to ask what people's impressions are of academics/the job role

[anotheracademic]

I see there are quite a few of us and also see from the recent money and salary threads how much people are earning, working conditions and qualifications .
Im wondering what non academics impressions are of what we do, what they think/thought we earn and what we are like.

How many male academics are on PTAs do you suppose?

I'm currently fasting from mumsnet, so everyone pile on and flame me, but I had to comment on this thread. (Oxbridge and RG humanities lecturer, permanent post, big grant, one child, DH Oxbridge senior scientist).

I got 5 As at A Level, quite some time ago, in Maths, Further Maths, Chemistry, English and History. I could literally have chosen to do anything, including lucrative careers like banking or brain surgery. But I had a passion for learning and teaching so I became an academic.

I love my job now I'm in a university that has a reasonable balance between teaching and research. My previous job was hell on earth, working 80 hours a week just to survive my appalling teaching load (research? Hahaha. Though was still expected to keep it all going stronger than ever.) And I'm still pretty damn resentful that my pay is so shit in comparison with what my peers are paid in other professions. Just lucky I love what I do, because at this age and stage it would be really hard if not impossible to change careers. Re childcare too, the flexibility is a god send, and students are off at the same time as schools so it's possible to work more from home then (and yes, we bloody well do work hard from home Ms university administrator who doesn't see that side of things. We're judged on our outputs, not our time in the office.) But if you want a real career in academia, you're competing against people with no childcare duties, and you just dob't have as many hours in the day as they do, which means working all the hours god sends (flu excepting, hence me succumbing to the lure of mumsnet )

But what I wanted to comment on is the foreign travel. It might look glamorous to admin staff who don't go or to PhD students who have no responsibilities except to themselves, but if you're a senior academic they are bloody hard work, a real grind, that take an immense toll. You start working over breakfast before the scheduled meetings even start and you're still at it after dinner late at night. And then you get up the next morning and do it all again. It might be in a nice location, but as you won't get to enjoy it it might as well be Heathrow airport, especially as all hotel rooms look exactly the same.

Sure, plenty of people in other professions do that kind of travel and work that hard - but noone I know at a similar career stage works as hard as I do on so little money. And I frequently have to pay for what are essential foreign trips out of my own pocket.

I work in a university though I'm not an academic. I do, however, have both a private sector and a teaching background, so what they do is not a mystery to me.

It may be possible that this is a symptom in my particular institution, which has a bit of a reputation for eccentricity, but some of them do themselves no favours. In general I find the academics who are also mothers tend to be the most sensible and realistic. But of, dear god, some of the others do themselves no favours at all.

This is an example of a typical email exchange I had over two days this week

Me: I've discovered a technical problem in something that I know has a very short deadline. While we wait for the support guys to fix it, I can put in a
workaround for you. Would you like me to do this? I will need Information A and Information B. Information B is very important (a deadline)

Academic: Yes please. that would be helpful.

Me: Could I have information A and B please, I cannot put in the workaround until I get these

Academic: Here's information A

Me: I really need information B please.

(At this point I make an educated guess at information B and put in the workaround anyway)

Next Day..

Academic: Here's information B but the deadline was last night.

Slug

Part of my job is staff training. One of the items I have to teach academics takes, on average 10 minutes to learn. To be honest, it's fairly intuitive and a reasonable percentage manage to work out how to use it with no input from me. However, for a reasonable proportion of the teaching staff, teaching them how to do a simple task, will inevitably involve an extra hour or so of me having to endure the moan that broadly consists of "I don't see why we have to do this, it's too complicated, the students won't do it, why can't I get a student to do this for me? It won't work, I don't have the time to do this, this is all part of the (insert academic conspiracy here) the faculty staff won't use it, why can't you do it for me?" FFS if they just stopped whinging and got down to it, they would have learnt something that actually saved vast amounts of time freeing them up for research/teaching.

I qualify all this by holding my hand up and saying I am a teacher, the whinest of all professions.

I am an RA at a RG uni and while it was always my dream to be an academic I am not going to be able to stay. For the sake of my sanity and my family I have been forced to decided to go into shock horror industry. My colleagues will shun me like the plague if/when they find out as industry people are loathed with a vengance. They are seen as failed academics! And, yes, that is what I am fast becoming as I can't take the politics, I can't take the personal attacks, the arrogance and cruelty laced with ill-disguised glee (displayed at anything from face-to-face meetings, departmental meetings and seminars to international conferences against anyone or anything deemd to be less intelligent or to have done less worthy research than the oh-so-brilliant attacker). Ironically it seems from industry friends that academics are seen as failed professionals...

Some "Academics" who are Kings of their Castle's (the successful ones at least) are allowed to run their Kingdom's like a medieval fiefdom rather far removed from the 21st century's HR policies. I would have to be a sadist to want to stay in this line of work.

Do you mean oxbridge has short terms thebride or everyone? Because if you mean everyone I dare you to come teach the first semester of other unis - 12 weeks of teaching in a row. Most lose the will to live by week 6.

No- I was referring specifically to Oxbridge. Was a tongue in cheek comment, but I do always rather wonder if the real reason for short terms there wasn't just so the academics had to see the undergrads as seldom as possible

Quite possibly thebride

I work in academia, my pay has been frozen for the last four years, I am on short term contracts only and since having the audacity to get pregnant have taken a £5k pay cut. I have experienced direct discrimination for being pregnant and while on maternity leave I will be looking for a career change!

My DH is an academic, and according to his family and our neighbours he works only 2 hours a week, and has 20 weeks holiday a year .

Well said, beanlet.

If you want an academic career with great field lab sites to go to, study oceanography . Canary Islands, San Diego, Great Barrier Reef, Hawaii... Used to scrape our jaws off the floor to hear about it.

My academic conferences were most often in places like .... Sheffield, Dundee, Birmingham....

Oh and spiders, I didn't by any chance interview you for a place on our UG degree a couple of years ago did I? You sound very much like someone I interviewed who funnily enough didn't get offered a place after annoying every member of staff she came into contact with .

ragged - I used to know a bunch of geologists that made me so when they talked about their field work. Choose your rocks carefully! Wouldn't work so well when the dc come along though...

just for the record, I've taken a 30% pay cut in the last 18 months - it hurts, a lot, and I can no longer subsidise my research by buying £60 monographs and funding my own research trips. If anyone is in any doubt about the sheer range of tasks, this is what is on my to-do list for now (and this doesn't include routine contacts with students, attendance at exams etc)

• write high-level report on student supports (following 4 days of site review)
• references for several students + post grads
• initial feedback on MA essays
• grading u/grad essays
• grading of exam scripts (600+)
• grade entry for all of the above, plus projects
• moderation of examining
• external examining for another institution (250+ scripts)

- training examiners - many of whom have not examined before

• timetabling and room allocation for 120+ modules for 2011-12
• recruitment of tutors for 2011-12
• implementation of budget cuts for 2011-12
• preparation of presentation on innovation in teaching for conference on Monday
• completion of two book-length essays (one mildly overdue, the other more seriously so)
• completion of draft of ch. 1 of contracted book
• turning up at social event for retiring colleagues (this is an evening thing, and this kind of compulsory collegiality is particularly hard if you have young children)

It's also worth saying that a lot of key elements of the professional profile are unpaid or very poorly paid (peer-reviewing for journals and presses; external examining - i was paid at considerably less than the minimum wage for this)

Haven't read the whole thread.

I'm an academic, a full-time research active lecturer. I love my job but find it very stressful to juggle with having a family.

The plus sides:
Nobody requires you to clock on and off at a certain time, so long as you are present for your commitments like teaching and meetings, you can work from home for the rest of it. In this respect it is quite flexible for family life.
Also very mentally stimulating and rewarding.
I think the pay is OK.
Once you are in a lecturing position, the job security is relatively good, even with cuts to universities probably still better than the private sector (but job security for junior researchers is rubbish).

The minus sides:
Although I am bullish about working no more than my officially contracted 37.5 hours per week (so that I can spend time with my family), I find it a constant struggle to do my workload within that time and I lag behind in terms of research, which may ultimately threaten my position.

adverse I agree about the divide; I have the utmost respect for the non-academic staff I work with - they are mostly super - and, I hope, they for me. I've worked in lots of different roles, and I think getting out of the pressure cooker of a department over the course of a career is actually a good thing (although a colleague did accuse me of not being a proper academic any more when I took charge of teaching and learning!!). Some of my colleagues don't realise that adminstrators are professionals too, and treat them as their personal secretaries

There is definitely a divide. I consider myself lucky in my current post as there seems to be a good deal of mutual respect, but having worked in other faculties I've seen at first hand the contempt in which some academic staff hold admin/technical.

Here's an example of a THE article written by a senior academic from Brighton University, which I found completely shocking. Perhaps she thought support staff were too thick to didn't read the Times Higher.

www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=415266

woollyideas that's an outrageous piece; shocking in its arrogance and its unthinking impulse to shoot the messenger

We are not permitted to work from home in our department

anotheracademic that's interesting - how is that enforced then? and what was the reaction when it was introduced? (we have a similar initiative here being introduced under the guise of necessary efficiencies because of the dire economic situation - it's fair to say that people are not happy about it) are you appraised on the basis of being in the office or on measurable outputs? I think that I would produce less under these terms, because I would feel disobliged to do anything work-related once I left the office, which is far from the case now - I usually work for at least 2-3 hours in the evenings once DD is in bed

We have a movements sheet we all have to fill in and have had a meeting about how its strongly discouraged and that we need to be in to liaise with the team. People have received snarky emails which have stated that they shouldnt work from home.
Academix freedom my arse. I had more freedom in my previous job.

When i say work from home, I do mean we must be in the office in office hours. Of course we all work in the evening - the jan-march to 1 am thing rings true with me too. I also find I work more in the evening as I am less productive in the office.

my PI enforces it by expecting us to work 10 hours a day, 6 days a week.

You can imagine how happy he was when I told I was pregnant. I shall be leaving this post-doc at the year mark, rather than two years (to which he replied that he thought I had made the right decision -wanker). It's just because it's the US because the other profs are lovely.

What is a PI?

principal investigator (my prof man in charge of lab)

Ah, thanks. Havent set foot in a lab since my undergrad days