The Secret Lives of Professors (What Being a Professor is Really Like)
matt-welsh.blogspot.com
The Secret Lives of Professors (What Being a Professor is Really Like)
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Re: The Secret Lives of Professors (What Being a Professor is Really Like)
#2I wish some of my professors would have read this as grad students. Become a professor because you love teaching, not because you want to do research.
Which also raises the question whether there should be a similarly venerable(and compensated) position reserved for researchers who don't teach?
Re: The Secret Lives of Professors (What Being a Professor is Really Like)
#3I wish some of my professors would have read this as grad students. Become a professor because you love teaching, not because you want to do research. Which also raises the question whether there should be a similarly venerable(and compensated) position reserved for researchers who don't teach?
Which also raises the question whether there should be a similarly venerable(and compensated) position reserved for researchers who don't teach?
Being a staff scientist at a national lab is about as close as you can get to this in the US. Compared to being a professor you'll get similar money (sometimes more), less prestige, more time for research and slightly more annoying bureaucracy. There's upsides and downsides of each.
Re: The Secret Lives of Professors (What Being a Professor is Really Like)
#4It's more fun to create something novel that many people use and appreciate (e.g., an iPhone game).
Much better than research prototypes that go no where beyond a publication or two.
Re: The Secret Lives of Professors (What Being a Professor is Really Like)
#5This nicely sums up a bunch of reasons why I decided not to do a postdoc, and instead joined my first startup after finishing my PhD. I'm sure it works for some people, but I just couldn't see myself being happy with it.
Re: The Secret Lives of Professors (What Being a Professor is Really Like)
#6I wish some of my professors would have read this as grad students. Become a professor because you love teaching, not because you want to do research. Which also raises the question whether there should be a similarly venerable(and compensated) position reserved for researchers who don't teach?
Which also raises the question whether there should be a similarly venerable(and compensated) position reserved for researchers who don't teach?
an academic research lab sponsored by a big company (note that this is not the same as a corporate R&D division) ... in the 1970's, this was epitomized by Xerox PARC and AT&T Bell Labs. today, Microsoft Research is currently the leader in this category.
Re: The Secret Lives of Professors (What Being a Professor is Really Like)
#7I wish some of my professors would have read this as grad students. Become a professor because you love teaching, not because you want to do research. Which also raises the question whether there should be a similarly venerable(and compensated) position reserved for researchers who don't teach?
A handful of universities have Research Professor positions. At Carnegie Mellon, it's basically the same as a normal Professor (tenured, similar prestige, etc.), except that you don't normally teach, and in return, you're expected to fund a portion of your own salary out of the grants you bring in. (If you don't bring in grants some year, you can fall back on teaching to earn your keep, so research profs do occasionally teach.)
Re: The Secret Lives of Professors (What Being a Professor is Really Like)
#8It's more fun to create something novel that many people use and appreciate (e.g., an iPhone game). Much better than research prototypes that go no where beyond a publication or two.
ok, i'll bite ;)
if everyone thought the way that you did, then we'd still be programming by submitting our punch cards to some gigantic centralized machine. think about how much basic academic research occurred before the invention of something like the iPhone became possible
Re: The Secret Lives of Professors (What Being a Professor is Really Like)
#9This does vary based on the field and kind of school. It's definitely accurate for being a professor at a top-tier research university in the sciences or engineering. A prof job at those kinds of places could accurately be titled "research manager": the main job requirements are managing and bringing in funding for a fairly large research lab of 5-10 grad students and possibly some research scientists and postdocs.
But you can shift the balance of the various components if you go to different kinds of schools. To take the opposite end of the spectrum, if you're the CS prof at a small liberal-arts college, your job will involve a lot more teaching and mentoring undergrads, and a lot less grant-writing and research-lab management. It's unfortunately not true that there's a happy medium to fit every kind of temperament, but there are some options at least.
Re: The Secret Lives of Professors (What Being a Professor is Really Like)
#10It's more fun to create something novel that many people use and appreciate (e.g., an iPhone game). Much better than research prototypes that go no where beyond a publication or two.
Seriously? You'd rather implement Tetris in Obj-C than make a fundamental, provable improvement to an important algorithm? We have very different ideas of fun.