MTP 45: How The “Overlap Principle” Can Help You Avoid Burnout, Steve Hall, NC State, Part 2

In this episode, Shane Hartley chats with NC State professor Steve Hall about overcoming fear, sharing faith in the classroom, and mentoring students. Steve offers helpful advice to other professors to avoid burnout and live out their faith on campus.

Read more about Steve Hall online:

https://meettheprof.com/view/professors/entry/steven-hall/

Professor Hall's Campus Email Address:

shall5@ncsu.edu

Christian faculty, staff, and grad students, you’re invited to the A Common Call conference on Feb. 7 & 8, 2025 in Raleigh, NC. Check out this website for details and registration:
https://cfsn-ncsu.org/conf-info/


00:00-01:17 – Student question & intro
01:18-02:58 – Overcoming fear of sharing faith in class
02:58-05:59 – Faith’s impact on students & classroom interactions
06:04-07:44 – Faculty publicly identifying as Christians
08:26-11:23 – Managing a heavy workload as a Christian professor
11:23-13:27 – How to mentor students spiritually
15:05-17:07 – Connecting with students in online classes
17:16-19:56 – Final encouragement: Be bold, find community, walk wisely

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Transcript

0:00

I'm David Hidalgo. I'm a student here, accounting student here at UNCW. And a question I got for my Christian professors is do you guys feel a little nervous to bring up your spiritual beliefs, your Christianity to your classmates or to your students? Hey everyone, welcome to Meet the Prof. My name is Shane Hartley and I interview Christian professors using questions we get from college students. And our goal is to encourage Christ-centered conversations on the college campus. Thanks so much for taking time to join us now. I don't take that lightly. You'll have the treat of hearing part two of our interview with Steve Hall today. Steve is a professor at North Carolina State University. Before we jump in with him, if you are a Christian faculty member or a staff or a grad student even, we want to invite you to a conference called A Common Call. It's happening in Raleigh, North Carolina, February 7th and 8th. And there's no conference really I've heard like this that's aimed at equipping Christian professors for ministry on campus and encouraging you in your faith. description of the podcast, I'll have a link you can go to there to register as well. well, let's jump in. Here is part two of my interview with Steve Hall. First of all, thank you for David for asking the question. Thank you, Shane, for getting out there and seeing what the students are interested in. I would say, first of all, yes. And I recall the first time I was challenged by a colleague who said, do you share Christ in your class? And I'm like, no, not really. so I thought about that and He prodded me, know, and so finally I said, all right I'm gonna put a slide in and I'm gonna see how it goes and I was terrified. I really thought like somebody's gonna call the dean, I'm gonna get fired, I'm never gonna get tenure. And to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever called the dean. This year, after, in fact, right at the end of the first class, the students said, doc, I saw you at the Cru meeting. Now I don't go to the, I'll admit, I don't go to the undergrad Cru meeting very often. I work with grads and faculty more. The timing's tough with putting kids down to bed. But I had gone to this one, you know, that kind of previous week and I'm like, okay, yeah, cool. How'd you like that, you know? And yeah, so they had invited a couple of us faculty and the faculty lead for Cru, Rick Hove was speaking that night. And he gave a really nice talk, really encouraging talk out of Matthew. But just, know, students like that will reach out and they'll say hi. You know, and so then, you know, I sort of corner him after class and talk to him a little bit more. How's it going? Tell me about your life, but also tell me about, you know, other students or how do things feel in the department and class? I want your feedback. So that's, know, so then all of a sudden you're talking to each other a little more personally, which is positive for learning, but it's also positive for, you know, how do we share our faith? And yeah, I think it is. It makes us real. I mean, we're not some, you know, distant IT device. We're human. We believe something, right? Everybody believes something. But, you know, okay, that's what this guy believes. And even if they don't agree, okay, all right, I can see where that's at. I think there's a lot of quiet believers. I think there's a lot of people searching that maybe either don't know that much about Jesus and want to know more. And a lot of times, you know, if people are searching for something, I'll steer them towards an undergraduate graduate group or Bible study or people who have fallen away. there, you know, there's a lot of this myth out there. Well, smart people never believe in that stuff. But now here's a professor that's teaching the class and he's fairly intelligent and he seems to think this is OK. In fact, he seems to think it's pretty cool. Hmm, you know. And so, you know, I'm not there to prove anything to them, but I think that just opens doors. They're a little more receptive to me personally, but then also to the material. And I do try to learn, right? I try to memorize every student's name. If there's a spot where they sit, you know, that's Megan and that's Brianne, but she actually comes up by a different name on the class roster. And there's Caleb and there's Brandon. know, okay. And I try to, you know, call them by name. Shane, it is good to see you. You know, just having someone say your name, recognize you if that's possible. It's easier for me. tend to have smaller classes, but even in big classes, I think some of our Christian profs will make an effort to really learn people's names, learn a little bit about them, and just leave the door open. We're not. We're not preachers, we're professors. And then we get back, and so then I get back to the engineering. Okay, now let's talk about thermodynamics, you know? And let's crunch some numbers. Okay, and that's fine. And they need that, and they respect that. But I sort of leave the door open. Then again, after class, in the hallway, come by the office. And at the office, I have a number of inviting books out and quotes on the wall and things like that. Nice. Yeah. take a copy of the ads. So we do some ads in the student newspaper and I'll take a copy of the most recent one, which in our case would be the Christmas ad, but we'll do one at Easter. We do one at Thanksgiving. We do a summer one and I'll hang them just out so we have a little bulletin board right outside. That's kind of my space, so I'm allowed to do it. And sometimes people like stuff things on top of it, which is okay, know. But generally, like, no, people respect that. And then there it is. And my name is one little name down in the second column. But it is, you know, welcome. Here's a little discussion of what we believe, usually some kind of simple biblical quote and a little encouraging message. How many would you say of Christian faculty put their name on a school paper ad like that? it's faculty and staff, and we do ask people. So some people who are on our mailing list do not, for various reasons, they're like, please don't put my name on the ad. Okay, fair enough. But between faculty and staff, it's over 100 faculty and staff. This one from English and that one. biology and engineering and agriculture, know, just all different departments. then some of the staff are from, you know, accounting or architecture so they're not necessarily studying that, they're practicing that. They're people that are like helping to build the new buildings on campus or this sort of thing. And I think it's also good for us. I mean, we got to be a little brave. We got to be a little bold with sharing what we believe. It's not super bold because it's just a name. But I think for some people, and I just had a young chemistry professor who I've been mentoring, who spoke to Jim Tour, who is a somewhat famous Christian academic evangelist. And I've been nudging him. You could put something in your syllabus, you could put something on a slide, but do your students know you're a Christian? And he's, I don't know. nervous about that. Well finally he announced to me one day, I'm gonna I'm gonna say it. Like okay cool I'll be praying for you you know. It turns out he also recently got a particular kind of grant that in his field is very special. And I think that he has gone up in the academic view and I also think that's God opening a door, you know. So God can do whatever he wants, but I think he loves it when we want to join him in what he's doing. And taking bold steps like that. We did a survey recently of Christian professors around the country and we asked what topics they're interested in. And one of the top topics that came out of the poll was bold steps of faith that other Christian faculty take. And you've described some steps you've taken and then now a colleague, a younger colleague is beginning to take. So that's pretty exciting. would like to transition into some things of advice that you would give to other faculty specifically. So this would be like a lightning round of questions. So the very first one would be what advice would you give to professors about managing the heavy load they have? Yeah, first it's a reality. From the outside, people at your church will say, what do you teach? I teach this three hours a week. you don't even have a job. But of course, the reality is you are really busy and it's a balance game. I wear three hats teaching research and extension, which means I'm out in the field or I'm asking or answering practical questions. And of course, each one of those jobs, the boss thinks that's your 100 % job. So you have to find ways to be efficient. think finding ways to do the things that have to be done well. One of my favorites is how can you do more than one of those at the same time? How can you check off more than one box? And so is there a part of some research that I'm doing that I can bring into the classroom? Now it's cutting edge teaching that's also a chance to reiterate my research. And it's a way from the research side to get some feedback from students on how that sounds or feels and does that make sense to them. or extension in research. A lot of times I'm out in the field talking to very practical, I work with farmers. and they, doc, I got this problem. You know, I've been struggling with this. What do you think? And I mean, I don't always have the answer, but I'm happy to talk to them and help them where I can. Again, oftentimes direct them to resources that might help them. But that also, especially if I'm hearing that from more than one farmer, like, you know, we've been having this problem. I heard that the other Jim down the road was having that issue. Yeah, I don't know. Nobody seems to know the answer. Well, if there are a bunch of people having a problem, that's a research topic. Okay, so now, and now I've got partners, I could do some really controlled study at the lab at the university, and they might be able to do some more applied work, perhaps, and they might be willing, because now there's a conversation there. So I always try to find ways of doing more than one. During COVID, did, or actually right before COVID, and it worked out well, we did a series of virtual videos, virtual tours. So you couldn't go on some of these farms. You still can't go on some of the farms for various biosecurity type reasons. But you want to show people, like, what does this look like? How is this done well? Obviously you can do something poorly. That's not what we're talking about, but how do you do it well? And so we went out with film crew you know, and we filmed the process of growing them from babies up through... big fish, harvesting them, sending them off to market. In this case, it was live tilapia that came in as little teeny fish, went into small tanks, eventually got graded up to bigger tanks, and then went out as fish that were going out for sale. And they ship them up to the cities and sell them live, which is kind of a cool thing. So those are some hints, some ways to try to do more than one thing at a time. I like that. Look for crossover opportunities. Great. That's helpful. Another felt need for many Christian faculty is to learn how can I have any kind of a mentoring relationship with students? Maybe it's not their students at that semester, but other students at other times. So what advice would you give to faculty who are wanting to learn to take steps like that, mentoring students spiritually? I think students are looking for that more than you think. Now sometimes the student will be a little bit brave themselves and they'll come by, maybe even bother you a little bit and you realize like this person's looking for some advice and you can respond. know, let's talk, learn a little bit more about them. I try to set up separate times where I'll Meet up for a cup of coffee or something like that. Meet up for lunch. And I might buy somebody lunch or buy somebody a cup of coffee. Even on a faculty budget, you can probably afford that once in a while. I don't try to pick everybody. You can't spend lots of time with many, many people. But I think pray about it and think about it. And I think... As a faculty, I have become more bold over the years in kind of cornering somebody and seeing this young professor is one of my. So now I do work with some undergrads, but I more and more I'm spending time with like the grad students and with young faculty. Now, as I get older, they all look younger to me, you know? And so maybe I have a little advice for them, but I will invite them. then lately I've actually been inviting them to my house, come for dinner. come for a cup of coffee, we'll sit on the porch. They then witness my kids doing their thing. They witness the mess of my house, but also the mess and a bless. It's a messing and a blessing. And they get to see, this guy's real. He's kind of a mess sometimes, but that he seems to be enjoying it and navigating it. it can be done. Mostly I just want to dispel some of these myths. You can't be a Christian and be smart. You can't be a faculty member and be a Christian. Yes, you can. You can be smart and love Jesus. Jesus was infinitely wise. Why shouldn't smart people today love Jesus? can. You can't be a faculty member and start a family. Well, I'm not saying there's a perfect time for starting a family. mean, anybody that has kids will admit that. But, you know, the Lord has provided. And I'm not saying we haven't squeezed in a couple of times, But the Lord has really, supernaturally, at one point we were paying one of our first semesters of tuition. and this check arrived in the mail within a day or two when the tuition bill and we had kind of looked at that number that's kind of a big number let's just let that sit for a little bit and we'll see and then this check came in and they were within four hundred dollars of the same number. Pray to the Lord. I sometimes forget to pray. I mean, the Bible says pray continually. So even our conversation should be a kind of prayer. Thank you, Lord, for letting me be here with Shane. use our voices to go out to faculty and students and others, encourage them. But bring your supplications to the Lord with thanksgiving and he will provide a peace that passes understanding. And I think bring your needs and your requests to the Lord. That's helpful, great. Last lightning round question is what advice would you give to faculty who are struggling to connect with their students now that the classes they have are strictly online? Yeah, so different institutions have gone different ways and depending on where you are, you might be very in person, you might be some kind of hybrid and you might be strictly online. And the online is harder. I do think in person is hard because you got to get there and you got to physically work on things. But online is hard to connect. Again, I think if you can have... virtual space. I share my personal cell phone number and invite people to text me or call me. Some of them do. Many of them don't, but some of them do. And I will also have, oftentimes, some physical space I can be that some of the students may get a chance to intersect with me. And then I think there's lots of online tools. and you can steer people to other online resources. Meet the Prof, and I think you might share that at some point, or the CFSN site, or the Common Call site, various other resources that appropriately, hey, here's some more information about what professors are doing. If you're interested in that, take a look over there. Hey, here's a... conference that might be of interest. Here's a book that I've been reading and you're not preaching that, you're just sharing that. And you can even have a sort of thing you share each of the days, a new different thing that you share. And it doesn't always have to be Christian, but hey, this is the latest on Ultimate Frisbee. Okay, that's cool. Here's some cool cat videos. Okay, yeah, that's fine. But some of them can be linked to your faith walk, linked to how to live in the world, linked to something that is encouraging and can again just open the mind of students that they can believe they can walk with Jesus. Young faculty can be Christians and they can be out with being Christians. They can be somewhat public about that. And so I just... Any way you can leave doors open for people you can then have further conversation. That's so good. Well Steve, before we close, is there anything else that comes to mind that you'd like to share? I know you and I are, you know, just just small parts of, you know, God's kingdom, but he's using us and it's such an honor. And I think he's calling some of the people listening to this to join us, join God in what he's doing on your campus. Come to one of these conferences and join us there. avail yourself of some of the online resources and find other like-minded believers. There are faculty, staff, grad students that are real believers and they're around you. Some of them are a little shy and you might have to knock on some doors or investigate a little bit, but it is so encouraging when you can come together and pray together and encourage each other, maybe study the Bible or do something fun together. have a dinner. And I just want to, I think my thought for today is be bold. You know, God is calling us and God is, God's in charge. You know, He's in charge of the whole universe and we get to join Him. So I think wherever you are, you know, you don't have to conquer the universe. God's in charge of that. But you are called to your little part, reaching out to a student or a colleague. Reaching out to a neighbor, sharing a little bit of encouragement, sharing the good news in one way or another, being a listening ear. And it can be the kind of thing that can be very helpful for your success as a teacher and a researcher, in my case extension. worldly success and walking with the Lord don't necessarily always look the same. I'm not as worried about getting to the top of the ladder. I'm not as worried about money per se. But at the same time, I think most people would describe my life as pretty successful. But I attribute it to Jesus. And so I think, you know, walk with him first and be wise. Wise as serpents, innocent as doves. It's okay to think about who you're talking to and... say something a little more subtle in some cases, or then leave a door open and say, hey, do you want to talk about this? So thanks again. I'm really thankful for you. Really grateful for this time to get to interview you and get to hear God's fingerprints all over your story, over your life. From the beginning, Him showing Himself, a generous God to answer a prayer for a couch and to be one who cares and brings your wife to you at the perfect time and a God who gives us strength. to be bold and courageous. So yeah, thanks a lot for this time, Steve. Thank you, Shane. God bless you and blessings to all. Well, Steve is such an encouragement. I really appreciate him. And I hope you were encouraged to get to know him some and hear about the steps of faith that he has been taking on campus and how he's trusting God. One thing I really appreciate about Steve is his heart for prayer. So he is asking God for a lot. And that's sort of contagious to me. And remember, if you're a Christian faculty member or a staff member or a grad student, you're invited to A Common Call. a conference for professors and staff and grads to grow closer with Jesus and learn more how to follow Jesus on your campus. And so the description will be having some of the links to that. And so until next time, I hope this encourages you to have a Christ-centered conversation on your college campus.