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From School to Work to Working at School?

Posted by Cliff on from the from-corporate-to-college dept.

torgosan asks: "After years of school and many years of toiling in the corporate world and being laid-off in one of the seemingly perpetual down-sizings [my former company was employee-owned until a corporate buyout a few years back, after which point it all went downhill - a mini-Enron, as it were, including crooked execs, cooked books, SEC investigations, the whole mess], it appears my days of joblessness may possibly be coming to an end. A small university near my hometown has an opening that has my name written all over it. This is all still early in the process and the offer hasn't come yet but that's not stopping me from researching the target city, moving expenses, cost-of-living comparisons, living arrangements, etc. Taking the position would mean a sizable pay-cut but I need to get back to doing what I love to do and this seems to be 'it'. What I haven't been able to find, though, are the insights into university employment and how it compares to working in the 'real world'. This would be a staff position working with other staff and professionals and with some interaction with the student body. So my question for you uni workers out there is: What sort of adjustment should be expected? Is the uni workplace as structured as the corporate world? Pet peeves? What are the politics like? I ask as I attended a commuter-school with little campus life and have little to draw on for perspective."

2 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. From this side... by Otter · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Having just gone in the opposition direction, it seems like major differences on the big corporate side are:
    • You need to show up at work at a regular time.
    • They make me use Windows which is preventing me from copying and pasting list item tags from one item to the next because Windows IE is too "smart" to let me do that. Anyway...
    • Generally, computers are far more locked down and standardized. On the other hand, as someone pointed out, they're therefore not broken half the time.
    • Breakfast and lunch meetings provide food, and it's not immediately stolen by starving grad students.
    • I can't wear a t-shirt and jeans every day.
    • They pay a lot more.
    • Total Slashdot time is unchanged.
    OK, the combination of the last two has shamed me to going back to work...
    --
    What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
  2. Some comments from within academia... by drnlm · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The answers to your questions vary greatly from institution to institution and from department to department within a given institution. Tradionally, the humanities and the pure sciences are the least like the "real world", and engineering departments the most bussinesslike, although this is by no means universal.

    At some universities, administration bureaucracy is a major problem. Usually, larger and/or older institutions are worse, smaller and/or newer institutions are better, but there are exceptions in both directions.

    Academic politics is always bloody. Kissinger's "University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small" is apparantly universal. Fortunately, the tradition of lying low and avoiding getting involved is also well established. If you can avoid getting seriosuly involved, that is probably a good thing. If you actively want to get involved, then there is no hope for you :).

    Best course of action is almost certainly to talk to few people working there, especially people in the department you hope to be appointed to, and see how they feel about these things.