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The Least Stressful Job for 2013? A Real Look at Being a Professor in the US

48 points by jvdh 14y ago

eli_gottlieb 14y ago
My adviser is rather lucky: he commutes to Technion via carpool, which puts a strong limit on the amount of time he can spend in the physical office everyday. Of course, he works plenty from home, but physical office-time limits things like committee drag and teaching load. And we get TA's here.
patio11 14y ago
I'm related to a few professors, and they largely carry massive chips on their shoulder about this. For example: And for those of us whose research directly translates to the real world (e.g., in my case — persuasion, crisis communication, strategic communication), the so-called professionals look down their overpriced noses at us. That means that even if we did want to move back to the ‘real world’ — we have to basically apologize for our PhD, our time spent training them (Where do they think new professionals come from? Are they hatched?), and kiss their asses for handouts. So, basically until we write our book and ‘become’ a pundit or consultant later in our careers we’re stuck because Americans are scared of smart people. is a great example of the genre. There's huge amounts of rank jealousy directed at classmates who took a look at the (readily available) evidence of what a PhD's career track looked like and decided against it. (Amazingly, despite hearing terrible complaining about the stresses of tenure-track professors every time I meet my family, they always ask "So when are you going to grad school?")
- tellarin 14y ago
  That doesn't mean what she describes is not painfully true.
- kulkarnic 14y ago
  Yes, they may complain about society/"industry" not caring enough, and that's mostly because it is true. Let me offer an analogy: when veterans are badly treated, everyone's angry because society isn't valuing their contribution enough. If scientists and professors contribute at least as much (and think of how far we've come in just the last 50-odd years), I think it's fair they're miffed if you trivialize their jobs as "least stressful" when they're not.
  - bthomas 14y ago
    Agree directionally, but comparing professors to veterans is tough. People get mad that veterans can't get any jobs, or end up homeless with PTSD.
- jibjaba 14y ago
  I'm sorry but this is a very ignorant assessment. I spent 5 years doing research in academia and none of the professors on our team had as easy of a work life as 99% of the software developers I have worked with do. I am in no way criticizing developers, being a professor is just damn hard and very stressful in comparison. The demands of the sink or swim nature of academia, the need to be constantly seeking grants, teaching classes, participating in running the department and being an active member of their research area (organizing conferences, editing journals, etc.) are enormous. A good academic is expected to do all these things and do them well. I grad school I was mostly a night person and so would frequently be at school around midnight. So would several professors on our team, except they would also be there at 8:30 in the morning every day, and work at home on the weekends. In the 7 years I have been a developer I have never seen a workplace that puts as much demands on it's employees. Not even close.
  - carbocation 14y ago
    Your comment doesn't strike me as being in tension with patio11's. Rather, it seems to underscore his point.
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  There's huge amounts of rank jealousy directed at classmates who took a look at the (readily available) evidence of what a PhD's career track looked like and decided against it. The problem being that in most of the natural or social sciences, there are few job-options for researchers, or even for applied scientists, outside of the Academic-Governmental scientific complex. Yes, yes, yes, everyone is about to point out their favorite example of a profitable industrial firm doing Real Science. Very nice for you at Microsoft Research or your chosen pharmaceutical company. Problem is, those companies can only afford to do a small piece of the total research load every year, and only in subjects where research can translate into profits in the next 10 years or so. So it becomes a decision of society's values: should scientific research be done without a prospect of profits in the next 10 years? And at the moment, most people hate being so much as confronted with a question like that, let alone actually paying taxes and engaging in the political-budgeting process to make sure allocations to science happen so that scientists can do their/our jobs.
_dps 14y ago
The article, without being wrong exactly, is responding to a non-point while missing what I consider to be a deeper problem (disclosure: was very briefly a professor, now founding a startup, which is much more stressful for me ;-). CNBC: "Being a professor is the least stressful job." Article: "The first 7 years until tenure are hard." Overlooked Fact: For the remaining 30+ years of your career, you have unbeatable job security, summers without any externally imposed obligations, sabbaticals, and the option to "take a slow year with your research" should you decide to have children, or have a family/personal emergency, or just want to, you know, live life and see the world. Additional Speculation: The majority of people have a very tenuous understanding tenure to begin with, and CNBC may have elided "tenured" in their article for simplicity; it was, after all, a fluff piece designed to generate ten page views to deliver ten paragraphs of text :-). In any case, the much bigger problem faced by aspiring professors is not the tenure process itself; it's that normal labor market mechanisms are strained-to-broken for several structural reasons: 1) Regional oligopolies of reputable schools almost everywhere outside of Boston (and Boston, while having several reputable schools, is still much more full of, say, reputable law firms). This means that it's hard to have a lot of negotiating power if you're not willing to uproot your life and move to another city. 2) Another large switching cost arises from having your research program embedded at a particular school (students, lab equipment, grants, participation in "centers", that are all hard to move). 3) Universities don't directly capture value from professors' work, with the important exception of collecting grant overhead. This exacerbates 1, because as a candidate your argument is "I'm great" and not "You will benefit" 4) Because of 3, hiring is bottlenecked by "slots" in a department, rather than by being able to find people who have net-positive ROI. 5) Because of 3 and 4, it's quite possible that highly qualified candidates will float around the labor market as post-docs until a "slot" opens up at a suitable school. I have directly seen colleagues choose to delay their Ph.D. defense for a year because they knew that there were a lot of highly impressive post-docs already competing for the few slots in their field that year, and they wanted to wait for a more opportune time. 6) Again because of 3 and 4, the already existing time-scale imbalance between institutions and individuals is exaggerated. "Not quite sure if a candidate is a good fit? Just wait another year. No big loss. We only have the one slot after all." 7) Highly discontinuous payoff curves: the present value of switching from untenured to tenured is hard to estimate, but I'd put it at upwards of $1M (see my calculation [1] in case this sounds implausible). There's no obvious way to hand out fractional tenure, and once you have it most of the university's negotiating power is gone, so universities have (rationally) evolved mechanisms to maximize the value they extract until then. [1] My calculation: 1) assume your market consulting rate is $150/hr 2) model tenure as the option to "slack" by only teaching ~10hrs/week for full salary and doing no other work 3) assume $100k/yr salary 4) so tenure allows you to work 10 hrs/week for $100k, rather than the $75k you'd make consulting 5) ergo, tenure can be made to simulate a risk-free $25k/year income stream 6) it's hard to get $25k/year risk-free without investing something like $1M, but obviously this depends on interest rates
idm 14y ago
Doubtless this poll is capturing the essence of something interesting, but when I look at that list of professions, a host of statistical moderators come to mind. I claim this list isn't measuring what they think it is measuring. I think the reason "professor" ranks first is that the compensation seems to be proportional to the responsibility, whereas most other jobs appear to under-compensate. People are sensitive to this, but they misattribute it as "lower stress." Well, the job itself (professor) is really hard, but the lifestyle (everything outside work) is really great. It's a great damn job. That's different from being "stressful." Where does the stress come from? Well, I bet the HN community knows professors better than most, but between publication and grant writing, there's a ton of professional evaluation that directly impacts your quality of life. Your personal and private lives will blend much more than in other professions, and being rejected professionally (i.e. being denied a major grant) will mess with your personal life as well. There's no free lunch here.
edtechdev 14y ago
Pre-tenure, it all boils down to just being above average on 3 numbers: * how many journal articles have you published * how much grant money are you bringing in * what is the average rating you get from students Interestingly, there does not appear to be much validity behind those numbers. Higher student ratings, for example, actually negatively correlate with student learning: http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/scarrell/profqual2.pdf http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/scarrell/profqual2.pdf http://listserv.aera.net/scripts/wa.exe?A2=AERA-L;6767f510.1105 http://listserv.aera.net/scripts/wa.exe?A2=AERA-L;6767f510.1... And the 'impact' of journal articles has been criticized more ways than I can count: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor#Criticisms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor#Criticisms I've seen blog posts with more impact than average journal articles. Lastly research grant money - I don't know the research on the impact of grant money - but in many fields, when you have an original, new idea, you usually get a smaller grant, maybe even just a seed grant at first (just like how little money startups usually get), or you do it on your own in grad school. The large grants are for large scale collaborations and scaling up of well-trodden ideas. 55% of the grant money doesn't even go to the research project - it goes to the university's administrative overhead.
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  Higher student ratings, for example, actually negatively correlate with student learning: Well... duh? Obviously students are going to give higher ratings to professors whose courses seem easier.
drblast 14y ago
Plus you have to add the 8-10 hours a week of complaining about all the sacrifices you're making to be a professor. That can really add up.
- jibjaba 14y ago
  HN needs down votes for crap like this.
  - glenra 14y ago
    HN has downvotes (and the post you refer to did get downvoted) but you don't get access to that feature until you have a certain level of karma.
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
A slightly tangential observation: I've had the good fortune to meet and work with people in all walks of life. Oddly, I've found the amount of stress they feel at work is hugely related to the type of personality they have. I'm not discounting external factors: surely those bomb disposal guys have it tough. But some folks just seem naturally sunny and light-spirited, while others seem to be on the verge of a monstrous breakdown. I've seen people who were stressed who were moved from a stressful situation to a much less stressful situation stay just as stressed as before. Perhaps, like weight, there is a "set point" for the amount of discomfort you feel in your job, and over time you can train yourself to become more and more stressed, regardless of the externalities? Beats me. Interesting subject, though. Definitely falls in the nature versus nurture arena.
- matwood 14y ago
  Good point. I tend to operate under a certain level of self imposed stress plus whatever actual stress there is with the job. Not monstrous breakdown type stress, but definitely a heightened sense of urgency most of the time. Personally, my self imposed stress comes from my desire to make things perfect and my fear of failure regardless of the job at hand. I attributed most of my personal stress to nurture, and the lack of a family to fall back on should I fail.
dfc 14y ago
"loads of us finish our Ph.D.’s (which is what you have to have to be a ‘regular’ professor) with between $75,000 and $160,000 in debt" The link/citation for this statement never mentions 75,000 or 160,000. In fact it says: "According to the National Science Foundation (NSF), individuals earning research doctorates in academic year 2009-10 did so owing over $20,400 on average in education-related debt, of which about $14,100 on average was graduate debt and about $6,400 on average was undergraduate debt" Granted this NSF data is limited to research doctorates but it certainly does not support the statement that "loads of us" have 75k to 160k of debt. Moreover the NSF data says that 52% of the research doctorate population graduated with no debt.
mitchi 14y ago
I just woke up from an all-nighter of correcting exam papers for my professor here. I'm being paid $15 an hour to grade all the homework assignments and the exams. I'm a regular teaching assistant at my university, I can usually handle the load of correcting assignments in time but correcting exams is actually the worst thing in the world. Depending on how the exam is made of course. If you care about being fair to everyone, you will usually have to backtrack through your first copies (when you were more severe) to add points. Any professors who grade their exams here? Do you use any heuristics (if you know what I mean) to correct faster? That being said, as you can see, professors in Canada can "offshore" the job of correcting to students. After that, you are left with the best part of the job. Preparing the course material, preparing the presentations and giving it every week. It's a high paying public sector job with 3 months of vacation and you can take a year off every 3 years with 80% salary. I'm in Canada though, I don't know how professors are treated in the US. I know that for students it's shit! Graduating with mountains of debt, I don't know if I could celebrate that.
- anonymouz 14y ago
  > It's a high paying public sector job with 3 months of vacation and you can take a year off every 3 years with 80% salary. Nobody in Canada does research then? No classes does not mean vacation.
  - mitchi 14y ago
    yea, I never said that. I was just describing what the vacations are. If you think that they don't do research you are partially right because of a lot them don't do it after their permanent status.
    - anonymouz 14y ago
      Do Professors really have three months of vacation in Canada? I assumed you meant 3 months without classes (which is totally different from vacation). I find it hard to believe that they would get 3 months of vacation. I am from Austria, and here and in some other European countries typically one has about 5 weeks of vacation per year, so 3 months sounds like a lot. How many weeks of vacation do other people in Canada have, for comparison?
lisper 14y ago
I was never in academia, but I was a researcher (at NASA) so I played the publishing game. And if you look at my record, I was relatively good at it. Not only was my publications list fairly long, but my work was also pretty widely referenced. But since my career no longer depends on it, I am now free to say that I credit my success almost entirely to gaming the system. This is not to say that I didn't do good work (I think I did), but there was virtually no correlation between what I thought was quality work and what I actually got rewarded for. The vast majority of my publications were minor tweaks on previous work that were specifically engineered to get past the program committees of key conferences. My best work (by my own quality metric) either went unnoticed, or could not get accepted for publication at all. When it got to the point where I was faced with a very stark choice between continuing to produce bullshit and get rewarded for it, or to do what I thought was good work and eventually get fired, I quit.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Industry isn't so different. My salary is determined by 2 days of interviews and negotiations, and only slightly perturbed by my performance over the next several years.
michaelochurch 14y ago
Academia's the biggest fucking scam there is. Look at the prize. Around age 35-40, if you work 80-hour weeks and don't make any mistakes, the prize is getting a job that you can't be fired from. Meanwhile, the same kind of exertion (and political luck) in finance or software will have you able to retire: not in luxury, but at a middle-class standard of living that could be described as "making your own tenure". Also, you get to live where you want, instead of rolling the dice on where in the country you will end up living. It's billed as "the life of the mind", but the reality is that a lot of the work is mindnumbingly boring: writing grant applications, grading papers, attending committees. Every industry has some boring work and vicious politics, but most industries are honest about it. In software, having been fired once because of political bullshit is par for the course. Yep, that happens. In academia, getting shot down for tenure is this huge mark of shame. Finally, the academic industry has a huge underclass of people who spend lots of time between adjunct gigs on teaching work that is viewed as a commodity and paid extremely poorly. I'm sorry, but this industry has sold out a generation and a half, while tuitions have shot toward the moon, and that's fucking inexcusable. University leadership: stop building fucking ziggurats and colossuses and get fund some goddamn research and teaching. In other words, do your job.
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with this bit: Meanwhile, the same kind of exertion (and political luck) in finance or software will have you able to retire: not in luxury, but at a middle-class standard of living that could be described as "making your own tenure". Also, you get to live where you want, instead of rolling the dice on where in the country you will end up living. In this realm, I really don't think software, finance and academia are all that different. You go where the work is, and on average, the best you can do is to nicely secure a comfortable, upper-middle class position for yourself with plenty of job security. You're right that being lucky enough to get a tenured position, but "applying that luck" to software or finance, can make you a millionaire. Problem is, that kind of luck is not a known probability on which we can set rational expectations. If I go work 80 hours/week at a software start-up, I can't expect even a 3% chance of becoming a millionaire. It's just not a random process with a set probability distribution. So you can't "apply your luck" to software instead of academia, because we're talking about two different kinds of luck.

48 points by jvdh 14y ago

My adviser is rather lucky: he commutes to Technion via carpool, which puts a strong limit on the amount of time he can spend in the physical office everyday. Of course, he works plenty from home, but physical office-time limits things like committee drag and teaching load. And we get TA's here.

patio11 14y ago

I'm related to a few professors, and they largely carry massive chips on their shoulder about this. For example: And for those of us whose research directly translates to the real world (e.g., in my case — persuasion, crisis communication, strategic communication), the so-called professionals look down their overpriced noses at us. That means that even if we did want to move back to the ‘real world’ — we have to basically apologize for our PhD, our time spent training them (Where do they think new professionals come from? Are they hatched?), and kiss their asses for handouts. So, basically until we write our book and ‘become’ a pundit or consultant later in our careers we’re stuck because Americans are scared of smart people. is a great example of the genre. There's huge amounts of rank jealousy directed at classmates who took a look at the (readily available) evidence of what a PhD's career track looked like and decided against it. (Amazingly, despite hearing terrible complaining about the stresses of tenure-track professors every time I meet my family, they always ask "So when are you going to grad school?")

tellarin 14y ago
That doesn't mean what she describes is not painfully true.
kulkarnic 14y ago
Yes, they may complain about society/"industry" not caring enough, and that's mostly because it is true. Let me offer an analogy: when veterans are badly treated, everyone's angry because society isn't valuing their contribution enough. If scientists and professors contribute at least as much (and think of how far we've come in just the last 50-odd years), I think it's fair they're miffed if you trivialize their jobs as "least stressful" when they're not.
- bthomas 14y ago
  Agree directionally, but comparing professors to veterans is tough. People get mad that veterans can't get any jobs, or end up homeless with PTSD.
jibjaba 14y ago
I'm sorry but this is a very ignorant assessment. I spent 5 years doing research in academia and none of the professors on our team had as easy of a work life as 99% of the software developers I have worked with do. I am in no way criticizing developers, being a professor is just damn hard and very stressful in comparison. The demands of the sink or swim nature of academia, the need to be constantly seeking grants, teaching classes, participating in running the department and being an active member of their research area (organizing conferences, editing journals, etc.) are enormous. A good academic is expected to do all these things and do them well. I grad school I was mostly a night person and so would frequently be at school around midnight. So would several professors on our team, except they would also be there at 8:30 in the morning every day, and work at home on the weekends. In the 7 years I have been a developer I have never seen a workplace that puts as much demands on it's employees. Not even close.
- carbocation 14y ago
  Your comment doesn't strike me as being in tension with patio11's. Rather, it seems to underscore his point.
eli_gottlieb 14y ago
There's huge amounts of rank jealousy directed at classmates who took a look at the (readily available) evidence of what a PhD's career track looked like and decided against it. The problem being that in most of the natural or social sciences, there are few job-options for researchers, or even for applied scientists, outside of the Academic-Governmental scientific complex. Yes, yes, yes, everyone is about to point out their favorite example of a profitable industrial firm doing Real Science. Very nice for you at Microsoft Research or your chosen pharmaceutical company. Problem is, those companies can only afford to do a small piece of the total research load every year, and only in subjects where research can translate into profits in the next 10 years or so. So it becomes a decision of society's values: should scientific research be done without a prospect of profits in the next 10 years? And at the moment, most people hate being so much as confronted with a question like that, let alone actually paying taxes and engaging in the political-budgeting process to make sure allocations to science happen so that scientists can do their/our jobs.

_dps 14y ago

The article, without being wrong exactly, is responding to a non-point while missing what I consider to be a deeper problem (disclosure: was very briefly a professor, now founding a startup, which is much more stressful for me ;-). CNBC: "Being a professor is the least stressful job." Article: "The first 7 years until tenure are hard." Overlooked Fact: For the remaining 30+ years of your career, you have unbeatable job security, summers without any externally imposed obligations, sabbaticals, and the option to "take a slow year with your research" should you decide to have children, or have a family/personal emergency, or just want to, you know, live life and see the world. Additional Speculation: The majority of people have a very tenuous understanding tenure to begin with, and CNBC may have elided "tenured" in their article for simplicity; it was, after all, a fluff piece designed to generate ten page views to deliver ten paragraphs of text :-). In any case, the much bigger problem faced by aspiring professors is not the tenure process itself; it's that normal labor market mechanisms are strained-to-broken for several structural reasons: 1) Regional oligopolies of reputable schools almost everywhere outside of Boston (and Boston, while having several reputable schools, is still much more full of, say, reputable law firms). This means that it's hard to have a lot of negotiating power if you're not willing to uproot your life and move to another city. 2) Another large switching cost arises from having your research program embedded at a particular school (students, lab equipment, grants, participation in "centers", that are all hard to move). 3) Universities don't directly capture value from professors' work, with the important exception of collecting grant overhead. This exacerbates 1, because as a candidate your argument is "I'm great" and not "You will benefit" 4) Because of 3, hiring is bottlenecked by "slots" in a department, rather than by being able to find people who have net-positive ROI. 5) Because of 3 and 4, it's quite possible that highly qualified candidates will float around the labor market as post-docs until a "slot" opens up at a suitable school. I have directly seen colleagues choose to delay their Ph.D. defense for a year because they knew that there were a lot of highly impressive post-docs already competing for the few slots in their field that year, and they wanted to wait for a more opportune time. 6) Again because of 3 and 4, the already existing time-scale imbalance between institutions and individuals is exaggerated. "Not quite sure if a candidate is a good fit? Just wait another year. No big loss. We only have the one slot after all." 7) Highly discontinuous payoff curves: the present value of switching from untenured to tenured is hard to estimate, but I'd put it at upwards of $1M (see my calculation [1] in case this sounds implausible). There's no obvious way to hand out fractional tenure, and once you have it most of the university's negotiating power is gone, so universities have (rationally) evolved mechanisms to maximize the value they extract until then. [1] My calculation: 1) assume your market consulting rate is $150/hr 2) model tenure as the option to "slack" by only teaching ~10hrs/week for full salary and doing no other work 3) assume $100k/yr salary 4) so tenure allows you to work 10 hrs/week for $100k, rather than the $75k you'd make consulting 5) ergo, tenure can be made to simulate a risk-free $25k/year income stream 6) it's hard to get $25k/year risk-free without investing something like $1M, but obviously this depends on interest rates

idm 14y ago

Doubtless this poll is capturing the essence of something interesting, but when I look at that list of professions, a host of statistical moderators come to mind. I claim this list isn't measuring what they think it is measuring. I think the reason "professor" ranks first is that the compensation seems to be proportional to the responsibility, whereas most other jobs appear to under-compensate. People are sensitive to this, but they misattribute it as "lower stress." Well, the job itself (professor) is really hard, but the lifestyle (everything outside work) is really great. It's a great damn job. That's different from being "stressful." Where does the stress come from? Well, I bet the HN community knows professors better than most, but between publication and grant writing, there's a ton of professional evaluation that directly impacts your quality of life. Your personal and private lives will blend much more than in other professions, and being rejected professionally (i.e. being denied a major grant) will mess with your personal life as well. There's no free lunch here.

edtechdev 14y ago

Pre-tenure, it all boils down to just being above average on 3 numbers: * how many journal articles have you published * how much grant money are you bringing in * what is the average rating you get from students Interestingly, there does not appear to be much validity behind those numbers. Higher student ratings, for example, actually negatively correlate with student learning: http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/scarrell/profqual2.pdf http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/scarrell/profqual2.pdf http://listserv.aera.net/scripts/wa.exe?A2=AERA-L;6767f510.1105 http://listserv.aera.net/scripts/wa.exe?A2=AERA-L;6767f510.1... And the 'impact' of journal articles has been criticized more ways than I can count: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor#Criticisms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor#Criticisms I've seen blog posts with more impact than average journal articles. Lastly research grant money - I don't know the research on the impact of grant money - but in many fields, when you have an original, new idea, you usually get a smaller grant, maybe even just a seed grant at first (just like how little money startups usually get), or you do it on your own in grad school. The large grants are for large scale collaborations and scaling up of well-trodden ideas. 55% of the grant money doesn't even go to the research project - it goes to the university's administrative overhead.

eli_gottlieb 14y ago
Higher student ratings, for example, actually negatively correlate with student learning: Well... duh? Obviously students are going to give higher ratings to professors whose courses seem easier.

drblast 14y ago

Plus you have to add the 8-10 hours a week of complaining about all the sacrifices you're making to be a professor. That can really add up.

jibjaba 14y ago
HN needs down votes for crap like this.
- glenra 14y ago
  HN has downvotes (and the post you refer to did get downvoted) but you don't get access to that feature until you have a certain level of karma.

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

A slightly tangential observation: I've had the good fortune to meet and work with people in all walks of life. Oddly, I've found the amount of stress they feel at work is hugely related to the type of personality they have. I'm not discounting external factors: surely those bomb disposal guys have it tough. But some folks just seem naturally sunny and light-spirited, while others seem to be on the verge of a monstrous breakdown. I've seen people who were stressed who were moved from a stressful situation to a much less stressful situation stay just as stressed as before. Perhaps, like weight, there is a "set point" for the amount of discomfort you feel in your job, and over time you can train yourself to become more and more stressed, regardless of the externalities? Beats me. Interesting subject, though. Definitely falls in the nature versus nurture arena.

matwood 14y ago
Good point. I tend to operate under a certain level of self imposed stress plus whatever actual stress there is with the job. Not monstrous breakdown type stress, but definitely a heightened sense of urgency most of the time. Personally, my self imposed stress comes from my desire to make things perfect and my fear of failure regardless of the job at hand. I attributed most of my personal stress to nurture, and the lack of a family to fall back on should I fail.

dfc 14y ago

"loads of us finish our Ph.D.’s (which is what you have to have to be a ‘regular’ professor) with between $75,000 and $160,000 in debt" The link/citation for this statement never mentions 75,000 or 160,000. In fact it says: "According to the National Science Foundation (NSF), individuals earning research doctorates in academic year 2009-10 did so owing over $20,400 on average in education-related debt, of which about $14,100 on average was graduate debt and about $6,400 on average was undergraduate debt" Granted this NSF data is limited to research doctorates but it certainly does not support the statement that "loads of us" have 75k to 160k of debt. Moreover the NSF data says that 52% of the research doctorate population graduated with no debt.

mitchi 14y ago

I just woke up from an all-nighter of correcting exam papers for my professor here. I'm being paid $15 an hour to grade all the homework assignments and the exams. I'm a regular teaching assistant at my university, I can usually handle the load of correcting assignments in time but correcting exams is actually the worst thing in the world. Depending on how the exam is made of course. If you care about being fair to everyone, you will usually have to backtrack through your first copies (when you were more severe) to add points. Any professors who grade their exams here? Do you use any heuristics (if you know what I mean) to correct faster? That being said, as you can see, professors in Canada can "offshore" the job of correcting to students. After that, you are left with the best part of the job. Preparing the course material, preparing the presentations and giving it every week. It's a high paying public sector job with 3 months of vacation and you can take a year off every 3 years with 80% salary. I'm in Canada though, I don't know how professors are treated in the US. I know that for students it's shit! Graduating with mountains of debt, I don't know if I could celebrate that.

anonymouz 14y ago
> It's a high paying public sector job with 3 months of vacation and you can take a year off every 3 years with 80% salary. Nobody in Canada does research then? No classes does not mean vacation.
- mitchi 14y ago
  yea, I never said that. I was just describing what the vacations are. If you think that they don't do research you are partially right because of a lot them don't do it after their permanent status.
  - anonymouz 14y ago
    Do Professors really have three months of vacation in Canada? I assumed you meant 3 months without classes (which is totally different from vacation). I find it hard to believe that they would get 3 months of vacation. I am from Austria, and here and in some other European countries typically one has about 5 weeks of vacation per year, so 3 months sounds like a lot. How many weeks of vacation do other people in Canada have, for comparison?

lisper 14y ago

I was never in academia, but I was a researcher (at NASA) so I played the publishing game. And if you look at my record, I was relatively good at it. Not only was my publications list fairly long, but my work was also pretty widely referenced. But since my career no longer depends on it, I am now free to say that I credit my success almost entirely to gaming the system. This is not to say that I didn't do good work (I think I did), but there was virtually no correlation between what I thought was quality work and what I actually got rewarded for. The vast majority of my publications were minor tweaks on previous work that were specifically engineered to get past the program committees of key conferences. My best work (by my own quality metric) either went unnoticed, or could not get accepted for publication at all. When it got to the point where I was faced with a very stark choice between continuing to produce bullshit and get rewarded for it, or to do what I thought was good work and eventually get fired, I quit.

Evbn 14y ago
Industry isn't so different. My salary is determined by 2 days of interviews and negotiations, and only slightly perturbed by my performance over the next several years.

michaelochurch 14y ago

Academia's the biggest fucking scam there is. Look at the prize. Around age 35-40, if you work 80-hour weeks and don't make any mistakes, the prize is getting a job that you can't be fired from. Meanwhile, the same kind of exertion (and political luck) in finance or software will have you able to retire: not in luxury, but at a middle-class standard of living that could be described as "making your own tenure". Also, you get to live where you want, instead of rolling the dice on where in the country you will end up living. It's billed as "the life of the mind", but the reality is that a lot of the work is mindnumbingly boring: writing grant applications, grading papers, attending committees. Every industry has some boring work and vicious politics, but most industries are honest about it. In software, having been fired once because of political bullshit is par for the course. Yep, that happens. In academia, getting shot down for tenure is this huge mark of shame. Finally, the academic industry has a huge underclass of people who spend lots of time between adjunct gigs on teaching work that is viewed as a commodity and paid extremely poorly. I'm sorry, but this industry has sold out a generation and a half, while tuitions have shot toward the moon, and that's fucking inexcusable. University leadership: stop building fucking ziggurats and colossuses and get fund some goddamn research and teaching. In other words, do your job.

eli_gottlieb 14y ago
I'm not sure I agree with this bit: Meanwhile, the same kind of exertion (and political luck) in finance or software will have you able to retire: not in luxury, but at a middle-class standard of living that could be described as "making your own tenure". Also, you get to live where you want, instead of rolling the dice on where in the country you will end up living. In this realm, I really don't think software, finance and academia are all that different. You go where the work is, and on average, the best you can do is to nicely secure a comfortable, upper-middle class position for yourself with plenty of job security. You're right that being lucky enough to get a tenured position, but "applying that luck" to software or finance, can make you a millionaire. Problem is, that kind of luck is not a known probability on which we can set rational expectations. If I go work 80 hours/week at a software start-up, I can't expect even a 3% chance of becoming a millionaire. It's just not a random process with a set probability distribution. So you can't "apply your luck" to software instead of academia, because we're talking about two different kinds of luck.