Abstract
I Did Not Anticipate This: Experiences from the Early YearsWhat does the reality of being an instructor truly encompass? For most, this is something thatevolves while they are on the job. Courses and workshops whose objectives are to prepare futurefaculty often focus on big picture tasks while failing to touch on the many everyday hurdles thatone will experience. These challenges can be time consuming, controversial, cause significantstress, and have a tendency to blind-side junior faculty.The objective of this paper is to help new, or aspiring, engineering educators to be aware ofcommon issues they will likely deal with while identifying some key information in the literaturethat may be helpful. The topics addressed include academic misconduct, students withdisabilities, student requests, and institutional requests. The authors have teaching experience atfive different engineering schools ranging from liberal arts to R1 settings and the issuesdiscussed appear to be ubiquitous in undergraduate engineering. This paper further reflects onactual extreme experiences from the first couple years of teaching which were not anticipatedsuch as a case of cheating resulting in a lawyer’s involvement, having to physically stop onestudent from choking another and a student requesting a letter of character to stay out of prison.This paper concludes by discussing some of the positive experiences which were also notanticipated but experienced. By confronting these topics in a frank and public manner othersmay learn from these collective experiences and perhaps find themselves better prepared whenthey arise.