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An E-Mail List for Tomorrow's Professor

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By Jennifer Jacobson

Richard M. Reis's electronic mailing list is called "Tomorrow's Professor," but it's helping many would-be professors today.

About 15,000 graduate students and faculty members subscribe to the free service, which distributes biweekly e-mail messages with career tips and information on issues of interest in higher education.

"It's sort of billed as desktop faculty development," says Mr. Reis, a consulting professor in the electrical and mechanical engineering departments at Stanford University. Besides running the e-mail list, sponsored by a $15,000 grant from the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning, Mr. Reis is also executive director of the university's Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing.

Mr. Reis started the e-mail list in 1998, after he wrote Tomorrow's Professor: Preparing for Academic Careers in Science and Engineering (Wiley-IEEE Press, 1997), based on seminars he ran for graduate students at Stanford. Once the book was published, he began receiving e-mail messages from faculty members and graduate students who wanted career advice. At the same time, publishers started sending him copies of books related to academic careers and higher education. He decided "it might be nice" to offer excerpts from those books in the form of an e-mail list.

Of the 500 people he initially subscribed to his service, 100 unsubscribed. "About 400 didn't say anything," he recalls. So he kept sending the excerpts, and the e-mail list simply grew from there. "People would send other articles to other people and some would subscribe," Mr. Reis says. "It was almost like a virus. I would get a subscriber from New Zealand, and a few days later I would have 20 subscribers from New Zealand."

Today, about 40 percent of his 15,000 subscribers are graduate students or postdocs, 50 percent are faculty members or administrators, and the rest are professionals who work for higher-education associations or government agencies. The e-mail service is aimed at Ph.D.'s in a variety of disciplines, not just those in science and engineering.

About 100 to 110 people join the list every week, and 10 to 15 unsubscribe. He has readers in at least 110 countries, including the United States (9,252), Canada (799), United Kingdom (177), Sweden (171), Australia (162), Germany (153), Kuwait (150), South Africa (121), Jordan (110), and New Zealand (102).

Mr. Reis, who maintains the list with the help of a graduate student, has an arrangement with several publishers: They send him their higher education books -- many of them career guides on topics like coping with faculty stress, others on broader issues like cost containment in academe. He uses 1,000- to 1,250-word excerpts in his e-mails, and includes the publisher's URL, appropriate attribution to the author, and copyright information. Once in a while professors will write something for the e-mail list or will ask him to use an article they've published elsewhere.

A typical message begins like this one did in August, with a quote: "At a time when university resources are stretched and demands upon staff are increasing, it [peer learning] offers students the opportunity to learn from each other." Then Mr. Reis addresses the readers: "Folks: The posting below looks at a still-underutilized resource, students learning from other students. It is from Chapter 1, Introduction: Making the move to peer learning, in Peer Learning in Higher Education: Learning From & With Each Other, edited by David Boud, Ruth Cohen & Jane Sampson."

Mr. Reis could have just set up a Web site with this sort of information. But after surveying his subscribers, he found that that was not what they wanted. No one wanted to have to retrieve the information from a Web site, he says. They preferred to have the material "pushed" at them in the form of e-mail messages. However, previous messages -- all 435 of them so far -- are available online.

This past summer, Mr. Reis announced that he would be taking a short break, from June through September, to revamp the e-mail list, redesign the Web site, and offer some new features, such as a searchable database of previous postings. The list was up and running as of October 1. Mr. Reis is also planning to create a registration system that will allow him to send subscribers supplementary information on topics of interest to them.

Vicky J. Meretsky, an assistant professor of conservation biology and applied ecology at Indiana University, has been a subscriber since August 19, 1999 (she's kept the very first e-mail she received.) "It really is a pleasure to be able to put some of these things in front of students," she says, "because your own experience is your own experience. This gives them a broader perspective on how people who are in the arena they're entering think about the arena they're in."

Mr. Reis, who used to write about careers in science for the Catalyst column on this site, started the e-mail list because he wanted to make a difference in helping up-and-coming faculty members. And he has, according to Victor P. Seidel.

A Ph.D. candidate in the management science and engineering program at Stanford, Mr. Seidel expects to earn his degree in June and has already landed a job -- the equivalent of an assistant professorship -- at Oxford University. He enjoys the e-mail messages from Mr. Reis that deal with the early stages of what it will be like to be a faculty member -- for example, how to collaborate on a book and how to prepare for a tenure review, he says.

The list "kind of serves as an additional adviser," Mr. Seidel says. "It answers a lot of questions I don't know to ask yet. It's kind of neat that way."

To subscribe to Mr. Reis's e-mail list, send the following message in the body of the test-- "subscribe tomorrows-professor" -- to majordomo@lists.stanford.edu