> Then I’d send ‘em to my advisor Dan, and he would unpack them in 10 seconds flat. “I do this,” he would say, miming typing on a keyboard, “And I do this,” he would add, gesturing to the student and himself. “I write research papers and I talk to students. Would you like to do those things?”

> Most of those students would go, “Oh, no I would not like to do those things.” The actual content of a professor’s life had never occurred to them. If you could pop the tops of their skulls and see what they thought being a professor was like, you’d probably find some low-res cartoon version of themselves walking around campus in a tweed jacket going, “I’m a professor, that’s me! Professor here!” and everyone waving back to them going, “Hi professor!”

I don’t know if there’s something wrong with me, but as a grad student I hated walking around at the front of class going “I’m a lecturer here” and having the students say “hi lecturer!” It was the least satisfying part of the job. Maybe it feels better if you have the real title.

Office hours were great, though. It’s is like debugging a program, you start at the symptoms and then try to trace your way up to the root cause. Except you have a conversation instead of a stack trace. Just like debugging, it can be really frustrating in the moment, but the end result is really satisfying.

Also, grading was fun, just because you can be an unusually good grader by doing the barest-minimum and including, like, any notes at all (the students just want to know that you actually understood why you took their points away).

It strikes me that those are two spots that seem hardest to automate away, and involve satisfying the customer the most. But they don’t really seem to be central to the professor’ actual identities, or to the general perception of them.

> I don’t know if there’s something wrong with me, but as a grad student I hated walking around at the front of class going “I’m a lecturer here” and having the students say “hi lecturer!” It was the least satisfying part of the job. Maybe it feels better if you have the real title.

I think you're misusing the analogy completely. In the analogy, the cartoon version of the professor doesn't actually _do_ anything. I don't see how you could compare that to your real life, where you were actually doing something (teaching students). Unless you're dismissing the act of teaching students as a lecturer as a completely empty pursuit.

FWIW I wasn’t trying to contradict the analogy or argue against it, just had some reflections based on it. In the story, the students have an entirely imagined idea of professoring. I think if most people put a little more thought into it, they’d come up with lecturing as a major job of a professor.

I didn’t go all the way down that path, but got one step closer to the job, so I’m reflecting on the bits that were surprisingly rewarding and what wasn’t (for me).

> Office hours were great, though. It’s is like debugging a program, you start at the symptoms and then try to trace your way up to the root cause. Except you have a conversation instead of a stack trace. Just like debugging, it can be really frustrating in the moment, but the end result is really satisfying.

This is awesome, I love the way you phrase this and having that mindset.

+1, I loved office hours, and felt _ok_ about giving demos/lectures. I honestly didn’t care much for research though lol, it’s very lonely. I wish “teaching professor” was a more viable career, my impression is that it pays poorly

The college I went to explicitly billed itself as for teaching, and most of our professors were just that. They might do research with the upperclassmen, but their priority was teaching.

That is, until we got a new president who set a new strategic goal for being a top research school and adjusted all hiring and tenure standards for that.

Maybe in the future AI will take all the big lecturing and research jobs, but will need teaching assistants to do the in-person stuff, haha.

>I don’t know if there’s something wrong with me, but as a grad student I hated walking around at the front of class going “I’m a lecturer here” and having the students say “hi lecturer!” It was the least satisfying part of the job. Maybe it feels better if you have the real title.

You didn't like teaching like that. Some people really do, some people don't. Nothing wrong with individual preferences.

> Office hours were great, though. It’s is like debugging a program, you start at the symptoms and then try to trace your way up to the root cause. Except you have a conversation instead of a stack trace. Just like debugging, it can be really frustrating in the moment, but the end result is really satisfying.

You sound like one of those rare souls who might both enjoy and be good at people management.

(Line management, at least. The higher up you go, the less fun it gets, unless you're a psychopath whose primary motivation is Number Go Up.)

I once knew a manager who told a group of us engineers that they love getting contacted by customers. The angrier the better.

This was baffling, of course. But the explanation was that every time it was an opportunity to listen to their problems and ask questions and figure out what the problem was and try to work out a solution. Might be their expectations or their situation or it might be the company product or service. Either way, they could usually find a way to make things better and the customer would end up being happier than they were before the talk.

It's still pretty far down the list of jobs that I'd ever want to do, but I can really relate to the motivation. Made a lot of sense.

I found that example weird, probably because it's the one I had the most experience with, having been a grad student at two different universities. (I don't have enough familiarity with the other examples to know if they're weird or not.)

I don't know any grad student (outside perhaps a first-semester master's student) who has delusions about what a professor does. First off, they know academia is publish-or-perish, they've been told it every day, and they're prepping for it right from the get-go, with qualifying papers that are going to turn into their dissertation which is going to turn into their first academic book -- the first of many they know they're going to need to write. And they know that it also involves a lot of face time with the students, since as grad students they spend a lot of face time with the professor. And they know about the teaching because they're having to do it too now, as barely-paid lecturers.

> "Then I’d send ‘em to my advisor Dan"

Did those students not have advisors?

Sorry, I got the point of the article, and it was fine, but this whole anecdote felt off.

That anecdote was about undergrads who thought they wanted to be professors.

So it was. I swore I read grad students. I guess my eye skipped on after "In grad school..." and filled it what it imagined. Ignore my comment above, then.