Is it okay to publish less and teach more during your PhD? (CS USA)

Question

Background: I read this Quora post where someone mentioned they TA'ed pretty much their entire PhD tenure and took up extra TA spots as well for the same because they really liked teaching. The person only ended up publishing 2 papers (very good ones) during their tenure because maximum amount of their time went in teaching (The person won multiple TA awards and Head TA positions).

Question: Is this something which is frowned upon?

Personally, I really love to teach and would love to devote some of my research time to teaching.

Answer 1

There are lots of good teaching-focused jobs in academia, for example faculty positions at small liberal-arts colleges, and lecturer-type positions in larger departments. It sounds like this kind of job would appeal to you more than a job whose primary focus was research. That’s great! Go and learn about those jobs, find people who have taken that career track and talk to them, and start doing what you need to make yourself an appealing candidate for those positions. Part of that last point is teaching, but it’s not really about teaching more, it’s about doing things that make your CV appealing to SLACs. You need to do some teaching, but it’s going to look better if you advise an REU student or run a directed reading program than if you just teach one more section of a class you already teach. See if you can find teaching assignments that add to your CV, eg if you have the opportunity to be instructor-of-record instead of just a TA, do that. Finally, even if you have teaching-centered career goals, you still need to graduate! So don’t overstretch yourself teaching at the expense of getting a solid thesis done. Research expectations are different at SLACs, but they definitely want you to be able to supervise undergraduate projects and they want you to have a PhD, so you can’t neglect that aspect of your program

Answer 2

This might depend somewhat on the field and certainly on what you intend to do as a career. It is field dependent since different fields place a somewhat different balance on teaching v research.

But if you seek a career in an R1 or R2 then you want to focus primarily on showing good research "chops". For those seeking to (mostly) teach at a liberal arts college then teaching will be looked at closely.

But you also need to think about the number of jobs available and their specific requirements. Look in professional publications, for example, to get an idea of what is being looked for.

At some colleges and universities, research into the specific pedagogy of a field might be honored. Other places it would be discounted. Moreover, it is easier for a senior faculty member to focus on "out of the mainstream" research than it is for someone on the tenure track.

And also note that it is probably easier to move from an R1 (say) to a teaching oriented college than it is to move in the other direction, though getting hired and then tenure at an R1 is pretty tough. Very hard in some fields at the moment.

Finally, if you can manage to do what you love, then you will be happier overall, so think long term about goals and how best to achieve them.