What It Took to Produce Concise Video on Beginning and Building a PUI Career
Sometimes, the best things come together on the fly, like the video at the bottom of this page.
Cottrell Scholar Gina MacDonald, chemistry, James Madison University, got together with some of her colleagues from other primarily undergraduate universities (PUIs) at the 2015 Cottrell Scholar (CS) conference in Tucson, Az. They wanted to come up with an effective way to reach out to postdocs and graduate students at large research universities who might not be aware of the rewarding teaching and research opportunities at the smaller PUIs, nor how to go about applying for those positions.
“In the beginning we thought we were going to do a website,” MacDonald recalls. Over the course of a few months of back-and-forth discussion, they worked out the most important content for the site, “but we had trouble getting started -- where to put a website, how it would be maintained. During these discussions somebody came up with the idea of doing a video instead of a website, and so we went with that.”
The Cottrell Scholars participating in the discussion were primarily from research-focused PUIs. They included Mario Affatigato, physics, Coe College; Katherine Aidala, physics, Mount Holyoke College; Mark Bussell, chemistry, Western Washington University; Michelle Hamm, chemistry, University of Richmond; Casey Londergan, chemistry, Haverford College; and Julio de Paula, chemistry, Lewis & Clark College. Two other Cottrell Scholars joined this group: Moses Lee, science programs, M. J. Murdock Charitable Trust, and Brad Smith, chemistry, University of Notre Dame;
None of the participants had much experience with video. Nearly four years later, with a finished product in hand, none of them, including MacDonald, could recall who came up with the video idea.
Fortunately, they were working under the auspices of a Cottrell Scholar Collaborative grant, which allows for a lot of flexibility once a basic idea is approved. CSC funding is meant to support projects that can change the culture of a department or institution or connect with a national initiative related to improving science teaching in colleges and research universities, according to RCSA Senior Program Director Silvia Ronco. Only Cottrell Scholars attending the annual CS conference are eligible to apply for the $25,000 CSC grants.
MacDonald says she was lucky to come across videographer Zachary Kulzer in the small town where James Madison University is located. In one of those unique, synchronistic twists of fate that seem to occur with many successful efforts, Kulzer was in Harrisonburg, Virginia, because his wife, Gretchen Peters, had just been hired as a JMU assistant professor of organic chemistry.
Kulzer arrived in Harrisonburg after spending time in Austin, TX, where Peters earned her postdoc. He worked as a videographer and producer for an Austin art museum, but most of his professional life up to that point had been at the Aspen Institute and the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., where he produced public policy videos.
“When Gina got in touch with me,” Kulzer recalls, “she said she had the grant money, but she didn’t know anyone who could undertake this kind of project, and she wasn’t sure she could get it done. She was a little bit at a loss in terms of what to do.”
Kulzer was willing and able to tackle the project, which went through a few changes over time. Eventually they settled on coming up with good questions to ask PUI professors – the same folks who had come up with the project in the first place.
“I was at the ACS New Faculty Workshop in Denver [another project that got its start with CSC funding],” MacDonald said, “and I asked some of the new people who were taking the training what kind of questions they had before they got their jobs.” She combined those with the questions her cohort had come up with at the CS conference, and in subsequent emails and Skype sessions, and turned them over to Kulzer.
Before embarking on the video interviews, Kulzer sent an outline of the questions to MacDonald for discussion. “But my interview style is that nothing’s off the table,” he said, “although something may or may not make the final cut. I let the professors address more or less what they wanted to address, and I was there to guide them in the right direction, or to change the subject when things went off into the weeds.”
“It was pretty easy,” recalls Mount Holyoke’s Aidala of her on-camera video experience. “It was just a matter of picking a day, and then spending about two hours.” Because she’d done other, more limited video projects for her school, the PUI interview wasn’t an entirely foreign experience, Aidala recalls. “I’d at least been through the ‘look-at-the-camera, here’s-where-the-microphone-goes, don’t- fidget, don’t-go-back- and-forth-in your-swivel-chair’ part of the process before.”
Western Washington’s Bussell recalls Kulzer doing his interview “in a smooth, natural fashion that wasn’t awkward. The questions were woven into an hour long conversation.” Being the subject of a video interview, he adds, can be a positive experience, “Because once you see final product, all the awkward moments have been removed, and that makes the outcome more pleasant.”
Lewis & Clark’s de Paula recalls Kulzer “had some questions already drafted and we went through several takes of answering this or that. My answers were completely off-the-cuff and I assume many of the questions were, too. That added a more natural feel to the content. But Zack was also very good in picking out the answers that were more cogent and that flowed better without having to do much cutting and pasting. I suspect he spent many hours in the editing process.”
The interviews took place over the course of a few months. That phase of the project required Kulzer, who mostly worked as a one-man band, to schlep around to different schools with all the cameras, tripods and lighting equipment, and then try to keep the questions flowing while simultaneously monitoring the technical aspects of the shoot.
“When I finished an interview, I’d cut it up to get rid of all the dead air and things that were neither here nor there, and I’d send that version to Gina. She’s a busy woman, so she didn’t go through everything with a fine tooth comb, but she would say, ‘I like this and I really like that.’ So that way I’d get a sense of what she thought were the important points, and I could tailor the later interviews to get to the point a little more efficiently.”
But that was only half of the process. Editing also took months.
“There was so much material,” Kulzer recalls. “My original intent was to spotlight the schools a little bit more, but it turned out this approach didn’t naturally fit into the subject -- which is how to get into a school for an interview, and once you get the job, what do you do then; that’s the all-important to message we’re trying to get across to people -- so I soon realized I had to ax half the b-roll I’d shot.”
The most difficult part, he said, “was cutting up every interview so they’re talking about the same things at certain points; but since each of the interviews progressed in a different fashion, it’s not always easy to pick out those parts, and yet I had to apply that to multiple sections. It was really just like a big jigsaw puzzle…Sometimes I couldn’t even look at it for a day or two. You get tunnel vision and you have to step back and unwind.”
Eventually he sent a rough cut of the material to MacDonald. “It was at least twice as long as the final product ended up being. But she’s the expert on this stuff, so my question to her was, what do you think is important, what do you think is not important? She helped me pick out the key points, and she sent it out to the group at large for more revisions.”
Kulzer said he initially thought the project would run eight or nine minutes. “It ended being a lot more than that [at just over 21 minutes]. But I still think it’s relatively concise.”
From the perspective of RCSA, the final product accomplishes just what a Cottrell Scholar Collaborative project should do: make a significant contribution to the careers of a broad array of faculty in the physical sciences. As Dan Linzer, President of RCSA and a long-time faculty member at a research university, acknowledged, “Postdocs and grad students are for the most part working with faculty advisers with no PUI experience, so those advisers cannot really advise on a PUI job search; this video is a wonderful resource for these trainees who may be interested in a research-active PUI faculty career.”
