Forbes 2013 Career List Flamed By University Professors 370
An anonymous reader writes "The Forbes list of 'least stressful jobs' for 2013 is headlined by... university professors. This comes at a time in which the academic community has been featured on controversies about 100-hour week work journeys, doctors live on food stamps, tenured staff is laid off large science institutions, and the National Science Foundation suffers severe budget cuts, besides the well known (and sometimes publicized) politics of publish or perish. The Forbes reporter has received abundant feedback and published a shy, foot-note 'addendum'; however, the cited source, CareerCast (which does not map to any recognizable career journalist, but rather to a Sports writer), does not seem to have had the same luck. The comments of the Forbes reporter on the existence of a Summer break for graduates ('I am curious whether professors work that hard over the summer') are particularly noteworthy."
Here is the CareerCast report the article is based on, and a list of the "stress factors" they considered. The author of the Forbes article passed on a very detailed explanation of how tough a university professor's job can be.
they seem to go crazy (Score:2, Interesting)
My wife works at a rehabilitation/nursing home and there are so many college professors in there that have gone Looney. Some think they are aliens and others have gone Looney in other ways
Re:they seem to go crazy (Score:5, Funny)
Ahh, I understand your confusion there, your wife accidentally stumbled into the Philosophy department. It's a completely understandable mistake to make, the average university philosophy department is filled with senile, tenured professors and hipsters who spent more on their iPads then they did on toothpaste that semester. If you tried to talk to any one of them you'd be hard pressed to believe you _weren't_ in a retirement home.
Easy test to keep her from getting mixed up again; if she walks into the building and is immediately hit with the stench of patchouli, body-odour and hashish, she's probably wandered into the local college again. If on the other hand it's just the usual potpourri of soiled beds, Old Spice and death, then she's going to have a wonderful day at work!
Re:they seem to go crazy (Score:5, Funny)
hipsters who spent more on their iPads then they did on toothpaste that semester.
What the hell? You spend $600 on toothpaste per semester? As in $100 of toothpaste per month? And you find it strange other people don't?
Re:they seem to go crazy (Score:5, Funny)
One month's worth of toothbrushes: $175
One month's water bill: $315
A smile bright enough to woo a female into a slashdotter's basement: Priceless
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Hey, some of us make enough that we've been able to afford our operations!
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what else are you supposed to use to stick bathroom tiles with?
damn tiles keep falling off, grr.
Re:they seem to go crazy (Score:4, Informative)
Average full professor salary at Harvard is different than "average faculty salary."
The source for your article [insidehighered.com] says that real average salaries for full professors (the top of the pay-scale, to which you can be promoted after being tenured from an assistant professor to an associate professor, so typically 10-15 years at your school) is $118K, if you are at a PhD-granting institution. Average salary for "college professor," with all ranks and grades of institutes in the US is $63K per year, because there are a lot more community college/baccalaureate-only schools than there are masters and doctorate schools.
Re:they seem to go crazy (Score:4, Funny)
My wife works at a rehabilitation/nursing home and there are so many college professors in there that have gone Looney. Some think they are aliens and others have gone Looney in other ways
As the saying goes, there is a fine line between the genius and insanity.
Re:they seem to go crazy (Score:5, Insightful)
The moment the article talked about the school year as a factor, I knew it was pretty much a bullshit article written by someone who THINKS they know what professors do. I work in a research lab with professors (I'm not one of them, I'm a software engineer) and teaching classes is not even the main part of their job. My boss loves teaching and wishes he had MORE time for it, but can't teach but maybe one class per semester because of research time, lab management, grant proposals, and other commitments.
Re:they seem to go crazy (Score:4, Insightful)
My boss loves teaching and wishes he had MORE time for it, but can't teach but maybe one class per semester because of research time, lab management, grant proposals, and other commitments.
That RIGHT THERE should tell us how fucked up the US university system is... When a professor's job of teaching is secondary to everything else, what has become of a university? Is it nothing more than a high-end Government research lab (with free/low cost lab techs called students), or should it get back to the original goal of learning and teaching?
Re:they seem to go crazy (Score:5, Informative)
I don't give you my last mod point, because then I can not post, sorry.
Totally understood. Academia has gone totally bonkers since the pea counters took over. I have been in academia (with many interruptions) since 1980. And what used to be a science-oriented employment basically decided on by the requirements of science, has become a business organisation with decision-making essentially done on economic principles.
At my age I can surely say that we have experienced a total rear entry into capitalism. And from my experience I can surely deduce the lack of serious progress in the light of a betterment for mankind. Science - or what is called so - has become a fast-lane; a boiler-like heating up of tiny, partially scientific non-results, for immediate harvesting opportunities in almost exclusively business-oriented areas.
My boss, a full-tenured professor, works any minute he does not sleep. Per hour, his salary is probably in the range of that of a janitor. Which would not matter to me, if I were in his position, if only the work was academic work. But it isn't. I bet that 90 percent of his work is menial work, administrative work, sitting in committees, haggling over money.
This applies similarly to most universities world-wide. The stress is on to be ranked among the top universities, and at the same time to generate a continuous flow of income to the university. And to cater for ever larger numbers of ever less prepared students.
Grad students? (Score:2)
Re:Grad students? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hey, what about us drones, man?
Don't worry, you are Forbes' target audience: the under $50K/year crowd that needs to be taught how capitalism is good for you in the long run.
As always, they'll run an article next year about how you are on a great track and maybe one day will be earning $120K/year. So please don't join Occupy Wall Street, just concentrate on not getting drunk at your next Christmas party or something.
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So please don't join Occupy Wall Street,
Because OWS is going to change anything?
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In my opinion, they definitely shifted the politics of the country more to the left.
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IMO By just being in the news so much, their ideas get absorbed over and over again in the public consciousness. The same principle as used in advertising. Repeating an idea over and over again is nebulous force, difficult to fight against with a logical argument, but definitely present and can be extremely powerful. Especially the way they did it, showing mobs of people all in agreement of *something*, which provokes the "me too" instinct. Even if that *something* is not logically consistent, or even compl
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Thats why the republicans only got 1% of the vote too, idiot.
Perhaps the REST of us has realized that the democrats are anti-middle class. Our taxes went up, especially if you undergo extensive medical treatments. They are attempting to outlaw the ability for us to protect ourselves while increasing the number of their amred guards. Hell, this week alone the middle class got a 2% tax increase while Obama took a $20 million dollar vacation to Hawaii.
Republicans lost the election and lost the popular vote for President.
And Democrats in the House won the popular vote, just not the majority of districts.
Re:Grad students? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Grad students? (Score:5, Insightful)
So please don't join Occupy Wall Street,
Because OWS is going to change anything?
I doubt they'll change anything. But Forbes seems to prefer you don't think about changing anything beyond having a better relationship with your boss.
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Wanted: Really Smart Suckers (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-04-20/news/wanted-really-smart-suckers/ [villagevoice.com] ..."
"Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off. Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air.
Or also:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science [greenspun.com]
"The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
1. age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
2. age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
3. age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
4. age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
5. age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s
This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.
Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias. "
For ways beyond that, see my online book:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html [pdfernhout.net]
Or this book by Jeff Schmidt:
http://www.disciplinedminds.com/ [disciplinedminds.com]
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[...] Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air. ..."
See second paragraph: "The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:"
...emphasis mine, which kind of explains the rest. Being a Humanities PhD? The tech equivalent is kind of like being a a PMP-certified project manager now, or being MCSE-certified admin in 2001. There's too many out there, more on the way, and so the market has no room for you.
Now if you have a PhD in chemistry, engineering, or a field where there is some chance of using it to get a kick-ass job out in private industry? Suddenly your chances of landing a solid job in academia (esp. with industry/applied experience) isn't so dismal, and any uni with a half-intelligent leadership know that in competing w/ the outside world, they have to offer something at least half as attractive.
As a graduate student in chemistry, I have to say that your naiveté is charming. It's not as bad as the humanities, I'm sure, but even with tenure an academic scientist is in a constant struggle to keep their job. Not as in, "If I keep doing my job well, everything will be fine," but, "If I keep doing my job well, spend all of my time writing for funding and am lucky enough to be in the 6% of applicants that are funded, I'll keep my job until the grant runs up."
In chemistry, at least, Academia does not
the least stressful career (per dollar) is (Score:2, Insightful)
Judge on the state bench. They get fat salaries (usually well over $100K), pensions, the usual perks of state employees (vacation and sick day carryovers etc), and many have lifetime tenure on top of that.
Re:the least stressful career (per dollar) is (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny how what was once normal for all American workers - paid time off - now only largely remains in public sector jobs, but instead of the public asking why their paid time off was taken away or how they can get it back, the public is asking how they can take it away from the last remaining jobs that still have it.
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Dear God, my neighbor has a cow. I have none.
Please kill my neighbor's cow.
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The reality is TANSTAAFL, the private sector is hurting, and the public sector needs to tighten its belt accordingly.
Thank you for demonstrating so precisely the mental pathology OP was talking about.
Re:the least stressful career (per dollar) is (Score:5, Funny)
Judge on the state bench. They get fat salaries (usually well over $100K), pensions, the usual perks of state employees (vacation and sick day carryovers etc), and many have lifetime tenure on top of that.
Except that once in a while someone is screaming that they want to kill you.
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Except that once in a while someone is screaming that they want to kill you.
That seems to be a perc of pretty much any job in the US at least.
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I think you can take any job where you have to deal with the public and toss it into the "stressful" heap. I worked at a refreshment stand one summer and hated people by the end of it. But I think a job where you sentence people with fines or jail time will get more than it's share of stress.
Maybe engineers should be in the non-stress category. What's the Douglas Adams quote? "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
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but some Judges can be voted out.
These guys should try working in a video store (Score:2)
Randal Graves: Some guy just came in refusing to pay late fees. Said the video store was closed for two hours yesterday. So, I tore up his membership.
Dante Hicks: Shocking abuse of authority.
Randal Graves: Hey, I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class. Especially since I rule.
--Clerks
I don't understand this world (Score:5, Insightful)
So, if we are so productive, what are we producing and for who?
If our technology is so advanced, why do we need to work so much?
What happened to the leisure society concept?
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In the 19th century, surprisingly few people had iPads, flat screen TVs, two cars, and, heck, indoor plumbing.
They could also look forward to yellow fever, polio, dying before the age of 50, no warning on hurricanes, and nobody caring about your civil rights if you were female, colored or non-Christian.
Other than that, it was heaven.
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people work longer hours than ever and households now require both parents to work just to get the same level as single income families in the 1960s
Well, it's actually quite simple. First, we have a lot more stuff, of much higher quality, than was available in the 1960s. Technically, it's a 1959 model, but I'm sure you'll spot me one year for this [youtube.com] video of a 1959 Chevrolet Impala in an off-angle collision with a 2009 Impala. Our houses are much, much larger. We have cable and air conditioning and cell phones and computers and DVRs and giant flat televisions that hang on the wall. So that's part of it.
The other problem is the Red Queen effect of women'
Re:I don't understand this world (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I don't understand this world (Score:5, Insightful)
You probably aren't going to enjoy reading this, but labor unions played a big part in people having things like weekends, time off etc.
As to why people are working longer hours despite being more productive you might want to consider that many people are doing more than one employee's job so that the rich people who own the orgs ( know as "job creators" ) can profit more by hiring few people.
Re:I don't understand this world (Score:4, Funny)
Commie! Terrorist! Why do you hate America?
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When you expect strawmen rather than reasoned discussion, its a sign youve been on slashdot too long.
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And what restrictions were in place when the system got bailed out? NONE. The entire banking sector was bailed out because for the rich upper class, them getting ousted from power was not a "politically acceptable outcome".
They didn't want a repeat of the 1930's and the rise of unions and strife, so they did the safe thing to protect capitalism once again. So please spare me your rhetorical bs. We already socialism already, just for a minority. You'd have to be a moron to deny the "gifts" Mr wolff was
Comes down to metrics used (Score:5, Interesting)
Since when.. (Score:3)
..is "drill press operator" a job all its own? I haven't been to a single machine shop or factory where they have one person who's only job is to run the bloody drill press. If there was such a person he would be forever in the way of everyone else who had work to do.
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Production environment, with people using drill presses to pop holes in using pre-built drill jigs and possibly fixturing to hold down the work depending on the size and other factors.
It has died down in recent years due to lower volumes being produced in North America, combined with CNC machines making drilling part of the same process instead of a additional step, but some higher volume items are still done this way in this part of the world.
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Re:Since when.. (Score:5, Funny)
..is "drill press operator" a job all its own?
It's code for male porn star.
Profs these days don't know how good they have it (Score:3)
When I was a prof, we taught in a cardboard box by the side of the road . . .
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You had a cardboard box! We only dreamed of having a cardboard box! We had to lecture in a hole in the ground, writing on the dirt with a rock. Every night our department chair would thrash us to sleep with his belt.
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ALL WE HAD WERE TELETYPES AND PAPER TAPE
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
If this were to be done in a meaningful way... (Score:5, Insightful)
It just bothers me to see people spinning up myths and expending so much energy in debate that is so fact-free.
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Well, they would have done that, but then they'd have had to get some of those lazy good-for-nothing professors to come down from their ivory towers to do the study.
Doctor living on food stamps (Score:3, Insightful)
The story in the link of the "Doctor living on food stamps" is about a Ph.D. in medieval history who is an adjunct professor at a community college teaching only two courses.
This isn't exactly a normal professorship, she's not even working full time.
The other story about '100 hour work weeks' isn't talking about professors at all, it's talking about grad students. If you want me to feel sorry for the stresses of being a grad student, yeah I do, but once they become professors it's not the same.......
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What are you going on about pointing out issues in TFA? You're not going to get anywhere arguing about points in it.
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Re:Doctor living on food stamps (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't exactly a normal professorship, she's not even working full time.
Unfortunately, this has become EXTREMELY normal. There are lots and lots of people teaching part-time because colleges and universities want to hire cheap part-timers rather than pay more for full-time professors. Some drive long distances between different schools so that they can teach enough courses per semester to actually live on the combined income.
If you don't know this is happening and commonplace, you are simply ignorant of the situation. But the moron at Forbes who wrote the article should have at least done a tiny bit of research to find out about it before writing such utter crap.
fundamental misunderstanding of what academics do (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that many non-academics believe that the primary job of college professors is teaching undergraduates, and so they see any time not in the classroom as "time off" (never mind that the ratio of classroom prep time to classroom time can approach 1:1 if you really care about doing it right). In some institutions this is much of what college professors do, but in most schools that have any pretentions of being a research institution, academics are expected to produce publishable scholarship. Scientists and engineers spend much if not most of their time in the lab; humanities profs tend to work less collaboratively, but still spend a lot of hours reading, researching, and writing in whatever their field is. Most schools will give lip service to the idea that working with students is the most important thing, but in reality most of the incentives are geared towards producing quantifiable amounts of research (so many books, so many published articles, etc.). Far from having semester breaks "off," professors often use this time to focus more intently on their research, and sabbatical years are generally used to polish off major works of scholarship. On the surface, it can seem like this is work you're doing for you rather than for your job -- after all, it's your name on the book, and you take your reputation with you if you jump to another school -- but this work is one of the university's primary missions, and it's what they're paying you to do, as it reflects back on htem.
It's also worth nothing that in those schools where teaching undergrads really is the primary mission, professors spend much more time in the classroom than the stereotype discussed in the Forbest article (i.e., 3 or 4 classes a semester as opposed to the two typical of a research institution).
Finally, there's an awful lot of diversity within academia as to what professorial workload is like. In particular, more and more academics are being hired on interm or adjunct bases and end up spending a lot more time in the classroom for a lot less money than what tenured and tenure-track profs get. The irony is that the way to get onto the tenure track is to publish impressive research, but the lower-level jobs often don't allow you the time to do it.
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"On the surface, it can seem like this is work you're doing for you rather than for your job -- after all, it's your name on the book, and you take your reputation with you if you jump to another school -- but this work is one of the university's primary missions, and it's what they're paying you to do, as it reflects back on htem."
And most universities own everything created by their professors.
Welcome to Big Data Research (Score:2)
Welcome to Big Data Research, where the algorithms can't lie. Actually evaluating the stressors of real jobs using scientific methods is so old-school. And if the outcome appears incorrect we just need a bigger database...
It is difficult (Score:3)
As a college professor, you have to teach new things to people who already know everything. That does sound really hard to do.
The true answer: "It depends" (Score:4, Insightful)
My experience: I worked for 15 years as an engineer, mostly at startups, and then went back for a PhD and became a professor of computer science; I'm up for tenure next year so this post is anonymous. I'm at a research university - not a top-tier one, but good enough that I'm expected to bring in significant grant funding and do leading edge research or I won't get tenure. It's more stressful than the startups I worked at, although not horribly so. (i.e. they weren't a walk in the park...) Some of the factors adding to the stress:
(1) Deadlines. Conferences and grant submissions have strict, non-negotiable deadlines which typically only get altered for natural disasters. I've yet to see an industry deadline that didn't have some wiggle room. (including salespeople doing a song and dance while you fixed the last bug for a demo)
(2) Competition. I went from being an irreplaceable member of a team (at most of my employers, at least) to a situation where 500 people would apply to replace me if I lose tenure. In addition, if I messed up at a previous job I could go somewhere else and try again, while you really only get one shot at an academic career.
(3) Politics. Fixed-sized organizations (schools, universities, hospitals) tend to have nastier politics than organizations which are planning to grow, because every person who gets ahead means someone else loses out. Look up Sayre's law on wikipedia, although I'm not sure academia is the worst offender in this area - google "nurses eat their young" for a non-academic example. (note that my department is actually quite decent in this area)
(4) Teaching. Half your work (i.e. teaching) has strict deadlines several times a week, and the other half has long-term goals measured in months or more. It's all too easy to let teaching expand to 100% of your time, which means there's another 50% that has to get done when you should be sleeping instead.
(5) Funding. In a research field, getting funding is crucial - in CS it's mostly to pay the PhD students who actually do the work. It's not as much work as getting funding for a startup, but the amounts are far smaller and you have to do it for your whole career.
(6) "Service". Serving on the hiring committee and wading through those 500 job applications. Serving on the admissions committee and wading through a zillion grad school applications. Reviewing papers for conferences and journals. Flying to Washington to review grant proposals for the NSF or NIH. Other than NSF reviews, where you get a per-diem and can make a bit if you skimp on the hotel, the rest is of course all unpaid.
Once you get tenure, you can in theory sit back and do almost nothing. The worst your department can do is not give you raises, make you teach an extra class or two (including all the night and summer classes no one wants to teach), give you a bad office, and deny you any grad students. I can think of plenty of worse jobs, but none that are so hard to get. I think the only reason the tenure system works at all is because it mostly weeds out anyone who has so little self-respect that they'd be satisfied with this, which means back to the rat race again. If someone slips through who is willing to sit on their butt, it's a mess.
Note that I can't speak for other fields. In computer science (and many other technical fields) the competition is shaped by the fact that almost anyone involved could drop out and get paid more. You don't worry about student loans (beyond undergraduate) in these fields, because your grad school was paid for by someone else's research grants. There's a general consensus about what constitutes research, which is shared to a large extent by the broader public. In other words, I'm the exact opposite of an English professor in many ways...
So am I happy with my career choice? Yes. Just like pro athletics, the reasons it's stressful are the same reasons people choose the career in the first place - because you're trying to compete with other people who are the best. I gave up nearly half a million in salary to go back to grad school, and would be making nearly double what I'm making today, but I might also be saying "I could'a been a contender..." instead of actually going for it.
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If you want to overwork yourself, take lots of research projects with deadlines, and go intop university politics it can become a very stressful career, though. It is a matter of choice. A choice you often do no
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Good luck getting a decent job in academia with that attitude. If you want to qualify "being a professor" as "being a lazy professor with a low salary at a crappy school that doesn't care about teaching or research," then sure, it's easy. But couldn't that be said for any career? "Being a lazy programmer at some low level company that doesn't realize how shitty you is really not stressful at all. Therefore, being a Programmer is one of the least stressful jobs possible."
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it is most stressful because you typically work 12-15 hour days, including weekends and holidays
This doesn't match any professor I've ever met.
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Re:Choice (Score:5, Informative)
Bullshit.
Suppose you choose not to make your academic career stressful. Here's what happens: if you're a grad student, you won't graduate and will have wasted your twenties. If you graduate, you can relax and take a cush job at a cash-strapped community college where you will earn peanuts and always be on contract. But say you keep working: if you've busted your ass as a grad student (say published a few papers a year in top venues), you can compete to be in top 5% that manage to get tenure track jobs. If you relax after getting the tenure track job, you can rest assured you'll be looking for work once your tenure is denied after a little more than half a decade (this means you're fired). Suppose you kept on working and now have the tenure track job-- that's great, except universities are cutting tenure positions so you better hope your department isn't on the chopping block. Oh, and you still have to write grants or you won't get funding. So after fifteen to twenty years of running yourself into the ground and relying mostly on luck, the job becomes as stressful as a NORMAL job. Oh yeah, I forgot to include working as a post-doc while waiting for a tenure track position; it's becoming much more common to pursue several post-docs.
In conclusion, you are an unrepentant moron who is ultimately detached from reality.
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In conclusion, you are an unrepentant moron who is ultimately detached from reality.
Then you get a job on Wall Street or run for a House seat in Congress.
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Suppose you kept on working and now have the tenure track job-- that's great, except universities are cutting tenure positions so you better hope your department isn't on the chopping block.
Please provide examples of a university cutting the position of an existing tenured faculty member for financial reasons (without cause, in other words).
What they generally do is not allow OPEN/VACATED faculty lines to be filled - but that's not remotely the same thing.
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Suppose you choose not to make your academic career stressful. Here's what happens: if you're a grad student, you won't graduate and will have wasted your twenties.
I've seen an awful lot of grad students coast through their degrees, even in science: advisor writes the hypothesis, designs the experiments, massively revises (or writes outright) the papers. I've seen students roll in at 11am, putter around the lab until 6, and go home. For years. If you ask these people, they generally have the impression they're working hard, that they're busy all the time, and under constant performance pressure, but the reality is they're coasting. Now, those people may not be on
Re:Choice (Score:4, Informative)
Now, teaching 3 or 4 classes a semester may not be "relaxing," but it is less than 15 contact hours per week. Once you've taught the classes a couple of times, got the powerpoints made and the lectures down, that doesn't have to be very stressful. Be a good performer, put on a good show/lecture, and you'll get tenure.
What universities and fields offer tenure positions for just instructing 3 to 4 classes a semester? At the places I've worked, you would get maybe $2-3k per course you instructed, with no guarantee you would be rehired the next semester. As more tenure track professors retired, the number of people being paid as instructors like this has grown to the point of being the majority of how course instructors are paid at some places. To get tenure, you had to climb the ladder several years of successfully pulling in grant money and getting recognized for research, while hoping that there would still be a possible tenure position when you get that instead of some budget freeze preventing it, or the department deciding they want use the few tenure options on a different subfield, so as to not even give you a chance.
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Here's an easy analogy: being a professor is pretty similar to running a small business. You attract funding, you manage cash flow, you pay your employees and you produce goods (ie. in the case of a professor, the goods are research output). If you don't do these things well, your lab will go bust, just like a business would. Nobody would argue that being a business owner is stress free even though you don't have a boss breathing down your back, so why would being a professor be stress free?
Re:Choice (Score:5, Insightful)
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We don't have deadlines? Hahahahahahaha. Oh my.
No deadlines? (Score:3)
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Re:Choice (Score:5, Informative)
Ridiculous. Around 70% of all college courses are now taught by contingent faculty. These faculty have no offices, no long term contracts, and no support. The average pay for these courses is $2k to $2.5k. Speaking from a humanities viewpoint, a majority of the phds we produce will never land a job as a professor. In my particular discipline, it is common for there to be 6-10 jobs per year in any given subfield with 100-300 applicants per job. "Chances are you will succeed" is not the phrase that should describe the situation. Chances are very grim indeed. I advise all of my undergraduates not to go into academia and I give dire warnings to those that do.
Once an academic has a job, they can then expect to work 60-80 hours per week for the first five to six years. This will decrease over their career if they get tenure and take their foot of the gas, but with budget cuts and cut-throat competition for funding, that's not a wise idea. Quite simply, you have no idea what an academic job entails.
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Hear, hear. I worked a couple years teaching part-time at a community college and I can certainly vouch that as easy at teaching looks from a student's perspective, it's not. Not by a long shot. Doing an even halfway decent job was one of the most brutal jobs I ever had, and I didn't even have to deal with all the unpaid "extracurricular" responsibilities that are expected of those on the tenure-track, research not the least of it. There is certainly something to be said for the large amount of unstructu
Re:Choice (Score:5, Informative)
That sounds right. I work at least 5 hours every Saturday and Sunday. I get to my job between 8-9 each day and leave around 5. I then do about 3-4 hours of work at home each evening, except Fridays.
Re:Choice (Score:5, Informative)
Many of us got into academia because in addition to enjoying teaching we thought:
All of these have since gone down the tubes. Even in non-tenure track jobs, one has to do advising and committee work (at least at our school). The next big thing is to teach evenings and weekends because that's more convenient for students. I'm already doing that, and it means that one can't actually go anywhere or do anything. My wife, who is an adjunct, is a facing a 35% pay cut plus a 30% increase in course load in a Pennsylvania State school. Generally, I always have overload and can't say no, or they'll get someone else. And that 12 hour a day thing, that's peanuts. Around here, I get home from work and fire up the laptop to grade papers and respond to emails until about 11pm. I've been working over X-mas "break" almost constantly, writing reference letters, doing two new preps for next term, and dealing with last minute grade changes from last term. The only day I actually got to take off was X-mas day when we went to see the Hobbit. Most of my colleagues are basically in the same boat.
One of my buddies with a Ph.D. got hired out of his adjunct job by a chemical engineering company. He says he's now making about twice as much, can't take his work home (yea!), sees his family in the evenings and on weekends, and gets more true vacation.
Almost nobody I talk to outside of academia has any idea of what life is really like. The Forbes journalist comes off as being completely out of touch.
Forbes is very out of touch (Score:3)
Just throwing in my 2 cents of agreement. I work at a tech school that has essentially laid off nearly all of their full time faculty. This means the adjuncts (i.e., me) have to pick up the slack, and I can't very well say no because (1) they will just find someone else if I do not, and (2) they will consider me "not a team player" and give me less of a workload in the future.
I am doing essentially the same amount of work as a full time faculty because of the course load I have, but do not get any benefits
Re:Choice (Score:5, Informative)
No, chances are that you'll fail, because you will never get tenure if you take a low-stress, laid-back approach to the job, unless you're at a community college perhaps. The academic career is completely organized around deadlines and management: the NSF grant application deadlines, conference paper deadlines, hiring grad students and postdocs, etc. In CS at least, if you don't bring in substantial funding, crank out many publications, and support a large-ish lab of students and postdocs (who you have to pay for!), you won't get tenure, and therefore won't have a job very long.
Re:Choice (Score:4, Insightful)
Here are the actually stresses in a job. Will I be working tomorrow. If I don't work tomorrow, am I getting paid enough so I can save money, or will I get a severance of unemployment sufficient to get to me to the next job. Before the wingnuts go off on me, I am not saying that anyone deserves these things, only that these things do lower stress.
One way to get a lower stress job is to get the education and training so that one can get a job that has less competition. Fo instance, we expect teachers to have college degres and most of the time no felonies, and an ability to not kill the children who have nothing better to do than to attack teachers. This is a very large pool of people, but not as large as say an office manager. An office manager is a very important job with it's own set of requirements that limits the pool, but an office manager will likely start at less of a salary than a teacher, and will be more likely to less job security.
This is why we have all these people getting MBAs, so they can enter what is a much smaller pool of people who can be executives. What is interesting is that all these people are buying MBA, but hardly anyone goes into a wekkend doctoral program. I do not see many people who want to be a professor because the money is good and the work is easy. I mean I know many managers who have an house and an expensive car and get home before 5pm. Professors OTOH may be teaching classes at 7. I am in a univeristy class where the professor teaches from 7 to 8.
It is true that a professors schedule can be flexible, and they can make it harder or easier. What I don't agree with is that as a group, those with masters or higher do not often have the same flexibility. I don't have the flexibility to take just any day off to get errands run, but many managers I know do.
As I said, this is Forbes, and anyone who is not pushing papers is going to have an easy job. I am sure they would say that wprking at a car wash is easy, simply because they have no conception fo what real work is. That is producng a real product that will drive profit, not just taking a percentage off a trade, or leveraging the arbitrage.
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You make some good points, but, I think, miss a few things. Yes, an executive may be a low-stress job at some times - but it's a heck of a lot of work to get there for most (look at Jack Welch's biography, for instance - interestingly, he actually did have an earned Ph.D and considered teaching). You don't get hired to the top job without having proven yourself first (sometimes, I'm sure, nepotism comes into play, but it does anywhere and one would expect it to be less likely in C-level positions that need
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Assistant professor is a very busy, very stressful position. Once you reach Associate, though, you've got a guaranteed paycheck for the rest of your life. "Stress" regarding how you're remembered and whether your latest venture will be successful and bring you wealth is NOT equivalent to what people in the real world are feeling - will I have a job next year, how am I going to pay for rent and food after this month's medical bills, etc.
Good grief, at our university faculty were angry that their annual salar
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There's a difference between knowing about a topic and delivering 30-45 detailed lectures on it, tailoring it to the learning needs of students, etc. It IS easy to be a bad professor, but it's easy being bad at anything. "Programming is easy. You just learn a few programming languages and then it's all just retyping stuff you already know. Pretty easy way to make good money."
Further, "good money" is a questionable statement. Putting aside the 70% of faculty who are contingent (making $2k-$3k per course), yo
Re:Professors (Score:4, Insightful)
Speaking as a professor in the humanities, you have no idea how awful the job market is. In my discipline (history), you can expect 6-10 decent jobs per year to come open in each subfield. There will be 100-350 applicants for each of these. Getting to the point where life as a professor is "easy" requires either very low standards (you don't care how much you're paid) or going through a few decades of grueling, underpaid, 60+ hour work weeks. It's a great job, but anyone who declares that, as a profession, being a professor is "easy" and not stressful has zero understanding of academia.
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Mod parent up - professors complaining that their jobs are more stressful than others are doing so without any rational basis for comparison if their academic career didn't have any gaps while they did other jobs.
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professors complaining that their jobs are more stressful than others are doing so without any rational basis for comparison if their academic career didn't have any gaps while they did other jobs.
So, you think professors' parents name them "Doctor" when they're born?
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Actually, wouldn't "student teacher at the university" (given the horror stories we get about grad students and the pressures put on them), give something quite similar, or even worse?
I'd also argue that even simply being a student in academia gives at least some degree of insight - certainly more than being say, a customer of a car repair joint.
Bull. Shit. (Score:4, Informative)
After I graduated, I worked for a while as a student teacher at the university. When I'd been doing it for a while, a professor came up to me and said, "Isn't this great? It's such a nice job and you get 4 months of the year for vacation!"
Professors don't get 4 months of vacation a year. Not even remotely close. Most professors are on continual cycles of grant writing just to keep their jobs. The top federal agency for research grants runs three cycles per year, and most professors who do work in the relevant areas are submitting at least once or twice per year (twice generally being the most one can do as the review process takes longer than the time that passes between cycles).
In other words, you are making shit up. Professors don't get 4 months of vacation per year. Not even remotely close.
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Unlike you, I actually gave a source for my statement.
You quoted a person who you did not name, at a time you did not state. You could very well have made up the quote, as it has no reflection on reality.
It is real
Just because you say so?
Do you have a source
I work at a university. I interact with actual living, breathing, faculty members on a daily basis. I know what they go through to keep their jobs. If you want a source, you can start by looking at the funding numbers at the NIH - particularly the rates of acceptance for grant applications and the rate of awards in dollar amounts
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And then some pinhead in administration decides it's time to change textbooks to something that suits their particular ideology or vi
Re:Special snowflakes (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey guyz guess what? I've worked *plenty* of 50-60 hour workweeks and holidays. Deadlines all over the place. Pressure to perform. Stress levels off the map, schedules, budgets, and meetings.
At a construction company. As a labor crew leader.
Note to professors: It's called "the real world", deal with it.
Note to you: anywhere where people live is the real world.
I've held a fairly wide variety of jobs in my life: Army infantryman, Air Force medic, civilian EMT, web developer, programmer, DBA, teaching assistant, research assistant, graduate research fellow. (Next, hopefully, comes the remainder of the academic track: postdoc, assistant professor, associate professor, professor ... if I'm lucky, and I reach the endpoint before "corpse" appears on the list.) So far, my working life has been about equally divided between military, industry, and academia. You know what? None of these fields is any less "real" than any of the others. In every single one of them, I've had to deal with long hours, unreasonable demands, and the feeling that I'm never getting paid quite enough. You know, like damn near everyone else in the world. And paying attention to the way my advisor and other faculty members live, I don't expect this to change until (if) I retire.
We academics understand perfectly well that other people in the world have hard jobs too. All we ask is that other people recognize that our jobs are, first and foremost, jobs, like anyone else's. And if you're not willing to do that, then just take your "real world" self-righteousness and shove it up your ass.
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And yet, apparently, despite all your work, you still have time to post on the internet accusing people of not working hard enough because they post on the internet.