Re: Geo or Bio?

[Bill Shear <bills@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Having started this thread, I've now missed a lot of it because of blank
postings, including some of my own which have not made it through (at least
not to me).

I wanted to reiterate the opportunities, often overlooked, that exist for
broadly trained palaeontologists in small colleges.  Being able to provide
a wide variety of courses is very important when you only have 4-10 people
in your department.  I would urge people to broaden their backgrounds in
graduate school if they think small college teaching might be for them.
For example, I took a couple of microbiology courses in my MS program, and
every job I got afterwards depended on my being able to fill in on that
course (though I don't teach it now, thank God).  As I posted before, I
didn't begin as a paleontologist, but microbiology is still something of a
stretch for an evolutionary biologist/systematist.

Bill Shear
Department of Biology
Hampden-Sydney College
Hampden-Sydney VA 23943
(804)223-6172
FAX (804)223-6374
email<bills@tiger.hsc.edu>