Grad School, pt. 3

Today, I'm going to talk about professors, and the transition between graduate student to professor in the sciences. Both my parents are professors in microbiology, so I knew the words "publish or perish" by the time I was 7. Here's how professorship works, what a professor really does all day, and how this affects science and research.

When applying for a faculty position at a university in the sciences, here's what you need to keep in mind:
- Almost all schools will hire you as an Associate Professor and put you on a tenure track.
- Tenure track means that you have 6 years to "prove" yourself and your worth to your department
- At the end of 6 years, if you haven't published enough / gotten enough grants / done a good enough job teaching, you are fired.
- Once you are "fired" by a university, no university of higher or equal rank will ever accept you for a job again.
- If the university decides to keep you after 6 years, you get tenure and a job for life.

Therefore, those first 6 years can be very stressful. Here at UIUC, I've heard of 32 year old professors that sleep in their offices because they are so busy trying to get tenure.

Also, from the graduate student point of view, if your advisor doesn't have tenure and is fired, you might be given 1 year to complete your degree if you are close to finishing. Otherwise, you either have to move with your professor (if she stays in academia) or start all over from scratch, usually negating 2+ years of your progress.

Because those first 6 years are so important, most people do a post-doc. A post-doc is where you go work for yet another advisor for 2 years, doing all you can to publish your own papers and get your own grants so you have a head start during your 6 year trial period. The amount of time spent in a post-doc seems to vary on the competitiveness and age of the field. Computer science doesn't require but recommends a post-doc before applying for a faculty job. Five years ago, post-docs in CS were unheard of. My parents each did a post-doc in microbiology 30 years ago. Nowadays in Biology, Dani says you can't get a faculty job unless you've done at least 2 post-docs, or 4 extra years of school. Post-docs get paid slightly more than graduate students, perhaps $10/$17 an hour. The idea behind taking a post-doc is that you can build your research without worrying about all the obligations that being a professor brings.

Speaking of those obligations, here's what professors do for the majority of their day
- write papers and grants based off of the research of their students
- mentor and meet with students
- teach classes, advise undergraduates
- sit on committees
- budget grants
- other miscellaneous administrative tasks.
- network with other researchers

Notice how "researching" or "planning science" isn't on the list. If those things happen, they are squeezed in between all the other obligations. As a fellow student Tanya Crenshaw told me, "If research was like football, grad school would be a grueling boot camp that trains you to be the best quarterback you can be, and as soon as you graduate, you are hired into the position of head coach." My dad also complains about the lack of hands-on science at the professor level: "All I do is write and listen to people complain. I never get to do any science anymore."

You see, to be successful in science, you need money. My parents spend most of their days figuring out which government agencies they can beg for funding. They vote for whichever politicians will increase research spending, and they change their research goals to match the buzzwords of the moment. You have to do these things just to keep your money flowing. Once you have money, you hire graduate students and post-docs to do all the work (after all, they are cheap). Once you've hired people, you now have people who depend on you for their paychecks and life's goals. Therefore, you need to get even more money to cover lean times when grants don't get funded. This leads to a vicious cycle: as the labs grow, they produce better results, which leads to more money, which leads to more people. etc. Eventually, the money runs out, a grant doesn't get funded, and grad-students loose their jobs. Furthermore, as a beginning professor, you don't have students or money, so no one will fund you. Hence the post-doc -- you have more experience than grad students and can out-perform them. So you trade a few more years of blood, tears, and low pay so your publication list compares favorably to a professor with 2-3 graduate students already.

That's all for today. Tomorrow, I'll talk about how science is like advertising, perception and reality, and how science encourages bad practices like manufacturing false importance.