Hi, I'm Casey and I'm a fancy college professor.
And this video is about what my job actually is.
When I tell people that I am a professor very often the next question someone
asks is: oh what do you teach?
For the type of professor that I am this is kind of the equivalent of
if someone tells you they're a doctor asking, oh what kind of medication do you
prescribe? It's one very specific question
about one part of my job. Before I get into this, a caveat. I
am a tenure track professor in a STEM field at an R1
university in the United States. There are
lots of types of positions where your job is going to look very different.
In fact there are lots of people who the main part of their job is definitely
teaching and if you are, for, example an undergraduate student
at a university like mine, probably some of the instructors that you have
most of their job is teaching and some of the instructors you have are more
like me and it's not. What I'm saying may not apply to
everyone, but the kind of professor that I
am where research is a big part of my job, a lot of people have jobs like this.
So for a tenure track or tenured faculty at a university like mine, in theory
my job is supposed to be 40% teaching, 40% research
and 20% service. In reality it's probably more like 50%
research, 40% teaching, and 40% service and yes I realize that
that adds up to more than a hundred percent.
BBut let's break it down. First, teaching! Yes I do teach. In fact I
love teaching and that's why I am a professor
instead of for example working in the tech industry. Teaching
loads really vary by faculty. They're different at different
universities and in different disciplines etc
I teach right now three classes a year. Now I happen to be teaching
two classes. So right now I'm teaching an information ethics and policy class
separately at the undergraduate and graduate level.
Because I'm teaching two classes that means that I am spending
five hours in the classroom a week. And let's say that I'm spending another
two hours prepping for each class. That's a total
of 10 or 11 hours that i'm spending a week
on teaching. And of course I have more work
some weeks than others, because maybe I have to grade something or not grade
something or something's almost due and so I'm answering a lot of questions.
It's not necessarily the same amount all the time. Basically the things that Ido
related to teaching are teaching, being in front of a classroom,
preparing for teaching, things like rereading stuff and setting up
discussion documents, creating slides etc, also grading of course, answering
questions from students, setting up course materials
like in a course management system, giving feedback.
All the kinds of stuff you would expect. Teaching is pretty straightforward.
One thing that's also worth noting is that if you are teaching a class for the
first time, a brand new class you're teaching
from scratch, it probably takes at least twice as much
time every time you're doing prep related
stuff. And to be clear, I want to do a good job teaching.
I care a lot about teaching. However teaching is not the most important part
of my job performance. This is because with rare exceptions you don't get
tenure on your teaching performance. When a tenure track faculty member goes
up for tenure, which is the you know the big goal, the
job security, the you've made it stamp, you are
evaluated on teaching research and service. You are
expected to meet a bar for all three of those
things and to be exceptional in one.
Almost everyone in a university like mine
tries to be exceptional in research. But to be clear you still have to meet a
bar. You can fail to get tenure
if your teaching is real bad. At least I hear that this has happened.
Okay so that is teaching, which is indeed part of my job.
The next part, arguably the most important part at least
in terms of things like job performance, is
research. There are types of professor jobs where research is not an important
part of your job, for example ,if you are at a teaching university,
but for me it's expected. It's a big deal. And I love it another reason that I am a
professor. If you don't love doing research you
probably don't want to get a PhD in the first place.
So what does research mean? So there's the kind of obvious stuff
like oh you are doing a research project, like I am sitting here
collecting data or analyzing data or writing a paper and yes I do do some
of those things. Some of those things I do directly and
some of those things I do in collaboration, particularly with
graduate students. But that also means a lot of project
management is actually a big part of my job related to research.
I'll also note that I categorize advising PhD students as part of
research. It's also part of teaching, it's also
part of service, but in a discipline like mine
that is highly collaborative, a lab-based discipline, I am doing research with
my PhD students. Almost all of my publications
are with them as authors. That means that they are a huge
part of my research output. Also with all of that
collaborative helping students kind of thing
it means a lot of editing, a lot of feedback,
and a lot of meetings. There's also some stuff that comes along
with slash after the research, giving presentations and talks. I really
care about public scholarship so i tend to write blog posts or tweet about
or even occasionally youtube videos
about the results of research. And finally
a part of research that drives it all grant writing. I sometimes joke that a
big part of my job is asking people for money in
increasingly complicated ways. The most complicated way involves
spending months and many many
many hours of work writing a proposal to ask someone like say the National
Science Foundation to please give me money. So in my
discipline not only is bringing in grant money a big
part of my job performance and determines in part whether I get tenure
but I also need grant money to pay PhD students. If you have seen some of my
videos about PhD applications you'll know that I've
talked sometimes about how whether a particular faculty member
can be your advisor depends on part on whether they have grant money.
In any case anyone who is trying to get tenure
at an R1 research intensive university in a STEM field
has to get grants. One of the really tough things about spending
so much time on this kind of work is that if you aren't successful,
if you don't get the grant, sometimes it's completely
wasted effort. I try not to propose work that I know that
I absolutely cannot do if I don't get the
money but for some people you have to get the money in order to be
able to do the work. And then if you're lucky enough to get
grants, this involves a lot of project
management and administration and financial stuff.
Writing reports to the people who gave you money,
so yeah, the world of grants, a big part of doing research.
There's a lawnmower outside my window right now but I already put my makeup on
so I'm not redoing this video later.
[background noise] We're just gonna wait for it to be over.
All right I give up, we're just gonna power through this thing.
Okay so, teaching, research, now what is service? Well this means
service to my department, to my college, to my university, and to my
scholarly slash professional community. At the most local level this includes
things like going to faculty meetings, serving
on the graduate committee, running PhD admissions, which I have done for the
past five years. This is why I have so much knowledge, you
should check out my videos about that. Lots of types of department and
university level service that people do, often it involves
committees, so many committees. Faculty council, grievance committees,
diversity committees, curriculum committees, committees
committees committees. And every time I say the word committee
imagine like many many meetings, so many
meetings. I also already mentioned that I do not consider PhD advising to
be a service role for me, however serving on committees
is a service role, so being on the dissertation committee for other
students in our department or students at other universities.
And then there is service to your scholarly slash professional community.
The number one time sink for this is reviewing papers. I
just did a video about how the peer review process works.
And so you should definitely watch that and it'll give you a sense of
how much labor goes into this process.
Oops my camera battery died. There's also a lot of other kinds of professional
service. I happen to do a lot,
it's partly just because I really care about my scholarly community and because
some of this kind of work is stuff that I particularly enjoy so
for example one of my scholarly communities is SIGCHI which is the special interest group for
human computer interaction within ACM which is a big computer
science professional community. I serve on the
research ethics committee for SIGCHI.
I also do a lot of work related to conference organizing.
for the main conferences in my field. So for example right now Iam
one of the general chairs for a conference that is happening in
january of 2022, the ACM conference on supporting group
work. I've also agreed to be one of the general chairs for the
2023 CSCW conference and work for that is already starting
believe it or not. I think that giving back to your
community is really important. I will link to a
blog post down below from Cliff Lampe who is one
of my favorite people in my scholarly
community and he wrote something great about the joy of academic service and
why it's nice. I mean another example of a type of
service that I do is giving advice to graduate students.
That's one of the reasons that i started this youtube channel. And finally
there is a miscellaneous category this involves things like
administrative tasks, reimbursements, keeping track of finances, updating my
website, and also things like attending talks,
meeting with people that don't fit into other categories, talking to journalists.
I might put tweeting into this category but
one thing on the topic of administration is that being a research professor
is kind of like running a small business, and honestly this is something that I
was not expecting to be part of my job like
I knew about the grant writing thing and I knew I wasn't gonna like it. It's
not the actual process of writing grants that I don't like, it is the anxiety
that comes with asking people for money and knowing that you will not have money
if they say no, But a lot of the tasks around like
project management and keeping track of financial things and that sort of stuff
I really had to just learn on the job. This is not the
kind of thing you're trained to do as a PhD student.
So I would love to at some point do like a
day in the life vlog even though right now day in the life
at like zoom university is probably not going to be that interesting.
So maybe I will do that at some point and you can just watch me sit right here
all day typing on my laptop. Let me give you a general
sense of what a day might look like for me.
So I started making this video at four o'clock
and I started my work day this morning at about seven. So that's about
an eight hour work day and here's what it looks like.
First thing in the morning I did prep for the class that I was going to teach
later in the day. I found some recent news articles about
tech ethics which is how I start every class. I skimmed
through some reading reflections that they had done,
I set up a discussion document, I have students do shared notes on a
google document during class, all of that kind of stuff that I need to
do to get ready for class. At 8 a.m I had a meeting. I don't usually
have meetings at 8 am but I don't really mind them because clearly I'm a morning
person. This was a meeting about a research
collaboration, we're writing a grant, it lasted about an hour. I had a short
break and then I taught for an hour and a half.
After that I had a meeting with someone who wants to interview me
for a podcast. I also had an hour meeting with
a PhD student. I spent about an hour on a service task, and I spent probably
45 minutes to an hour doing some research related organization
essentially to give some undergraduate research
assistants some tasks to do. That was my eight-hour day!
I'm not gonna talk about how many hours I work in a week. I don't think
that's a particularly productive conversation
in part because there's going to be someone who either thinks it's too much
or too little. I will say that it is possible to have good
work-life balance with the type of job that I have. One of
the difficult things about this kind of schedule
is that it can be really hard to find time to do things like
write a paper. And this is one of the really tricky things about my job,
you might have noticed that there was a lot of scheduled time in therem
meetings, teaching. This means that it can be difficult to find the time to do
things like sit down and write a paper. And actually this brings me to a
really important point, which is that one of the things that it
can be the most difficult to learn how to do
as a new faculty member is set priorities.
This is in part because they're not given to you
and this is one of the things that I love
about my job. I get to pick what research I do.
No one ever tells me what kind of research to do.
Sometimes it can be dependent on grant money right so
whether I get a particular grant might influence whether Ido the research but
I get to decide what I'm going to apply for grants for. A lot of this job
is a choose your own adventure and that is what I
love about it. But it also means that if you're someone who has difficulty making
decisions about priorities you're gonna find this really challenging.
So that is my job and again I love my job.
If you think that a job like this is exactly what you want,
then maybe your first task is to apply for a PhD
program! Hopefully I have lots of advice on that,
link to playlist down below. And also if you are a student, you're an
undergraduate and you're taking a class that class is a small amount of what
that professor does. So please don't think that for example
they are sitting around waiting to answer your email. You need to be patient.
They might have a lot on their plate at any given time and again my disclaimer
that other people's jobs as professors might look
quite different than this. Maybe you're a professor and you're like that looks
nothing like my job. Well tell us in the comments how your
job is different than mine. And feel free to ask questions about any
of this or other parts of my job and feel free to
subscribe if you want more videos about academic
life and sometimes some other things too. All right well I'mCcasey and that's all
I have for you today. I gotta go do some work! Thanks for
watching.