Our department has a distinguished history of training and supporting graduate students as they prepare to enter their own classrooms for the first time. The establishment of a Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program brought our commitment to training students in all the primary roles of faculty members—teaching, research, and service—to a new level.

The program’s focus is to ready our graduate students to enter faculty positions as competent professionals who have already begun a process of growth as teachers, scholars, and members of an academic community. It provides advanced coursework, training, and experiences in teaching and scholarship in a variety of settings, including liberal arts colleges.

The architects of our PFF program were outstanding scholar/teachers—Distinguished Professor Bernice Pescosolido and Rudy Professor Brian Powell, and (later) Chancellor’s Professor Rob Robinson.

We are proud of what the PFF program has been able to do for our students. In recent years, our graduate students have won more system-wide teaching awards than the grad students in any other department at IU.

Our graduate students have been successful in publishing, not only in research journals, such as the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Sociology of Education, etc., but also in journals that focus on college pedagogy (e.g., Teaching Sociology). And in 2001, the program received the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award, an award that usually goes to individual teachers.

Learn about the PFF Conference