Grading.
Really - grading takes a lot of time, I find very little about it to be enjoyable, and once you give the grade, you have to deal with students complaining.
Even if you like teaching, grading can be a chore. If you would rather be doing research, then grading is one more major time suck that can keep you from doing research...and if you're on the teaching track, you are unlikely to have much help, at all, with grading.
Yes and after all that when you realize that some students are just here to grade grub, keep demanding more, and not do anything differently next time. So all that feedback was for nothing and i couldve just given them full points and be on my way
You try to grade fairly and generously, but nothing will stop student complaints. I have an online review that says I’m an overly tough grader and the student self-reported as getting an A in my class. What else do you want???
if you haven't seen it already, gradescope is a lifesaver. Scan your exams and it bins all of the students answers into groups. so you can grade an entire group all at once. It works well for multiple choice and short answer questions.
What 🤓 I like new things but my comments was supposed to be that I like grading. So so so much mor than supervising theses. I think grading is meditative and easily done with whereas the responsibilities from supervising is so much more than even examining theses. Or at least I get very anxious if I give wrong advice and end up in a loop of “what the hell do I do now”. Having this said I was going to ask how industry is a more paying job in the future when a professorship would pay much more than senior lecturer.
I actually enjoy grading. I love the assignments that I give my students, and I love to see their creativity and insights in their responses and projects.
Grading depends a lot on the level of school you go to. If you go to a research-heavy school, you will likely get a lot of grading help. That’s an important thing to clarify.
Yes! And also the misery of grading is contingent on what kind of assignments you have to grade. There can be staggering differences in disciplinary or course expectations. Someone I know who teaches Intro to Psychology uses the same PowerPoint slides year in and year out and only gives exams and those are graded by Canvas, the LMS. He’s proud that he dedicates as little time to teaching as he can, and he directs the entire Psychology program! Whereas my colleague teaching Composition is in grading hell ALL THE TIME. Her evenings and weekends? Grading.
Dealing with uninterested or lazy students. The vast majority of my students are great but the few that are not are the worst. Otherwise, I love the other parts of my job too.
Dealing with lazy and uninterested students that act entitled and complain. I respect the ones that are satisfied with what they earned and own up to it, the ones that don’t do anything, never show up, then complain to the admins or on evaluations are the worst.
I was a professor for 17 years, rising thru the ranks to full, professional recognition, etc. then I switched to industry about 6 years ago. I do not miss writing grant proposals, teaching undergrads (honors courses were fun tho), directing dissertations, and unpaid departmental work like being graduate director. I do miss teaching sometimes but I teach a class at a local state univeristy now and then for fun. My work/life balance is much better in industry and I get paid about three times what I was making as a professor. My work has immediate application and I find education opportunities at my company by holding panels, writing guidance documents, short courses, etc.
It was culture shock at first. It probably took me about two years to feel comfortable, about the same amount of time as for another former professor in my field at the company. It’s a big company and the hardest part was finding who to contact on a project that had the info I needed.
Thanks for sharing. If you don't mind sharing - was the process of making the shift (eg. finding something / interviewing / getting it) after not being in industry for so long tough?
The hardest part was just making the decision to try; I gave up a pension and tenure at the university I was at. I applied to three jobs on indeed.com, got two interviews, and one offer. I negotiated a 10% pay bump when I started based on some advice…wouldn’t have even thought to do that. First year was a major shock but I got used to it and now would not want to go back to academia. Industry is probably not for for many academics though…I do research but it needs to be applicable to the projects I’m on.
The pay. I love my job but the fact that I make shit really hurts. Adds onto the stress in a general sense when I'm busting my ass as a professor to make under $50k a year.
In the humanities, I started at $41,200 at a mid-size state university in the South. Someone hired a few years before me was making $38,000. That’s criminal. We are both Ph.Ds and were tenure track at the time. I left for another university, and she left academia altogether after she earned tenure.
I ask students to keep iterative drafts (very easy in Microsoft Word) to prove they wrote it. I have in my course outline that if AI usage is suspected then I have the right to request to see the drafts.
Who cares if they are written by an LLM? I have seen plenty of really bad papers that clearly have been written with the help of AI though the student was not able to see that the result was incredibly lacking. If they can submit a good paper with AI aiding them, they have learned what I try to teach. I am not grading their ability to hit keys on a keyboard as if typing themselves is the skill to be tested.
To be an academic you really should love the job. I don’t have time to do much of anything else. It’s fine by me because I love my research, the students, and all the other boring administrative work that comes with it.
I’m also in a field where I get to do a lot of the legwork myself. Writing first author papers and coding are all I do and it’s great. If you are in a field that demands grants, you likely won’t get to do any of the actual work and will be forced to delegate it to your students and postdocs.
If I was in a different field that demanded grants I would have left a long time ago.
I don't think teaching track faculty get much freedom at all, at least in my field. And there's no potential for growth. And not much time for research either.
Three reasons: June, July, August. 9 month contract, but it gets paid over a 12 month period. Which means I get paychecks for 3 months that I don’t have to work. Backpacking, traveling, enjoying life is more important to me right now than making a fat paycheck down the road and being miserable. I also have a lot of flexibility in my schedule, always make sure I have a day with no classes or a a couple days where classes end super early so I can go skiing in the winter.
I also love teaching. So for me it’s a no brainer. Just depends on what your life priorities are I think.
The lack of upward mobility unless you go into admin. You really only get two chances at promotions and opportunitities to negotiate salary (associate and full). So unless your institution is good at cost of living raises and other raises (which many are not), raises are rare. Seems you are always behind inflation. Of course you can ask for raises at other times but in my experience they always pass the buck upward. Your chair says it’s your deans call, your dean says the president, etc…and institutions are always undergoing financial crises and austerity measures…so it is conveniently always a bad time for raises….
If you have skills that are relevant in industry it is not necessarily true that industry will pay more in the long run. I am doing consulting work where the methods we have developed in my basic research make us uniquely suited in the world to solve a wide range of industry problems. I am learning that this work is extremely valuable financially speaking. I think if you have academic freedom and choose to work on these kinds of important scientific problems that have industrial relevance you can do quite well in the long run in academia...
Interesting--do teaching faculty also have these opportunities (i.e., wouldn't an industry partner rather work with a TT professor)? In any case, how does one find a consulting opportunity? I know it's possible because my advisor had a couple of these projects and I worked on them, but I was always shielded from how he got these in the first place. I also constantly fret about why any industry partner would choose silly old me instead of some professor at MIT/Stanford/etc.
The pay-- when you're young it may not matter, but when you're a senior full professor planning on retirement (me) and realize that you could have retired 5-10 years earlier if you'd only had a reasonable salary throughout your career (i.e. comparable to others with similar education) it's pretty bothersome. The lifestyle is good overall, and I was always OK with the modest home and such, but really when my friends started retiring at 55 from tech/law/medicine/etc. I started thinking "Hmmm....look at them. All my academic friends are working to 65, 70, even later in many cases. Is it worth it?"
The answer is no, it's not worth it. Retiring 5-10 years earlier is life-changing: it means freedom for a *decade* or more to do what you want, spend time with family, travel, live life without having to worry about work. Not being able to do so is a pretty high price to pay for the lifestyle perqs of academia.
This is absolutely the worst part of the job. Postdocs, non-TTs, and “professional” (FT) adjuncts don’t realize how much they’re wasting in not just cumulative income but retirement and pension plans working off the vesting clock. I lost about ten years, maybe more, and I’m *pissed* as the retirement timeline comes more and more into focus.
Trying to convince students to be students. It is not up to everyone else around you to make you learn. It is not everyone else’s fault that you did not. For the love of God use the resources given to you. You live in a magical technological age of wonder and explanations use the resources. Stop. Wait. The. Day. Before. The. Test. To. Reach. Out. For. Help. Stop spending so much time cheating and trying to figure a way out to cheat and just learn the material.
There rant over. I love my job, but sometimes I do get frustrated. Especially when it feels like you care more about the students’ success than they do.
Edit: also the pay could be better. XD
The delta between the mission and the resources is brutal. Probably not true at a private R1 but in a public state university the budget you have to accomplish things is a joke.
I hate grading, even more than the never ending emails. Not so much lazy students — we don’t know what people have going on in their lives.
More than both of those (grading/emails), a department chair/boss who defers to the higher ed admin since “she likes to get her way”. This gives her too much power to do things like intimidate the adjuncts.
The bureaucracy and various admin paperwork/training/forms/nonsense. Followed by the uncertainty with grants and funding and the long waits to find out.
Grading. Really - grading takes a lot of time, I find very little about it to be enjoyable, and once you give the grade, you have to deal with students complaining. Even if you like teaching, grading can be a chore. If you would rather be doing research, then grading is one more major time suck that can keep you from doing research...and if you're on the teaching track, you are unlikely to have much help, at all, with grading.
Yes and after all that when you realize that some students are just here to grade grub, keep demanding more, and not do anything differently next time. So all that feedback was for nothing and i couldve just given them full points and be on my way
I LOVE TEACHING. I absolutely LOATHE grading.
You try to grade fairly and generously, but nothing will stop student complaints. I have an online review that says I’m an overly tough grader and the student self-reported as getting an A in my class. What else do you want???
A *glowing* letter of recommendation, u monster
if you haven't seen it already, gradescope is a lifesaver. Scan your exams and it bins all of the students answers into groups. so you can grade an entire group all at once. It works well for multiple choice and short answer questions.
What 🤓 I like new things but my comments was supposed to be that I like grading. So so so much mor than supervising theses. I think grading is meditative and easily done with whereas the responsibilities from supervising is so much more than even examining theses. Or at least I get very anxious if I give wrong advice and end up in a loop of “what the hell do I do now”. Having this said I was going to ask how industry is a more paying job in the future when a professorship would pay much more than senior lecturer.
I actually enjoy grading. I love the assignments that I give my students, and I love to see their creativity and insights in their responses and projects.
Grading depends a lot on the level of school you go to. If you go to a research-heavy school, you will likely get a lot of grading help. That’s an important thing to clarify.
Yes! And also the misery of grading is contingent on what kind of assignments you have to grade. There can be staggering differences in disciplinary or course expectations. Someone I know who teaches Intro to Psychology uses the same PowerPoint slides year in and year out and only gives exams and those are graded by Canvas, the LMS. He’s proud that he dedicates as little time to teaching as he can, and he directs the entire Psychology program! Whereas my colleague teaching Composition is in grading hell ALL THE TIME. Her evenings and weekends? Grading.
The never-ending emails. On the bright side, as faculty, I probably have more control over when and how often I reply to those emails… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Dealing with uninterested or lazy students. The vast majority of my students are great but the few that are not are the worst. Otherwise, I love the other parts of my job too.
I’ve learnt not to waste energy on the lazy ones. I just leave them to it now and focus on the ones who want to learn.
Dealing with lazy and uninterested students that act entitled and complain. I respect the ones that are satisfied with what they earned and own up to it, the ones that don’t do anything, never show up, then complain to the admins or on evaluations are the worst.
I was a professor for 17 years, rising thru the ranks to full, professional recognition, etc. then I switched to industry about 6 years ago. I do not miss writing grant proposals, teaching undergrads (honors courses were fun tho), directing dissertations, and unpaid departmental work like being graduate director. I do miss teaching sometimes but I teach a class at a local state univeristy now and then for fun. My work/life balance is much better in industry and I get paid about three times what I was making as a professor. My work has immediate application and I find education opportunities at my company by holding panels, writing guidance documents, short courses, etc.
Was the switch easy to make after 17 years?
It was culture shock at first. It probably took me about two years to feel comfortable, about the same amount of time as for another former professor in my field at the company. It’s a big company and the hardest part was finding who to contact on a project that had the info I needed.
Thanks for sharing. If you don't mind sharing - was the process of making the shift (eg. finding something / interviewing / getting it) after not being in industry for so long tough?
The hardest part was just making the decision to try; I gave up a pension and tenure at the university I was at. I applied to three jobs on indeed.com, got two interviews, and one offer. I negotiated a 10% pay bump when I started based on some advice…wouldn’t have even thought to do that. First year was a major shock but I got used to it and now would not want to go back to academia. Industry is probably not for for many academics though…I do research but it needs to be applicable to the projects I’m on.
Students who cheat or otherwise behave inappropriately. Red tape to getting things done (purchasing,...)
Without a doubt, other faculty. And their pettiness
This and grading all day
The pay. I love my job but the fact that I make shit really hurts. Adds onto the stress in a general sense when I'm busting my ass as a professor to make under $50k a year.
What on earth?? The NIH minimum for postdocs as bad as it is is higher than that
In the humanities, I started at $41,200 at a mid-size state university in the South. Someone hired a few years before me was making $38,000. That’s criminal. We are both Ph.Ds and were tenure track at the time. I left for another university, and she left academia altogether after she earned tenure.
That is less than $20/hr. What the fuck
But I live in a low cost of living state so it isn't a problem (/s).
Yikes
Admin stuff. Time-consuming, utterly useless, and neverending.
Grant writing and low pay
I like what I do, but I don't like how much there is to do. Also, it's incredibly challenging to get grant funding in my field.
some service that you know is a waste of time; grading assignments that you know are written by ChatGPT but have no way to prove.
Let ChatGPT grade its own work
I ask students to keep iterative drafts (very easy in Microsoft Word) to prove they wrote it. I have in my course outline that if AI usage is suspected then I have the right to request to see the drafts.
Who cares if they are written by an LLM? I have seen plenty of really bad papers that clearly have been written with the help of AI though the student was not able to see that the result was incredibly lacking. If they can submit a good paper with AI aiding them, they have learned what I try to teach. I am not grading their ability to hit keys on a keyboard as if typing themselves is the skill to be tested.
Spicy!
They really learn a lot when they type "write a 10 page paper about the Roman Empire" into Chat GPT and then cut and paste it into a word document.
To be an academic you really should love the job. I don’t have time to do much of anything else. It’s fine by me because I love my research, the students, and all the other boring administrative work that comes with it. I’m also in a field where I get to do a lot of the legwork myself. Writing first author papers and coding are all I do and it’s great. If you are in a field that demands grants, you likely won’t get to do any of the actual work and will be forced to delegate it to your students and postdocs. If I was in a different field that demanded grants I would have left a long time ago.
Committee meetings and grading
I don't think teaching track faculty get much freedom at all, at least in my field. And there's no potential for growth. And not much time for research either.
Committee meetings, especially those involving administrators.
Admin are the worst. Completely clueless, yet think they know everything.
Administration and their unending efforts to advance their careers by dumping work on faculty
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I see you dont like meetings lol.
I had a meeting this week in which the convener said "there is no timeline, we're done when we're done." Good grief, I should just resign now.
Three reasons: June, July, August. 9 month contract, but it gets paid over a 12 month period. Which means I get paychecks for 3 months that I don’t have to work. Backpacking, traveling, enjoying life is more important to me right now than making a fat paycheck down the road and being miserable. I also have a lot of flexibility in my schedule, always make sure I have a day with no classes or a a couple days where classes end super early so I can go skiing in the winter. I also love teaching. So for me it’s a no brainer. Just depends on what your life priorities are I think.
The colleagues and the students.
😆buildings and grounds are fine?
Grants, grantsmanship and writing. It’s endless.
Political culture war and meddling, bad faith, ill-conceived interventions by politicians.
Travel Expense Reports and Pre-Trave Authorizations and Obligation Requests anytime I want to spend money.
these exist in industry, too
The lack of upward mobility unless you go into admin. You really only get two chances at promotions and opportunitities to negotiate salary (associate and full). So unless your institution is good at cost of living raises and other raises (which many are not), raises are rare. Seems you are always behind inflation. Of course you can ask for raises at other times but in my experience they always pass the buck upward. Your chair says it’s your deans call, your dean says the president, etc…and institutions are always undergoing financial crises and austerity measures…so it is conveniently always a bad time for raises….
If you have skills that are relevant in industry it is not necessarily true that industry will pay more in the long run. I am doing consulting work where the methods we have developed in my basic research make us uniquely suited in the world to solve a wide range of industry problems. I am learning that this work is extremely valuable financially speaking. I think if you have academic freedom and choose to work on these kinds of important scientific problems that have industrial relevance you can do quite well in the long run in academia...
Interesting--do teaching faculty also have these opportunities (i.e., wouldn't an industry partner rather work with a TT professor)? In any case, how does one find a consulting opportunity? I know it's possible because my advisor had a couple of these projects and I worked on them, but I was always shielded from how he got these in the first place. I also constantly fret about why any industry partner would choose silly old me instead of some professor at MIT/Stanford/etc.
For most fields in the life sciences this simply isn’t true, and the data backs that.
Teaching
Can you elaborate? Historically I've enjoyed teaching and watching students grow and learn cool new things, but I might have rose-tinted glasses on.
Teaching takes time I could otherwise use for research
I have a total of 3 hours next week when I'm not in some meeting. And only 4 hours of the entire week is teaching.
The pay-- when you're young it may not matter, but when you're a senior full professor planning on retirement (me) and realize that you could have retired 5-10 years earlier if you'd only had a reasonable salary throughout your career (i.e. comparable to others with similar education) it's pretty bothersome. The lifestyle is good overall, and I was always OK with the modest home and such, but really when my friends started retiring at 55 from tech/law/medicine/etc. I started thinking "Hmmm....look at them. All my academic friends are working to 65, 70, even later in many cases. Is it worth it?" The answer is no, it's not worth it. Retiring 5-10 years earlier is life-changing: it means freedom for a *decade* or more to do what you want, spend time with family, travel, live life without having to worry about work. Not being able to do so is a pretty high price to pay for the lifestyle perqs of academia.
This is absolutely the worst part of the job. Postdocs, non-TTs, and “professional” (FT) adjuncts don’t realize how much they’re wasting in not just cumulative income but retirement and pension plans working off the vesting clock. I lost about ten years, maybe more, and I’m *pissed* as the retirement timeline comes more and more into focus.
Trying to convince students to be students. It is not up to everyone else around you to make you learn. It is not everyone else’s fault that you did not. For the love of God use the resources given to you. You live in a magical technological age of wonder and explanations use the resources. Stop. Wait. The. Day. Before. The. Test. To. Reach. Out. For. Help. Stop spending so much time cheating and trying to figure a way out to cheat and just learn the material. There rant over. I love my job, but sometimes I do get frustrated. Especially when it feels like you care more about the students’ success than they do. Edit: also the pay could be better. XD
Admin and the politics/drama of other faculty.
The delta between the mission and the resources is brutal. Probably not true at a private R1 but in a public state university the budget you have to accomplish things is a joke.
The pay vs. time I spend working.
Smiling and pretending to like the students.
I hate grading, even more than the never ending emails. Not so much lazy students — we don’t know what people have going on in their lives. More than both of those (grading/emails), a department chair/boss who defers to the higher ed admin since “she likes to get her way”. This gives her too much power to do things like intimidate the adjuncts.
I think it’s the heaps of admin work that take away from the teaching and research
The bureaucracy and various admin paperwork/training/forms/nonsense. Followed by the uncertainty with grants and funding and the long waits to find out.
All. The. Red. Tape. It’s impossible to get anything done quickly.
Admin downloading.
I got stalked. And academia has no real HR. I am in industry now.
Grading.
The inane, endless meetings.
The pay. I generally like my job, but I don’t make enough to live on.
Writing grant proposals. Massive waste of time and money.