Would you become an academic if you could do it all over again?

[Wahoo Redux]

I was just wondering if people would find this interesting.

Some time ago someone, I believe it was Polly, made an aside to the effect of "The idea of being a 'professor' was not as much fun as the job of actually being a professor, and I suspect many other people have had that same experience," or maybe it was "Being a professor was not as much fun as the idea of being a professor made it seem," or "Once I became a professor I found the job was not nearly as interesting as the idea of being a professor made it seem"...I'm not remembering the actual wording, but you get the idea.

There were a surprising number of posters who keyed off that comment.

I've mulled that over a bit since then and wondered some things. 

For instance, how many professors went straight from undergrad to graduate school to the professoriate without first working in the corporate or blue-collar worlds?  My experience has been that many professors did other kinds of work between their bachelors and the beginning of their graduate studies----but maybe I am wrong.  After college I had a series of jobs in one of the stable, always healthy industries in America, and I almost lost my marbles (and almost everyone I knew hated what they did to one degree or the other)
While there are definitely things I dislike about academia, at least I am not living the lifestyle accurately lampooned in Office Space and Fight Club.  And while I spend most of the semester stressed out over the treadmill of grading and prep-work, at least I am studying things I find genuinely interesting (most of the time, that is). 

But then again, 2008 really put a crimp our industry...and I don't want to die one day in the rural ghetto we are now stuck in...so maybe...

You get the idea.

[mamselle]

I said, "Other," because.....

I are a academic.

It weren't about becoming, I already was it.

M.

[Chemystery]

Other.  I have no regrets.  I love what I do and really can't imagine doing anything else.  But I am and always have been strongly driven by the notion of security.  If the 20-something version of me had looked ahead and seen the number of colleges closing or struggling to stay afloat, she would have almost certainly made a different choice. 

[San Joaquin]

Yeah, it wasn't an either-or so much as finally an accurate diagnosis of my essential nature.  Even though I was going to be a poet (and was/am) and I'm doing more freelance things at present, I'm an academic whether I'm employed there or not.  Nerd to the bone.  :-)

[backatit]

I worked in industry before I went into academia. I think I made a pretty clear-eyed decision, because the reason I went into academia was that I looked at what I was doing on a day to day basis, and the things I most enjoyed (training classes) were the things I would typically do as a teacher. I considered becoming a high school teacher, and looked into that, but as I was getting my MA I taught classes, and enjoyed the day to day dealing with students (and tbh, my cousins were in high school and I couldn't imagine teaching them :D). I never really considered pursuing a more research-oriented TT job - I like my teaching focus. I think sometimes about going back into industry, and it doesn't horrify me, but I really like teaching fully online now, and it gives me a certain freedom I don't think I'd get in a regular job.

I firmly believe in looking at how you want to spend your time as a career focus. I like working in intense bursts, being able to do most of my work from home but collaborating with colleagues occasionally, and I like learning new things. For the most part, I like the way my days are structured now, and think I spend most of my time on things that are important (developing new learning materials, learning new things for my classes, giving feedback for pretty well-designed assignments). I've got a groove going on, and hopefully no one throws a spanner into it anytime soon :D.

[Juvenal]

Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

[lightning]

If I had to do it all over again, I would not bother with industry first, and I would instead go straight into academe.

I had this notion, when I was younger, that I should prove myself first as someone that made a living at what I was going to teach & research, before I went into the subject area as an academic. I felt that the professional experience in the field was important. I thought it would get me more credibility.

It's ends up that professional experience in the trenches didn't mean as much as I thought.

I work with a lot of people--good people--who were in school their entire lives before getting their TT post. And they have been here ever since. I don't think any less of them. And they don't think any more of me.

So, yes I would become and academic, if I could do it all over again, but I would pursue it sooner.

[onthefringe]

I actially adore being a professor, but acknowledge there's a lot of privilege inherent in where I am and how I feel about it,

[fishbrains]

I discovered a way of life that would accommodate me without significant violence. I am grateful.

[Caracal]

I never had that many illusions about the strength of the job market. I actually have more doubts about whether the pattern of work really suits me. On one hand, part of me likes having so much control of my time. I also, in theory, like the big chunks of time when I don't have any responsibilities. Sometimes, however, I wonder if I'd be happier and less anxious off the academic calendar. The end of the semester always takes a lot out of me, and then suddenly all of the classes I've been juggling are gone, the grading is over and I just have these long term projects confronting me that I struggle to complete.

There might be ways to fix this. If it runs, I'm going to have a summer class this year, but part of me sometimes wonders if a more normal work schedule would suit me better.

[polly_mer]

While there are definitely things I dislike about academia, at least I am not living the lifestyle accurately lampooned in Office Space and Fight Club.  And while I spend most of the semester stressed out over the treadmill of grading and prep-work, at least I am studying things I find genuinely interesting (most of the time, that is). 

In contrast, in my current job, I spend most of my time doing things that are genuinely interesting or necessary to get to do the interesting things.  Academia was the place where I didn't fit at all, despite being bookish, loving school as a student, and wanting to talk about ideas.  Instead, most days were the horrible lifestyle lampooned in Office Space and Fight Club in trying to meet arbitrary requirements clearly put in place by morons who were more concerned with keeping their jobs and the form of education than actually providing an educational community in which people were learning, discussing, and being modified by that learning and discussion.  I was busy all the time, but seldom was I doing something that was long-term important.  The least intellectual places I've been have been universities and that's not just Super Dinky.

I currently have a very flexible day with far fewer meetings than when I was an academic and the rules are rules that are required to do the work, not some weird leftovers from 1955 about how the world could be.  I have much better colleagues than the students who didn't want to learn or, worse, were so unprepared by their previous education that they couldn't learn what was necessary for the required classes.  I have colleagues who eagerly spend a whole afternoon kicking around the ideas and then we go do the work to learn something that no one has ever learned before.  I work less and enjoy it much more.

I stand by the notion that being a professor was far less good on almost every measure than the idea I had in my head for decades.  I won't say I'll never go back, but I would definitely be checking pretty hard for the conditions of having a true learning community that has a research component in which I would be doing research along with the students, not being manager of a research group scrambling every day for the funding while never doing the research or being the lone voice who truly cares about education instead of just getting through some classes.

[downer]

It is a question I ponder sometimes. I enjoy a lot about teaching and thinking carefully about stuff I care about. Academics often suppose that they are the only people who get to do that, but plenty of other jobs involve that too. I was interested in becoming a journalist, but that would have probably been quite a challenging and stressfull career. There was also the option of going into law, which would have probably made me a lot richer. Hard to say how that would have been.

It is always tricky working out where you would have ended up had you gone down another path.

[RatGuy]

I'm not saying my job sucks or that the life that I have sucks because of my job route, but I there are plenty of times that I wish that I'd participated more in my career fairs as an UG. I was pre-med, realized too late that that wasn't a viable professional route for me, and wound up in grad school for the worst possible reasons. I never got off that train. And here I am.

My life has a lot of good things going for it, and my job is a pretty sweet gig.

But I don't have money and I'll never have money doing this. I see my HS cohorts with houses and families and trips to Disney World (or trips anywhere, lately), and I hope that I get some summer teaching so I don't have to suspend my Netflix account. My sister is 41 and she'll retire in 10 years (my father has been retired since he was 55, the year I graduated college). I will die in my office because I can't afford not to.

[mahagonny]

If I had my life to live over, I'd stop fantasizing.

[apl68]

It's hard to say.  Of course I ended up ABD and so failed to become an academic and had to find an alternative career.  But I gave it my best shot, for what little that was worth.  I went straight into grad school from undergrad because I admired my profs, and they said I had potential, and I couldn't really imagine doing anything else for a living other than following in their footsteps.  This was just before the Bowen Report was debunked, so I had undergrad mentors telling me in good faith that the outlook for the job market was strong.

Though I met some good people and studied some interesting things in grad school, it was overall not a happy experience.  I learned that I was not a natural as a teacher, felt as the years dragged on that I was falling behind others my age who had taken different career paths, and realized that the bad job market meant there was little chance of any reward for completion.  Finally giving up and writing off all those years of hard work as a loss, and starting over in a new career, was a tough experience as well.  For a long time I felt bitter--like the grad program had knowingly duped me and others into pursuing an impossible dream so that they could exploit us a cheap teaching assistant and adjunct labor.

With hindsight I realize that I was an example of what Chronicle's Ms. Mentor once called "The Person Who Is Very Good In School."  I tried to become an academic because I thrived in a school environment and imagined that I could stay in one for the rest of my life.  That surely explains the motivations of a lot of academics and would-be academics like me.  At one level I'm glad I had a chance to receive a great education and broaden my horizons in a PhD program.  I gained a great deal from that.  But it came at an awfully high price.  I never felt that I could in good conscience encourage anybody else to try grad school.

At this point, though, it's hard to imagine my life ever having taken a different path from what it did.  Grad school did lead me indirectly into the career I have now.  I still use much of what I learned then.  Ultimately I just try not to second-guess things, and to figure that God knew what he was doing when he allowed my life to take the course it did.