4 ms·

Your "summary" is bullshit and has completely distorted the article. You're not just biased, you're also completely misinformed. > You haven't really developed

by pbiggar 14y ago

Your "summary" is bullshit and has completely distorted the article. You're not just biased, you're also completely misinformed. > You haven't really developed any skills that are useful, and now you are going to be paired up with some 25 year old that has 3 years of experience more than you do at 30. More likely, you've spent 3-6 years coding, learning to communicate, and work well in a team. > This is all going to make you very depressed since you are facing 50 hour weeks doing work you don't really care about, instead of 9 hour weeks doing only what interests you in Academia. Most recently hired academics on a tenure track work 80 hour weeks. You've got to teach course, mentor research students, write grant proposals, and produce research. If you don't, you're out the door. Imagine I were to suggest that because you're a dropout, all you're good for is saying "do you want fries with that?" That's about the level of what you've done with your comment.

bnegreve 14y ago
I think justin_vanw wanted to show that the article was not really informative. I agree with that, I haven't learnt much by reading it.
- pbiggar 14y ago
  Oh, if that's the case I overreacted. Sorry justin_vanw!
  - pbiggar 14y ago
    It turns out I did not overreact. Apology rescinded, you do not know what you're talking about.
justin_vanw 14y ago
Tenure track profs work 80 hours per week? Really? They work from 8AM to 8PM, 7 days per week (taking only a 15 minute break each day to eat)??? This doesn't seem likely, since they would be completely burned out after only a few months, and you would have diminishing returns after the first week. If you are really working 80 hour weeks then you are being incredibly foolish and wasting a lot of time being completely unproductive due to exhaustion. But, of course, you don't really mean 80 hours, you were just exaggerating a bit to make your point. Fair enough, lets say profs are putting in (I'm assuming a proper research university where tenure track professors teach 3-4 classes at most) 12 hours lecturing each week, for 30 weeks per year. That's (at most) 360 hours of teaching, per year. Lets say you spend 2 hours per week preparing for lectures (you should know this stuff already, but lets say you just need time to get organized). That's 60 hours, yearly. Now, lets say you spend 4 hours every day working on research. Everybody probably would like to spend more, but some days you have to see friends or your wife/husband or kids or get your car fixed or whatever. That's 4 * 365, which is probably a huge overestimate for most people, but that's 1460 hours per year. Now, as for writing grant proposals, or mentoring students, or whatever else, nobody believes you are spending any serious time (more than 5 hours a week) on that. I don't know how long you really spend on it, but I'm going to assume that you aren't writing more than 1 grant proposal per month, so I'm going to just say that I gave very optimistic and too-high estimates for everything else, so this will get rolled in as overhead. So you're doing (drumroll) 360 + 60 + 1460 = 1880 hours of work per year, all but 420 of which is just thinking about the problems that interest you most. If you work in industry, you are spending 220 * 9 = 1980 hours per year working on stuff that are not the things that most interest you, and almost none of it is blue-sky thinking of any kind. Want fries with that? Edit: With my really crazy overestimates on how tenure track profs spend time, averaged over a regular work schedule it is 42.72 hours per week, of which 9.5 is anything at all besides pure 'research'. Odd that, it's within .5 hours per week of my original guess, and I swear I didn't cook the numbers to come to that.
- daleroberts 14y ago
  I think you're seriously underestimating the amount of work we need to do...
- AlisdairO 14y ago
  I'm friends with several lecturers, and while they don't work 80 hours a week, it's fair to say they work substantially longer hours than I do. That's fine, they generally enjoy their jobs and get to do interesting things (as well as deal with a lot more bullshit than I do). You're utterly crazy if you think they spend only 10 hours a week on non-research activities. As an outsider, your estimates are finger in the air at best. How can you possibly know you've covered all their activies?
- liedra 14y ago
  Wow, your hours on preparing lectures, grant proposal writing, dealing with students, etc. are all way underestimated. A solid grant proposal that is likely to get funded (often in a super competitive field with maybe 8% acceptance rate) can take well over 2 months of solid preparation. Of course we don't actually get 2 months of solid preparation time, what with all the other stuff we have to do. My workload as an early career academic is roughly 10% on a funded project, 20% "research", i.e. grant/paper writing, 5% on a couple of committees I am on, and the rest teaching, with roughly half of that supervisions of PhD/Masters students. For my masters students that equates to about 6 hours of meetings and reviewing their stuff over 3 months of their project. Most of my colleagues and I burn through that in the first month. So what do we do for the other 2 months? Well it's not like we can shut up shop and say "welp, sorry, but you've used all your allotted time" because that'd be terrible. So we continue to give whatever amount of time we feel is necessary (within reason). Anyway it's not as simple as you've broken it down to be. Things ebb and flow over the year too, students need more mentoring at certain times of the year than others. Grant proposals, conferences, special issues journals all have deadlines and calls. My week is extremely varied and I'm still working on juggling all the different hats and priorities I have. I have a full load right now over summer even without teaching; when teaching starts up again I'll have to do all the stuff I'm doing now (bar masters student supervision) while doing roughly 25% of my allotted time teaching undergraduates. Anyway, just another perspective.

by pbiggar 14y ago

bnegreve 14y ago

I think justin_vanw wanted to show that the article was not really informative. I agree with that, I haven't learnt much by reading it.

pbiggar 14y ago
Oh, if that's the case I overreacted. Sorry justin_vanw!
- pbiggar 14y ago
  It turns out I did not overreact. Apology rescinded, you do not know what you're talking about.

justin_vanw 14y ago

Tenure track profs work 80 hours per week? Really? They work from 8AM to 8PM, 7 days per week (taking only a 15 minute break each day to eat)??? This doesn't seem likely, since they would be completely burned out after only a few months, and you would have diminishing returns after the first week. If you are really working 80 hour weeks then you are being incredibly foolish and wasting a lot of time being completely unproductive due to exhaustion. But, of course, you don't really mean 80 hours, you were just exaggerating a bit to make your point. Fair enough, lets say profs are putting in (I'm assuming a proper research university where tenure track professors teach 3-4 classes at most) 12 hours lecturing each week, for 30 weeks per year. That's (at most) 360 hours of teaching, per year. Lets say you spend 2 hours per week preparing for lectures (you should know this stuff already, but lets say you just need time to get organized). That's 60 hours, yearly. Now, lets say you spend 4 hours every day working on research. Everybody probably would like to spend more, but some days you have to see friends or your wife/husband or kids or get your car fixed or whatever. That's 4 * 365, which is probably a huge overestimate for most people, but that's 1460 hours per year. Now, as for writing grant proposals, or mentoring students, or whatever else, nobody believes you are spending any serious time (more than 5 hours a week) on that. I don't know how long you really spend on it, but I'm going to assume that you aren't writing more than 1 grant proposal per month, so I'm going to just say that I gave very optimistic and too-high estimates for everything else, so this will get rolled in as overhead. So you're doing (drumroll) 360 + 60 + 1460 = 1880 hours of work per year, all but 420 of which is just thinking about the problems that interest you most. If you work in industry, you are spending 220 * 9 = 1980 hours per year working on stuff that are not the things that most interest you, and almost none of it is blue-sky thinking of any kind. Want fries with that? Edit: With my really crazy overestimates on how tenure track profs spend time, averaged over a regular work schedule it is 42.72 hours per week, of which 9.5 is anything at all besides pure 'research'. Odd that, it's within .5 hours per week of my original guess, and I swear I didn't cook the numbers to come to that.

daleroberts 14y ago
I think you're seriously underestimating the amount of work we need to do...
AlisdairO 14y ago
I'm friends with several lecturers, and while they don't work 80 hours a week, it's fair to say they work substantially longer hours than I do. That's fine, they generally enjoy their jobs and get to do interesting things (as well as deal with a lot more bullshit than I do). You're utterly crazy if you think they spend only 10 hours a week on non-research activities. As an outsider, your estimates are finger in the air at best. How can you possibly know you've covered all their activies?
liedra 14y ago
Wow, your hours on preparing lectures, grant proposal writing, dealing with students, etc. are all way underestimated. A solid grant proposal that is likely to get funded (often in a super competitive field with maybe 8% acceptance rate) can take well over 2 months of solid preparation. Of course we don't actually get 2 months of solid preparation time, what with all the other stuff we have to do. My workload as an early career academic is roughly 10% on a funded project, 20% "research", i.e. grant/paper writing, 5% on a couple of committees I am on, and the rest teaching, with roughly half of that supervisions of PhD/Masters students. For my masters students that equates to about 6 hours of meetings and reviewing their stuff over 3 months of their project. Most of my colleagues and I burn through that in the first month. So what do we do for the other 2 months? Well it's not like we can shut up shop and say "welp, sorry, but you've used all your allotted time" because that'd be terrible. So we continue to give whatever amount of time we feel is necessary (within reason). Anyway it's not as simple as you've broken it down to be. Things ebb and flow over the year too, students need more mentoring at certain times of the year than others. Grant proposals, conferences, special issues journals all have deadlines and calls. My week is extremely varied and I'm still working on juggling all the different hats and priorities I have. I have a full load right now over summer even without teaching; when teaching starts up again I'll have to do all the stuff I'm doing now (bar masters student supervision) while doing roughly 25% of my allotted time teaching undergraduates. Anyway, just another perspective.