Life Post PhD

[ERR_Alpha]

http://mashable.com/2015/03/11/career-profile-college-professor/?utm_cid=mash-com-fb-main-link

 

I found this article and found it interesting, figured you all would like to see it.

 

I give anyone who finds this kind of life appealing a lot of credit- a lot of work for not a lot of thanks it seems!

[Cheshire_Cat]

It all depends on how you look at it
Tenure- If you are able to research well, then you have job security for life.
Research- You get paid to think about things and ask and answer questions no one else is answering.  It takes work, but so does everything else.  If you like to think about your interest and tell others about things you have found, then this can seem very appealing
Travel- You get to see the world. Conferences can be fun, and you will see a lot of different cities and talk to a lot of unique people.
Public speaking- Not only do you get to think about your interests all day, you also get to talk about them and tell other people about them.
Grants- No sugar coating this one.  Getting grants sucks.
Mentorship and personnel management- You get to be the boss and decide who works with you
Letter writing- People look up to you and want you to help them get a job
Graduate student mentorship- You have the great privledge of molding and shaping the next generation of researchers.
Committe work- it sucks too
Teaching- Teaching is good. Even this professor says that.

I think most jobs themselves can be good or bad, depending on how you view them. You can see the positives in your worklife, or the negitives, and whichever one you see will grow.  The only caveat is that if you have bad mangers even the best job can suck and there is nothing you can do about it.

[Wonton Soup]

I stopped reading at "Stanford's tenure system is a real review." Implying that their process is one of the few rigorous ones and other schools just dink and dunk around.

 

Typical Ivy League elitism. I wonder if he came in thinking that way or they slowly indoctrinated him. 

[fuzzylogician]

Aside from some annoying 'this is my perspective from my (very elite) position at Stanford' this is really very standard. You manage a research group (which includes making hiring decisions, advising students, writing grants, presenting and writing up your work, etc), you do various admin work (including LORs, committee work, etc), you teach. The degree to which each component is weighed for tenure varies across schools, but not by that much. There is a lot to do and not a lot of time, some (most?) of this is stuff no one teaches you in school, and the stakes are very high. That's just the life of a professor. 

[Crucial BBQ]

Is it even possible for a young prof so early in career to rack up that many air miles (assuming even if it were a gross exaggeration--nearly 1M)?

 

Or is that a perk of working at a HYPSM?

[fuzzylogician]

Is it even possible for a young prof so early in career to rack up that many air miles (assuming even if it were a gross exaggeration--nearly 1M)?

 

Or is that a perk of working at a HYPSM?

 

It seems far fetched but not impossible. Suppose that this is over 10 years, since this person is almost up for tenure and has probably been flying with high frequency at least since being a postdoc. Flying from the West Coast to e.g. Tokyo or Paris is about 5,000 miles. Both ways = 10,000. Divided over 10 years, it means 10 overseas trips in the course of one year. I am going to be traveling that kind of distance this year 6 times between January and July (I have no plans for later in the year yet, but more travel is possible and even likely), and I've also done 2500-3000 mile trips two additional times. So, doable, but terrible. Doing that every year for 10 years seems not sustainable. I can't imagine continuing at this pace once I have a permanent job. But maybe if you're a hotshot at Stanford, that's what you have to do. 

[ZeChocMoose]

When I read articles like this, I often wonder what the heck happened during this person's PhD?  It just reads to me like "this is the life of a tenured-track professor and  *surprise* I had *NO* idea?!"  

 

It just seems so odd to me that this person never had a discussion with their professors about the lifestyle of an academic and whether they thought they were well suited towards this type of career.  It just makes me wonder - did they think they wanted this and then when they had it, it wasn't for them?  Or did they go forward with this career path, but didn't really think about what it would mean once they were on it?  

 

I also wonder whether they had worked before in a professional capacity because some of these issues are not unique to academia i.e. travel, public speaking, committee work, mentorship and personnel management, and providing recommendations.  Definitely the tenure process is unique and high stakes - but other professions (the health fields or law fields for example) have high stakes tests or trial residency periods too.

 

I am just always baffled when articles like these come out and makes me wonder what happened?! and how do we do better in PhD programs to provide more information on academia and non-academic career pathways so that people are satisfied or at least neutral with their post-PhD life.

Edited March 13, 2015 by ZeChocMoose

[ERR_Alpha]

When I read articles like this, I often wonder what the heck happened during this person's PhD?  It just reads to me like "this is the life of a tenured-track professor and  *surprise* I had *NO* idea?!"  

 

It just seems so odd to me that this person never had a discussion with their professors about the lifestyle of an academic and whether they thought they were well suited towards this type of career.  It just makes me wonder - did they think they wanted this and then when they had it, it wasn't for them?  Or did they go forward with this career path, but didn't really think about what it would mean once they were on it?  

 

I also wonder whether they had worked before in a professional capacity because some of these issues are not unique to academia i.e. travel, public speaking, committee work, mentorship and personnel management, and providing recommendations.  Definitely the tenure process is unique and high stakes - but other professions (the health fields or law fields for example) have high stakes tests or trial residency periods too.

 

I am just always baffled when articles like these come out and makes me wonder what happened?! and how do we do better in PhD programs to provide more information on academia and non-academic career pathways so that people are satisfied or at least neutral with their post-PhD life.

I feel like this is the result of having academic mentors, but not professional mentors. Many PIs have the fault of pushing their students more towards academia, because that is what they know the best. My department has actually been actively working to bring more speakers from outside academia to give us the chance for mentorship and examples to follow. 

[juilletmercredi]

Chesire_Cat...I haven't really gotten to see the world in academia. I end up returning to the same cities over and over again for conferences, and thee days given budget cuts a lot of conferences are in smaller cities (Tampa, San Antonio, Albuquerque) although some are in bigger cities. Actually, I make conference decisions based on location and cost - one of my field's big conferences this year is in New York, and I'm going because I used to live there and still have an apartment! There are international conferences sometimes, but I can never afford to go. If you're a bigwig, maybe you can travel internationally a lot. But most of the junior professors I know who are trying to make a name for themselves hate it. My advisor has the opportunity to go to Vietnam for research and he's trying to get out of it.

On the contrary, though, I like writing grants. Yes, you don't always get them, but you're spending time sitting down and really thinking through your project and the way you want to run it, why it's important, and potentially collaborating with other interesting people.

Wonton Soup...Stanford is not in the Ivy League. I don't know that that was his implication, although it came off that way. The reason for the statement is that at many non-elite schools, the tenure review process isn't so rigorous - you don't have to be well-known in your field; you don't have to get external letters from scholars who don't know you testifying that you are the rising star in the area; you don't have to bring in millions in grant money. If you teach reasonably well and you publish at a decent clip, your tenure is assured - even elite small liberal arts colleges have very good tenure rates (I went to a conference on teaching at small elite liberal arts colleges, and several faculty members mentioned that they tenure almost everyone they hire).

By contrast, at top schools, the tenure review process is crushing and many - if not most - new assistant professors are denied tenure.