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Math professor here. We are definitely expected (or at least encouraged) to write grants, but this is not such a big deal and most of my time is, as promised, d
by impendia 15y ago
Math professor here. We are definitely expected (or at least encouraged) to write grants, but this is not such a big deal and most of my time is, as promised, devoted to teaching and research.
IMHO the most two important drawbacks are (1) you will make less money than in the private sector and (2) unless you are really outstanding, you will probably eventually have to move to whatever random city to happen to find a job in. A large proportion of tech jobs are in places like SF Bay Area, Austin, Seattle, Boston. The same is not true of academia.
- _delirium 15y agoInteresting; I'm a CS prof., where you can sometimes get away with that, but increasingly the expectation is really that you'll be funding several students out of your grant money, and at some schools, funding a portion of your salary. Baseline to get tenure at a research-oriented university seems to be about $500k-$1m of grants during the 6-year assistant position (i.e. enough to fund an average of 2 PhD students per year over that period out of non-TA/dept money). It could be less in math because there isn't the same "lab" concept, where to be considered a "successful" professor you're supposed to oversee a lab of 3+ (better if it's 5+) PhD students, a post-doc or two, research scientists, etc.?
- impendia 15y agoYeah, thankfully this lab concept is absent, although it is always good to be advising grad students and postdocs. Most universities have tons of students who need to brush up on mediocre math backgrounds, which makes for a lot of paying work for math grad students.