data scientist. Explaining sophisticated technology to students helps me to understand the technology better and hone my communication skills. Preparing course materials compels me to study the latest technologies that any advanced data scientist should be learning. Meeting the students has offered valuable networking activities as the students continue or start their careers. I frequently hire interns from my students and have occasionally hired them into full-time positions with my employer.
Money is a benefit. Many financial writers speak of the value of a “side hustle”. A job as an adjunct faculty member does produce a secondary source of income. The amount that the school will pay you varies with your credentials, the school, and geographic location. Websites such as Glassdoor will give you a reasonably accurate estimate of the salary you can expect.
How to Become an Adjunct Instructor
Now that I’ve covered why you might want to be an adjunct instructor, let’s talk about how actually to become one. If you have no teaching experience, I suggest trying a MeetUp or two in your chosen field. First, attend to watch others and learn new things. Come up with a topic that might become your first class. Presenting at the MeetUp becomes your initial teaching experience. Update your LinkedIn profile with this new valuable speaking experience. Also, make sure your LinkedIn profile has a good picture and lists relevant work experience.
When you are ready to try to find an adjunct gig, select a couple of colleges near you. Find the department that you will target. A college is made up of schools or departments headed by a dean. Either directly or indirectly, under the dean, there will be department heads or program directors who are generally the individual’s task with hiring adjunct instructors. These are the individuals that you will approach.
Hopefully, the program director is on LinkedIn. If they are, this is a great way to connect initially. LinkedIn allows the director to see your credentials and experience. Reach out with an initial connect request and mention that you have an idea for a course and are interested in discussing adjunct opportunities. Some academics are not at all active on LinkedIn. If the director ignores you on LinkedIn, then try to send an email. If the director ignores you on both, move on to the next school.
For your initial communication, be it email or a LinkedIn message (after you connect), always propose an idea for the sort of class that you might want to teach. At this point, the proposal is nothing more than the level of description the university might have in a catalog. Of course, browse their course catalog and make sure you are not proposing a duplicate course. The director may well have a class they are looking to fill with a new adjunct instructor. However, offering a course idea shows that you are a thought leader and might pique the interest of the director.
I’ve been with my current university for three years and find adjunct teaching to be a rewarding activity. I have discovered adjunct teaching to be very compatible with my primary career. It is beneficial for the students to interact with someone who is working in their industry of study. If you are looking for a way to increase your brand and thought leadership as a data scientist, then adjunct teaching might be a good fit for your career.
