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.
