4 ms·

If you get lucky in academia you get the possibility of tenure track which is a made race to publish and that means not only doing your research, but grant writ

If you get lucky in academia you get the possibility of tenure track which is a made race to publish and that means not only doing your research, but grant writing, dealing with internal politics and discovering life as a manager of grad students... oh yea, and can you lecture these undergrads too?

chrisseaton 6y ago
This isn't what I see in practice. Most professional researchers at the level of being a professor teach a couple of masters lectures for topics they're genuinely interested in and the rest of the time enjoy working on their research.
- azalemeth 6y ago
  At Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, an explicit part of the system is that almost every senior academic teaches common, first/second-year "core" courses and spends a significant amount of time -- 6 or 12 hours a week in full term -- directly teaching 18-21 year olds. In addition to running a group and everything else. It is very rarely negotiable, and usually not.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  There's a significant gap between the experience of a bunch of elite research-oriented universities, and the vast majority of universities where the professors are not "professional researchers at the level of being a professor" but rather teaching staff that might try to get some minimal research done but don't get much support and aren't really expected to succeed. The professors we read about on HN are the exception rather than the norm. The median professor working in a mid-rank institution (not a top-100 institution, not even close to that) does have academic freedom, but most of their time is taken with non-research duties, they do not have an a research group under him/her as they do not have an active research grant which would fund that, and so the median professor does a very limited amount of research which comes out, if I recall the statistics correctly, to approx. 1 paper per year.

chrisseaton 6y ago

This isn't what I see in practice. Most professional researchers at the level of being a professor teach a couple of masters lectures for topics they're genuinely interested in and the rest of the time enjoy working on their research.

azalemeth 6y ago
At Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, an explicit part of the system is that almost every senior academic teaches common, first/second-year "core" courses and spends a significant amount of time -- 6 or 12 hours a week in full term -- directly teaching 18-21 year olds. In addition to running a group and everything else. It is very rarely negotiable, and usually not.
PeterisP 6y ago
There's a significant gap between the experience of a bunch of elite research-oriented universities, and the vast majority of universities where the professors are not "professional researchers at the level of being a professor" but rather teaching staff that might try to get some minimal research done but don't get much support and aren't really expected to succeed. The professors we read about on HN are the exception rather than the norm. The median professor working in a mid-rank institution (not a top-100 institution, not even close to that) does have academic freedom, but most of their time is taken with non-research duties, they do not have an a research group under him/her as they do not have an active research grant which would fund that, and so the median professor does a very limited amount of research which comes out, if I recall the statistics correctly, to approx. 1 paper per year.