Five Things My 18-Year-Old Self Would Never Have Guessed about Working in Academia
I was a freshman in college when I first realized that I might be able to get a job doing what I loved: reading and talking about books. I sat in my classes, stared up at my professors, and thought, “You read and write and talk about books all day for a living!? How can I do what you’re doing?” And then I asked them. Half of the professors in my department worked to dissuade me from applying to English literature PhD programs–the programs themselves can be long, isolating, and impoverishing, and your odds of landing a tenure-track job at a thriving school are very, very small. The other half of my undergraduate professors were more encouraging. I listened to those ones. Ten-ish years later, I ended up with a doctorate, and I won the lottery and landed a job as a teaching professor at a growing university in Tampa, Florida.
In my seven years at a flagship state school and going-on-four years at a mid-sized private institution, I have learned a lot about working in academia (at least in the US). Here are a handful of daily realities that my wide-eyed, eighteen-year-old self have been hard pressed to believe.
A lot of professors who got their PhDs and jobs before 2008 (this is only sort of an arbitrary date) know a lot about their area of research–no surprise there–but may not know much about anything else. This includes teaching. My graduate program had pretty significant support for teaching, but a lot of it was opt-in (i.e. not required), and a lot of my colleagues who’d been teaching at the university for decades were just discovering things like rubrics. There seems to have been this widely-held idea that if you learned a lot about organic chemistry or 16th century Castilian literature, you would automatically be the best person to teach bright young minds about that subject. But teaching is, of course, a skill that requires ongoing learning itself (as anyone in an education department has always known). If you ever had a professor who was really good at teaching, they probably worked really hard at it. It almost certainly wasn’t the focus of their training.
Professors do a lot of what’s called “service” work. I had zero idea of what this was as an undergraduate–let me break it down. First of all, it includes a lot of committee work. We have committees to make decisions about curriculum, to advocate for good salaries and benefits, to run programs, to grow the number of students in our majors, and to write mission statements, among dozens of other things. I currently serve on a university-wide and department-level committee, and there are also college-level committees, and all of these committees sprout the occasional ad-hoc subcommittee. Second of all, it includes a lot of unpaid, unrecognized work to perpetuate basic academic functions. For example: letters of recommendation. Everyone needs letters of recommendation for everything in academia. Julie Schumacher wrote an entire novel about this called Dear Committee Members. (It’s satire.) Another example: peer reviews. Once you place an article in a peer-reviewed journal, you’ll also get asked to do peer reviews yourself. This often involves doing extra reading in and maybe beyond your field of research and writing up detailed comments and making tough decisions that might significantly impact people’s careers. Service work is incredibly important, but most of us are at least a little grouchy about it sometimes.
Professors often get tapped, are elected, or self-nominate for middle-management positions, like chairs of departments, committee chairs, or program directors. Remember what I said about professors only being guaranteed to have training in their super specialized field? Some professors are amazing middle-managers. Some are not. It’s not something we’re trained to do in the vast majority of cases. Honestly, it isn’t something that most of us want to do, because it means managing a bunch of people who also may or may not have had much work experience outside of academia, and they might not know how to be a good colleague. In fact, they might pride themselves on being a difficult colleague, and if they have tenure, no one can touch them–at least not just for being difficult.
The teaching can be rough. Even the tenured faculty in my department teach at least half of their load in the general education writing course sequence. My whole load defaults to gen ed writing courses, though I occasionally get to teach a gen ed literature course. It isn’t just English that offers a lot of lower level courses to less-than-eager students. Math departments have College Algebra. Communication has speech. Strictly based on my own experience, it seems to me much of the teaching in institutions of higher learning happens in courses most students would prefer not to take. The result is that much college-level teaching ends up being a sales job, at least if you want to convince your students to care. I show up three times a week and do a song and dance to try to get the guy in the back row to take at least one earbud out of his ear so he can half listen to me explain how the peer review process works while he watches sports highlights on YouTube. Okay, this is unfair. Most of my students are very pleasant and make a concerted effort to pay attention in class. But all the same, most of them aren’t exactly pumped for a required writing class, and I don’t blame them. Most of them have been at least mildly traumatized in a past literature or language arts class. In any case, it’s a far cry from my rosy vision of sitting in a solemn circle and marveling at W. H. Auden with a bunch of rapt undergraduates.
You cannot beat the schedule. I teach what is by most standards a pretty heavy load of courses, but even so, I am actually in a classroom 12-16 hours a week for 15-week semesters, including finals. Although I have lots of meetings, probably about half of my work hours in any given week are such that I can flexibly schedule them. I did the math of how many hours I spent grading last semester, and it was a lot. Those papers aren’t going to grade themselves! But once grades are submitted, they’re done and dusted. I could take on additional classes during my breaks if I wanted extra money, but so far, I haven’t needed to, so no thank you! I do work pretty much year round given my class prep, research, and service work, but the geographically tethered parts of the job are concentrated around those 30 weeks when I’m teaching. That leaves (count ‘em!) 22 weeks a year when I likely don’t have to go to campus to report for anything. It has left a lot of time to do things like be a foster parent and a bio parent, knit, travel, cook, read, write, and train for the occasional 5k.
For the most part, I really like my job, though it isn’t at all what I imagined being an English Professor to be. Since I got my full-time faculty job, I’m not sure that I’ve ever had the kind of conversation about a poem or a novel that my college-aged self imagined would be my daily fare if I made it this far. But the main thing that I’ve learned is that being a professor is a job, and just like any job, it’s work. But you cannot beat the breaks, so if you can get a PhD without debt and don’t mind getting a little weird from spending six years in graduate school, think about it!
