My life is brilliant.

I have the best job in the world.

When I started teaching at a community college, I had just left one of the biggest, most prestigious, research institutions in North America. I was definitely excited to be teaching, but looking at the courses offered here, it was a little bit disappointing to think that I would be teaching the same three or four courses for the next 30 years. Here's what I had to choose from:

Basic Psych. Essentially Psych100 smooshed into one semester.
Lifespan Developmental Psych. Development from 'womb to tomb'.
Personal Psych. Understanding yourself and others.
Strategies for Success. Study skills, critical thinking, etc.

Coming in with a research background, the first two courses sounded very exciting, and the last two sounded a little bit ... horrible.

Every semester since then has been better and better. This past Fall, I was asked to re-structure and teach a Psychology of Advertising course (until then I didn't know this course existed at the college) to the Graphic Design students here (a very bright and motivated group). Now there is some talk that I may be able to teach Statistics to the upper-year students of the Collaborative Nursing program (collaborative with the University of Windsor), another one of my favourite groups to teach. Intro Stats is one of the most rewarding courses to teach because you get to see the 'aha!' moments on your students' faces.

As for the Personal Psych and Strategies for Success courses, I'm working with some of the other teachers to develop a new course that combines the useful elements of those two courses, along with some Educational and Social Psych concepts so that we can offer one course that will be more interesting and helpful for the students.

I may also get to teach the university-level two-semester Intro Psych course here for students who want to transfer credits over. It will be so nice to have twice as much time to get into these concepts.

The other great aspect of this job is the department. We have 4 Psych professors here, all hired within the last three years. So we've got a ton of energy and we're all happy to share ideas and work with eachother without any of the politics that might exist in more established departments.

Very, very happy.