Speak Up!: How to Talk to Your Professor

By Amy Handlin

Speak Up! teaches students how and why they should reach out and connect with their professors. Author Amy Handlin provides thoughtful and strategic advice based on her 25+ years of teaching and advising experience.

Students know it’s important to connect with their professors, since those relationships will pay off immediately and throughout their academic careers. Approaching professors can be intimidating, but this step-by-step guide prepares college and graduate students to advocate for themselves and develop the skills they need to build connections with professors.

Speak Up! includes cut-and-paste sample emails, scripts for in-person meetings, and tips for navigating tricky situations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kaplan Test Prep
• Release date: May 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781506258171

Amy Handlin

Amy Handlin is Deputy Minority Leader of the New Jersey General Assembly and Associate Professor of Marketing at Monmouth University. She is a past member of the New Jersey Commission on Higher Education and a former Senior Fellow at Monmouth University's Center for the Study of Public Issues. Dr. Handlin is a graduate of Harvard University, holds an MBA from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Marketing from New York University's Stern School of Business. Prior to being elected to the legislature, she served on the governing body of Monmouth County and as Deputy Mayor of Middletown Township, where she lives with husband David, son Daniel and daughter Rebecca.

Book preview

Opening Quiz

Why reach out to a professor if you’re doing fine in the course?

What is unique about adjunct professors?

What’s a disadvantage of relying on TAs (teaching assistants) for help?

Professors are easy targets for criticism—not only from students, but also from society at large. That’s because much of what they do is visible only to other professors, who read their articles in scholarly journals or listen to them present their research at conferences. Steeped in the high-level theories of their fields, they use a lot of unfamiliar words and pick on minor errors. For example, a professor might say something to you along these lines: I liked the part of your paper where you successfully synthesized several conflated paradigms. Now you need to distill dispositive evidence for your argument. Oh, and it’s incorrect to use i.e. and e.g. interchangeably when listing your examples. Translation: You’re doing a great job. I want to help you do better.

Behind the big words and seemingly picayune criticism, professors (at least the vast majority of them) care—a lot—about what their students learn and how well they learn it. These things reflect on the quality of their teaching skills, the value of their scholarship, and their overall professional competence. After all, they chose to pursue careers in education, where the ability to share knowledge is celebrated and admired.

That’s all very well, you’re probably thinking, but I want to know if they care (or even know) about students as people. Does my professor really care about me?

Here’s the truth: How much an individual professor cares about an individual student is largely up to the student. Why? Put yourself in that professor’s shoes. Most of the time, she walks into lecture halls filled with hundreds of anonymous learners. After lecturing in front of that ocean of faces, she may conduct seminars with dozens more students, who, while advanced in the field, are also just names on a roster. From among that vast crowd, whom will she get to know on a personal level? Whom will she come to care about? Those who stand out . . . those who speak up!

In this chapter, you will learn:

Section 1: A professor’s job

What’s visible to a student is only one part of the complex, demanding job of a professor.

Section 2: Who is your professor?

The more you know about what makes your professor tick, the better your chances are of connecting with her.

Section 3: Adjunct professors, online professors, and TAs

There are some significant differences between on-campus professors, adjuncts, online instructors, and TAs. But all of them play major roles in the academic community and can be very important to you.

Section 4: What a dean can do for you

Deans are administrators, not teachers, but they can offer a wealth of resources.

Section 5: What’s in it for them—and for you

When a professor shows that he cares, he benefits himself as well as his students. It’s a classic win–win!

Section 1: A Professor’s Job

To get a better understanding of where your professors are coming from—and why it’s so important for you to take the initiative—let’s take a look at the typical responsibilities of a full-time professor at a four-year college or university. These responsibilities are divided into three main categories: teaching, research, and service.

A. Teaching

To a casual observer (or student), teaching at the college level looks easy. Professor X breezes into a classroom and runs through her slides or lectures for an hour or so. After answering a few questions and calling attention to upcoming assignments or tests, she’s done for the day. Or so it seems.

In reality, what that student sees is the end product of many hours of work. Not only does Professor X need to write lectures and prepare slides for each class session during the term, she must also create the syllabus, website, homework, and exams for every course she’s teaching (usually between two and four, but the number can go higher). At most institutions, professors are expected to grade papers, advise both undergraduate and graduate students, hold office hours, oversee independent studies, and supervise honors or graduate theses. Their teaching responsibilities extend to designing new curricula, degree programs, and courses—and often involve writing textbooks for those new courses. Of course, Professor X must also find time to respond to the dozens of questions, complaints, and requests for help that can arrive every day from students, administrators, and/or other professors.

B. Research

The amount of time professors spend doing research varies widely. At some research-intensive universities, it may be 75 percent of an average week or more; elsewhere, research may be a lower priority. But at virtually every four-year institution, there is an expectation that each full-time faculty member will engage in serious efforts to advance knowledge in his or her