What do (Astronomy) Professors Do?

March 23rd, 2008

As a professional astronomer with a faculty job as a professor at the University of Wyoming, I find it very common that people outside of academia don’t really understand what it is I “do.”   A lot of misconceptions floating around there, so let me knock some down first before building something in their place.

First of all, there is the notion that professors teach.   We do.   But there’s the notion that all we do is teach, and, moreover, if we only teach say one class a semester, that we just work three hours a week while we’re lecturing, and that teaching assistants handle all the unpleasant and tedious chores like grading.   That’s bull crap.   I do have what we call a “one-one” load, generally speaking, which means I teach one course each semester.   Alternative teaching loads for very research intensive places like Caltech might be one-zero, meaning one course a year.   A more teaching intensive university might be a two-two load, or even higher.   How much work we do for a course can vary a lot from professor to professor and from course to course, but it’s way more than three hours.   The rule of thumb is something like three hours outside of class for every hour of lecture, at least the first time you teach a course.   That’s time spent learning or relearning the material at a high-enough level to teach it well, working problems, preparing slides or other lecture materials (notes, overheads, etc.), writing exams, reading assigned material, meeting with students, working with teaching assistants if you have them, and more.   The material at the graduate level is particularly challenging since you have to make a lot of updates every time you teach a course as it needs to be at the cutting edge of knowledge.

People think that we have summers off, like K-12 teachers, at least if we don’t teach a summer course, which are not that multitudinous.   Ha!   I wish.   My schedule is more flexible in the summer, but that’s a time to get research done (more on that in a minute).   In particular, that’s a time when graduate students get heavily involved in research for the first time, and I spend a lot of my time mentoring them.   Everything from develop research projects to teaching them how to collect, reduce, and analyze data to how to interpret the results and write them up for publication.   We have summer programs for undergraduates, too, and that’s more challenging.   Undergraduates vary in their commitment, skill level, and understanding much more than graduate students.

So what else?   Some people are aware that professors do research, but don’t always understand what that means.   My official job description calls for equal time to be spent on teaching and research.   In my case research output is measured by things like number of papers published, number of grant dollars collected, and outside letters from those in my field (considered when up for tenure).   But what does that mean on a daily basis?   Like most people, I spend my days in an office in front of a computer, spending too much time with my email.   The research time is either spent with students, post-docs (journeymen scientists I hire with grant money), or working on my own projects.   As an observational astronomer, I spend a lot of time working with data from telescopes and trying to understand what it’s telling me about the physical nature of the things we see in the sky.   The research doesn’t count until it’s communicated to others in a detailed fashion. This involves writing papers and traveling to meetings to report results.

Here’s a big misconception I need to correct.   Most astronomers don’t spend very much time looking through telescopes.   In fact, we almost never “look” through them.   Data is recorded digitally as with digital cameras, using very sensitive detectors.   As a practical matter, many of use do use optical telescopes on remote mountaintops, but that’s usually just a few weeks out of the year, if that.   Observational astronomers also analyze data from large surveys that are public and data from space-based telescopes (which include extensive planning, but no real-time observing).   I spend less time observing than I used to, and some of the more recent observing runs (as we call them) were executed from my lab in Wyoming where we sat and controlled an instrument on a telescope in Hawaii.   And in order to get that telescope time in the first place many days or even weeks are spent crafting competitive proposals.   I wrote about the process with the Hubble Space Telescope before.

I’ve also got some time commitments in my official job description that include service and advising.   I spend time every semester talking with students about what courses to take and about longer term goals like applying for graduate school.   I write dozens of reference letters for students and post-docs trying to get into a new school or land the next job.   I work on our graduate program curriculum and our graduate exam, run interference between students and profs as our Director of Graduate Studies.   I volunteer at the open house we have annually at our local observatory.   I referee papers for peer-reviewed astronomy journals.   Usually once a year I review proposals at the national level for telescope time or grant money (taking between 1-3 weeks of my time depending on who it is for).   I host department parties and drive prospective graduate students around town.   And you wouldn’t believe how much time goes into necessary but tedious faculty meetings working on by-laws, hiring decisions, program assessment, and other matters great and small.   Things like my Launch Pad Workshop for Writers fall somewhere in between official duties and bonus extras that look good on my curriculum vita, but that takes a week to run, and a lot of time to prepare for.

Officially,   I get no vacation, either.   I can get away whenever I can afford to.   I set my own schedule.   The truth is most professors, at least younger ones working toward tenure (I’m getting tenure this year with flying colors), work way more than 40 hours a week.   I didn’t take any real vacations the first three years I was a professor, but learned over the last three how I need to.   The university pays me a salary for a nine month work period, spread out over twelve months.   If I have grant money, I can pay myself summer salary, which comes in the summer, giving me big paychecks then.   This gives professors a big incentive to land grant money, or it’s a hit in the wallet.

And let me explain a few things about tenure, what it means, and what it doesn’t.   Generally most new professors are technically “assistant professors,” who are regularly reviewed and can be dismissed easily if they’re not performing at expected levels.   Usually they’re given six years to meet that standard, and then they’re promoted to associate professor and given tenure, or fired (with a year to make a transition).   There’s a final level of full professor above associate that requires a tenured professor to continue to show high performance levels.

So about tenure…it is job security of a sort.   It makes firing a professor very difficult, and is meant to protect us and let us follow our research where ever it leads, even if it is offensive to some or just something that others think is a waste of time pursuing.   We can still be fired for the usual reasons someone would get fired (e.g., gross underperformance, etc.), but there’s a legal procedure that must be followed and a lot of corrective steps before those are reached.   I’m generally in favor of tenure (certainly for myself!), but it has pluses and minuses.   Some professors become what we call “dead wood” after getting tenure.   They teach their classes, putter about, but don’t continue doing significant new research or contribute to a department in serious ways.   Some do spend the last years of their careers pursuing bogus research that never pans out.   Sometimes though, it does let someone do something like a major long-term project that doesn’t bear fruit for many years, something that junior people trying to land jobs can’t afford to do.   That’s a good thing.

Oh, and one major job perk that we have is the sabbatical.   Every six years we can apply for time off, a semester or two, in order to get away from the grind of the fun but stressful job in order to re-energize ourselves and our research.   Some professors complete big projects.   Some find entire new directions to head into.   Different universities have different rules about sabbaticals and cover different amounts of salary.   For instance, I’m heading to Porto Alegre, Brazil and Tianjian, China during the next academic year to do research (making significant steps on my efforts to understand post-starburst quasars).   The University of Wyoming will pay 60% of my salary during that period, while my grant money will contribute the other 40%.   The university would cover 100% of my salary if I left for only one semester.   I expect to publish a lot of papers next year and forge new collaborations.

My astronomy page has links to my papers, my research group, and some recent courses, if you’re curious, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg.   And I realize that there are things I’ve neglected to mention above.   Things like going to seminars, journal club, reading papers in my field, various university business, and more.

My colleagues ask me where I find the time to write novels.   I wonder that myself sometimes, and wish I could spend more time on it and get books out faster than I’ve managed.

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