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I'm glad to hear it's great for you. Being a tenured professor in a field with low overhead is great. However: The median undergraduate won't get to be a prof.

I'm glad to hear it's great for you. Being a tenured professor in a field with low overhead is great. However: The median undergraduate won't get to be a prof. The median grad student won't get to be a prof, however much they might wish to. In physics the median postdoc won't make it to prof. Too many postdocs. Not enough new profs. I went to a top grad school and made a bunch of friends. Of all my Ph.D.-holding friends I know of exactly one tenured professor. He recently graduated his first Ph.D. student, who promptly got a junior faculty position. He jokes that his work is done: All of his future grad students will be aimed at positions that don't exist yet. May never exist. I'm aware that being a successful prof seems like a fun job, just as I'm aware that being Lady Gaga is a silly and remunerative job. But when I advise anonymous people on the internet I try to advise the median person, and the median person ain't going to get tenure, just as the median musician isn't going to be Lady Gaga. Or is it different in your field? The physicists used to dream of easier advancement in math or CS, but the grass is always greener. Congratulations on being a winner, by the way. Have fun, and help your students have fun!

impendia 15y ago
Thanks! I will have fun. Is it different (in math)? Yes and no. There are a bunch of jobs teaching low-level courses (often 3 or 4 a semester) at teaching colleges, most of them in isolated locations, where little or no research gets done. Some people are happy to accept these, some don't want to and take industry jobs. I teach at the University of South Carolina, and with rare exceptions, our Ph.D. graduates work at these kinds of places. I don't know how other fields are, but it is typically predictable how well grad students will do. I think grad students usually know if they have a reasonable shot at making it big (or semi-big as in my case) halfway through grad school, so they don't have to go through eight years of crap to find out.

impendia 15y ago

Thanks! I will have fun. Is it different (in math)? Yes and no. There are a bunch of jobs teaching low-level courses (often 3 or 4 a semester) at teaching colleges, most of them in isolated locations, where little or no research gets done. Some people are happy to accept these, some don't want to and take industry jobs. I teach at the University of South Carolina, and with rare exceptions, our Ph.D. graduates work at these kinds of places. I don't know how other fields are, but it is typically predictable how well grad students will do. I think grad students usually know if they have a reasonable shot at making it big (or semi-big as in my case) halfway through grad school, so they don't have to go through eight years of crap to find out.