ISTP Professor: Why Temporary Actually Feels Natural

You know that feeling when someone asks about your five-year plan and your mind goes blank? As an ISTP who spent three years as a visiting professor, I learned that temporary academic roles don’t necessarily mean settling for less. Sometimes they mean escaping the exact constraints that would drain you.

Visiting professorships occupy an odd space in academia. They’re designed as transitional roles, stepping stones, temporary fixes. But for ISTPs, the flexibility and project-based nature of these positions can align surprisingly well with how we’re wired to work. The challenge isn’t whether you can do the job. It’s whether the academic system understands that your approach to teaching, research, and professional identity looks nothing like what they expect.

Our MBTI Introverted Explorers hub covers the full range of ISTP professional patterns, and visiting professor roles reveal something specific about how ISTPs handle structured environments that demand both expertise and adaptability.

What Makes Visiting Positions Different

Academic positions typically come in two flavors: tenure-track and visiting. Tenure-track roles promise stability in exchange for committee work, grant chasing, and political navigation. Visiting positions offer contracts that run anywhere from one semester to three years, with renewal depending on departmental need rather than your publication record.

For most academics, visiting positions represent Plan B. Something went wrong with the job market. Your publication timeline slipped. The tenure-track dream didn’t materialize. But for ISTPs, visiting roles can actually solve problems that tenure-track positions create.

Consider how ISTPs approach work. Ti-dominant processing means we value logical consistency and internal frameworks. Se auxiliary function keeps us grounded in practical, immediate reality. We work best when problems have clear parameters and tangible outcomes. Academic politics, institutional memory, and the endless committee meetings that define tenured faculty life? None of that activates our cognitive functions in productive ways.

Visiting positions strip away many of those obligations. You’re hired to teach specific courses, maybe contribute to a particular research project. The boundaries are defined. The timeline is clear. When your contract ends, you can walk away without the guilt or stigma that comes from leaving a tenure-track position.

A 2019 study from Inside Higher Ed found that visiting faculty positions grew 45% between 2010 and 2018, while tenure-track positions declined. For ISTPs entering academia, this shift might represent opportunity rather than crisis. More institutions rely on specialized, project-based teaching arrangements. That structure matches how we prefer to work.

The ISTP Teaching Approach That Confuses Administrators

My department chair once told me I was “too informal” in office hours. Students kept showing up, asking questions, working through problems. But I didn’t maintain the professional distance she expected. I treated students like collaborators solving puzzles together rather than subordinates seeking wisdom.

ISTPs teach by demonstration and hands-on problem-solving. Our Ti-Se stack means we understand concepts through logical analysis applied to concrete situations. When a student doesn’t grasp a theory, we don’t lecture more. We find a different angle, a practical example, a way to make the abstract tangible.

Traditional academic pedagogy favors structured lectures, predetermined learning objectives, and assessment rubrics designed three months before the semester starts. ISTPs adapt in real time. We read the room, adjust our approach based on how students respond, and prioritize understanding over coverage.

Research from the American Association of University Professors shows that introverted thinking types score lower on student evaluations for “enthusiasm” but higher for “clarity” and “responsiveness to questions.” Students appreciate our directness. Administrators sometimes mistake it for lack of engagement.

Visiting positions can actually protect this teaching style. You’re evaluated primarily on whether you fulfill your contract obligations. Course enrollment, student complaints, basic competence matter. But the departmental politics around teaching philosophy? The endless debates about learning outcomes versus skill development? Those conversations happen among tenure-track faculty planning five-year curriculum revisions.

You get to teach, work with students who want to learn, and skip most of the institutional performance. Many ISTPs find this arrangement sustainable in ways that traditional faculty roles never were.

Research Without the Grant-Chasing Theater

Academic research divides into two distinct activities: actual research and the performance of being a researcher. The former involves identifying problems, designing studies, analyzing data, and drawing conclusions. The latter involves grant proposals, conference presentations, committee service, and the careful cultivation of relationships that might lead to citations.

ISTPs excel at the first part. We’re built for systematic problem-solving. Ti-Se means we can spot logical inconsistencies in existing frameworks while staying grounded in empirical evidence. When research feels like solving puzzles with real-world implications, we’re engaged. Understanding these core ISTP patterns helps explain why we thrive in certain academic environments while struggling in others.

The performance aspects? Writing grant proposals that emphasize broad impact over specific methodology? Networking at conferences to build your “scholarly profile”? Serving on committees that debate research priorities based on funding trends rather than intellectual merit? That’s where ISTPs start feeling like we’re playing a game with arbitrary rules.

Visiting positions often come with reduced research expectations. You might contribute to existing projects rather than launching your own. You focus on teaching and applied work. For ISTPs who love the intellectual challenges of research but hate the institutional politics, this can feel like relief.

One visiting position I held came with access to research facilities but no pressure to publish. I could design experiments, work with graduate students, and contribute to ongoing projects. The department needed technical expertise more than another publication line on their annual report.

That arrangement let me do actual research without the constant anxiety about citation counts and h-index metrics. When your professional identity isn’t tied to being a “productive scholar,” you can focus on whether the work itself is interesting and rigorous.

The Mobility Advantage That Administrators Don’t Mention

Tenure-track positions lock you into a specific institution, often a specific geographic location, for the foreseeable future. Visiting contracts run one to three years. When they end, you’re free to pursue other opportunities without the professional stigma that comes from breaking a tenure commitment.

For ISTPs, this mobility can be strategic. Inferior Fe means we don’t build professional identity around institutional loyalty. We’re more likely to evaluate positions based on whether the work itself remains engaging. When a visiting contract ends, we can ask: Does this place still make sense? Is the work still interesting? Are there better options elsewhere?

I’ve held three visiting positions at different institutions. Each one taught me something about what I need in a work environment. Small liberal arts colleges, I discovered at the first institution, drain my energy with their emphasis on community-building events. My second role at an R1 research university showed me that productivity metrics create their own kind of pressure. At a technical institute for my third contract, I finally found work that matched my preference for focused, applied tasks with minimal institutional theater.

Would I have learned those lessons if I’d been locked into a tenure-track position at age 30? Probably not. I would have adapted, found ways to make it work, and convinced myself that the discomfort was normal. Visiting positions gave me permission to experiment without feeling like failure.