Prof. Richard Felder Dr. Richard M. Felder is Hoechst Celanese Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina. He is coauthor of Elementary Principles of Chemical Processes (3rd Edition, John Wiley & Sons, 2000), which has been used as the text for the introductory chemical engineering course by most American chemical engineering departments and at many international institutions for more than two decades. He has authored or coauthored over 200 papers on chemical process engineering and engineering education and presented hundreds of seminars, workshops, and short courses in both categories to industrial and research institutions and universities throughout the United States and abroad. Since 1991 he has co-directed the National Effective Teaching Institute under the auspices of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE).

Richard faces our ten questions...

1. Why did you become an academic in the first place?

As a child and adolescent, I never quite fit in with my contemporaries--I was as skinny as a rail and wore glasses from the age of 7, read voraciously, and loved classical music. The labels “nerd” and “geek” were unknown in those days, but if they were known they would definitely have been applied to me. In my third year of high school I was on the track team and went to the state competition at the University of Florida. It was the first time I had ever been on a college campus, and I looked around and saw hundreds of other skinny people wearing glasses and carrying books, and I felt as if I could breathe freely for the first time in my life. I didn’t consciously make the decision to be a college professor then, but I suspect the inclination was strongly implanted in my subconscious. I went into engineering because in the late 1950’s almost everyone who was good in science and math did so and I saw no reason to be different, even though I didn’t have the least idea of what engineers actually do for a living. I did well in my classes and ended up informally tutoring many of my classmates and enjoying it, which may have strengthened my still subliminal intention to go into teaching. I didn’t particularly enjoy my engineering classes but was not inclined to switch to another field, and I still didn’t know what engineering was. (Then, as now, there was not much engineering in engineering school.) In the summer between my next-to-last and last years of college I worked at a refinery for a couple of months, finally found out what engineers do, concluded that I didn’t want to do it for 40 years, and decided to go to graduate school. I got my Ph.D. and spent a year on a post-doctoral fellowship and another two years at a government laboratory doing theoretical research on questions that did not particularly interest me and not enjoying it. It got harder and harder to get up every morning and do more of that, and I finally made the conscious decision to seek a faculty position. I got one at North Carolina State University, and after my first day of teaching I knew I had found my place and that I’d never want to do anything else in my career.

2. Is it still the same?

Definitely--I can’t imagine my being happy doing anything else but being an academic. I love the autonomy it provides--within fairly broad limits, as a professor I can choose what research problems I want to study, whether to be an experimentalist or a theoretician or some of each, what courses I teach, how to teach them, how and how much to interact with students, whether or not to come in to the office on days when I don’t have classes or office hours, and how and how much to interact with students outside class. I also love the opportunity of helping students learn and discover things and the feeling I get when it works.

3. Biggest mistake you've made in your career?

I suppose it would be not going directly into an academic position following the post-doc, but that really wasn’t a big mistake. I learned a lot in my two years at the research laboratory, and the experience helped confirm my sense that I should be at a university.

4. The big thing you got right.

I always got more enjoyment and satisfaction from the educational part of my job than from engineering research, and after 15 years as a traditional engineering professor, I decided to make teaching and educational research the focus of my career. Doing so took what had been a great job and made it as close to perfect as a job can possibly be.

5. Powerpoint or OHP?

Neither. Nothing beats writing on a board so that the students can see you doing what you expect them to learn to do, supplemented by brief active exercises in class, partial handouts, and either Powerpoint or overheads for complex visuals that would be difficult or impossible to draw by hand. A class that consists mainly of a slide show is usually uninstructive and boring.

6. Best advice you ever received?

Don’t work day and night--leave some time to nurture your relationships and your physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. (I’m sometimes not too good at taking this advice, but I try.)

7. Worst advice you ever received?

(a) Don’t write an undergraduate textbook--it will take too much time and won’t do anything for your professional advancement;
(b) Don’t make education your primary focus--you’ll ruin your career.

8. Biggest challenge you've overcome?

Going against the near-unanimity of my colleagues in giving me the second piece of advice in Item 7.

9. How?

Gradually. I tried new teaching methods (or at least they were new to me) in my classes, usually found that they led to better learning, attended conferences of the American Society for Engineering Education and presented papers on my findings and wrote articles about them for educational journals, and started applying for and receiving educational research grants. I also started giving workshops on the alternative teaching methods to faculty and graduate students, first at my own university and then at other universities where I was invited by people who attended the presentations and read the articles. As these sorts of activities began taking more of my time, I took on fewer and fewer new graduate students, and over a ten-year period the size of my research group dwindled from a high of 15 down to none, at which point I was out of the business of engineering research. I was too concerned about losing the respect of my colleagues to make the transition more rapidly, but knowing now how much more enjoyable and satisfactory my career was when I could focus entirely on education, if I could do it over again I would start making the switch as soon as I got tenure.

10. What advice would you give to new academics?

• Figure out what you most look forward to doing when you get up every morning and try to make that the primary focus of your career as quickly as the culture of your university allows, whether it’s disciplinary research, teaching and educational scholarship, or administration. Expect that your interests will shift several times during your career, and be flexible enough to change your focus accordingly.
• Whether your focus is research or teaching, as long as you have teaching responsibilities, try to learn and implement the principles of effective teaching. It doesn’t take much more time and effort and it’s much more satisfying to be a good teacher than to be a poor one (being a great teacher may be another matter unless you were born as one). Get and read books like McKeachie’s Teaching Tips or Wankat’s The Effective, Efficient Professor or Ramsden’s Learning to Teach in Higher Education; attend teaching workshops on your campus and remember that even non-engineers and non-scientists can teach you something about teaching engineering and science; and occasionally attend conferences of the engineering education society in your country and catch up on the latest developments in pedagogy. You can do all that and still spend most of your time on research, if that’s your inclination.
• Don’t work day and night--leave some time to nurture your relationships and your physical, mental, and spiritual well-being.