Surprisingly few of the graduate students do.
My father says, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."
The internet says that college professor is one of the lowest stress jobs.
All I can say is, WOW. Here's what it looks like from a new professor's perspective:
- You walk in ready to rock and roll based on your hands-in-the-lab experience. No one appears to truly care about your teaching experience, nor your leadership, grant management, etc.. experience when they hire you. The overall attitude is, "well, you're great in the lab, obviously you'll figure the other things out." At this point I'll start highlighting all the roles in which you're expected to excel despite no training or experience...
- Suddenly you get students. Or not. It depends on how "sexy" your research is at the moment, and how well you can sell it, honestly, despite no training in being a good salesperson. Hopefully you will get good students (I did), and hopefully you'll be able to tell the difference between good ones and bad ones, despite having absolutely zero experience as a hiring manager.
- Of course, at the same time, you'll be asked to either teach an established class or design a new one. Most likely, if your university is kind to new professors, you'll be asked to design a new course. Also of course, this won't feel particularly kind, as you've never ever had any experience as a course designer, at the university level, before.
- You'll start ordering things for your new laboratory, and your budget admin people will start to query you about how much you should request for this first year. You likely have some clue, because you wrote the budget in the first place, but if you're really interdisciplinary like me, you're going to start to realize how little experience you have in financial administration. If you're really smart or really stupid, you'll offload a lot of this on your new support team, only to find out you both had assumptions, and your assumptions made a donkey out of both of you.
- Now it's been half a semester, and your students are getting older and more experienced and you are starting to realize they know more than you in some areas. They should, as they should graduate as the world's expert in their field, which should be different from yours. This development is awesome!! But this is also the time they start to realize they know more than you in some areas. If you have an awesome group, like mine, your team takes all this learning in stride and comes out the other end stronger and more awesome without major scuffs. If you have a less-awesome group, well... You get your first major lesson in personnel management.
- After that first semester, the department expects you to do things you didn't have to do before, like committee service. You're probably about to be asked to chair a committee that actually means something. Shoot. And you just figured out a little bit of management with your hot-headed-lab-manager, now you have to manage a team of professors. Professors are worse than cats - if you walk into a room with two professors and ask for an opinion, you'll walk out two hours later with 132 different opinions. Let's call this boss-level management, because managing that situation feels a lot like fighting the "boss" on the old video games.
- Teaching - now you'll actually be asked to teach something the institute values, rather than "whatever I think is cool" like you got to last semester. There will be learning objectives and assessments and these will be happening to you while you're barely treading water to keep up with the class, since you probably never took the equivalent. The students will also turn to you for help, and suddenly you'll be confidant, tutor, teacher, and therapist. Some will come with normal questions about content, others will come with personal questions about their lives. This is where I think it's somewhat easier for our male colleagues, because I somehow doubt many of them have sat in an office with a basket full of kleenexes as a student bawled her eyes out over the stress of deciding between relocating for her fiancee's job or for the graduate school of her dreams.
- Oh yeah, now it's been a year and it's starting to look bad that you never set up your website. Add web developer to the list of things you're supposed to be good at.
- You should also be more social. How will the department or college ever get to know you unless you hang out from time to time? Also, you're expected to organize these get-togethers. Add social organizer to your list.
- You got your first grant (yay!) and your second (double yay!). Now you have multiple funded projects. For the first time there are actual, honest questions about where to charge stuff to, including personnel time. Oh shoot. That means you also have to become good at being a project manager.
There you go! Ten simple steps in my plan to becoming a professor, with only 12 new roles to master. Good luck!
