Mentioning POI's - Lecturers and Post-Doc Fellows

[napoleon87]

For one Art History MA I'm applying two, I'd like to mention two POI's whose work aligns nicely with mine.  One is a lecturer and the other is a post-doc fellow and they both teach courses that I'd be very interested to take.  I realize that admissions is likely asking you to name a potential advisor, but these are the only people on faculty working directly in my subfield.  I found this school rather last minute, so it's too late to email them and see if they accept students.  Should I only be mentioning tenured faculty in the SOP?

 

 

[fuzzylogician]

For both, I would wonder: 1) Will they still be there next year, and the year after that? Both positions are of a temporary nature so I don't know that you can count on it. Postdocs in the humanities, in particular, tend to be quite short. Lecturer positions can be more permanent, but can also be to replace someone on sabbatical or temporary leave. 2) Can they advise students? Often lecturers and postdocs are not allowed to supervise students, at least not alone. Even if you could make it work technically, you'd be asking them to invest their time in something that they might not be paid to do. Not everyone is that generous with their time, and it would put you quite low on the priorities list: the extra thing they signed on to do after they are done with their formal obligations.

 

I would worry about only listing temporary POIs as faculty of interest. If there is no one else with a good fit, this school might not be for you. What would you do two years from now if you had a write a thesis, and one or both of them are gone and/or can't advise you? The chances of that happening are not insignificant. 

[rising_star]

It's not that you should only mention people with tenure, just that you should only mention those who might be there long-term.

[TakeruK]

Agreed with the above with the caveat that if you are talking about a UK school, a "Lecturer" there is basically a tenure track professor position, so it's perfectly fine to list them as a POI.