Animal Science Professor

Animal Science Professors used to teach students about domestic farm animals, such as pigs, goats, cows, and horses. While that is still a key component, the field has now expanded to include many other types of animals on farms, in zoos, and in the wild. This gives modern-day Animal Science Professors a lot of material to cover.

If you’re an Animal Science Professor, your students are often working towards a degree in veterinary medicine, fish and wildlife, or animal nutrition. For any of these degrees, they need to understand the animals inside and out. That’s where you come in.

You discuss reproduction, nutritional needs, disease, genetics, and development. By the time your students leave your classroom, they’ll know how long a pig’s gestation period is, how long a chicken lives, and how many stomachs a cow has.

To teach them all this, you pass your passion for the subject on to them through lectures, exams, and homework. In addition, you assign projects, reports, and quizzes. That’s a lot of paperwork, so you spend a great deal of time evaluating assignments and recording grades. With luck, you’ll have an Teacher Aide to help the process along, because you still need to prepare lectures, spend time in the office, allot consultation hours for students, and perform research of your own.

In addition to an acute knowledge of animal science, you will need strong computer, research, and communication skills.