AdjunctOverload

Hilarious!
 
These two are my favorites of the older ones I've scrolled through:
 
"I checked to see if our galaxy’s chemistry could protect humankind from being nuked by an enormous stellar explosion. Bad news, everyone…"
~Astrophysics, University of Hawaii
 
 
"Someone, please, for the love of God, hire me."
~Historic Preservation, University of Oregon

One summary of what I'm working on could be: "Some big puffy planets might have bang buddies"

This kind of practice is unfair to the potential candidates--even when the interviews are scheduled weeks in advance.  MLA interviews sessions, depending on the school, are routinely for 40+ applicants.  Usually you get 5-15 minutes to make your case, with applicants coming one right after another, and with search committees in various states of exhaustion.  There are also the situations where search committees already have someone in mind, but they need to make the search look legitimate for the department/school or HR.  Is it worth $600+ dollars and traveling hundreds or thousands of miles for this "opportunity"?  Can you do this every year until you find a job/the perfect job? Probably not.
 
This practice also seems detrimental to the hiring institutions by excluding the qualified candidates that can't or won't drop everything and travel to the MLA conference.
 
Phone or Skype interviews would work just as well for this type of initial/first round interview.

This kind of practice is unfair to the potential candidates--even when the interviews are scheduled weeks in advance.  MLA interviews sessions, depending on the school, are routinely for 40+ applicants.  Usually you get 5-15 minutes to make your case, with applicants coming one right after another, and with search committees in various states of exhaustion.  There are also the situations where search committees already have someone in mind, but they need to make the search look legitimate for the department/school or HR.  Is it worth $600+ dollars and traveling hundreds or thousands of miles for this "opportunity"?  Can you do this every year until you find a job/the perfect job? Probably not.
 
This practice also seems detrimental to the hiring institutions by excluding the qualified candidates that can't or won't drop everything and travel to the MLA conference.
 
Phone or Skype interviews would work just as well for this type of initial/first round interview.

For the record, i'm the TA was who guilty of numbering students because I couldn't be bothered to learn their names.. In my defense, it's nicer than giving them nicknames based on their obvious traits.

Why I would go into academia:
 
1) Autonomy/Independence - I could choose my research topic and when I want to research it
 
2) Flexible Schedule - I would not have to work all day
 
3) Rewarding - I could help people learn
 
Why I would not go into academia:
 
1) Teaching - I dislike teaching.  I have taught before and I will hopefully not do it again.
 
2) Schedule/Routines - The work never ends.  Professors are always preparing for class, teaching, grading, or researching.  They also have to meet with students and deal with administration.  This means working on weekends and holidays.
 
3) Competition - It is really difficult to get a full tenured position at a university.  Universities are increasingly hiring adjunct lecturers because it is easier then giving someone tenure.
 
4) Meetings and administration - what juilletmercredi said
 
5) Niche - It is good to have a specialty.  But I also want the opportunity to explore new areas in my subject.  I am interested in international affairs, specifically the U.S.' relationship with Asian countries.  If I was in academia, I would probably have to become an Asian Studies or Political Science professor.  I do not want to limit myself to only knowing about Asian countries.

Why I would:

1) Autonomy/independence.  I get to determine what I work on, when I want to.
2) Flexibility of schedule.  I may have to work 80 hours a week, but they're any 80 hours I want!
3) Intellectually stimulating environment of the university.
4) Shaping young minds, I guess.  Helping to influence the future of my field.  I'd like to advise pre-health undergrads in their careers, and maybe advise new doctoral students one day.

Why I wouldn't:

1) I don't really like teaching.  Every time I get involved in it, I always think it's just distracting from my research, so I think that's a sign.
2) I would prefer some geographic mobility.  I don't want a job in a place I hate just for the opportunity to be an academic.
3) I prefer a more medium-stress lifestyle, and I don't want to fight for tenure.
4) Tenure doesn't appeal to me.  I don't want to be tied to one institution for my career; I want the freedom to move if I want to.  I know it's a bit harder to move on in academia when you're an associate or full professor unless you are prolific.
5) I don't want to pay my own salary through grants.  I would prefer a guaranteed salary.
6) Academia moves too slowly for me.  I want my research to go towards applied programs that will solve problems in the more immediate future.  I want to work on very applied issues and help people in the more proximal future.
7) I really don't want to run my own research lab.  It's not that I'm not a good manager, but I would prefer the structure of an established company rather than being, essentially, the proprietor of a small business.  I just want to worry about the science and not the money or the equipment or the space.  I would rather work on a team with other researchers at my level, all of whom have a particular skill set they bring to the problem at hand.  And I want to work for a corporation that hires other people to worry about the money and the equipment and the space and leave me to play with data and write papers.
8) I hate committees, and I hate meetings.  I realize that those happen in corporate, too, but from my (admittedly limited) experience, academia = endless pointless meetings whereas corporate seems to have mastered them a little better.
9) I like routines and predictability.  I know that I enjoy the flexibility of academia, but I also would not mind one bit working a 9-5 and knowing that at 5 or 6 or 7 pm I can drop everything and go home and not think about work the next day.
10) I like juggling multiple research projects at once, but I don't like juggling multiple tasks at once.  I want to be a researcher working on a variety of projects, but not a teacher, adviser, and researcher all at once.  I'm not really good at segmenting my time properly, and I've found that I waste a lot of time transitioning my brain from one task to the next.
11) I like to call myself a "research mercenary."  I am more broadly interested in public health research, but there are a wide variety of fields within that area that I am interested in.  I feel like if I became an academic, I'd be expected to dig a specialized niche within a particular area and burrow into that niche for the next 20 years.  But that's not what I really want.  I'd much rather be a semi-generalist, and know a little about a lot and a lot about one particular area of that lot.
12) Again, I have limited experience, but I find corporate bullshit more understandable than academic bullshit.  Corporations want to make money, and people in corporations work together to make money somehow.  Even in think tanks and policy institutes, the goal is to compete for government contracts and produce good end goals so that more agencies want to contract with you.  Government agencies and institutes produce research for the national good (theoretically) to serve priority areas.  But academic politics drive me nuts.  I always feel a little bit alienated around other grad students who really, really want to be academics.
13) I don't like conferences.  I know I will still go if I am in non-academic research, but they'll be less critical to my career (somewhat) and so maybe I will go to fewer.

Now I sound like a misanthropic academic, lol.

Yes, undergrads have wild misconceptions about what TAs/grad instructors are and what we do. Some believe that we're mini-professors; most don't understand that we hardly get paid anything to teach them. I've had a few tell me that they "pay my salary" as a kind of threat (which makes me laugh). I've heard others say that they believe their bad evaluation got a TA fired. As in: "So-and-so doesn't teach here anymore--it must be because I gave her a bad evaluation and got her fired!" No, dumbass. So-and-so probably just graduated and got a job somewhere else.