Re: Profession
Well buddy, firstly, I’m a full-time Assistant Professor at a University - and not a Community College… and where I work, all my colleagues spend a good 100 hours/week or more working… in terms of salary figures, with my Ph.D. near completion, I’m looking at around $110K to start with as an Associate Professor next year - right now I’m at $80K.
So yes! again, the money is decent… but hours are crazy… I don’t get to see my family much at all since I’m also managing p-t studies. However, there’s general misconception about work in academia, and like you said there may even be profs who have it easy… but you gotta look at a lot of variables:
Salary = f (qualifications, industry experience, academic experience, publications credit) ;
Hours = f (professional faculty, type of courses, research projects, administrative responsibilities, govt. grants work).
There’s more to a Professor’s job than just going to class and delivering lectures especially if you’re in a Professional Program like teaching at the School of Business (which is where I am) or say Engineering etc. where industry collaboration projects take up a good chunk of your time. Here’a partial list of what I do on a regular basis.
- Teaching classes
- Grading papers and assignments
- Marking tests and exams
- Counseling students and providing course and career advice
- Attending administrative committee meetings
- Participating in school development projects
- Partaking community service with university associations and external not-for-profit agencies
- Writing research papers & journal articles
- Conducting field studies in collaboration with organizations
- Presenting research findings at conferences
- Publishing in journals, books and online
- Participating in Steering Committee meetings for two or sometimes three projects in the Private Sector
- Taking up a Program Management responsibility for parts of various projects for Govt. agencies etc.
and the list goes on…
and yes, again not all Govt. jobs are easy - common generalization!
I’ve had my share of working in the Public sector (2 years), Private sector (3 years), Consulting (2 years) and Academia (4 years)… every job had its own appeal, its own challenges as well as rewards. All I’m saying that is a bird’s eye-view isn’t adequate enough to make judgements about a job - you need to be in the trenches yourself to realize what its like.
and ohh I hope that also assures your reservations about core competency - cuz IMHO, GS takes elaborate measures to ensure alignment of forums to people where they not only enjoy core but rather distinctive competencies.