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Things I did wrong as a professor (2016)
- chrisseaton 9y agoWow this guy seems so incredibly young to be a professor! Did he get a professorship right after finishing his PhD?
- shubb 9y agoLooks like he's about 45, which is extremely young to be a professor, but still leaves a 10 year gap between phd and tenure. I think he just looks very young.
- greenburger 9y agoIn the US tenure track university faculty typically have three ranks: Assistant Professor (upon hire and prior to tenure) Associate Professor (typically awarded at tenure) and Full Professor. All of these ranks are referred to as "professor", in fact, non-tenure track faculty as also frequently referred to as professor.
- newen 9y ago45 is definitely not extremely young to be a professor. Not in the US, where you start as assistant professor. I know plenty of PhD's who graduate and start in a university as assistant professors, age range starting at around 26. My advisor started at 28.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- timdellinger 9y ago2002 PhD granted 2002-2003 Senior Researcher, Intel Research (Berkeley) 2003-2011 Harvard according to his latest webpage at http://www.mdw.la/ http://www.mdw.la/
- dracodoc 9y agoFirst with 4 years as assistant Prof. From the CV: Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science July 1, 2010 July 1, 2011 Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Computer Science July 1, 2007 June 30, 2010 Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Assistant Professor of Computer Science July 1, 2003 June 30, 2007 Intel Research, Berkeley Senior Researcher August 2002 July 2003
- dgacmu 9y agoYes - at the time Matt graduated, this was still the norm in CS. Things are changing and it's becoming more common to do a post-doc, but it's still not unusual to go directly (in the US).
- chrisseaton 9y agoWhere do they go from there if they're already a professor from day one? Is there no promotion? In the UK you won't get to be a professor until your forties, and many people never do.
- sjg007 9y agoYou start at assistant professor.
- scott_s 9y agoTo further clarify: The UK has the distinct titles "reader" and "lecturer" before "professor." In the US, if you have a PhD and you're teaching a college class, you're called a professor, even if you're an adjunct (not tenure track). The tenure track titles are "assistant professor", "associate professor" and then just "professor." Informally, we tend to use "professor" to refer to all of them, and it's common for people to say "Professor Doe" even if the person is an assistant professor.
- chrisseaton 9y agoOh sorry I did know that I remember now. Here professor is quite a distinguished title, and while it isn't legally protected, I've never seen it used for anyone except a very senior academic who has been formally appointed as a professor.
- tnecniv 9y agoThe US still has lecturers (who normally have PhDs), but the title is different from the UK one.
- vxNsr 9y agoAs others have said in the US if you're teaching a class in a university or college you're generally called a professor. I definitely used that title for all my teachers throughout my college career.
- crescentfresh 9y ago> There were times when I felt that my airline status was more important to maintain than my marriage Oh my, I hope the marriage still survived if it was meant to.
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoRead the lyrics to "American Dream" by Casting Crowns sometime. It's sobering. You can lose your family for stuff like this, and it's not worth it.
- purple-dragon 9y agoAnecdotally, I'd say these aren't just mistakes he made; these are systemic problems I see with academia (I can only speak from my experience in the US). Every professor I know under age 40-45 did or does these things. Among its many causes are peer pressure, fear (of competition, of missing out), tenure anxiety, hubris, and "tradition".
- skosuri 9y agoIt depends. I'm still under 40, and many of the things he considers mistakes I don't (yet). That said, three of the things on the list I've been able to avoid, and I think it's made the rest easier. 1. I was lucky to get a bunch of money early, and stopped spending a lot of time writing grants after the first year. 2. Made a conscious decision to not travel excessively, spend time at home, and vacation for all sorts of family reasons. That said, I've used twitter to supplement the backroom chatter I am missing and that's worked well enough 3. I initially took a lot of committee work but have backed off a ton in the last few years. I do run a pretty big group, though I've downsized a bit (now 8 Phd, 3 postdocs, many undergrads). We work on too many things and most are pretty ambitious, but that makes it fun. I wouldn't change that much honestly. Maybe I need a few more years before I regret everything, but things are pretty good IMO, but again, I think you need a few chips to fall your way before things become manageable (e.g., like early grants).
- bsder 9y agoFunny how "Get large amount of funding" solves most problems in most fields ... Glad it worked out for you, but "hit the lottery" is, unfortunately, not a viable strategy.
- niyikiza 9y agoGetting a research grant is not "hitting the lottery", it's being recognized for your previous work and having people believe that your new proposals make sense and that you have what it takes to carry on your new ambitions.
- KKKKkkkk1 9y agoWhen I interview and they ask me "Tell us about your biggest flaw" or something along those lines, I too always answer that it's that I'm too ambitious and that I work too hard.
- baxtr 9y agoIf I get asked this question, I always stop intentionally as if I’ve never been asked this before, look out of the window (if there is one), then look back at the interviewer and say - with lots of pathos: well, I guess I’m too much of a perfectionist
- vog 9y agoYes, that's the classic standard response to this question, because it makes a kind-of positive outcome. But, really, isn't this the only kind-of positive response to this question? Is there any other response that works this way? And hence, why are interviewers asking this question in the first place? I pretty sure they know they will always get some variant of "I'm a perfectionist" as response, because that's the textbook answer to this textbook question.
- baxtr 9y agoI had one guy who was serious about this and I learned a lot through that: he sincerely asked this, but differently: “What are the things you are working on to be better at?” At first, I was kinda startled and couldn’t answer really, tried to bullshit him like the answer I gave above. He called it though and said that he is disappointed by such an answer and that he’d expect everybody to work on 2-3 things. Otherwise, he concluded, there is a lack of introspection to be assumed. Fair point, I thought
- wott 9y agoIntrospection is analysing oneself, it does not mean taking actions about it, IMO.
- basseq 9y agoThis has parallels to professional life as well: 1. Working on too many projects at once. I joke with my team that "we're never short on problems". It's tempting to hear about something interesting and want to be involved—or worse, feel like you should be involved. It's very hard to say no. 2. Taking on high-risk projects with factors out of my control. If there's one thing I'm good at, it's setting expectations. But combined with #1, handling too many projects mean you never have time to properly think (and mitigate) the risks. 3. Taking on too many students. You could flip this to "growing too fast," though that's not a problem I've personally had. There was a culture of mentorship at my previous company, which a pressure to take on mentees. Similar... 4. Wasted too much time courting companies for money. Probably an analog into the startup scene, but again, not a problem I've had. 5. Way, way, way too much travel. / 6. All the boondoggles. Forget travel, the core message here is opportunities. The author says, "I found it hard to avoid this trap because you think, well, saying no means you're not going to get asked to do the more important thing next time." Oh man, do I agree. And I agree that most of the time it's a moot point. But there's something to be said for "visibility" and there's a 1-10% chance that the one "boondoggle" you sign up for ends up yielding an opportunity you wouldn't have had otherwise. This is my major personal and professional issue, and I haven't solved it yet, either.
- eli_gottlieb 9y agoHonestly, this sounds like a "reverse any advice you hear" sort of situation. Welsh did too much. However, from many people's perspective, Too Much is exactly what you have to do to succeed in academia. You would really need a retrospective survey from those granted tenure to actually calibrate how much Too Much is a healthy margin to move up in your job, versus how much is actually way too much and harms your prospects. (I'm assuming that to some degree it will harm your health. This is unfortunate but true in most competitive fields.)
- aseoijef 9y agoAs an N of 1, a professor with tenure, I think he's exactly right about being wrong in what he did, from the perspective of what is rational in the overall scheme of things. However, what he did is exactly what a professor is expected to do, from the perspective of promotion. I've read his essay before, and it touches a nerve, only because it's so revealing of how broken academics is. Everything Welsh says was wrong is wrong for all the reasons he says it is. The irony is that he seems to blame himself, when he should be blaming the standards of academics. Everything he says about grant writing, conferences, etc. being irrational is true.
- bachmeier 9y ago> Too Much is exactly what you have to do to succeed in academia I won't dispute that statement with respect to his situation. Academia is very broad, and the expectations at Harvard are rather different from most of academia. At many academic institutions you can have a life and get tenure.
- jimhefferon 9y agoI think that statement is getting less true every year. Increasingly, for instance, we seem to only hire people who would be tenurable today. So people are thinking they need to have a number of papers, etc., before they get a PhD. It is an accelleration and a person wonders if it doesn't result in people churning out stuff because it it publishable, rather than because it is worthwhile. And when you reward that, that's what you get.
- monksy 9y agoAt what point of this does he comment on the quality of his ability to teach students and lead them to become incredibly successful? This sounds more of a professional researcher than a professor.
- purple-dragon 9y agoDing ding ding. That's probably my (recovering academic) number one complaint with modern academia.
- deong 9y agoWell, he does talk about having too many PhD students to really mentor them well. For better or worse, TT professors at modern R1 universities aren't really there to contribute to undergraduate education. They're there to do research and to mentor graduate students.
- throwawayjava 9y agoThis criticism is unfair for many reasons: 1. Advising is teaching. In fact, advising is the majority component of an R1 teaching load! So, he DID discuss the teaching component of his job. A lot. 2. In terms of classroom teaching, he was probably teaching 1-2 courses per year at Harvard. So classroom teaching really wasn't the majority component of his job. It's unsurprising that he didn't spend much time talking about this minority component of his job, in the same way that it's unsurprising when a developer talks primarily about writing/reading/testing code rather than the ~20% of their workday activities that are something other than writing/reading/testing code. Of course, one hopes that developers introspect on their effectiveness in various meetings, when talking to clients or internal stakeholders, and so on. But you'd be unsurprised if a dev, discussing their biggest mistakes during their first few years, focus on code-related mistakes. 3. Maybe he felt good about his non-advising, classroom teaching? The title of the post is "everything I did wrong", not "a summary of everything I did".
- monksy 9y ago> classroom teaching really wasn't the majority component of his job. It's the title of the job: Professor.
- yitchelle 9y agoThe funny thing about these type of thought exercise is whether you would be a better person? I am who I am because of all the mistakes I have made, because of all the crisis I went though during my projects, because of the laughter and satisfaction in my life so far.
- divbit 9y agoUnless you have like a beachfront university, no one should be spending more than ~ 20-21 hours a week at actual working (commute included). Slight caveat 1. once decent VR gets here, and you can make it to a reasonably nice VR beach from home, sort of like in that Valerian movie... but more MMO style. Slight caveat 2. if your work is really fun or (reasonably) progresses the state of humanity to where no one really needs to work / everyone is supermodels / environmental and social problems are all solved etc. (I say this with out considering it that deeply, but it's probably right.)
- danieka 9y agoThe author mentioned not taking on too much risk and avoiding straying to far from the lab. When I studied CS I was never that excited with the pure, abstract CS-bits. I was a lot more interested in how we could apply those bits in the real world to affect change in peoples lives. Volcano sensors may be high risk, but may also have a lot more impact than more theoretical/abstract work. That being said, I'm grateful we have researchers interested in the theoretical stuff, otherwise practical guys like me wouldn't have anything to apply. So it's important to realise that while "minimise risk" might be good advice for the author, for another researcher "maximise real-world impact" might be sounder advice.