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Most students do not know the true details of the hiring process for university professors. Unlike many jobs, it is not as simple as sending in a resume, going in for an interview, and accepting the position.

There are certain steps that have to be taken in order to get yourself in front of the classroom at the university level.

Dr. Ana De La Serna, Assistant Professor of Journalism, is currently serving as the chair of the search committee hiring a new tenure-track faculty for the Journalism program for Fall 2020. She explained how extensive the process is with choosing a candidate that best fits their description of what they are looking for in a full-time faculty member.

"You have to have all the requirements to be a [full-time] professor," said Dr. de la Serna. "If you're in the tenure track, you have to do three things. You have to do teaching, research and service to the university."

Dr. Brant Burkey, an Associate Professor of Journalism, is also a part of the search committee and explained how extensive the selection process is when trying to narrow down a large selection of candidates.

"Being on a search committee as a professor is important," said Dr. Burkey. "It's a lot of work because you do get involved with a lot of things, from going through applications, narrowing down candidates, and then video interviews until we select three of four qualified candidates to invite for campus interviews."

Once the candidates visit the campus, they have to go through a day-long interview process, including meeting with the Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, the Chair of the Communications Department, student organizations, as well as conduct research presentations, teaching presentations, have lunch with the COM faculty, an interview with the search committee, along with a dinner with the COM faculty.

Currently, there are only eight full-time faculty members in the Communications Department, with four tenured and four of whom are currently tenure-track. The other faculty are part-time or full-time instructors.

"It's not good that we have so many people who are part-time," Dr. de la Serna said, "because they are not getting paid what they should and they don't have the benefits that they need but that is pretty much in all of academia in general."

The whole process begins when the CAH Dean authorizes a department to be able to search for a new hire. A department must then determine what they are looking for, in terms of their expertise, area of discipline, and what classes they may teach. In most cases, a department is looking for someone with a PhD with a specific area of specialty but sometimes they are looking for faculty with a master's degree and more professional experience.

"Do we need somebody in PR? Do we need somebody in journalism? Once we decide that, we need to know exactly what kind of person that we need," said Dr. de la Serna. "Do we need somebody who has this characteristic or the other? Then we draft a job description. For this job description, we wanted somebody who has a PhD or a Masters with a lot of experience in journalism because we know that a PhD may bring something but we are also lacking somebody who has been out in the field right now."

The search committee was trying to find a professional journalist who has teaching experience and worked with Spanish-language media, as the journalism program hopes to eventually offer a Spanish-language journalism certificate. They were also hoping to find a candidate who can develop networking opportunities for journalism students with LA-based Spanish-language media organizations. So it's important to be very selective on who they eventually choose.

Once the search committee makes their determination, they recommend to the Dean who they think would make the best fit for the COM Department. Then the Dean will make an offer to the candidate based on that recommendation and his own determination.

"I found that as much as this is time consuming and it's a lot of work, the important part of it is, we're trying to choose the right person to join our full-time faculty," said Dr. Burkey. "It is great to see our full-time faculty expanding. We have more classes to offer and we have more colleagues who are not just part-time lecturers or adjunct faculty. To grow our full-time faculty, we want to make sure that we are choosing the right person for the job."

This year's search was successful and the candidate chosen to join the full-time COM faculty is Dr. Fernando Severino, who will start teaching this fall. Dr. Severino received his PhD from the University of Minnesota and has conducted extensive research on immigration news in Latin America, as well as having worked as a News Editor and Anchor for CNN Chile, making him the perfect candidate to join the full-time faculty and have an impact on future Journalism students here at CSUDH.