Be a professor

“Here's what I love about being a professor (I teach at a SLAC where teaching is the focus and the research requirement is more modest): * The freedom: I set my own research agenda and design my own courses. There are very few fields where you have this much agency in your working life. I'm only required to be on campus on my teaching days and working from home or on the road when I'm not. * The environment: at a college/university you're surrounded by learning, books, ideas, and experts. I'm often times on campus just to admire the work my colleagues are doing or to support student research. It's really cool to work at a place where the flourishing of ideas is (at least in theory) at the heart of what folks are doing. * I don't have do wear a suit: This might be super niche to me, but I was a first generation student from a working class family. I'm often times on campus in work boots and a Carhartt hoodie from the Lumber company I used to work for. Those are the clothes I'm comfortable in and I'm not required to wear slacks or a jacket or anything corporate. This kind of comfort at work is hard to understate.”

“In graduate school (Marquette University for my master’s in international studies, Florida State University for my PhD in political science), I got to serve as a teaching assistant and a research assistant. Though it was great getting paid to go to college, I derived something much more valuable from the experience: I learned that professors didn’t know everything about their discipline, which is why they need assistance. We collaborated on matters grand and mundane, from cutting-edge research to writing test questions. And sometimes they know what you need better than you do. “I’m writing you a letter of recommendation to Florida State University,” my advisor at Marquette told me. “Why?” I asked. He smiled. “They’ll teach you all of the statistics you’ll need to test those arguments you should be developing.” My eyes widened. I was never a great math student [...] “It’s all word problems!” I exclaimed on my first day of Ph.D. studies. Sure, it was a geek moment, but I discovered that I liked the math almost as much as the politics I was studying.”

“I wish I had known how much politics would be involved in the discipline (and how malicious some of my colleagues would be). I wish I had known that at key stages in one’s career, such as peer-reviewed publishing and at tenure and promotion to full professor, that one’s work was reviewed anonymously. Often this is fine, and people review with integrity. Other times it means there is no public accountability for (negative) evaluations, including career-ending ones. I wish I knew earlier that waiting for someone to retire was the way universities got rid of bullies and other serial troublemakers. I wish I knew earlier that it really was an old boys club.”