What exactly do professors DO all day?

What exactly do professors DO all day?

Brian T. Cunningham

May 31, 2013

When I was a graduate student, I knew that my advisor did not spend much of his time in the office, or even on campus.  When I hear our state representatives complaining about how professors are paid so much to work only 3 hours per week (the hours that we teach class), I have to cringe at their ignorance of how faculty members really spend their time.  So to give you an idea of what a typical “day in the life” of a professor includes, in this blog I will describe what I’m typically up to.  I hope it does not sound like complaining, but it’s good for students considering the academic life to understand that it’s not all fun and glory – there are a lot of responsibilities and work that does not get much attention to go along with the fun parts – just like with most any job.

Teaching.  During a typical semester, I am responsible for teaching one 3-hour class.  While this takes three hours of actual lecturing in front of the class, I spend a lot more time in addition to this.   It takes me approximately eight hours to prepare a single one-hour lecture for the first time.  This includes the time I spend researching the topic, gathering and understanding the source materials, preparing lecture notes, making vugraphs look pretty, and reviewing/revising it to make sure the whole thing makes logical sense, and to make sure that I understand everything in it completely.  If I have lectured on the same topic in a previous semester, I will still spend ~90 minutes per lecture to makes updates/revisions, and to study the lecture material to refresh and reload my brain.  I’ll do most of my lecture preparation for the week during the preceding weekend.  Before the semester starts, I’ll try to get ~50% of the homework assignments figured out.  With the help of the TA, I will create new questions, go through a couple rounds of revisions to balance length and difficulty level, and work out the solutions.  Each homework probably takes 3-4 hours total to create.  I prefer to create and grade my exams without input from the TA, so I have a clear idea of how the students are doing.  My preference lately has been to give a large number of short and simple quizzes, which are easier to create and grade than open-ended calculation questions, so each bi-weekly quiz takes ~90 minutes to make, and another 2 hours to grade.  After factoring in office hours (~ 2 hours/week) and other administrative stuff related to teaching, that 3-hour class probably takes ~12-16 hours/week.  While this is the level of effort for a 400-level class with ~40 students, teaching a big sophomore-level class takes much more because office hours are in very high demand, creating exams requires collaboration with other faculty, grading is much more elaborate, and there are always students who need extra help.  

So, since teaching nominally only took 2 days out of my week, I should have tons of time left over to go bowling at the Union, exercising at the gym, and playing video games, right?  Wrong!

Committees:  To run an academic department, there are committees for everything, and their activities can take very large chunks of time during intense periods.  For example, this semester I am on the committee for hiring new faculty in the ECE Department, the curriculum committee for ECE, and the committee to hire a new Department Head for the Bioengineering Department.  Committees meet to determine what questions will be asked of each candidate, to review and discuss the qualifications of applicants, to decide on who to invite, to meet individually and as a group with each candidate, to listen to the candidate seminars, to discuss the inputs of everyone on how well the candidate performed on their interview visit, and to decide which candidates should receive a job offer. 

I have served on the UIUC Faculty Senate, the committee that reviews student candidates for fellowships and scholarships, the committee that decides which faculty will receive special recognition for their teaching, the committee that reviews applicants for admission to graduate school, and the College of Engineering Executive committee.  However, there are many, many more!  Usually, a faculty member will serve on ~2-3 committees each semester, and their duties will rotate every year.  Since I am a member of the ECE Department and the Bioengineering Department, I unfortunately have double the number of committee meetings to attend.  These responsibilities can take between 1-8 hours/week, although it drops to zero during the summer.

Reviewing Stuff:  I spend an extraordinary amount of time reviewing things.  Since I serve on an NIH review panel, I am responsible for reviewing 10 proposals for each of three meetings per year.  Each proposal has a “core” section that is 7-13 pages long, but each proposal also incorporates a lot of other information (investigator biographies, support letters, lab facility description, budgets…) that bring each proposal to ~75-100 pages.  Reading each proposal takes me at least two hours, and sometimes more if I have to perform extra reading of published papers to get a good understanding of what is being proposed and to understand prior work.  It takes me another 1-2 hours to write each review, so 10 proposals takes me ~40 hours of work.  In addition to that, I have to travel to another city for a 2-day closed-door review meeting, where a group of ~25 scientists discuss ~90 proposals that includes the 10 that I was responsible for.  So NIH proposal reviewing consumes 8x3 = 24 workdays per year.  In reality, I spread out my reviewing so it is only 2 hours per day during the weeks leading up to the meeting, so I do not go review-crazy.  I can only hold so much information in my head at one time, so I like to read a proposal on one day, and then write my review for it during the two following days.

Although I spend most of my proposal-reviewing activities for NIH, since I also receive funding from NSF, I typically participate in one more review panels on their behalf.  The workload is typically the same (10 proposals + a trip to NSF in Washington, DC).  However, that is not the end of my proposal reviewing responsibilities.  Very often, I’m asked to review batches of proposals that are internally submitted within our campus, or other one-off proposals where a colleague at another school has solicited my written opinion.

But wait, that’s not all.  Scientific journals require a pretty rigorous review process.  If you think about it, every paper that is submitted requires an average of 3 reviewers.  Since my research group is usually submitting 10-15 journal papers each year, that means we are generating a need for 30-45 reviews/year.  Karma dictates, therefore, that my group and I should be reviewing 30-45 papers from other people every year.  If I am very busy reviewing proposals, and I am requested to review a paper on a topic that one of my senior students is very familiar with, I will suggest that the paper be forwarded to my student for review.  However, I still end up reviewing ~20-25 journal manuscripts myself every year.  Actually, the good ones are interesting to read and easy to review, so it is not necessarily a painful duty.  However, I have seen a lot of poorly written, incomplete, non-novel, or incomprehensible papers too.  I refuse to correct grammar or spelling, except to tell the author that it needs more attention.  Reading a paper and writing a thorough review for it typically takes me ~2-3 hours.

Recommendation Letter Writing:  Students and faculty are in constant need of reference letters for admission to graduate school, consideration for a fellowship, consideration for promotion/tenure, getting a job, obtaining “Fellow” status in their technical society, and every other imaginable recognition.  It’s just how the world rolls: nobody wants to make a decision without at least three “famous” people endorsing the decision.  When I worked in Industry, nobody ever wanted my opinion, but now that I am a professor, people seem to think that a positive word from me will be the key thing that pushes them to the top of the pile!  After having served on fellowship award committees and graduate school admission committees, I have a pretty good idea of what a recommendation letter needs to say, in order to flag the person as an exceptional candidate.  I also know what to say if I think a person is just OK, or if I don’t know them very well!  Let me say that I am very happy to write fantastic recommendation letters on behalf of my graduate students, graduate students for whom I have served on their PhD committees, undergraduate interns, undergraduate mentees, exceptional students in my class, former co-workers, and faculty colleagues.  It bugs the heck out of me to be asked to write a letter for a student who I have barely met, but who just needs “someone” to write a letter for them because they never took the opportunity to make themselves known to a faculty member before.  I am a softy, so I always say “yes” anyway.  I have a folder on my computer that contains every recommendation letter that I have ever written, and it is a long list!  A great letter needs to be detailed, obviously not a cookie-cutter cut/paste job, and approximately 2-pages long.  These days, I can churn out a good letter in ~1 hour if I am already familiar with the person, and longer if I have to study their CV (for faculty promotion cases).  For graduate school applicants, a typical student seems to submit their application to ~10 schools, so every Thanksgiving break I find myself uploading ~10 letters to ~10 schools/letter for ~100 web sites.  Yawn.  At least I can do that part while watching a football game.  Next year, I’m going to see if my secretary can do the uploading part for me.  I have been asked to write recommendation letters for people for whom I actually had a negative opinion on two occasions.  I was honest and tactful.  The person was hired anyway on both occasions, but whoever hired them cannot say that they were not warned!

Advising my Graduate Students:  Since I do not have time to work in the lab myself, my graduate students are my hands, eyes, ears, and brain in the laboratory.  My biggest opportunity to guide their tasks, to get them to think about new ideas, and to take an efficient path to completing a project is during the time that I meet with them in person.  I have found that seeing a student nearly every week is the best way to keep them on track, and to avoid the phenomenon of going off into the “wilderness” of fruitless wheel-spinning activities. However, if I am advising ~12 students and if I meet with them for 1 hour/week, it will take nearly a 1.5 day/week chunk out of my schedule.  Many of my research projects involve more than one student, and I have found that students that should be cooperating sometimes do not communicate with each other unless I enforce it in some way.  So I have been using a system of meeting with students individually every other week for 30 minutes, while using the alternate weeks for 60-minute sub-group meetings of 3-4 students who are working on similar projects.  I have found that 30 minutes is enough to get an idea of what a student has accomplished in the past week, and to give them an idea of how to address problems that they are encountering.  The individual meeting does not allow shy students to “hide” from me in situations where another student may be more vocally dominant, and allows me time to discuss their particular situation and milestones without them having to worry about what other students might be thinking.  The sub-group meetings allow each student to share their most recent results with the rest of the group, and allows us to take a higher level strategic view of the project goals. 

Meetings with my students are quite honestly my favorite part of the week, and I do not allow other priorities to infringe upon that time.  At the start of each term, I ask each student to write a list of their goals, and we review the goals together – sometimes with me adding or subtracting items from their list.  At the end of the term, we review the goals together to see how things went, and update as needed.  My goal is to keep the students focused on activities that will help them move speedily towards completing their journal publications and thesis without too many unproductive excursions.  Actually, a few excursions are OK, but I like to know about them!

Founding a Startup Company:  Last year, I founded a new company, with the goal of commercializing some technology that has been under development in my group for the past several years, and is ready to make the leap.  I had founded a company previously, so I have some idea of what to expect, but that first company was my full-time job responsibility, so I was not juggling anything else at the same time.  First, I found that none of my senior students really had the burning interest to be an entrepreneur, so I felt that it was up to me to create the vision, understand the potential markets, develop a product development plan, and to build a team of experienced advisors who could help me consider all aspects of intellectual property, business development, investment, and government grant possibilities.  There were also a lot of boring “nuts and bolts” administrative stuff to take care of, that could not be done by anyone except me.  Over the past several months, I have spent a considerable amount of time meeting with mentors and advisors to discuss business strategy, markets, competing technology, intellectual property licensing, personnel, investment, milestones, and money.  I have spoken with potential business partners, joint-development partner companies, potential investors, and potential suppliers of key services.  Especially with potential investors and business relationships, it takes many hours of meetings to get familiar with each other, and to explore whether or not there is a good match.  At this point, it is up to me to develop the manufacturing plan, to write the product requirements specifications, to raise the money, and to decide on the first few key hires.  Many of the discussions with potential investors and potential commercialization partners end up going nowhere in the end, making the time seem like it was wasted, but really it is all part of the game.  In theory, the University allows me to spend one day per week on activities like this.  Honestly, I can’t keep track since so much of it ends up taking place in the evenings, the weekends, or in small bursts during the workday.

Administrative Responsibilities:  One of my responsibilities is to serve as the Director of the Bioengineering Graduate Program, which means that I am responsible for what happens to graduate students in Bioengineering who are working across campus for ~13 core BioE faculty and ~45 affiliate faculty across campus.  I’m responsible for overseeing graduate admissions, managing our qualifying exam process, assisting graduate students who have a wide range of issues, and developing new programs.  I am also the person who graduate students turn to if they are not getting along with their advisor, cannot find an advisor, or who just want some advice on how to get by in graduate school.  It’s hard to say how much time this activity takes, since it is not consistent through the year. I am working to establish a new professional degree program in Bioinstrumentation, which needs a lot of coordination with industry people, marketing people, faculty in engineering, and faculty in business.

Writing Journal Manuscripts:  While I wrote nearly all the text and produced all the figures for the journal papers in the earlier parts of my career, I ask my students to do quite a lot of it now, and I serve in more of an editorial role.  I will generally guide students towards what data they need to produce that will result in a convincing paper, and outline the sequence of figures and what data should be included in each figure.  This process usually takes a few rounds of refinement, but the figures are the heart of the paper, and we work those out before doing much substantial writing.  The student who will be listed as first author is responsible for preparing the first draft, and I ask them to write the abstract, introduction, results, discussion, and conclusion sections to the best of their ability before giving it to me.  Depending on the writing skill of the student, I may rewrite the entire introduction and abstract, or I may just make a few organizational and grammatical suggestions.  Usually, I edit the whole paper pretty heavily, except in a few cases.  Most papers seem to take between 5-10 drafts before they are ready to submit.  So many students have not yet developed good writing habits, skill with creating clear figures and plots, or even overall logical organization of a convincing argument.  Although often the first paper by a new graduate student is a tough multi-multi-draft exercise, the final papers by finishing graduate students can be very close to finished after a couple of rounds of edits. 

Writing Grant Applications – To keep the money coming in to support all the ideas we come up with, it’s necessary to write grant applications to companies, NIH, NSF, and other foundations.  It’s hard for me to estimate how much of my time is spent on grant writing, but I need to have several hours of uninterrupted time to make much progress on them.  Holding all the various pieces in my head, thinking about how the reviewers will understand what I write, making a logical and convincing argument about why our idea is significant and innovative while developing an approach that makes it all look feasible takes a lot of concentration.  Every time the phone rings, the email pings, or someone just decides to pop into my office probably sets me back by 10-15 minutes, as I try to regain my train of thought.  So I have found that my office is probably the absolute worst place to get any proposal writing done. My practice is to take my laptop to any location where people cannot find me, and try to get my writing done.  It takes quite a while to work up figures like Gantt charts, and concise descriptions of the technical approach.  Sometimes I ask a student to help me with specific drawings, but generally never with the writing.  Most proposals require collaborating with other scientists, so getting their inputs and making the whole proposal merge together takes a lot of time.  Some proposals require meetings to discuss/debate the plan, or even to meet new people who I have not worked with before.  Mostly, I try to get proposal work done over the summer, but I always have something in the works.  The process of having to write a proposal is actually an excellent way to organize my ideas and to develop a workable plan of attack.

Meetings, Meeting, Meetings:  I’ve discovered now that more people want to talk to me than I actually have time to meet with. However, face-to-face interaction is important, especially for mentoring students and making personal connections to other scientists.  Every semester, I mentor ~30 undergraduate students, serve on ~15 preliminary or final exam committees for PhD students, and participate in ~10 PhD qualifying exams.  I meet with my graduate students every week, and we have a weekly group meeting.  All the committees in the department meet every week, and I meet with the Managing Director of my NSF center, and the coordinator of BioE graduate studies for an hour every week.  Sometimes, all the hours between 8AM-6PM are completely filled with meetings, so I end up answering my email for 3 hours after dinner in the evening. If I can find a way to save time by NOT meeting someone, I will certainly try, but it is not always possible.

Administrative – getting bit by a million mosquitos = being sucked dry by one big vampire!  While no single administrative task is so burdensome by itself that it is worth complaining about, sometimes it seems like there are so many of them that combined, they add up to real amounts of time that I would frankly rather be doing something else.  I understand the necessity for it, but it seems like there is always more of it to do every year!  An incomplete list includes performing yearly performance reviews for all graduate students, performing yearly performance reviews for university staff who I supervise, progress reports (technical and financial) for every grant, university ethics training, university safety training, university child-molestation-reporting training, accreditation reporting, ranking of students in my classes, graduate student RA appointments, travel expense reimbursement forms, purchase orders…  We have forms and documentation for everything we do.

Travel:  I hit Platinum status on American Airlines last year, and I am not totally proud of it.  The benefits are nice though.  I seem to travel somewhere at least twice per month, whether it is for a review panel, a conference, a meeting with a collaborator, or even just for vacation.  Actually, when I am on travel, I cannot attend all the meetings that I talked about earlier, so I find that I actually have more time.  I can get a lot of writing and reading done in the airport, on the plane, and in the hotel that otherwise would actually take much longer.  I refuse to do much more than monitor my email (and not answer unless it’s an emergency) while on vacation.  I’m old enough to remember the days before laptops and smartphones, when you could really be gone from work.  It was pretty good, so sometimes I still like to pretend that there is no internet.

Answering Email:  Email is the bane of my existence.  I receive 100-150 emails per day, and sometimes I cannot answer them faster than the rate at which they arrive.  While I sit in meetings in my office, I can hear my computer softly announcing the arrival of a new one very few minutes, and I am terrified to see that I got another 40 to deal with while I was interacting with people in the real world.  The analogy that I use is a soccer goalie who has to stop a dozen balls coming at him at once from all different directions.  No matter how hard he tries, one is going to get by once in a while if he lets his guard down for an instant!  I can delete about half of the email immediately after looking at it, but a lot of stuff requires me to think and read before immediately reacting.  A lot of it ends up putting a new item on my to-do list (a report that is coming due, a meeting to attend, a paper to edit, an administrative requirement, some new form of “training” that is required by the University… the list never ends).

Since I am 48 years old, I remember having my first email account as a graduate student at Illinois, and there were only ~15 other people I knew who had an email address.  I remember being kind of happy when someone sent me something, before there could be an attachment with 90 pages of things to read.  Now I hate email from the core of my soul!  I must spend at least 2-3 hours per day dealing with it, but honestly I can’t keep track.  I must admit that I am part of the problem by sending people so much email myself.

So that solves some of the mystery of what a professor does with all their time.  Actually, sometimes I get to go into the lab, but nobody lets me push buttons or turn knobs on equipment anymore.  However, I miss the days when I spent my time building and measuring things with my own hands.  The payoff is when a student accomplishes something great, or when we show off some cool new science for the first time.  We make ambitious plans to make a difference in the world, and it is great to see when our ideas are having an impact.  It’s also fantastic to see my students go out into the world and accomplish things on their own.  I always have time to hear from my students, and how their lives and careers are going.  Be sure to stop by, give me a call, or shoot me an email!   Those 

What am I looking for when hiring a new graduate student

February 28, 2011

For students who are entering graduate school with the intention of earning a PhD, the choice of an advisor is truly a career-determining decision.  Your thesis topic is certainly not the only thing that you will ever work on in your career, but your choice of a research group will determine at least what your scientific focus will be for the next 5 years of your life.  Students seek out faculty to serve as their advisors by any number of criteria: Are they famous?  Are they well-funded?  Are they working in the technical area that is likely to result in future faculty positions?  Is their research group spinning out companies with a lot of potential?  Are they the same nationality?  Are they at a prestigious university?  Do students seem to be graduating in a reasonable amount of time?

While you might be considering all these questions about potential advisors, let’s think about how things look from the opposite point of view: What are professors looking for when considering which new students to bring into their research group.

For a faculty member, this is an extremely serious question.  Excellent students will be able to work independently, collaborate on development of creative ideas, work hard, write lots of papers, and give presentations that reflect upon the whole research group.  Poor students will not make much progress in the lab, will need precise directions for every small task, will never think for themselves, never conclude an experiment, write poorly organized papers with no attention to grammar or spelling, and mumble incoherently when up in front of an audience at a conference.  Hardly any students start off graduate school in the “excellent” category in all respects.  While part of the process of learning in graduate school is to develop, over time, the skills and approaches that are more like the “excellent” student than the “poor” one, a professor is looking at a potential new graduate student and trying to decide if they have the makings of future greatness.  The ability to recognize great students has consequences for the professor: a group loaded with poor students is going to accomplish very little, resulting in lower numbers of high quality publications, little research getting done in the lab, and bad prospects for tenure and promotion.  Certainly, a professor can try to micromanage students, write every word of every paper, and take total responsibility for every tiny aspect of the group – but with a big cost in time, effort, and potential accomplishments.   It is far better, and less frustrating, to hire great students, to help them to develop their full potential, and to work with them as colleagues.

The relationship between a professor and their graduate student is kind of like the Jedi/Apprentice relationship in Star Wars.  The two people will be spending a lot of time together for several years, and most faculty members can only effectively train a handful of students at any one time.  A professor may also be responsible for providing funding support for a student for several years – representing a big commitment in successful proposal-writing.  Further, the student will be the person working in the lab to achieve the proposal’s goals, and thus will determine to some extent whether the “customer” (funding source) will be happy or not – which in turn has an impact on the professor’s ability to obtain future funding.

So selection of a student by a faculty member means a lot.  I do not know how typical my research group is, but in an average year, I may hire between 1-3 new students.  I am comfortable serving as the advisor for no more than ~12 students at any one time, so at this point my group has reached a kind of steady state.  Mostly, I look to replace students who are graduating (and try to arrange some overlap between the new ones and the graduating ones), or to staff a new research grant that has been recently awarded.  Certainly there are research “mega-groups” with a famous faculty member who oversees 30 postdocs and 50+ graduate students, but in groups like that it is most likely the postdocs rather than the professor who you will see most often.  In such groups, I have heard that the professor “does not even know your name” until you have prepared a first-author journal manuscript for a major journal.

With no more than 3 positions available per year, I receive literally hundreds of requests per year from students who are interested in joining my group.  How do I choose?

As I mentioned, hiring a new student is a risk.  Like most people, I would like to minimize my risk to some extent.  Therefore, the students most likely to be hired as students are those who I already know.  Fortunately, the University of Illinois is one of the top engineering schools in the US and in the world, and the population of undergraduate students is extremely good.  I teach undergraduate courses every year, and get to observe directly the classroom performance of nearly all seniors and juniors who are interested in MEMS and biosensors.  I can tell which students are taking the time to prepare for exams, doing a meticulous job on their homework assignments, asking good questions, and thinking about interesting topics for their final projects.  When those students apply to the University of Illinois for graduate school and indicate that they are interested in my area of research, those are among the students that I will consider first.  I also host several undergraduate students in my research group who are working on research projects for course credit.  I meet with them individually several times during their internship and can see what progress they are making.  The undergraduate students work with graduate students in my group who serve as their mentors.  I ask my graduate students about who is a hard worker, a fast learner, a careful experimentalist, and a good collaborative personality.  If a great undergraduate student who is working in either my lab or another faculty member’s lab shows interest in graduate school and joining my group, I am sure to talk with them, and they are at the very top of my list.

So it seems like undergraduate students at the University of Illinois have the best shot at joining my group.  This is true, but they are not the only students who I consider as top candidates.  When students from other universities apply to graduate school at Illinois, they can indicate on their application which research groups they are interested in.  When it is time to consider graduate school applications, I look at all the applicants who indicated interest in my area, but only if their GPA is greater than 3.5/4.0.  Grades are not everything in life, but they do say something about a student (see a future blog entry: “What do your grades say about you?”).  A student with very strong grades at an engineering program that I know to be a rigorous one also goes to the top of my list.  I look most closely at the applications of students with GPA>3.8/4.0 because these grades represent a long-term dedication to excellent performance and some ability to master a wide variety of course material.  Students from top-10 engineering schools with excellent grades also stand a strong chance of getting support from a Fellowship, which I can facilitate in some cases by writing recommendation letters or by working together to define a research plan.  Grades are not everything.  I also carefully read students’ essays to see if they can communicate effectively, to understand their motivation for going to graduate school, and to see if they articulate a research interest that matches mine.  Finally, I also carefully read a student’s recommendation letters.  I am looking for evidence of intellectual curiosity, problem solving ability, good interpersonal skills, and willingness to take on challenging problems.  If I happen to know the faculty member who wrote a recommendation letter, it carries extra weight with me, and I might follow up by writing a note asking about the student.  If all this is good, THEN I will write an email to the student to arrange a phone interview.

Basically, I will not hire someone without having an opportunity to meet them - at least by phone.  How a student handles the interview can either make me excited about hiring them, or totally kill my enthusiasm.   Some students do not seem to understand that interviewing a faculty member for a Research Assistant position is exactly like interviewing for a job, and fail to take it seriously.  Before speaking with a professor, you should know something about their research (at least from their web page) and you should have at least browsed through a couple of recent papers.  Being able to ask a couple of good questions shows that you have at least thought about what the research group does.  A student who can articulate a specific desire to work in some area is much more impressive than one who just says that they want to work on “something” or “anything having to do with nanotechnology.”  I want to hire someone who is committed to making an impact on the world with their research.  A student who wants to “cure cancer” is much better than one who wants to “think about it for a while and then see what clicks.” I have heard both things.

I have hired several students who worked for another advisor (at Illinois or elsewhere) and left their former group for some reason.  For example, if a faculty member moves to another school, or if a faculty member is notorious for poor relationships with their students (no names mentioned here), their semi-trained students often work out extremely well in a new environment with a new research topic.  These also are students who I can know a lot about from having them in my class, or by asking other professors what their opinions are.  I will also meet with them, sometimes several times, to see if there is a good fit.  If a student has been let go by their previous advisor for poor performance, however, then I am very unlikely to consider them unless the circumstances were exceptional.

Students from foreign countries have a more difficult path to joining my research group, however, I have served as the advisor for many very excellent foreign students.  Some of the top students from foreign countries are awarded fellowships that enable them to train in the US.  If these students have top grades from a great school AND financial support for at least part of their graduate education, it significantly lowers the risk to hiring them.  If they get here and turn out not to be well-suited to a PhD program, occasionally they may leave Illinois with a M.S. degree.  If the student gets here and turns out to be great, I am happy to support them for their Ph.D. work.  So in essence, their financial support helped move them closer to the top of the list – even though I still carefully read their application materials and talk with them before recommending admission.

For students who are not in any of these categories, this “system” may seem unfair.  The system is not totally different from the way that college basketball teams all try to get the best players from the top schools.  College basketball recruiters look at the numbers (like points per game, wins/losses), the quality of the basketball program at the previous school, the strength of the training provided by other coaches who they know, the opinions of other people, and their own instincts about who will develop greatness.  The top college basketball teams are able to pick from the top players, and there is a definite stratification that is used to differentiate the top from the rest.  The top research universities are able to likewise draw from the best undergraduate programs worldwide, and the competition is very tough.

The ECE Hallows

Speech at HKN Dinner – December 5, 2010

The ECE Hallows, by Brian T. Cunningham

It is 1950.  The new ECE building is only one year old, and William Everitt is now the Dean of the College of Engineering after having served as the Department Head since 1944.

Three ECE seniors have been staying up late every night for the past two weeks to complete their final project before the end of the semester.  Nothing seems to have gone right, and as a result they are tired, frustrated, and by ~2AM they are considering giving up. 

Unexpectedly, Prof. Everitt walks into the laboratory.  He says, “I have noticed how hard you have been working, since I have been seeing the lights on in this lab every night for the past two weeks.  I just wanted to stop by and see what you are up to.”

One of the students said, “Well Prof. Everitt, to tell you the truth, we have only been here so much because we can’t seem to get our project to work at all.  In fact, we were just discussing whether we would give up on the whole thing, and we were wondering whether we are really cut out for being engineers at all!”

Prof. Everitt replied, “I can see how dedicated you are, and I want to help.  It is within my power to grant each of you one wish.  However, consider what you wish for carefully.”

The first student thought for ~5 seconds and said “Prof. Everitt, this project has made me worried that maybe I am not a truly great engineer, so my wish is to never be fired from my job.” 

Prof. Everitt reached into his briefcase, and took out a pair of bright orange Illini boxer shorts.  Presenting them to the first student, he said “these are the Boxer Shorts of Invincibility.  As long as you wear them, you can never be fired or laid off from your job.” 

The second student said “Prof. Everitt, you would not believe how much time I spend studying for exams and working on my homework assignments, but I still get B’s in some of my classes.  I wish that I could be like one of those genius students who can get everything right without studying.”

Prof. Everitt reached into his briefcase again, and took out an orange Illini pencil.  Presenting it to the student, he said “this is the Pencil of Infallibility.  As long as you use it, every answer that you write with it will be 100% correct.”  Immediately recognizing the enormous value of such an artifact, the student gratefully accepted it.

The third student said “Prof. Everitt, I think that my biggest problem is that I do not have the energy to do all the things that I want to do.  Sometimes I try hard and fail, and that makes it hard to keep going the next time.  I just wish that I never get tired or discouraged.”

Looking into his briefcase once more, Prof. Everitt took out an Illini rubber duck.  Giving it to the third student, he said “this is the Duck of Willpower.  If you take a nice hot bubble bath with it, you will find that you will have a positive outlook on all your problems the next day, and the energy to work on them”  The third student took the duck, and thanked Prof. Everitt, thinking that she got the lousiest gift of the three, especially because she did not like taking baths.

Prof. Everitt turned to go home, saying, “good luck with your project!” 

The students could not believe what just happened, and really just thought that Prof. Everitt was playing a joke on them, since he was known for having a great sense of humor. 

However, just out of curiosity, the second student sharpened his new Pencil of Infallibility, and tried again to analyze the problem that they were trying so hard to solve just a few minutes ago.

 Miraculously, he suddenly knew exactly what formula to write down, and even somehow clearly understood what his equation meant.  Excited now, he continued solving equations, recalling concepts that he somehow knew despite never having studied them.  It was as if, as long as he wrote with the Pencil, he was an incredible genius without even trying. 

Within an hour, he completely understood what they had been doing wrong, and could see how to make the project work perfectly.  It was amazing.

The two other students were equally amazed.  They could see that the Pencil had incredible powers, and they now took their own gifts seriously.  The three students made a promise to never discuss this night ever again with anyone, as long as they lived!  They finished their project, and went their separate ways.

Student #1 (the one with the Boxer Shorts of Invincibility) graduated that year, and got a job as a design engineer with a big government defense contractor.  Even though he did not think he really needed the Boxer Shorts on his first day of work, he wore them anyway, and got into the habit of wearing them every Monday through Friday.

Things at the company were actually pretty good for 4 years or so, since the company was growing and hiring like crazy.  Profits were at record levels and everyone was getting stock options and bonuses every year.  He thought that he probably wasted his wish, and stopped wearing the boxer shorts since his wife (a Purdue graduate) thought they were unattractive. 

However, after the fifth year, the economy was bad, defense spending was down, and the company president retired.  The new management team was known mostly for their skill in “downsizing” at their previous company. 

Before long, there was a round of layoffs, and ~15% of the employees at the student’s department were let go.  He made sure to wear the boxer shorts to work each day without fail. 

The company reorganized, and 50% of his department was let go, while the rest were combined with another department.  The department was sold off to be managed by a hedge fund based in Sweden, and suddenly he did not even know who his boss was anymore.  He started wearing the boxer shorts on weekends just to be safe. 

Nothing was ever good anymore at his company after that.  However, no matter what happened, he always seemed to end up with a job somewhere in the company.

As a result, he started to believe that he really was invincible.  He started coming into the office later and later in the morning, and leaving earlier in the afternoon.  If there was a project deadline, he did not worry about it. 

He had seen so many of his projects scrapped, dropped, or changed over the years that he did not see the point anymore.  He started taking longer lunch hours, and sat around complaining about the crappy management of the company and endlessly trying to figure out what the next calamity was going to be, based on cryptic comments made by the management in the newspapers. 

One year, a few people at the company left to form a new startup, but he was never considered. 

Dissatisfied with the company, he tried to interview for a job at other companies, but the Boxer Shorts offered no aid in getting a new job, only enabling him to keep his current one.  Former managers and coworkers did not write very strong recommendation letters for him, so new employers stayed away. 

On the positive side, the boxer shorts allowed him to devote plenty of time to his outside interests, so he had plenty of hobbies, traveled a lot, volunteered in his community, and spent a lot of time with his family.  So it wasn’t all bad, as long as the company itself never went out of business…

The student with the Pencil of Infallibility finished his senior year with amazing success.  Every homework assignment was absolutely perfect, and he got perfect scores on every exam. 

Finishing his senior year with all A+ grades allowed him to get several job offers with high salaries, and he took a job that would allow him to do a lot of hard core engineering problem solving and analysis. 

His bosses were amazed, and soon started throwing every hard problem at him. 

The student was starting to get a little worried though.  He had to use the pencil as sparingly as possible because it got shorter every time he sharpened it.  He realized that once it ran out, his magic streak of easy infinite knowledge would end! 

The Pencil had other shortcomings.  Even though he would always be right when he used the pencil, he could not explain what he wrote to someone else, unless it was about something that he actually understood. 

Further, he found that all the “big” problems at the company were actually worked on by teams of people, and that no one person could possibly do everything themselves.  Since people soon realized that he was not a “team player” he got assignments that allowed him to analyze small aspects of problems, and he was never put in charge of a group. 

He also found that many problems could not be solved by mathematical analysis alone, and that success of the company’s products depended on things like whether or not the customers actually liked them, the needs of the market, and other human factors.

He started to fear the day that his pencil would run out, and people would discover that he did not really know anything. 

In fact, because the pencil was so good, he did not put a lot of effort into keep current in the quickly changing engineering world, and his actual knowledge was getting out of date. 

With only ¼ of the pencil remaining, he decided that he needed to take drastic action soon.  Wisely, he put the pencil away and starting studying and solving problems on his own.  He read scientific journals in several fields and took classes whenever he could in both engineering topics and management. 

He worked on developing his people skills, and gradually gained more and more responsibility, getting raises and promotions every few years.  He only took the pencil out once a year to do his taxes.

The student with the Duck of Willpower also put her gift to good use during the rest of senior year.  It seemed to give her the extra drive that she needed to study a little longer and to figure out homework problems without asking the TA for help every time she got frustrated. 

The Duck also seemed to get her to take on challenges and opportunities that she previously felt too flustered to take on.  She did an undergraduate research project with one of her professors, who recommended that she attend graduate school. 

She took on leadership roles in the student chapter of IEEE. 

In fact, her Willpower seemed to be infectious, since it seemed like other students would get interested in activities like mentoring and technical seminars only after she started organizing them. 

She soon got used to the baths, and used the time to relax and to plan what she would devote her energy to next. 

Once in graduate school, the Duck of Willpower was also very useful.  She took the initiative to read the scientific literature in her research field, and tried to understand what the key problems were that needed to be solved. 

Instead of waiting for her advisor to tell her exactly what to do every week, she would go into the lab and do what she thought was needed, and report back with her results.  Many of her experiments failed, some several times, but eventually she could always identify the problems and get things to work correctly.

The Willpower seemed to extend to life outside of work, so she could pursue any outside interest with equal energy, so she took up playing the guitar and ballroom dancing. 

In her first job after graduate school, it was not long before she was supervising a group of employees leading to the development of their leading product.  When she and a few co-workers saw an opportunity to spin out a new company, she jumped at the chance, and was soon convincing venture capital investors to put millions of dollars into her idea.  Needless to say, she was enormously successful both personally and professionally.

This story is a fable, but the point is to ask you to think about what you want out of yourself, your life, and your career. 

What is the best attribute to have, and to develop within yourself? 

Is it to be “safe?” 

Is it to be a “genius?” 

One point of my story is that, especially now, safety is an illusion.  Companies come and go.  Departments reorganize.  Economies go up and down.  Safety is actually attained by being the best you can be, and by making yourself valuable through your knowledge, attitude, skills, and effort. 

A second point of my story is that genius is a gift that VERY few people have. 

As a student, it seemed to me like there were always a few people to whom everything came easily, and that little effort was needed to get the highest grades.  I found that, even though I was far from being the smartest student, if I tried hard enough, I could get myself to understand almost anything. 

Most people who we think of as brilliant actually are very dedicated to developing their skill over time.  The more you work at being good at something, the better you get at it. 

This applies to writing, engineering, playing a musical instrument, sports, and many other areas of life. 

Certainly a little ability and the opportunity to learn from excellent teachers helps.  You all have that ability, and I would argue that your education at Illinois is among the best engineering education institutions that exists in the world today.

Through circumstances that I am not at liberty to divulge, I have come to possess all three of the magical items that Prof. Everitt gave to those students in 1950, including a renewed Pencil of Infallibility. 

Since I was granted tenure three years ago, I no longer need the Boxer Shorts of Invincibility. 

Since I am a professor, of course now I am never wrong, so I do not use the Pencil of Infallibility either. 

If you would like to borrow either of these for a while, let me know. 

I will, however, hold on to the Rubber Duck of Willpower, since even for professors, that is useful from time to time especially at the end of the semester!

Industry and Academia – What are the Differences?

When I graduated with my PhD in 1990 and searched for my first job, becoming a professor was one of the furthest things from my mind.  It’s hard for me to remember now why I did not consider life as a professor as an option – but I had an idea that I wanted to get out into the “real” world and to have a role in making products that people would actually use, rather than just publishing papers in scientific journals.  Also, even though I had published papers in some of the top journals, worked for a very famous advisor, and came from one of the best university-based research groups in the world in my field (compound semiconductors) I somehow did not feel qualified to be a professor on my own.  It just seemed that there was a huge gap between what my advisor and other professors were able to do, and my perceptions of my own capabilities.  Could I teach?  Could I raise money?  Could I do a decent job advising someone else, when I hardly knew what to do myself?

Also, at the time that I was ready to hold a job, there were several great alternatives to academia within industry for someone who was interested in doing basic research.  Big industrial research laboratories such as Bell Labs, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center all operated world-class research centers that promised great facilities, top-notch collaborators, higher-than-academic salaries, and a streamlined path to commercializing ideas.  Many large semiconductor, automotive and defense companies had research laboratories that followed the Bell Labs model, including Raytheon, General Motors, Ford, TRW, Texas Instruments, Hewlett Packard, and Hughes.  Rather than pursuing an academic career, many of the brightest students were heavily recruited by these organizations, which offered a highly attractive combination of stability (without having to obtain outside funding support), the ability to publish and patent extensively, and no requirement to teach classes.  National laboratories such as Sandia National Laboratory, Lincoln Laboratory, Draper Laboratory, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Lawrence Livermore offered very similar research experiences, but often with requirements to work on projects with a “secret” classification that would make it harder to publish.

Through the course of several economic recessions that occurred since the late 1980’s, most of the corporate research laboratories that I mentioned have been either completely eliminated or folded into the manufacturing parts of the company.  In some cases, “research” could be more accurately described as incremental product development, with the goal of more quickly delivering product enhancements to existing product lines, rather than developing fundamentally new products that the company might bring to market 5-10 years down the road.  While business executives can rightfully point to increased efficiencies that are realized through operating in this way (due to elimination of projects that might consume millions of  research dollars per year, and yet generate no revenue), there are now fewer opportunities for young engineers to develop the skills and resume that would help them make a transition to academia later in their careers.  As a result, in my opinion, the most innovative research now takes place at universities, startup companies, and national laboratories – but that will be the topic of a later blog entry.

Since I have worked at a big industry research laboratory (Raytheon Company’s Research Division – now closed), two government laboratories (Sandia National Laboratory and Draper Laboratory – both still open), a startup company (SRU Biosystems – also still open), and most currently at a university (University of Illinois – still going strong since opening its doors in 1868), students sometimes ask me about the advantages and disadvantages of each.  The following list is only my opinion, based upon only my own experiences and those gathered from friends and colleagues over the last 20 years.  There are exceptions to every rule, and your own experiences may differ.  I will start with corporate research labs of big companies.

Corporate Lab Advantages

·      Strong focus on translating R&D projects into something that makes an impact on the marketplace in the short term.  If you want to see your work “out there” right away, then this is the place for you.  The best labs are tied in pretty closely with marketing and manufacturing, and are highly focused on developing new features that are sought by customers of that can address a niche that might give some advantage over a competitor that is offering something similar. 

·      Can be an exciting environment since product development cycles are now very fast in some industries.  Trade shows at conferences can be filled with intrigue (what are the competitors going to unveil this time?) high stakes business deals, and the experience of being part of a big team (i.e. everyone wearing the same shirt to trade shows).

·      If you like to be told what to do or assigned tasks by your manager, then this is the place to go for a new graduate.  Especially at the beginning, a new PhD or MS engineer will not have much autonomy, with tasks or projects being assigned according to needs.

·      The pay can be good.  In some companies more than others, there are opportunities to earn performance bonuses, based upon the market success of your project or meeting some performance objectives.

·      There is a perception of job stability, but this can be an illusion (see “Disadvantages” below).

·      Despite a (sometimes) short-term focus, there can still be opportunities for performing more fundamental research and proposing new ideas if the topic is directly related to a company’s core strengths.

·      If you don’t like writing research grant proposals or raising money from investors, then this is the place for you.  You might still need to convince internal managers to fund projects that you support, so you are not totally off the hook.

·      A lot of people work 8AM-5PM, but there can be periods of longer hours near deadlines.  People who want to be seen as ambitious will consistently work longer hours.  Overall, it is not impossible to have outside interests and a family life.

Corporate Laboratory Disadvantages

·      At a really big place, it can feel like your own personal contribution to the success of the company is extremely small or nonexistent.  When I worked at Raytheon, the company’s annual sales were in the billions.  When a new idea would be proposed for some new semiconductor component, managers would ask: “what is the size of the market that we could generate with this product?”  If the answer was “0.01 billion dollars per year” the whole effort would be “in the noise” in the context of the whole company’s sales.  The same idea might be considered as a more substantial opportunity somewhere else.

·      Even if your company is large, job stability is an illusion.  Companies of all sizes are constantly going through re-organizations, mergers, acquisitions, bankruptcies, etc.  For every merger or acquisition that happens, there are probably at least 10 that “almost” happen but that don’t go forward for some reason.  Regardless, each transition results in disruption to your potential job function, who you work for, whether your job will be sent elsewhere (another state or country), and whether you will still have a seat after the music stops in the game of corporate musical chairs.  Each of these events can present new opportunities, but can also lead to much hand-wringing and rumors, as people try to guess what is going to happen to their job.  In my opinion, your only source of stability is to perform excellent work at all times and to maintain the highest ethical standards at all times.  When your boss’s boss is looking to lay off some percentage  of the division, you want to be the most valuable person – the one they would never consider letting go.

·      Big companies can have big bureaucracy.  Decisions about anything important can take layers of management approval, hours of meetings, committees, and consultants.  This can especially be a problem if the company is considering doing something new.  It is much easier to come up with excuses to kill an idea than it is to take a risk on advocating a new idea, which results in, very often, new technologies getting killed at a big company before they get a chance to become a product.

·      You will not get much vacation time – all least at first.  Two weeks of vacation  per year for the first few years at a big company are standard.

·      You may not get much opportunity to publish.  If you think that you would like be become a faculty member someday, it is important to establish a publication trail.  Some positions will provide more opportunity than others to publish research results.  Often, if the R&D project is comprised of incremental advances, scientific journal submissions may not be reviewed very favorably or the company will suppress publication in order to maintain a competitive advantage.

·      In my experience, some (but certainly not all) managers seemed to be promoted for odd reasons.  The people with greatest ability were often passed over in favor of those with the most obvious ambition, in a process that is far from rigorous.  This resulted in management positions being occupied by those with the best ability to please their bosses, rather than those with the best technical understanding, organization skills, or people-management skills.  While some managers were outstanding, I was puzzled by how others got their position.

Government Laboratory Advantages

·      Since my time at Sandia National Laboratory was a relatively short 9-month  postdoc, my comments here are drawn from my experience as a scientist in the MEMS group at Draper Laboratory.

·      Because they offer a research environment with good funding, strong laboratory facilities and good job stability, you will find that government labs have some of the brightest people working at them.  Many people have risen to become highly respected world leaders in their technical specialty in this environment.  Government laboratories tend to focus on big problems of national importance that do not have solutions that can be solved in one quarter. 

·      Because the national laboratories address tough problems, it is possible for your work to make a fundamental impact on the environment, space exploration, energy, fundamental physics, national defense capabilities, transportation, and many others.

·      Funding for these priorities goes through up/down cycles that are not as rapid as those within companies, but can shift due to the whims of Congress.  Despite this, I cannot think of any national laboratories that have gone out of business.  Many engineers have enough flexibility to shift to different projects as the priorities change.  In general, there is more job stability than at a company.

·      Some research at national laboratories may be classified as “secret” and therefore impossible to pubish.  However, this is not strictly the case.  At Draper Laboratory, I worked on non-classified projects in parallel with my classified projects.  Even though I had to fill out long forms and obtain several signatures to obtain publication permission, it would generally be granted it I could convince all concerned that no government secrets would be revealed.

·      National laboratories have funding and flexibility to explore new research areas and some funding to go after them in a meaningful way.  Many labs are getting into “hot” research fields such as nanotechnology, life science technologies, energy transduction, sensor networks, autonomous systems, and many others.  Researchers generally do not write grant applications to NIH or NSF, but may write internal research proposals or proposals to other government agencies (such as DARPA) where political connections of your managers make a big difference in your chances for getting funding.

·      At Draper Laboratory, I found the environment to be very conducive to proposing new research directions, especially if it could lead to getting outside funding.  The lab sponsored internal proposal contest to help foster new ideas and to encourage development of proposal-writing skills.

·      If the lab is affiliated with a university, there can be opportunities to continue your education through taking classes, earning a degree, teaching a class, or mentoring graduate students.  There is no expectation that scientists at a national lab will teach, but there can be opportunities for teaching if you actively seek them out.

·      You can come into work at 8AM and leave at 5PM if you want to, without being thought of as lazy.  A few people work longer hours when needed, but generally the parking lot was getting emptied out by 6PM.

Government Laboratory Disadvantages

·      Salary is generally on par with that of industry, but without the opportunity for stock options and bonuses.

·      Government laboratories can have similar bureaucracy to corporations in terms of management layers, meetings, and big-decision making.  At the level of a scientist working in the lab, I hardly experienced bureaucracy at all, however.

·      If your goal is to develop a technology into a commercial product or a spin-out company, doing it from a national lab is possible, but making the transition can be a challenge.  Some laboratories have technology transfer offices, but I have not seen these be as effective at starting successful companies as independent entrepreneurs.

·      There is little incentive for people to work together, resulting in a substantial degree of politics to obtain people and resources for a project.  Entrenched people can sometimes simply refuse to cooperate with others and focus instead on their own narrow interests.  In one case at Draper Laboratory, a senior scientist was being verbally abusive and insulting to one of the junior female engineers on my team – in front of many witnesses.  Since I was the project leader, I removed the offending senior person from the team, who howled in protest to every senior manager who would listen to him.  I don’t know how many hours of meetings I had to endure to deal with this jerk, but at a small company I could have simply fired him.  Higher level managers simply wanted to smooth over problems and to protect the ego of a prima-donna.

·      People are managed on a very strict accounting system for reporting the use of your time (in 6-minute increments – I am not kidding) so that the correct budget can be charged for your time.  This leads to every engineer, scientist, secretary, and technician scrounging for “charge numbers” for performing even the smallest task.  This has a stifling effect on trying to get traction for any new idea that does not have a large existing budget.

·      People cost a lot.  The overhead rates at national labs are very high, resulting in a cost of >$200-250K/year to support a single engineer.  Even a project with a few people working on it needs a great deal of financial support.

Startup Company Advantages

·      Starting your own company is an experience like no other – but I will try to write from the perspective of someone who is thinking about joining an existing small company.

·      Your work will have a strong impact on the success (or failure!) of the company.

·      There is a greater sense of teamwork than in any other type of organization, since everyone is in the same boat, and everyone will swim or sink together.  There is less tolerance for people who cannot get along or who want to do their own thing.  They will be asked to leave before their attitude spreads far.  That is not to say there is no conflict – quite the contrary.  People feel passionately about the company, and will argue passionately for defining the path that they believe will be successful.

·      A startup offers the best potential to substantially benefit financially, IF the company proves to be successful.  We all know stories of people with stock in startups who became millionaires after the company was sold or after it went public.  There is also the possibility that the company will fail, or that the venture capital investors will capture most of the financial benefit before employees get much money.

·      At a startup, there are opportunities to gain experience with a wide variety of roles and tasks.  For example, I’ve taken part in marketing, creating the web site, designing a company logo, business negotiations, manufacturing process development, fundraising, hiring, and business planning.  Some of the tasks are definitely non-glamorous (fixing the copy machine, setting up the internal wireless network, ordering/unpacking office furniture, finding leaks in the roof, shoveling the snow…) but they build character, I am told.

·      You will find a different style of engineer at a startup company.  I was fortunate to work with people with impressive technical skills, a get-it-done attitude, and dedication to excellence.  There is no time to study something for two years before trying to implement it, so there is more of a “just build it, test it, and we’ll understand it all later” mentality that helps move projects along quickly.

·      A startup has the ability to adapt to new market opportunities and customer preferences very quickly, resulting in a big advantage against larger rivals.  The skills of the management team, scientists, and engineers have a direct impact on the ability of the company to become and stay profitable.  The Darwinian effect of this kind of pressure for survival results in, I believe, a prevalence of more effective managers and leaders at startup companies than at large companies.  The bad ones simply do not get to stay at the job very long before someone forces them out.

·      If you work for a startup company that grows, it is possible to move up the management ranks much more quickly than you could at a big company, resulting in greater authority and salary at an earlier age. 

Disadvantages of a Startup Company

·      Of all the working environments, a startup is perhaps the least stable, because they can fail for so many reasons – not all of which are directly under your control.   The world is not exactly kind to startups, with big companies trying to keep them out of established markets, the challenges of obtaining funding, and many others.  Some people prefer the action/adventure, while others find it very stressful to wonder whether their organization will still exist in one month or one year.

·      By necessity, a startup must be highly focused on the product, requiring all elements of the team to pull together.  As a result, a startup may not be the right place to start your own separate new idea.  However, successful startup companies will continue to introduce new products, so opportunities for developing a new idea are certainly possible.

·      Work hours at a startup can be very demanding.  There are many milestones (imposed by investors, business partners, customers, trade shows) that simply must be met if the company is going to survive (or at least it always seems that way).  Expect to work nights and weekends – sometimes for a long period.  However, there are often compensations (like bonuses, time off, company recognition awards) for these efforts.

·      Even if the startup company consumes your life, hardly anybody else has heard of you!  There is an implicit assumption that you are just out to make a buck that results in some scientists looking down on you.  You will find yourself always explaining what your company does – even several years after it was founded – to people who have not heard of your products.

·      Universities de-value time spent at a startup compared to national laboratories, perhaps because of the low-prestige effect mentioned in the last point.  For example, even though I had dozens of patents, many publications, and started a successful company, the University of Illinois would only hire me as an associate professor without tenure, compared to younger faculty with Bell Labs experience or faculty experience who were made full professors nearly 5 years before I was. 

Advantages of Being a Professor

·      One of the best things about being a faculty member is the freedom to work on whatever ideas you are excited about, and to NOT spend your time on ideas that you believe are a waste of time.  You can work on any idea that you can get financial support for, which provides the opportunity to explore new ideas, to be creative, and to try things out that nobody has done before.  This is part of the excitement of being a scientist, and one of the things that I enjoy the most. 

·      Many people outside academia consider the obligation to teach to be a disadvantage, but I consider it to be a very strong advantage.  By teaching, not only are you contributing to the development of a new generation of students, but you also have to keep your own engineering skills very sharp.  When I taught undergraduate electromagnetics for the first time, I had to re-study Maxwell’s equations all over again – something I had not done in many years.  By understanding the fundamental concepts well enough to be able to teach them (and to teach them over and over again) actually results in a deeper understanding which in turn results in better research.

·      Having the opportunity to help young people get their careers off to a great start is highly motivating and personally rewarding.  I recall the teachers in my life who had the most positive impact on my outlook and education – it is great to have the opportunity to “pay it forward” to the next generation of students.

·      My colleagues are each, in their own area of expertise, among the best in the world.  This means that no matter what topic I am interested in, I directly talk with and work with people who are at the top of their field.  So much research is interdisciplinary, that this is a critical advantage.

·      I don’t really have a boss.  There is nobody who I report to every day, who checks up on my weekly or monthly progress, or who tells me exactly what I must do.  (see the topic under “Disadvantages: Everybody is my boss.”)  I am actually SUPPOSED to spend some of my time reading, writing, and thinking.  I am actually SUPPOSED to travel around the world to scientific conferences and universities in cool places and share my research results by giving presentations and meeting people.  I am actually EXPECTED to organize new initiatives to help educate students more effectively, and to meet with people across the country to figure out how to do it.  I am highly ENCOURAGED to participate in meeting with faculty colleagues from around the country to discuss and to evaluate the best research proposals in fields like nanotechnology, medical imaging, genomics technologies, and many others.

·      Being a faculty member results in development of strong and lasting interpersonal relationships with students, faculty, administrators, company representatives, and even parents.  I get to work with and interact with a much wider variety of people from different cultural and educational backgrounds that in any other job I have had.  I even teach a middle-school class on Electromagnetics, basically because I wanted to.

·      People have a lot of respect for professors.  Even though I am still basically the same person who I was before I was a faculty member, I have observed that people are more respectful to me now.   Not only students and parents, but also scientists, lawyers, business people, investors who I meet anywhere.  Nobody was this nice to me when I was a startup company CTO.  I think that there is a general recognition that faculty members put in extra time and effort for the benefit of students, at the expense of maximizing their salaries.  Since faculty are experts in their fields, their impartial expertise is highly sought after, where faculty may serve as consultants.

·      Working with students helps you keep a youthful attitude.  I have met many middle-aged engineers and scientists who have become highly cynical in their careers, but that trait is very rare in faculty members.  Students have such optimism and personal drive that even when asked to take on a very challenging task, they can do it extremely well, without even really knowing why the task was supposed to be difficult.  When I ask students what they would like to do in their careers, some say things like “get a job and make money,” but many others want to improve human life, develop exciting new technology, and make a positive impact on the world.  It’s really refreshing to hear that!

Disadvantages of Being a Professor

·      Being a professor is not so much of a job, as it is a way of life.  It can occupy much more of your time than any other job, even compared to founding a startup company.  Many of the responsibilities are very pleasant (award ceremonies, entertaining campus visitors), others are tedious (grading 80 midterm exams), and others just come with the territory (writing graduate school recommendation letters, faculty meetings, committees).  However, there are many separate groups of people who need your time, and there is only so much of it to give out.  Evening exams, banquets, faculty meetings, conference calls, meetings with graduate students, grant progress reports, answering ~100 emails/day, teaching, preparing to teach, generating homework problems, interviewing faculty candidates…) all take time.  I find that I work for ~2 hours every weekday evening and 8-12 hours on the weekends to keep up during the semester.

·      Everyone is my boss!  I find that I am constantly doing things for other people.  This includes multiple department heads, deans, lab directors, grant agency program managers, proposal team leaders, proposal review panel leaders, and committee chairpeople.  While it is true that you do not have a very invasive boss, you will find that you are serving many different groups and leaders at the same time.  Of course, none of these “bosses” coordinate with each other, so it is possible to have many reports, meetings, proposals, and reviews to work on, that are all due at approximately the same time.

·      Students think that they work pretty hard, but most of them accomplish only a fraction of the work of a good full time engineer – at least until they get near the end of their PhD.  Students are constantly distracted by homework assignments, midterm exams, small bumps in their personal lives, a million hobbies, and travelling around the world.  It still amazes me how long it takes for a new student to accomplish simple tasks.  Students seem to get sick with amazing frequency and duration compared to adult engineers who I have worked with.  Perhaps they do not get enough sleep or maintain a good diet!  Once focused on a goal, however, students are capable of working much longer hours than a non-student engineer, but this tends to happen in short bursts of activity. 

·      Achieving full-time professor status and tenure at a major research university is a big-time career challenge.  Even though your boss does not tell you what to do, there will be a promotion/tenure review committee that will closely study your record of accomplishments.  So even though nobody is watching you, people really ARE watching you.  Developing a record of excellent publications, successful proposals, service to your professional societies, excellent teaching reviews, and successful mentoring of graduate students takes a sustained commitment to developing your skills.  I am not sure whether this is a disadvantage or not, but it is a constant source of stress.  You are effectively being evaluated by all the senior faculty in your department and by many of the senior people (worldwide) in your research field who will be asked to provide external recommendation letters for your promotion.

·      Writing research grant applications can be a major time commitment and a mentally agonizing process.  Actually, the proposal writing is not the hard part for me anymore.  Rather, it is reading the review comments.  Sometimes, reviewers have some excellent insights and suggestions that would help to make a proposal stronger, but often the comments are totally incorrect, or indicate that the reviewer completely missed something that was written in the proposal.  Some funding agencies (NIH) provide an opportunity to respond to reviewer comments, while others (NSF) do not.  Regardless, there is a large time lag (perhaps 2 years) between the conception of an idea, preparing preliminary data to “prove” that the idea will work, proposing the idea, and getting outside funding for the idea.

·      Students seem obsessed with “points.”  Of course, students take classes to earn a grade, and their GPA’s are important to them.  When I was a student, I wanted to earn as many points on homework assignments and exams as I could, but I don’t recall trying to beg the professors for extra points or easier grading.  In the greater scheme of things, the “points” seem so trivial, but it drives me nuts at the end of the semester when students beg for a higher grade than they earned because they “need” it.  There is at least one student who does this every semester.