I gather from a lot of the postings on here that most of you are community college teachers.But I have a question for those of you who have experience with traditional universities and the big time pressure
of publish, perish, promotion, tenure, scholarship, and teaching.I'm a few months away from finishing my Ph.D. in the social sciences and have watched most people ahead of me get pretty decent jobs right out of the box. But what happens to those people is they seem to get hit with a sort of hammer of reality. When I hear from them they say things like, "Don't rush to finish. It's hard out here." They say that the pressure of being a new professor is high, but I can never tease out of them exactly what makes it so.
Q: So my question is, for those of you who know what it's like to leap from a PhD right to a big time position, what are the main pressures? What is the quality of life like for a young professor? What takes up your time and energy the most? What lords must be obeyed, and which can you merely ignore?
A: Post your replies below!
It's like being a freshman in high school. Remember that feeling?
ReplyDeleteI would amend your friends' advice to say that you should not be in a hurry to get the TT job. You should be hoping for two, maybe three postdoc years before your clock starts.
ReplyDeleteThe reason is simple. The first couple of years of full-time teaching can be tougher than you think. Class prep and grading will expand to occupy as much time as you allow them to. And if you are not lucky enough to be in a department that protects the youngest from service, you are likely to be looking at a variety of unfamiliar service tasks as well.
Why is it hard to make the transition? Simply put, in grad school you are master of your time and your universe. You are accustomed to doing your work at the time and place that best fits your life. Once you are on the TT, you have to get used to wedging your work into the spare minutes in your week. And if you have a spouse and/or kids who also want a piece of those spare minutes, it can become difficult to stay focused and actually do productive work.
And the problem in the world I inhabit is that research and publication are the only things that matter. And those are the very things that get put on the backburner at the beginning of your excellent TT adventure. This is especially grim if you are in a "book" discipline like mine. Given the production time for books, and given the difficulty with writing your first one, it is actually really hard to get it "between hard covers" in time for tenure review. The result is that you will likely have to make compromises you never imagined in terms of the quality of the book, unless you have some post-doc time before the TT starts. In fact, the experience of writing a book on the TT is so ugly that most people never manage to do it a second time--if I remember right, something like 80% never do it. I don't know if there are any studies of this, but I'd bet a significant part of my anatomy that most of the people who write multiple books, and therefore become full proffies and have the kinds of careers you are probably imagining for yourself, had at least one, probably more post-doc years where they didn't have to teach a full load and could really do what it took to take their crappy dissertations and turn them into quality books.
The good news is, you eventually get the hang of it. Or you don't and you get fired.
Hey, Kid, could you be more condescending? Really, could you?
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I know what the rise to the BIG TIME is like, and it's just a clusterfuck of envy and dick-measuring.
Enjoy!
You are going to get ragged on pretty hard for the tone of your question, but I’m going to answer it in good faith, because it is a totally valid question if you really do want to go and work at a top-tier research institution.
ReplyDeleteMe: Social Science Ph.D. in 2008, 31 years old, single. Got a job ABD at a middle-range state uni. Hated it (Archie is right—I should have gone for the post-doc, as most people in my discipline don’t get their dream jobs when applying ABD). Back on the market in 2009. Got a job at a great R1. Teaching load at both institutions: 2-2. Requirements for tenure: two journal articles a year and a major grant.
There are two major reasons I see why it is “hard out here.”
First, if you haven’t taught much, and actually care about teaching, even two new course preps is going to kill you. My first semester, I didn’t sleep more than four hours a night. I’m a little bit of a perfectionist about my teaching, and I kept telling myself that if I put in the work the first time around, it would be a lot easier the second time (mostly true). But here is the way I explained it to my family when they hadn’t heard from me in a month and thought I was dead: imagine working twelve hours a day doing things for a job that are not what keeps in you that job. Maybe you can fit your research in for two hours between midnight and 2:00 am, and how productive you are with those two hours is all anyone gives a shit about. This is just a situation that breeds anxiety, not to mention exhaustion.
Second, I have noticed that most of my friends go through what I think of as post-Ph.D malaise. Maybe this is better if you are married. I was seriously depressed for my first two years (and still am, a little). You have finally reached this goal, you know you should be grateful, but all you can do is look around and ask “this is it?” I had no friends. Not one. No dates. No one to grab coffee with during the rare moment I had for coffee. If you, like me, actually had a small social support network in grad school, you notice the lack even more. Simply put, you just aren’t going to meet people anymore. In the middle of my second year, I broke down and advertised for female friends on fucking Craigslist-- it was that bad.
I’m not sure if it gets better, or you just become inured to a new level of unhappiness.
The Kid is correct in that a majority of comments are from the CC community. And their fears and needs differ significantly from those of us at research universities. For example, it is extremely rare for someone to lose a position at a university due to poor student evaluations (and usually that was just an excuse for other reasons to reject the candidate). So, bottom line, place your teaching as the lowest priority till you get tenure, than you can "save the world". It is a classic mistake for new faculty to try and be super-teachers, resist that urge till later.
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ReplyDeleteThis may seem like an exaggeration, and when I was a new PhD, I didn't believe it, but when you first teach a course, you should expect 8 hours of prep time for each hour of lecture. If you start with 2 courses per semester, that is manageable,though stressful when added to researching/publishing/service.
ReplyDeleteIf you are teaching 4 courses a semester right off, you might have a breakdown.
If you do post-docs, you can use that time to begin designing courses -- 8 or 10 courses -- and putting together the basics of your daily lecture. That will cut down greatly on the grunt work of your first teaching experience. You can also get ahead on the publication requirements.
You will desperately miss sleeping in and having a social life.
There was a survey not too long ago displaying the various places that the readers of this site inhabit. It was a fairly diverse set of CC to ivys. I suspect that the CC world just, by the nature of the beast, has more stories to tell and more grievances to vent. I found most of their tales to resonant with my own experiences, although certainly amplified by a factor of 5 or so.
ReplyDeleteWow. So if I work at a two-year school, it's because I'm not good enough for the majors...I'm glad Angry Archie answered your question very reasonably, because I'm feeling more like Kimmie.
ReplyDeleteFrankly, I'm happy to be where I am, but you're nuts if you think that the path toward tenure is any easier here that it would have been at an R1 with a 2-2 load.
I have a 4-4 load, committee work at the campus and department level, expectation of publication, and oh yeah, I do it for $44,500 a year. Is it my dream job? No. But it's a job in a shitty economy and an even shittier academic job economy.
Can you publish with a 2-2 load? Are you going to have any "free" time? No. Get used to it now.
Before the flame wars begin, I believe most of us understand that a majority of our colleagues at the CC level could easily be at TT schools. The market is saturated, hundreds of applications for each position. This means a large amount of luck and politics decide who enters the TT world, rather than skill level. Which adds to the high level of frustration of our CC colleagues. The Kid was not putting down the CC world.
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ReplyDeleteI was beyond happy to stop being a graduate student and become "a real professor." No more reading and writing on subjects I have no interest in, no more financial penury, no more disrespect from everybody. Finally I can say that the horrors of grad school were worth it.
ReplyDeleteLife is great "out there." I get tons of time to do my research, read and enjoy life. The bureaucracy is annoying, of course. But it's nice to feel important and appreciated in a way no grad student ever does. (Unless their parents paid for a new building on campus, of course.)
Other than a few (dare I say it, “compassionate”) responses from honest_prof and others, I guess this reaction could have been anticipated. I vote for remembering what sort of mind-set you had during the last few years of your Ph.D. Most Ph.D. granting institution are research schools, so an R1 is likely the only academic the Kid has ever known. Furthermore, 90% of people come out of these programs thinking 1) an R1 is what they want and what fits everyone, 2) if they work hard enough, they can get one, and 3) once they get a research job, everything will be flowers and bunnies, and 4) if they can’t get that research job, they will be a failure. The fact that this isn’t true, doesn’t negate 6-8 years of Ph.D. program brainwashing. His question (“why do my friends with research jobs seem so stressed and bummed out?”) is still valid.
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ReplyDelete@Prof G: Agreed on your last point. If his friends are miserable, maybe they're not in the right jobs? I fail to understand how that's a hard question...if you're miserable, you need to look for other jobs, or dare I say it, other lines of work.
ReplyDeleteYou did, however, peg that the response "Kirk" would get was going to result from the tone "he" took. I took offense because it's a close cousin to the "those who can't, teach" bullshit I heard long ago. It's hard not to hear it when the first thing out of Kirk's mouth is to discount the work I did to get tenure at a two-year transfer institution--as if there isn't "big time pressure" that's as bad as (if not worse than) it is at an R1. I took my current job because I was assured that teaching was to be my main focus, but then got the old bait-and-switch (after publishing a 40-page article my 3rd year) that if I didn't publish and do service and keep my teaching to the highest standards, I wouldn't get tenure. My 5th and 6th years were hell on earth for me and my family, and perhaps that's why I so heartily resent Kirk's implication.
Keep in mind that there are also more than a few of us here who teach at R1s and R2s (and 4-year colleges), but who have a "community college" (i.e. teaching-oriented) perspective because we're the adjuncts and other contingent faculty actually teaching the gen ed classes so that the TT types can teach a 2/2 mostly-upper-division load. Spare us a thought on your way up, please -- out of human decency, and because we outnumber you and just might show up at the base of your ivory tower with pitchforks and torches one night (or at least get our act together and start outvoting you in the faculty assembly). As you'll realize when you're thinking about coming back here to complain about how badly your students write (and read, and think), what we and our colleagues in community colleges do *is* important.
ReplyDeleteBut back to the question. . . .from the perspective of an observer of the TT in what Archie calls a "book-oriented" discipline, I'd say that he's right: the book, and the timing thereof, is the major source of stress. If you take a TT job just after you defend, start thinking right away about possible sources of support for a research leave during your third or fourth year on the tenure track (if your university offers such leaves, then see what you can do to position yourself to win one, and choose housing and other major expenses with an eye to saving enough to take a full year at half salary rather than one semester at full salary. If your university doesn't offer such funding, start looking for outside sources now; the post-doc door doesn't entirely close when you accept a TT job). And plan your book so that you can actually finish the manuscript during that leave. I'm definitely not speaking from experience here, since I've never assembled, let alone reviewed, a tenure file, but it's my impression that the modest completed book that shows promise (perhaps accompanied by or incorporating a somewhat more splash-making article) beats the more ambitious but just-under-the wire manuscript in most situations.
Finally, you might check the gender of the people with whom you're speaking. For women who hope to reproduce (and partners who care about them, and plan to be active parents themselves), the intersection of the tenure-track years and the ticking-biological-clock (or baby/toddler/preschool) years is a recipe for stress all by itself.
I taught a 4-4 last year as a replacement hire. It was one of the hardest years of my life, but I definitely enjoyed not being treated like a moron by my colleagues.
ReplyDeleteWhat you focus on depends on where you work...R1, clearly the teaching comes at the end of the list. SLAC, teaching is higher. I happen to like teaching (and 'oddly' enough, I am actually GOOD at my discipline too...imagine!) and I will do my damndest to find work at an institution that emphasizes teaching.
From my perspective as an adjunct and replacement hire as I finish my PhD...dude. If you haven't ever taught more than a single course a term and you hit that 3/3 or 4/4? It's going to be like you're a big, juicy insect squishing against a windshield at 80-mph.
@Cassandra
ReplyDeleteWhat you say is right, but if the expectation is for the book to be a physical artifact, and not just "past final editorial board approval" then that fourth year leave is cutting it painfully close. A book takes 12-15 months from submission of the final typescript to come off the press. So counting back from September of your 6th year, you need to have the final manuscript turned in no later than the summer before your 5th year. To do that, you need to pray to the god of all things holy that your reader's reports are both timely and do not ask for much in the way of revisions. So you'd want those in hand sometime in early spring of your fourth year. For that to happen, you have to have a complete manuscript submitted by late fall of your fourth year. And that means you need enough to persuade an editor to send it out to readers sometime in your third year. If your school will award tenure on the basis of a contract with final editorial board approval, then slide everything up a year. Either way, that means that if you defend and then walk straight into a TT job, you can basically kiss your next three to four years goodbye.
And the math is just as pitiless in the "journal disciplines." Let's assume the expectation is 8-10 articles in top journals, with maybe two others in secondary journals. Top journals get lots of submissions and have long production queues as a consequence. I've had an article take nearly two years from initial submission to hot-off-the-press at a top journal. Most top R-1s expect you to submit your packet in May or June of year five. So to meet that deadline, the candidate needs to submit 10 articles no later than Spring of year four to be at all confident of meeting the criteria. So once again, kiss the first three or four years of the TT goodbye in terms of a non-work life if you don't want to get fired.
So a couple of post-doc years go a long way towards alleviating that stress. Going straight to the TT may seem like a great thing from the perspective of the unemployed grad student, but it comes with some serious drawbacks.
As for the Kid's query, I totally get why people thought it was smarmy and condescending. But if you remove the two instances of "big-time" from the text, which you can do without changing the meaning at all, it reads a lot better. That's what I did. I figure the guy's a gradflake and doesn't know better. Now he will.
And all of the above doesn't mean you can coast the last two years of the TT either. We expect a book, 2-4 articles, and evidence of progress on a second project. In practice that means an accepted journal article and a substantial grant for a project that is totally distinct from your book. So that's another reason why the fourth year leave is cutting it too close on the book. You need to be moving on to the next thing by that Spring.
ReplyDelete"What are the main pressures?"
ReplyDeleteYour main pressure will likely be from within, a desire to convey the wisdom and insight you've accrued over the past 12 years to the dozens eager faces in the seats in front of you.
You'll have to ignore that. The students don't give you tenure. You'll feel enough residual guilt and desire to teach that, even with a conscious effort to ignore them, you'll give them more than enough attention for them to learn something valuable in your classes with far less preparation and care than you might otherwise give to teaching them.
A professor who makes his or her mark in publishing but gets middling teaching-evaluations will get tenure; a professor showered by students with praise but with middling publications will not.
This is ordinarily the case at R1 institutions where you are assigned 2/2 teaching-loads and graduate-assistants to help you grade, but seems to be worse at R1-wannabees, where you will have the regular 3/3 or even 4/4 teaching loads, no graduate-assistants to help you with papers and/or blue-books, and tenure-committees looking to prove that their school is *just* as good as the R1 school they wished they worked at.
"What is the quality of life like for a young professor?"
Plan on none, and be grateful if you find more than that in your new job. Tenure will change everything, but until that is a given, you won't have the luxury to make a social-life part of the plan.
"What takes up your time and energy the most?"
What *should* take up ALL your time and energy is publishing. Articles, books, whatever. Get known to people in your field, get invited to share your ideas at conferences, and most of all, get words in print in peer-reviewed journals or recognized publishers in your field.
Whatever time and discipline you spent getting your dissertation researched and written, put that and more toward meeting the publishing-expectations of your big-time job.
"What lords must be obeyed, and which can you merely ignore?"
You must sit on committees, but do not volunteer yourself; show interest and support, but do not take on any projects; be collegial, but productive. Most of all, determine what the last person who got tenure did successfully, and then do that +2, because tenure committees very rarely diminish their expectations of new colleagues.
Some scholars will have the natural discipline by which they can write in some spare time and pump out the goods while spending hours lounging with colleagues and students and preparing their courses, but if you aren't a superhero, then put your head down and keep working until you get that tenure letter, and hope that some of the habits of diligence you develop in the interim will stick and let you retain the respectability in your field that you developed in earning tenure.
@Archie: that timing sounds right to me. On reflection, I think a third-year leave has been the standard at my (R2) institution, but leaves are competitive, and budgetary cuts have made them more so, so some of my colleagues are heading into a fourth-year leave instead (and a lot of nail-biting). Or, even scarier, they're trying to do it without a leave.
ReplyDeleteOh dear god I am constantly hounding my junior colleagues at my R1 to get that leave in place, which has to come by competitive national or system-wide fellowship: I'll read anything, I'll write for you, just please please do it.
ReplyDeleteI did not land in the big time; I landed in a SLAC but published my way to an R1 before tenure. So the expectations for my teaching were immediately high and I know I'd have to keep my publications level with R1 expectations to get out -- Archie's right, they are a book (for my job it's "in press," but not necessarily out), 2-4 articles (at least 2 in top-level, peer-reviewed journals, he forgot to say), and evidence of a new project in the form of at least one other published piece. It was murderous to do that on top of 7-9 student contact hours a week per class.
So yeah, get a postdoc or even a Visiting Assistant gig before the first job, if you can (though never turn down a TT job for a VAP). VAPs have the advantage of not requiring committee work and allowing you to fine-tune your teaching.
Music to go with this post:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0FBi5Rv1ho
Well I enjoyed graduate school. The stress of switching to professor was time and scheduling -- the institution can schedule you for anything, 8-5, and have mandatory or quasi mandatory social events in the evenings, too.
ReplyDeleteThe biggest error I've seen anyone make, though, was to take a TT at a SLAC, and a non major one at that, with the idea that this would help her grow toward a bigger, better job. Of course it just bogged her down.
The postdoc / VAP idea is a good one and I wish I'd taken the offer I had, first time out, *even though* I also had TT offers (that I didn't like). But barring that, the easiest jobs are the R-1 jobs. Lowest teaching load, so you can get your courses together, lowest service requirements for new faculty, and research, well you're on a research roll coming from graduate school, so you just carry on.
You're not that much better off economically than in graduate school, though, because you start having grownup type expenses. Warning. It's better, but not that much.
I also generally recommend public over private schools because they tend to follow laws more cloasely. Downside nowadays: only good private schools are safe-ish from the economic firestorm.
PS quality of life -- I've always had it. I used to take a day off every weekend in graduate school to play, and I still do. And go out some evenings, and so on. Otherwise I'll just work more slowly, so I might as well.
ReplyDeletePS What I don't hear people talk enough about: money. I started having to take on debt almost immediately because I didn't have a job at a school rich enough to pay for conferences. In theory, one pays these things off over time, and gets external grants, but still ... I'd say to new faculty that even if they have to take on debt, they should also start saving right away. You want to start building up a cushion, or you'll never be independent.
ReplyDeleteI've been a lecturer (UK post roughly equivalent to assistant professor) for a year and a half now. If I could go back in time and give one message to the me of 2009, it would be:
ReplyDeleteYou can't fix the university system all by yourself.
You're going to have to compromise, which we academics aren't good at because we tend to be perfectionists. It's easy to dwell on what's wrong with higher education at the moment, and spend hours preparing lectures or marking in order to give them the sort of education that you think every student should get.
There's no limit to the amount of time you can spend on teaching and admin. If you let it, it will eat into your research time, and then it will eat into your personal life. Your health will suffer, you won't be able to concentrate when you do get round to research, and you'll resent the people who spend five minutes a week on teaching but whose careers are zooming ahead of yours.
If you want to fix the system, go into university management or politics. If you want to do research, then carry on down the academic route, but accept that your teaching must just be adequate.
I got a piece of advice in my first semester of teaching: Pick a chunk of time every day for your research and schedule around it.
ReplyDeleteOf course, this is impossible long-term, but just having that goal is tremendous. I research "daily" from 9am to 12pm. I have an 8am class and afternoon classes/office hours/meetings. Those 3 hours before lunch ensure that I have research continually spinning, even though if I wanted I could dedicate that time to a million other projects.
9 to 12 is sacrosanct. I recommend you find what works for you and do the same.
Academic Monkey is right on this one. I did the "schedule research thing" during my first year of teaching (there is a great book called “How to Write a lot” that basically recommends the same thing). The only thing that I do differently is I actually schedule less time. Two to three hours every other day. You would be amazed at what you can accomplish during that small span of time if you firmly refuse to answer e-mail, the phone, do course prep, ect…
ReplyDeleteAs for the money issue, I find that whether you are doing a lot better than in grad school varies. If you have a lot of student loan and credit card debt, then yes, you are probably screwed. Outside of that though, it seems to depend on two things. First, professor salaries don’t vary as much as cost of living does-- you are going to be much better off with a smaller town. Second, don’t buy a new car or a house in your first year on the job. Pay attention to what your actual finances are like for a year instead of just viewing the hypothetical on paper.