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The examples given highlight the three sucky things about academic jobs: (i) less money than top-tier alternatives, (ii) insane competition at the start of your

The examples given highlight the three sucky things about academic jobs: (i) less money than top-tier alternatives, (ii) insane competition at the start of your career, and (iii) difficulty maintaining work-life balance if you want to be successful. ii and iii are the big issues for me (and obviously interwoven.) While it's not an original observation, one aspect of ii) that is especially bad is that most people probably have a distorted perspective on how good they are when they are starting out. The pool you will actually be competing with is probably much stronger than you realized. In discussing some of these issues with a friend of mine, he said that he thought a good solution would be to substantially cut graduate enrollment and fill the labor gap with an increase in staff scientist positions. I think there's a lot to recommend that, but I can't say I see it realistically happening.

crpatino 12y ago
It is impossible for Universities to cut down graduate enrollment. Professor productivity is defined primarily in terms of two measures: how many papers you authored (notice I avoided using the word wrote) and how many advanced degree students you graduate. Having a big pipeline of graduate students to help you achieve both goals is fundamental for success. Also, Professors are tasked with multiple responsibilities that add little, if anything, to their perceived productivity as measured by the University. The most time consuming of those is usually lecturing undergraduate classes. Having an even bigger pool of graduate students where to offload time consuming activities associated with the class (primarily T.A.s and L.A.s but also people never met by the class doing support work like slide preparation, library searches, capture of results in brain-dead software platforms purchased by Uni's managers not doing any teaching themselves, etc) will allow you to concentrate in your research and do things that really matter (a.k.a. athoring papers and advising future PhDs).

crpatino 12y ago

It is impossible for Universities to cut down graduate enrollment. Professor productivity is defined primarily in terms of two measures: how many papers you authored (notice I avoided using the word wrote) and how many advanced degree students you graduate. Having a big pipeline of graduate students to help you achieve both goals is fundamental for success. Also, Professors are tasked with multiple responsibilities that add little, if anything, to their perceived productivity as measured by the University. The most time consuming of those is usually lecturing undergraduate classes. Having an even bigger pool of graduate students where to offload time consuming activities associated with the class (primarily T.A.s and L.A.s but also people never met by the class doing support work like slide preparation, library searches, capture of results in brain-dead software platforms purchased by Uni's managers not doing any teaching themselves, etc) will allow you to concentrate in your research and do things that really matter (a.k.a. athoring papers and advising future PhDs).