I got hired on May 25, 2016 at the Milwaukee School of Engineering as a full-time adjunct faculty member ("lecturer" is how they technically classify me, I guess; I'm hoping to move up to "adjunct assistant professor" quickly, if my teaching goes well and then hopefully to "assistant professor" or "associate professor" if I can get a research program off the ground). I'm going to be teaching 2 sections of Calc I, 2 sections of a calculus-based probability and statistics course, and, as a recent addition, 1 section of a Calc IV course (they run their Calculus courses differently there; this course covers multiple integral in the plane and 3-space - but not line or surface integrals - and infinite series).
So, I got the Calc I book the day I signed the contract and the statistics book a few days later, and I've been LaTeX'ing up my lecture notes for the Calc I and statistics course since then, so I haven't had any time to devote to my "old" research (I have one paper on which I just gave a presentation at WGT earlier this month that's almost finished and another one on 1-sided h-cobordisms with non-split total group of the side with the more complicated fundamental group that I haven't really started working on) or my "new" research (the topic of this blog).
I have a week's worth of lecture notes done in each of the Calc I and statistics courses, and hope to get a jump start on the Calc IV course this weekend. With those in the books, I'm hoping I can settle into a schedule of working on lecture notes, typing up old papers and working on old research, and working on new research, all the while tutoring at my part-time tutoring gig. But, until then, I'm going to be a little light on research.
But, it's great news for me that I got this full-time gig. The job market is really dismal for math Ph.D.'s right now, as nearly as I can figure. The job postings I was looking at on Vitae right before I landed the MSOE gig were requiring out-of-state hires to pay for their own travel expenses to apply for the job; who can afford that? I mean, even if you're desperate and willing to do that, you can really only afford doing that 2 or 3 times before you're out of money. I can only guess that they're going only to get local candidates to apply after a few months or a year of that as an industry-wide policy; if they were able to find viable candidates with only a local job search, they really shouldn't have been advertising in Vitae with which to begin. I just don't see that as an equilibrium industry-wide policy, but time will tell.
Anyways, I'm very excited about my new job, and I'm pouring all my energies into getting ready for that in the Fall. It's kinda slow going LaTeX'ing up my lecture notes, so I may need to punt on that and start doing chalk-talk lecture notes in a few weeks if I don't think I will be able to finish the semester in Beamer slides in time for the end of the semester. They gave me a spiffy laptop on which they said I can install Ubuntu Linux if I want, and they use this spiffy cloud storage system Box that plays well with Linux (Marquette only used OneDrive for their cloud storage, so I had to "roll my own" cloud storage, especially after my hard drive on my desktop-server crashed in the Fall of last year), so I'm just really loving this new job - and, it hasn't even started yet!
