Should I be a lawyer or history professor?
I have graduated from law school and practiced law. My undergraduate major was history. Every law school graduate who passes the bar exam can find a job or start his or her own practice. Most law school graduates pass the exam in their own state and almost all of them can pass the exam in one state or another. Only about five per cent of history Ph.D.s find full-time jobs teaching history at a college or university. About the same percentage finds part time teaching jobs. History is fine pre-law major. Law school takes three years. A history Ph.D. takes at least five years and usually longer. My wife is also a history major who went on to law school. We enjoy reading and discussing history and never seriously considered earning Ph.D.s in history.
How stressful is it to be an assistant professor?
Remember there are three parts of a faculty job: Teaching, Research, and University Service. Stress level really depends on the University. For example if you are at a school that primarily values teaching, it is much easier to control your situation. If you put a great deal of thought into your class design and spend time with your students, you are very likely to be rewarded professionally. Research wise, you can probably do enough writing in the summer to get by. Conference papers are usually acceptable forms of publication. It is also important to put effort into getting along with people, especially senior faculty and administration. You are expected to be seen in your office and on campus.Being an Assistant professor at a research oriented university is very exciting and you have a wider range of directions you can take your career. However you have much less control, your grant applications can get rejected, your journal articles are more likely to get turned down since you have to publish in prestigious journals. For example at my current school publishing a conference paper does not count for anything. Also you are never done, while you are in the tenure chase you always have something to work on. Your success will be measured very clinically: how much money in grants you have brought in, how many books you have published (with consideration of what publisher published them) and how much your work is cited. You don't really work that closely with your students, your TA handles much of it. This is a stress reliever for some people. Generally you are working closely with a couple of graduate students. Research faculty often spend very little time in their office.
How stressful is it being a professor at a top university? What do university professors do in their free time?
It can be quite stressful. In contrary to what many people think professors* do not just teach. They are indeed teachers and they should do this job well but this is only part of their working time (in the UK 40% of their contract time generally). They should also produce excellent research (meaning NEW knowledge not in the literature) so uncertainty and hard work fills their days because you do not know where research will take you and if you are going to have a paper worthwhile publishing to a good journal. If you are lucky you have built a research group but this of course means you should also be a good manager and a good mentor to your graduate students.Seeking funding: On your research output you mainly base your applications for funding which take up a lot of time but have very low chances of success as this is a very competitive game. For example, all my August will be mainly spent writing an EU proposal with a very uncertain outcome. Add to these the several meetings and travels to talk about your research and discuss it at conferences and in other universities and elsewhere -quite a bit of preparation is needed generally for those presentations.Admin: departmental duties (admit undergraduate and postgraduate students, participate in examination committees and do other tasks.) sometimes, you organize seminar/conferences/workshops which again takes up a lot of time.adding all this together sounds like no free time exists. However, I believe relaxing is essential, preferably by doing sports (although I do not exactly follow what I advocate and I usually watch a TV series -although I do walk to my work and back.)Overall, that an academic cannot work less than 50 hours per week - many times more.*=permanent faculty member.
How hard is it to become a professor in Canada?
Getting a faculty job in Canada is about the same as anywhere else: academic faculty positions are competitive and particularly competitive at highly-ranked institutions.Speaking from my experience in faculty recruiting efforts in applied sciences (specifically, computer science and ECE) at UBC, applications to assistant professor positions typically receive between one and two hundred applicants for a single slot. Departments usually do a bunch of leg work and pre-interviewing, eventually doing in-person interviews with about 3-5 candidates.Most of the "how hard" bit of your question actually applies long before the "become a professor" part though. Strong candidates don't just have a PhD, they usually have demonstrated that they are capable of doing interesting and self-directed research, being able to lead others (especially research students), and being effective communicators. Great applicants usually have supporting letters from sources that are in addition to their graduate supervisor from activities like internships and (increasingly) postdoc positions, that help convince the hiring department that they will be capable of thriving in an academic job. If you'd like to get a better sense of this, it is pretty common for PhD students to place their application materials on the web at the time that they apply for jobs... look at a few of those packages to get a sense of the amount of work that people have put in already at that point in their career.One more point, regarding your comment on pay cut: If pay is really important to you, then this probably isn't the right job. There are some spectacularly wonderful aspects of pursuing an academic career, things like the freedom to pick the problems that you work on and the excitement and variety of working them with bright young students. There are also the less-glamorous bits... things like administration, marking, grant writing, and a fair bit of (typically very self-imposed) pressure to be hyper-productive early in your career. It's well worth trying to get a very good understanding of exactly what the job involves before undertaking the very significant amount of effort and training that it takes to get there.Good luck!
How hard is it to become a tenured professor?
A2A: One issue that I don’t see addressed in the other answers (so far) is that there is some variation in the strategies universities employ for hiring and tenure.At some universities, they have a fairly rigid number of tenure slots opening each year (or within a 3-year sliding window or whatever). They offer entry-level tenure-track positions to 2 or 3 times as many excellent candidates as they can ultimately offer tenure to, so there is major decimation of these faculty when the tenure clock strikes midnight.This gives the candidates a few years to prove how good they are, but it can be VERY stressful, and can lead to excellent professors being chopped if several of them hit the tenure bottleneck at once. This can be bad for morale and collegiality, since everyone knows it is a zero-sum game between them and their colleagues.(People inclined to be cynical about academia will also point out that this strategy gives the university a big pool of people to do junior-level teaching and research, without the need to give them all lifetime security. And it certainly gives junior faculty a lot of incentive to work their butts off until tenure is achieved, though I’m not sure that fear-driven research and teaching is the most effective kind.)Other schools (including CMU SCS) are generally much more selective about hiring people in the first place, but once people are on the faculty, we expect that most of them will get tenure, as long as they demonstrate the kind of performance we expected from them at hiring time. It is very seldom the case that we have to say, “You’ve been doing great as a faculty member, but we just don’t have a tenure slot for you because these other faculty are even better.” Personally, I like this system a lot better.Of course, these are two extremes on a spectrum. A school will seldom be purely one or the other, but there definitely is some variation on this dimension.Regardless of when the filtering occurs — hiring time or promotion time — it is very hard to end up in a tenured position in one of the top universities. The number of faculty positions is limited, whether by policy or by resource constraints, and these schools can generally choose from among the very best researchers on the world market in a given year. (OK, these days, there’s a lot of competition from industry in certain technical fields such as AI, but some of the best researchers still find the top universities attractive for some, if not all, of their career.)
How do students manage to work full time and attend school full time?
I tried to once, ended up dropping a class (also had intentions of not coming back) During that annoyingly frustrating semester I happened to attend classes on the days I did not work and took 4 classes, each back to back The only "off" day I had was Sunday, which was a lost cause since had to spend most of the time cleaning, laundry and other things. I did not have internet access at home By the time the 3rd or 4th week rolled around, I pulled all nighters to work on a college paper, I had yawning fits (sorry if contagious) and therefore I dropped English 101 So what do you do? Is it because work and school are relatively close by? How do you find time to study, to write papers Do you take classes online? Do you have computer with internet access at home? Do you have other people help you out with the day to day things (cause I certainly don't and I have to do everything on the bus) How do you find time to eat, bathe and sleep (god, I hope you keep clean, bad smell is offensive) and not going to sleep can put you in a state of well,drowsiness Hey, if you tried this and couldn't manage... cut hours at work or dropped a class, please let me know. I just happen to think that this is close to impossible (by the way, though I still work full time, I only attend school part time. Oh, and I take summers off from school)