Advice desperately needed: So I want to become a professor...

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Being naturally inclined towards a life of fusty academia, and having little in the way of practical skills, I have decided to become a professor. I have decided that I would like to specialise in either English or Media Studies, these being the fields in which I have most experience. The trouble is that I don’t know all that much about how one goes about getting a metaphorical foot in the door. I don’t know where to start.

I have, to my mind, several attributes which would endear me to this profession:

  1. I have teaching experience, albeit at the high school level.
  2. I really love public speaking, lecturing, moderating seminars, all that stuff. I get quite a kick out of it.
  3. I’m a pretty decent writer (this OP is not representative of that).
  4. I actually enjoy all the theoretical nonsense that most people in their right minds don’t give a fig for.
  5. I already know that the Dope is the one true repository of all human knowledge.

It is with this last point in mind that I have come to you. I would be very grateful if any professors, lecturers, or associates could give me some advice about (a) how to join their ranks, and (b) what to expect when I do. It is worth noting that I possess a decent Bachelors degree but have been out of higher education for about 2 years. Thanks in advance.

P.S. - This may be a GQ but I wasn’t sure if that particular form had a “mundanity threshold” so I decided to stick it here. Rest assured I will not take it personally if the thread is moved, although I may very well take out any ensuing frustration on my pets and/or any unfortunate passing transients. That said, I probably would have done that anyway.

P.P.S. - I will also be seeing a careers advisor.

Much love!

George.

2

You have two options.

  1. Get a Ph.D. in the field. Publish everywhere, attend every conference you can, meet everyone you can. Spend several years, maybe a decade, taking adjunct, postdoc, and visiting professor positions–probably a different one, in a different region of the country, every year. Do yourself a favor and publish a book or three. Eventually, one of those visiting professorships might turn into an assistant professorship. Voila.

  2. Write and publish an enormously popular book (preferably nonfiction) for the general market. Do it again. Do it one more time, and start shopping around for institutions that are willing to overlook your lack of formal credentials.

–Sattua, ex-academic gone corporate, where she gis paid twice as much and gets to leave her work at the office.

3

Yes, a Ph.D. or the equivalent is the basic qualification you need to start with in almost any area of academia these days. On top of that, publications in referreed journals are pretty essential. (But, if your Ph.D. isny good, you should be able to turn that into one or a few journal articles).

I would not be seeking advice from a careers advisor (or at least not just from one of those): I would want to talk to one or two leading academics in my preferred field to get an idea from them what is needed to get a start. Most of them are very willing to give advice to beginners.

4

It’s not as complex a process as you think, once you get into a good PhD program. A good program will guide you through the process, or at least give you the resources to figure out how to do it. I wouldn’t think too much about “becoming a professor” in grand terms like that, until you get into grad school. Especially if your interests are still as broad as “English or Media Studies.” I’m a cynic, but I know a lot of people who began MA or PhD programs with the intention of becoming a professor and realized soon afterwards that they don’t want to spend another decade in school just to get the chance to apply for dozens, or even hundreds of jobs they won’t get. (You MUST be aware of the realities of the job market in the humanities, particularly English, before starting grad school!)

From what I hear, it’s a great job if you love it, but there are a lot of people who love undergrad who don’t love the academic life. Not discouraging you, though. There’s no harm in trying.

5

Never mind

6

First, figure out whether you want to focus primarily on any teaching career as your goal (in which case you should try to scope out which field is likely to be hiring fresh Ph.Ds in about five to eight years from now, and then go apply to appropriate Ph. D. programs, with the knowledge that there still might not be a job for you) or whether you’d like to get expertise in a more narrow field because that’s what you’re truly interested in studying. The second choice is no guarantee either of a job opening up, but the satisfaction of studying your chosen field will help you get through the more tedious aspects of a Ph. D. program, which is often very little other than tedium. As of now, your fields of English and Media Studies are very broad and very competitive.

As to your attributes:

  1. Your teaching experience is meaningless, except as it inspires you.
  2. If you didn’t have some ability at “public speaking, lecturing, moderating seminars, all that stuff” why would you even consider being a professor?
  3. Everyone in any decent program will be a “pretty decent writer”–some will be fucking brilliant writers.
  4. Enjoying “all the theoretical nonsense that most people in their right minds don’t give a fig for” is probably good because that means you will stick with the work when it gets difficult.
  5. For the purposes of the Ph D program, your dissertation advisor (whom you may not meet until a few years into your program) is the one true repository of all human knowledge.
    Good luck. You’ll need it.
7

Sigh. . .
[heads off to print out tenure-track job applications for the fifth year running]

8

Just want to reiterate that teaching experience is not prerequisite to become a professor. Publishing is. One of the biggest complaints from undergraduates is that their professors are horrible lecturers and completely inaccessable, namely because they hide in their offices doing their research.

ETA: A lot of professors become so because they want grants for their research, not because they want to teach. Many of them hate teaching.

9

First, ask yourself the following questions:

– Are you prepared to pack up and move to North Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah, Bulgaria, or any other location where you may be offered a tenure-track job? More to the point, are you and your loved ones prepared to spend an average of three years not knowing where you might be offered a job, but ready to pack up and move there anyway?

– In any given year, there are more than twice as many new Ph.D’s in English than there are tenure-track jobs advertised. If you are among the people who never do find permanent employment, will you still feel that grad school was worth it for its own sake? Put another way, does seven to ten years of geeking out on your subject on a grad student’s stipend sound like great fun even if it never leads to a job, or are you going to feel like you wasted all that time if you take the gamble and lose?

– Can you face the thought of teaching lots and lots and lots of freshman composition, every semester for the rest of your life?

If the answer to all of those questions is yes, the best people to talk to are your undergraduate professors (especially younger ones who have a good handle on what the job market is like these days). You’ll need rec letters from them anyway, and they can give you better advice than a career counselor can.

Take the GRE. Apply to grad programs. It’s best to apply widely and aim high, as the selection criteria for different programs can be somewhat capricious. Expect to pay several hundred dollars in application fees alone. Write a kick-ass statement of purpose, highlighting your prior teaching experience as well as your research interests, and a kick-ass writing sample.

Do not go to a grad program that does not offer you funding. If they want you, they will offer you a fellowship or assistantship, and going into debt to get a Ph.D. in the humanities is a bad idea. If you are lucky enough to be offered funding at two or more programs, visit the campuses before making a decision. Try to get a feel for the climate: do grad students seem happy? Do they appear to like each other, or are they locked in a Darwinian state of competition? Do the professors seem genuinely interested in mentoring grad students, or do they lock themselves inside their offices and only rarely condescend to mingle with the populace? You’ll be spending a minimum of six years of your life with these people, and possibly closer to ten, so choose carefully. Also, find out all you can about the funding structure of the program, the amount and kind of teaching grad students usually do, and the placement rate for graduates.

Grad school is like an apprenticeship. The first few years, while you’re still taking courses, may feel a lot like undergrad, but the coursework is not the most important thing. Think of each term paper as a starting point, not an ending point: rework, revise, present at conferences. Seek out faculty who can tell you how to do these things. Make friends with the other students in your program. You’re all in this together, and the people who can give you the real dope about how things work are usually the students who are a few years farther along than you are.

Beware of advice from professors who believe the only kind of job worth having is a job at a big research university. Realistically, only a tiny minority of grad students are going to end up in these jobs. Get the kind of teaching experience that will make you look attractive to a regional state school, a small liberal arts college, or a community college. (The fact that you’ve taught at the high school level will be a big plus for some of these institutions; nearly all will want to know that you can teach freshman comp and an intro-level literature survey. Many of them will not care a great deal about your research, as long as you’re doing something. This is an utterly foreign world to profs at research institutions, and they often give their grads well-meaning advice that is completely wrong for other types of schools.)

Do what it takes to finish your dissertation. It doesn’t have to be perfect; you can always revise later. It does need to be signed, sealed, and approved before most hiring committees will take a chance on you.

Good luck! It’s a cool job; that’s why everyone wants to do it.

10

George Kaplin… perhaps you’d consider becoming a college instructor instead of a professor? The qualifications are far lesser and you would be expected to teach rather than publish. The downside is that they’d pay you badly, work you at a pretty hard trot, and you’d be teaching lower-level classes of obnoxious undergraduates instead of refined grad students.

Edited after I saw the post above mine: yeah, totally don’t go if they won’t offer you funding. Paying to go to grad school in the humanities is like paying to have your own book published… vanity education. If they won’t pay you to do it, you aren’t good enough to do it.

11

Thanks for the advice, guys. Very helpful and informative. Just one more quick question for those who’ve already travelled this route: How did you support yourself financially while earning your qualifications? I’ve got the means to support myself, but I’m always keen to find other avenues of funds.

12

I get the impression from your OP that you think the lion’s share of a professor’s job is teaching, or that you’re not even aware that there are other aspects. You are mistaken. Talk to your professors and find out what the job actually entails before you decide that it’s the life for you.

Any decent PhD program (in the US, at least) will pay you to attend. On an hourly basis, your stipend will probably work out to less than minimum wage, but you can live on it. At this point, you should be wondering exactly why academic departments consider it reasonable to pay their graduate students, and once you’ve figured that out, I think you’ll have a lot more insight as to whether it’s worth your while to go.

13

I supported myself almost entirely on my teaching stipend and my job as a tutor for one of the university’s summer programs. My parents sent me a couple hundred bucks every now and then, and I worked a few odd jobs (AP exam reader, office temp, even a toy store clerk for a while), but my program covered teaching assistants’ tuition and paid enough to live on, assuming you don’t mind a bare-bones thrift-store-shopping sort of lifestyle.

14

I figured as much. As I understand it, the proceedure is:

  1. Enrole on a Graduate program.
  2. While researching the PhD, publish work in refereed journals.
  3. Acquire the PhD and, armed with the qualification and aforementioned publishing credits, get a job as a professor.

Am I on the right track?

Thanks for the advice. I’m under no illusions about the practical difficulties involved in acquiring a humanities professorship. I know that it’s very competitive. On the other hand, in England, the Government is pushing more and more young people to go to University, so there are opportunities available.

Yes to the first one, not so sure about the second one (what is a Grad student’s stipend in the States?), and definitely 100% absolutely yes for the third one.

Hmmm, unfortunately I’ve been out of academia for 2 years. Will this pose a major stumbling block? After all, there are stories about people who’ve been out of education for 15-20 years and have come back to do professorships.

A college instructor would also be an ideal career for me. I know the money won’t be that great but, sadly, I’m rather limited by the practical skills I possess. The only things I can really do with any real sophistication are read, write, and talk. But, not to blow my own trumpet, I am very good at all those things. And as for obnoxious undergrads…well, I spent 2 years teaching at what was officially the nastiest High school in my district. There’s nothing a bunch of undergrads could do to me that a bunch of whiny 12 year old’s haven’t done already :slight_smile:

[sub]disclaimer: the preceding sentence has not been screened for unintentional double entendres[/sub]

15

Missed this:

The general impression I have is that a professor’s job is about 50% research, 30% miscellany which falls under the heading of ‘General administration’, and 20% teaching. How far off am I?

16

Sorry, I didn’t notice that you were in the UK. I personally hate it when Americans give me academic advice that’s useless to me (like calling my MA useless or a waste of money, when they are usually funded and almost always necessary in Canada), so I shouldn’t have done the same thing!

17

I supported myself through assistantships, and a lecturer position one term. At the end I got married and my wife helped. My daughter is in grad school now, and has a nice fellowship. She’s also busy applying for grants (which no one did when I was in grad school) and she might do quite well if she gets some.

As for just teaching, check out community colleges. However, without experience, I’d guess that most require a Masters at least, and I doubt if any grad schools give assistantships to those going for terminal Masters.

As for getting a PhD, ask yourself if there is a subject that you so want to work on that you will become the worlds greatest authority in a very minor aspect of it. I think it would be hell to have to write a dissertation on something you don’t care about. I loved working on mine, and even then it was stressful.

18

I ate very little and very badly for about five years, during which time I taught courses as a grad student, and taught courses during the summer vacations, and the winter breaks, tutored, wrote freelance articles, worked as a messenger, lived in a crummy apartment with my wife (also a grad student), bought about three or four articles of clothing in the five years, went without health insurance or a car ( I walked everywhere or took buses), never bought music or saw a movie (not that I had time for recreation) and basically lived like a pauper.

19

How are you faring now, if that’s not too personal?

20

I think being a professor is one of those jobs where you need to have a total, absolute, complete passion for the subject. It’s not enough that you just think it would be neat. Since you don’t even seem to have a focus- well, I don’t think it’s time for you to be thinking that far ahead.

If you like to travel, it’s worth considering that native English speakers have a relatively easy time finding work teaching college abroad. It’d be a tough thing to turn into an actual career, but people do it.

One question- You said you taught high school level. What makes you decide you would rather teach at a college level?