President Doh-Yeon Kim once emphasized recruiting new professors in his address. He mentioned recruiting 100 professors for a long term project, during his term. This year, POSTECH will mark its 30th anniversary of foundation. Consequently, the number of retiring professors within a few years is a troublesome for school. This is the main reason why POSTECH decides to put its effort on finding new professors. The Postech Times interviewed the two main institutes that demand professor recruiting, the Department Offices and the Office of Academic Affairs. The article will cover the overall process of recruiting.
Recruiting professors is a serious and important project for both POSTECH and Postechians. Therefore, the procedure is determined by relevant laws and minor university rules. In a macroscopic view, recruiting professors is divided into “open” and “special” recruiting. Special recruiting is usually conducted by university itself, in order to invite renowned professors. It is usually done when POSTECH was a growing star in its initial stage. Open recruiting currently takes the most part of recruiting. There are mainly three steps for open recruiting: Curriculum Vitae (CV) evaluation and individual interview done by each department, the final decision from university committee. Among those procedures, it is conspicuous that each department has considerable autonomy for recruiting, evaluating, and selecting the candidates. There is a big scheme for each step, but each department has their distinct traditions or methods for it. For instance, Department of Life Science conducts all of the three types of interview for each candidate: open seminar, individual interview, and meeting with the life science professors with dinner. On the other hand, Department of Computer Science conducts typically 2 days of marathon interview, the relay one-to-one interview with the whole computer science professors. Evaluation factor could be also different from departments. Some departments consider recommendation letters, while others focuses on candidates’ CV.
After these processes, POSTECH supports new professors in both financial and administrative ways. University provides about 300 million KRW for new professors on average for research fund and equipment costs. There are also residential stability perquisite, and support for business trip expenses. Departments usually assign less lecture credits to new professors for the first one or two years.
The number of POSTECH professors was 271 as of Mar. 1. University plans to manage the total number of professors around three hundred. POSTECH is now putting its full effort on recruiting new professors so that the new professors can successfully receive the baton from senior professors. Welcome for coming professors!