The Secret Lives of Professors (What Being a Professor is Really Like)

This does vary based on the field and kind of school. It's definitely accurate for being a professor at a top-tier research university in the sciences or engineering. A prof job at those kinds of places could accurately be titled "research manager": the main job requirements are managing and bringing in funding for a fairly large research lab of 5-10 grad students and possibly some research scientists and postdocs.<p>But you can shift the balance of the various components if you go to different kinds of schools. To take the opposite end of the spectrum, if you're the CS prof at a small liberal-arts college, your job will involve a lot more teaching and mentoring undergrads, and a lot less grant-writing and research-lab management. It's unfortunately not true that there's a happy medium to fit every kind of temperament, but there are <i>some</i> options at least.

This nicely sums up a bunch of reasons why I decided not to do a postdoc, and instead joined my first startup after finishing my PhD. I'm sure it works for some people, but I just couldn't see myself being happy with it.

I wish some of my professors would have read this as grad students. Become a professor because you love teaching, not because you want to do research.<p>Which also raises the question whether there should be a similarly venerable(and compensated) position reserved for researchers who don't teach?

I can certainly see the entrepreneurial aspect of being a professor -- managing a lab, hiring and firing people, and sourcing funding, and I don't disagree that professors are there to inspire the next generation. However, there is still a part of me that feels professors have that "safety net". Tenured professors are paid a monthly salary by the university, and often times at / above industry (that's true at least in Canada anyways). With a steady income, they have no risk, and the risk factor is a big part of being an entrepreneur.

I really liked how he compared being a young professor to being in a startup. I don't know how accurate that analogy really is but it's certainly fun to think about. At my undergrad they had a whole program designed to commercialize faculty research by funding school centric startups. I still find the whole thing fascinating.

When you join an elite school as an academic you become a bureaucrat in a bureaucracy. Want to spend the institution's money? Make an important decision? Get people to help you? Get ready to grovel, and sacrifice much of what you believe is worth fighting for.

Where the <i>fuck</i> is all the money going?

It's more fun to create something novel that many people use and appreciate (e.g., an iPhone game).<p>Much better than research prototypes that go no where beyond a publication or two.