What is service?
Faculty contributions to the University, profession, or community. These are activities that are valued and essential to the sustainability of academic programs or professional fields, but that are not captured by teaching or research. These are all the fuzzy things that we do to keep this place running, and it does count as part of your workload.
Specific examples can be found in the SPS P&T guidelines.
Service is distinct from administrative duties. Administrative positions are clearly outlined and are compensated as part of workload separate from service. Please refer to the SPS leadership document if you have questions about the distinction.
General Tips & Advice
- Service represents a distinct “box” for workload from teaching, research, and administration. Think about how activities fit into this box, as opposed to the others. For instance, is it part of a class activity or is this something extra that you are doing for your students? Is the purpose of your work with a community organization to advance your research agenda or is it something extra that is just related to your research interests?
- If you find it helpful, track your time and keep a running list of your activities. This is to your benefit as it will make it easier to input everything into F180 later.
- Most of us do two types of service: regular and one-off. Regular is easy to remember and describe, but it is often easier to understand the time commitment of one-off activities. Both are part of your service load, so don’t forget about one-off activities.
- Think about hidden “time sucks” (e.g., students asking advising questions after class or responding to emails about programs). Often these fit into existing categories of service (e.g., advising or program service), but go unaccounted for.
- When figuring out how to account for service (and how it may differentiate from teaching or research), think about who your service benefits and how it benefits them. It is not required to articulate these in F180, but it can be helpful for understanding how specific activities fit into different boxes.
- Note that advising graduate students is considered part of the teaching load for research-intensive faculty in SPS. To justify a 2-2 teaching load, faculty should either be advising graduate students and/or working on funded research projects. In F180, there is a separate box to enter information regarding graduate student advising.
Examples of Estimating Time for On-going Service Activities
- Light service: meets once a month for two hours, typically takes up two hours of time between meetings (e.g., prep-time, responding to emails).
- 4 hours/month X 9 months = 36 hours
- Medium service: meets biweekly for two hours, typically takes up two hours of time between meetings.
- 8 hours/month X 9 months = 72 hours
- Heavy service: meets weekly for two hours, typically takes up two hours of time between meetings.
- 16 hours/month X 9 months = 144 hours