My father was a tenured professor and growing up I heard enough horror stories from his department to know that a career as a professor at a research university is no easy career.
But at the same time, isn't a major part of your job instructing students? I understand the importance of grants, conducting research, etc. as it relates to getting tenure, but if your only focus is jumping through hoops with the end goal of getting tenured there are probably a lot easier ways to get job security and at higher pay. My point is that I would hope that those who go into a career in academia as a professor have a major interest in teaching and aren't just there to get the next promotion.
Out of the 20-30 or so lecturers I can remember from my degree in computer science, there was only maybe two I can think of that had any interest at all in actually communicating ideas and teaching students.
The vast majority of the lecturers were objviously focused on their research and even student questions about assignments / exams / any issue at all were directed to the tutor (who would often be the tutor for 6-7 subjects and be completely swamped by the workload).
The tutors have since been removed from that university due to budget constraints so I feel sorry for the students going there.
Not knowing any particulars I would guess that teaching, albeit time consuming, does not pose that risk.
I know a number of PhDs with aspirations of tenure. Not one has said they went into it to teach.
I'm an MIT Physics PhD who aimed at teaching from early on. I agree that we're in the minority, but folks like us aren't typically looking for jobs at R1 universities but instead at small schools where teaching is actually valued. Unless you're part of that culture, we may not be the PhDs that you know.
I have a number of PhD friends like me, teaching at small liberal arts colleges and community colleges. It's a career path that doesn't typically have the sexy budgets and bright city lights, but IMHO can still lead to an academically rigorous and balanced life.
Teaching is a pleasure - at the moment I supervise undergrads for both research projects and as an advisor, and it is very intellectually rewarding (at least at Cambridge - at my previous institution not so much). I look forward to more of it as an academic, it's just not my primary motivation.
I (a tenure-track assistant professor of math) didn't go into academia primarily to teach. But I enjoy teaching, value it, agree that it is important work, and make an effort to do it well.
Wait... you're assuming the alternative to the practice suggested in the OP is spending a lot of time focusing on instruction? (Of _undergrads_?)
I think you are misunderstanding the 'typical' approach to tenure-track career. I can assure you that the majority of people doing the "80 hour" work weeks are not focusing on teaching.
While the OP didn't mention really mention teaching, I would honestly assume the the author spends as much or more time on instruction/teaching, and does as good or better by her students, than the 'typical' workaholic junior tenure track faculty. The workaholics are not spending spending 80 hours a week because they're spending a lot of time on teaching, I assure you.
I've spent a lot of time in academia myself. I was a TA in computer science and have taught undergrads so I was exposed to the political battles and stresses that go on. Perhaps I am misinterpreting what she is saying and she is really just speaking of dealing with all the BS that comes with working at a research university and the importance of teaching is a given. The part about writing out every day that she only has to be there for 7 years is a bit unsettling for a professor though. If I were a freshman CS student it wouldn't instill a lot of confidence that my professor wrote down that she was only going to have to be there for a set period of time in order to get amped up to come in and teach my class.
Asking somebody at a high-tenure-rate, second-tier school to treat their tenure track position as an extended post-doc is essentially asking them to have a failed career, on the other hand.
(it's worth noting that Harvard has actually changed tack recently, such that they're increasingly promoting junior faculty...the above is still true regardless, at least for the time being)
That's sweeping, overstated, and unfair of me, but the job skills are quite different. Applied, directed research aimed at producing tangible and sell-able results is very hard, and by-and-large not what they do, at least based on who applies and interviews (which is of course a terribly biased and perhaps non-representative selection).
I more or less endorse the article. Seven years is a lot of time. I'd only give someone new a little bit of advice.
(1) Do a good job of your teaching, but economize on the effort you put into it. (2) Be civil to everyone, from the department head on down to the janitor. (3) Do your service/committee work as asked, and do it cheerfully, but for the most part don't go the extra mile. (And when you do go the extra mile, do so because you believe it's important, not because you believe it will win you brownie points.)
But above all:
(4) Kick ass in your scholarship.
There are plenty of sources that purport to break down and explain (4), some of which are worth reading, especially if caught in a rut -- but if you are successfully kicking ass, and paying at least minimal attention to career advice when it comes your way -- then I'd only worry about continuing to kick ass.
That is my perspective anyway.
The conveniences and cultural differences of the CS community are a stark contrast to academic biology. Considering the author's observations:
First, the opt-out options are often fewer and further between; making the jump between basic science work and industrial biotech/pharma can be very difficult depending on your area of interest.
Then, as a biologist, it can be incredibly difficult to restrict your working hours, as experimental (e.g. cell culture) work can operate with delays or intervals. Stepping out at the wrong time means your cells die.
Beyond the unpredictable timing, there's more uncertainty around whether experiments will physically work, and it can be nigh impossible engineer your way out of certain failures.
Further, the benchmarks for "contribution to the field" in biology can be extremely unforgiving; publishing papers in journals outside of Nature, Science, or Cell fails to paint a compelling picture.
These things are added on to the things pointed out in the piece. Extra hurdles.
That's not to say that biological science fields are evil or that faculty paths are never worth considering. But having worked in the lab of a junior faculty member, you can see the pressure and challenges.
That's where personnel management comes in. I've got an undergrad intern at the moment, who has only a modest amount of lab research experience. In a month and a half, I've taught him molecular biology from scratch (beginning with the fundamentals of PCR) and from what i taught him, I gave him a list of 48 mutations. He designed primers to make those mutations, does the molecular biology, checks the sequences, then does the biochemical experiment on the enzyme that's being mutated. He's finished about half of the mutants. We are able to get this done because the experiments were planned out to be paralellizable and scaleable, and if something is finishing up when it needs to be picked up at the end of the day (like a transformation recovery), I do it, because he comes in early and I stay in late. I also drop in on the weekends to start cultures- but usually only briefly -, to make the most efficient use of his and my time. He is in usually around 9:00-9:15 and I make sure he leaves at 5:00 and I really get angry if he's around past 5:15 except in exigent conditions.
Bottom line: Even in Biology, you can restrict your working hours if you're a team player if you have good management skills.
If you're overworking. Since science entails failure that you cannot engineer your way out of - you will wind up burning out, since the working hard followed by failure is exactly an optimal way of conditioning laziness.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl4L4M8m4d0
Talk about stress.
Every science has it's own merits and problems and we CS people do not only sit on the couch and drink coffee before we hit back on some brogramming and getting the next 10^9$ from Facebook.
I wouldn't say that many people see it as attractive relative to high-degree-of-freedom research positions in industry, but there just aren't that many such positions in industry. And, you often have to build up a reputation in academia first (as you did) before you can jump to an industry position that is senior enough to give you research & publication freedom. Even then there are only a handful of options; MSR and parts of Google are two of them in CS, and the numbers dwindle considerably if you look outside of CS. If MSR hired many more people straight out of grad school, and in a broader range of fields, I'm sure many grad students would consider that option rather than pursuing a tenure-track faculty position. Back in the Bell Labs days, it was a popular top choice out of grad school, with faculty job being a second choice.
If you relax the requirement that the job has to let you regularly talk about and publish the results of your research, there are more industry positions available, like R&D positions at petrochemical and aerospace firms. They have large R&D arms, but the average employee in them will publish little to none, except whatever ends up being published via patent filings. That can be a good choice (I have some acquaintances who work in R&D at BP and like their job), but a research career where you can't publish is a quite different choice of career.
As a more minor working-conditions point, I personally like the flexibility. I typically spend 3 days a week in my office and 2 days working off-campus, which most companies won't let you do. And if I want to take a 3-day weekend trip somewhere, I can just do it, as long as it doesn't interfere with a day on which I have classes; no need to ask for permission in advance or worry about how many vacation days I have.
> Given this I fail to understand why being a professor remains such an attractive career path.
I know a lot of students who made the very concrete decision between immediate grad school, a job followed by grad school, only a job, self-employment, self-teaching, vacation, etc. Guys and girls.
All I learned is everyone's different.
They would have gotten him somehow, it's only a question of how.
We end up with the situation where scientists in academic jobs are enriched for those good at politics and playing the game, and we lose brilliant minds to companies. Companies also do their part, and offer alluring salaries and job security (I've had quite a few recruitment attempts for wonderful companies, and almost left academia on several occasions).
With the folks in academic positions being political (and sometimes downright manipulative), it's no surprise that some make terrible mentors. Their success quite often relies on extracting work from postdocs that will never have their success. Sadly, there's no incentive for symbiotic relationships sometimes. Luckily, finally, I have met mentors that are exceptions to this, and are nerds like me (and quite frankly, keep me in the sciences). But it took a long time to find such mentors, and other very smart people are not so lucky as to find these types of mentors and they leave the sciences. Sadly, this enriches for more bad mentor types. I think the role my mentors' mentors had is huge too; often my mentors talk about how important their mentors were.
I think this is 75% of the "problem". It gets worse because the smart nerds who do like to play the political game are often so solipsistic and selfish that they are really spectacularly atrocious managers, many of whom take a scorched earth attitude to solving their scientific problems. This becomes a vicious cycle as that becomes the percieved way to act within the culture.
As a mathematician, I know excellent academics who narrowly missed getting tenured at MIT and Princeton. They were highly in demand, and are now happily working at other top-20 universities.
(ed: I am in math, and described what I observed. I see elsewhere in the thread that mdwelsh observed the opposite.)
On the "stop taking advice" idea: when I was a grad student (and postdoc), I kept notes in a personal wiki. I had a page entitled "Things Other People Have Suggested I Do". I didn't do most of them. Even more so, it was such a liberating feeling to look at it and tell myself, "I don't have to do any of that crap, I have my own research plan."
It's a good framework for thinking about any high stress, competitive career track. Ultimately, stress/pressure greatly affect performance and peoples' perceptions of you, both of which are paramount in ascending hierarchies.
But the more I read through stories like this the more I become convinced it's important to fool yourself: to convince yourself there's no pressure. As if the act itself unblocks some kind of neural pathways that allow you to do things you wouldn't have let yourself do otherwise.
The author might be a lot more courageous that they think, even if they hadn't realized it at the time: "But its not because I have extra courage. Rather, by demoting the prize, the risk becomes less."
Anecdotally, a professor once told me (when they look back on their tenure track) that it now seems irresponsible to them that they were devoting such little time to revising journal papers or writing such few grand proposals. (I got the feeling they were doing things that don't scale). Another said they were sure upfront they'd fire them at the end, so they tried to enjoy they ride while it lasted. Both of them got tenure.
Another thing this story shows is how logistics become manageable if you try. Like the approach to give the other person a weekend day off as counter-balance to you going on an extra trip is probably what prevents you from going astray. It's the right sort of tension. You pay twice for a workday like that (one for the trip, one for parent duty), so you now have a concrete measure to make that decision rather the vagueness of "it will help my career".
I do however take issue with this: "I guess my hope is to add one more option to the list, which is covering your ears and making up your own rules." No... That shouldn't be a hope. You should just do it.
My key take-away from this post is that: Yes, the system is designed for young, childless PhDs who are willing to put 80hs/weeks into work and robot-like follow the advice of others. But, it does not have to be like that. It's paramount to remember everyday why you are doing this job and why you love research and teaching.
