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Forbes 2013 Career List Flamed By University Professors
An anonymous reader writes "The Forbes list of 'least stressful jobs' for 2013 is headlined by... university professors. This comes at a time in which the academic community has been featured on controversies about 100-hour week work journeys, doctors live on food stamps, tenured staff is laid off large science institutions, and the National Science Foundation suffers severe budget cuts, besides the well known (and sometimes publicized) politics of publish or perish. The Forbes reporter has received abundant feedback and published a shy, foot-note 'addendum'; however, the cited source, CareerCast (which does not map to any recognizable career journalist, but rather to a Sports writer), does not seem to have had the same luck. The comments of the Forbes reporter on the existence of a Summer break for graduates ('I am curious whether professors work that hard over the summer') are particularly noteworthy."
Here is the CareerCast report the article is based on, and a list of the "stress factors" they considered. The author of the Forbes article passed on a very detailed explanation of how tough a university professor's job can be.
So, if we are so productive, what are we producing and for who?
If our technology is so advanced, why do we need to work so much?
What happened to the leisure society concept?
It just bothers me to see people spinning up myths and expending so much energy in debate that is so fact-free.
Funny how what was once normal for all American workers - paid time off - now only largely remains in public sector jobs, but instead of the public asking why their paid time off was taken away or how they can get it back, the public is asking how they can take it away from the last remaining jobs that still have it.
The problem is that many non-academics believe that the primary job of college professors is teaching undergraduates, and so they see any time not in the classroom as "time off" (never mind that the ratio of classroom prep time to classroom time can approach 1:1 if you really care about doing it right). In some institutions this is much of what college professors do, but in most schools that have any pretentions of being a research institution, academics are expected to produce publishable scholarship. Scientists and engineers spend much if not most of their time in the lab; humanities profs tend to work less collaboratively, but still spend a lot of hours reading, researching, and writing in whatever their field is. Most schools will give lip service to the idea that working with students is the most important thing, but in reality most of the incentives are geared towards producing quantifiable amounts of research (so many books, so many published articles, etc.). Far from having semester breaks "off," professors often use this time to focus more intently on their research, and sabbatical years are generally used to polish off major works of scholarship. On the surface, it can seem like this is work you're doing for you rather than for your job -- after all, it's your name on the book, and you take your reputation with you if you jump to another school -- but this work is one of the university's primary missions, and it's what they're paying you to do, as it reflects back on htem.
It's also worth nothing that in those schools where teaching undergrads really is the primary mission, professors spend much more time in the classroom than the stereotype discussed in the Forbest article (i.e., 3 or 4 classes a semester as opposed to the two typical of a research institution).
Finally, there's an awful lot of diversity within academia as to what professorial workload is like. In particular, more and more academics are being hired on interm or adjunct bases and end up spending a lot more time in the classroom for a lot less money than what tenured and tenure-track profs get. The irony is that the way to get onto the tenure track is to publish impressive research, but the lower-level jobs often don't allow you the time to do it.
I note that you have offered no rebuttals of the parent's points save "I know what I am talking about". I'm not sure you do. Would you please expand on how and why you think the parent is wrong? Note that if by "getting into an academic career" you mean "getting tenure", the I suggest you re-read the parent post carefully.
Pathman, Free (as in GPL) 3D Pac Man
So please don't join Occupy Wall Street,
Because OWS is going to change anything?
I doubt they'll change anything. But Forbes seems to prefer you don't think about changing anything beyond having a better relationship with your boss.
OWS really got two phrases into popular vernacular: "the one percent" and "income inequality." Believe it or deny it, at least the discussion crops up. It's not a big shift to the left, just a few more people thinking about the consequences of sequestering all of the country's wealth in a tiny slice of the population.
Hey guyz guess what? I've worked *plenty* of 50-60 hour workweeks and holidays. Deadlines all over the place. Pressure to perform. Stress levels off the map, schedules, budgets, and meetings.
At a construction company. As a labor crew leader.
Note to professors: It's called "the real world", deal with it.
Note to you: anywhere where people live is the real world.
I've held a fairly wide variety of jobs in my life: Army infantryman, Air Force medic, civilian EMT, web developer, programmer, DBA, teaching assistant, research assistant, graduate research fellow. (Next, hopefully, comes the remainder of the academic track: postdoc, assistant professor, associate professor, professor ... if I'm lucky, and I reach the endpoint before "corpse" appears on the list.) So far, my working life has been about equally divided between military, industry, and academia. You know what? None of these fields is any less "real" than any of the others. In every single one of them, I've had to deal with long hours, unreasonable demands, and the feeling that I'm never getting paid quite enough. You know, like damn near everyone else in the world. And paying attention to the way my advisor and other faculty members live, I don't expect this to change until (if) I retire.
We academics understand perfectly well that other people in the world have hard jobs too. All we ask is that other people recognize that our jobs are, first and foremost, jobs, like anyone else's. And if you're not willing to do that, then just take your "real world" self-righteousness and shove it up your ass.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
My experience: I worked for 15 years as an engineer, mostly at startups, and then went back for a PhD and became a professor of computer science; I'm up for tenure next year so this post is anonymous. I'm at a research university - not a top-tier one, but good enough that I'm expected to bring in significant grant funding and do leading edge research or I won't get tenure. It's more stressful than the startups I worked at, although not horribly so. (i.e. they weren't a walk in the park...) Some of the factors adding to the stress:
(1) Deadlines. Conferences and grant submissions have strict, non-negotiable deadlines which typically only get altered for natural disasters. I've yet to see an industry deadline that didn't have some wiggle room. (including salespeople doing a song and dance while you fixed the last bug for a demo)
(2) Competition. I went from being an irreplaceable member of a team (at most of my employers, at least) to a situation where 500 people would apply to replace me if I lose tenure. In addition, if I messed up at a previous job I could go somewhere else and try again, while you really only get one shot at an academic career.
(3) Politics. Fixed-sized organizations (schools, universities, hospitals) tend to have nastier politics than organizations which are planning to grow, because every person who gets ahead means someone else loses out. Look up Sayre's law on wikipedia, although I'm not sure academia is the worst offender in this area - google "nurses eat their young" for a non-academic example. (note that my department is actually quite decent in this area)
(4) Teaching. Half your work (i.e. teaching) has strict deadlines several times a week, and the other half has long-term goals measured in months or more. It's all too easy to let teaching expand to 100% of your time, which means there's another 50% that has to get done when you should be sleeping instead.
(5) Funding. In a research field, getting funding is crucial - in CS it's mostly to pay the PhD students who actually do the work. It's not as much work as getting funding for a startup, but the amounts are far smaller and you have to do it for your whole career.
(6) "Service". Serving on the hiring committee and wading through those 500 job applications. Serving on the admissions committee and wading through a zillion grad school applications. Reviewing papers for conferences and journals. Flying to Washington to review grant proposals for the NSF or NIH. Other than NSF reviews, where you get a per-diem and can make a bit if you skimp on the hotel, the rest is of course all unpaid.
Once you get tenure, you can in theory sit back and do almost nothing. The worst your department can do is not give you raises, make you teach an extra class or two (including all the night and summer classes no one wants to teach), give you a bad office, and deny you any grad students. I can think of plenty of worse jobs, but none that are so hard to get. I think the only reason the tenure system works at all is because it mostly weeds out anyone who has so little self-respect that they'd be satisfied with this, which means back to the rat race again. If someone slips through who is willing to sit on their butt, it's a mess.
Note that I can't speak for other fields. In computer science (and many other technical fields) the competition is shaped by the fact that almost anyone involved could drop out and get paid more. You don't worry about student loans (beyond undergraduate) in these fields, because your grad school was paid for by someone else's research grants. There's a general consensus about what constitutes research, which is shared to a large extent by the broader public. In other words, I'm the exact opposite of an English professor in many ways...
So am I happy with my career choice? Yes. Just like pro athletics, the reasons it's stressful are the same reasons people choose the career in the first place - because you're trying to compete with other people who are the best. I gave up nearly half a million in salary to go back to grad school, and would be making nearly double what I'm making today, but I might also be saying "I could'a been a contender..." instead of actually going for it.
The moment the article talked about the school year as a factor, I knew it was pretty much a bullshit article written by someone who THINKS they know what professors do. I work in a research lab with professors (I'm not one of them, I'm a software engineer) and teaching classes is not even the main part of their job. My boss loves teaching and wishes he had MORE time for it, but can't teach but maybe one class per semester because of research time, lab management, grant proposals, and other commitments.
Yes, absolutely! We've collectively had it with this damaging stereotype slowly infiltrating all the media. To be successful in present-day academia, you have to live for your work. Many successful professors never had the time to raise children. Those that do (and a lot of those that don't) have marital problems, because every evening, every weekend, every vacation, you'll be taking work with you. Otherwise, well I guess you could find a teaching-only job in a backwater community college and not even try to compete in your field. Or leave science altogether.
And all that would be OK - we're really passionate about what we're doing and a lot of us love the job despite all the pain - but the fact that we're constantly being painted as lazy fat cats that have an easy life, that's too much. This stereotype is slowly destroying American science, because it makes policymakers think they need to put just a little bit more pressure on us. And with this article in Forbes, a line has been crossed. You probably could get away with making covert allusions in mainstream media that black people (or pick whichever majority you want) are lazy, but put it into a high-profile magazine like this and you'll have riots. What you're seeing are outbursts of a pain that's been building up for decades. The stereotype has become an acute threat. If we were farmers, we would drive our tractors to the capital and block all the roads, but since we're academics, we write angry walls of text.