How does one rise from being a lowly undergraduate to an esteemed professor? Three scientists explain how the academic system works and how they won recent promotions. More about what science is REALLY like at www.test-tube.org.uk/
I earned my Ph.D (Doctorate in Philosophy) at 55-yo. It required 5 1/2 years and $10,000.00 and a small library to get there. Now I have my own Research Project. I am 67-yo now and am very inspired and motivated to assist others that has a hunger to ascend to a higher plane of mind. Peace
This job literally has no extrinsic value, at least not until one climbs the ladder, but the process is so long and strenuous that one has to wonder if the reward at the end does any justice to the investment demanded all throughout. It is so sad, these are the people that truly make a contribution to humanity, but what else can one expect from a society that does not value education. I now have a much more profound respect for all my tenure professors.
ibrahim, true, the worst enemy of a researcher/academic is universities themselves and university administrators. it's like reliving some Kafka's novel.
What do you mean by "all my tenure professors"? In my whole degree I was never taught by one full professor, they're too busy running their departments to be giving classes to undergrads. I had plenty of senior lecturers or associate professors but not *the* professor, let alone more than one (were they from different departments?)
@@QuasiELVIS Perhaps where you live it is somewhat different? I had a number of tenured professors who ran courses. I had one in sociology, one in math, one in a critical reading course, and one in physics at least. So quite a wide range of disciplines. It was in the US. It was at a very large university that has a lot of research, and was somewhere between average and ivy league as far as ranking/reputation in most areas. In all of these cases, the professors enjoyed teaching. Also I think maybe I actually had 3-4 tenured professors run my courses in physics (my major) because the department was somewhat small and a large portion of the upper level electives are taught by tenured professors.
Researchers, in general, are not necessarily trained to teach... that is one hole in the schooling. Some of the top universities require PhD students to do some teaching, as a teaching assistant. This is very useful.
This video was a fantastic inspiration to me and probably a lot of other scientists in training. Makes me value the genius of the professors I have access to even more. I'm definitely going to stay in active research though! Editing was really really good too.
It is, but this video makes it sound like it's just the "first step" lol, I do see why it's gone over so quickly in this vid TBF though, being a professor is an insanely high level to reach
@@robinthebobin6537 made this comment as a young individual prior undergrad/post grad studies. Needless to say my MSc experience will be the last. Academia is interesting, but not for me entirely.
In high school my longest paper was maybe 8 pages. In college I studied psychology with a minor in neuroscience and another minor in chemistry. My first semester psychology course final was a 20 page paper. First semester sophomore psych paper was 40 pages. Junior final was 60 pages. Senior final was a 12 month long intensive research project with a 100 page written thesis. It ramped up slowly, perhaps, but by the end it was hardcore.
Well done! it's nice to hear good things and how well people are doing. Stuff like this should be in the public eye like the news, radio, papers etc etc which can encourge others to go for it.
CastelDawn lol Let me guess, the video link in my comment was beyond your comprehension - congrats, you qualify for University admisson - followed by flipping burgers. I suppose you also believe in Anthropogenic Global Warming even though you can't show any causal correlation between atmosheric CO2 concentrations and Earth Temperature.
Moses Bullrush Whether "global warming" is real or not, the effects of addressing are beneficial for 99.9% of the human population (the 99.9% that don't make billions of of selling oil,coal etc.) why? Simple, because the hydrocarbon bi products of burning fossils fuels are harmful to human health. Replacing them with a clean, harmless energy source isn't a bad thing, and any sane person would be wise to encourage governments to address the issue of "global warming" even if they do not believe in it, for the sole purpose of creating a cleaner, healthier environment for everybody.
just to leave comments Hydrocarbon emmissions have been cleaned up by catalytic converters, acid rain and smog have been dealt with, CO2 emissions remain and that is why cars and power stations are evaluated according to the CO2 emissions. CO2 is not pollution, we need more CO2 which will boost plant growth and make the earth bloom with abundance, that is why they want to squash CO2 emissions and limit food production and limit population survival. Video Title: Seeing Is Believing /watch?v=P2qVNK6zFgE Do you really believe they want to limit CO2 because they care about us? The EPA movement is designed to crush the economy of America and force Americans down to lower economic levels which make ordinary people dependent on the Government. Land and resource control is all about enviro-green- communism. The NWO Corporations behind de-forestation are the same people as the Koch Bros and the Wall Street Fake Global Warming Carbon Tax Swindlers who want to treat all humans like Palestinians.
just to leave comments You can't show any historic or current correlation between atmospheric CO2 concentrations and Earth Temperature therefore Global Warming propaganda is promoted by Wall Street Carbon Tax Swindlers and the beneficiaries of their Trillion Dollar per year Carbon Derivatives Market. Global Warming is just a bigger version of ENRON.
why are so many people demoralised? becoming a professor means doing research and hard work...why would you think everyone has to be easy so everyone can be a professor?
The Aura Tree If your ignorant mind doesn't know this: the "le" was put in due to associating Reddit and sticking "le" in everything during the old times of Reddit - times when you still were in kindergarten. You contradict yourself as you call yourself "smart" yet you "judge a book by its cover", the least intelligent thing to do. I appreciate your trolling efforts and your display of ignorance, but the block button says otherwise. If you will continue to troll like you usually do in your pathetic life, then it will be put to use.
This video was quite good, and I hope it helps develope the standard worldwide. Having taught at large for years, it always sad how many students are given no understanding of the educative process.
He also implied the more post-docs you end up doing, the worse it gets. Surely having to do more post-docs on your way up the ladder couldn't hurt in of itself, as long as you didn't do poor research?
The One Yeah. I'm just finishing my Masters, and I'm having to really decide where in the world and in what exact area of nonlinear optics or laser tech I'm going to apply for a PhD in. It's too much to think about. Almost wish I had an agent, hahahah.
University of Rochester is well known for optics. University of Colorado Boulder is well known for Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics. But every big university should have research groups in most major categories of research. I sort of let fate influence my decision. I was told I should choose the school that I am are willing to live in for years, and that what specifically you do in research comes secondary. I chose the University of Maryland College Park because it was more metropolitan (near DC) among the two universities :( that I got accepted to. I'm hoping to take advantage of my 1st year lab rotations to get some breadth and exposure, but ultimately, I will probably work in the field of ultrafast lasers.
the formal time is 3 years. but it depends on your subject and research. if you doing researching in chemistry and stuff you might need more time because of the experiments. it also depends on if you have funding. if you do and it is for 3 years usually people stick to that period of 3 years because they do not have the money to fund themselves for more years. so an average time i would say is 3 to 5 years (there are exceptions to this however)
I'm 18 turning 19. Will be finishing my first year of university soon. I already have some ideas of what to do research in. Long way ahead will get there.
@Tactic11 Not necessarily: john nash received a doctorate on a 28 page thesis (but then again he did won the nobel prize partly due to that paper...). So less likely but possible nonetheless.
this is an insanely good video, it clearly explains the path to becoming a professor and how much you actually have to work in order to get into a position like that. look out world you'll be seeing a new professor soon enough!
I know in the USA that at some junior colleges you can teach with a masters. And even other non-"junior" colleges will sometimes give teaching jobs to people with masters. It all depends.
When I first got to university I was surprised to find out that some of the professors were horrible at teaching! :-( They may be very competant in their field of studies, but it seems like sometimes their ability to pass on their knowledge to others wasn't given much of a look at. Of course, from what I've seen from these videos that certainly isn't the case at Nottingham! ;)
3:24... "Lecturer, what I call the first grown up job in academia"... which you might get by your mid 30s... It turns out that after 10-15 years of training, 90-95% of postdocs are simply discarded... despite being the principal agents involved in research (lecturers usually have to divide their time between writing papers, lecturing, and applying for grants, rarely stepping into the lab...) A pretty shocking way to run an industry, and curiously relatively recent. I have met many retired professors who got their first 'grown up job' after their masters degree at age 23-24.
Basically it's publish or perish. To get an entry level assistant prof you need some pubs and conference proceedings. The exception is at a teaching college but for the most part those pay less than tenure track.
Overall pay is less but per hour break down is much more. Teach class, office hours, a few commitee meetings every so often, and youre done. No evenings, late hours, or weekends, and summer terms off.
Does anyone know the analogous process in the US? As I recall, the titles were bachelor's degree, master's, PhD, then post-doc, associate prof, assistant prof, full prof. I don't recall the lecturer steps.
There are at my university (manchester) but then it is reknowned internationally (although I thought many were). We have a lot of chinese lecturers and asians and a few fins too.
i think its a serious shortcoming of universities to not explain this stuff. I am in my last year of a biology degree, and it basically takes me picking the brains of my tutors and professors duing labs to get answers about career paths, and basic things like what tenure is. There really should be a webpage or a lecture where they talk about all the career related things.
It sounds impossible but it depends how good you are at a subject. Gifted people are frustrated by the amount of time it takes and get very angry that they are being held back and wasted by the system.
intresting to hear how that's actually done. I didn't realize that "Professor" wasn't just the name they gave to any collage staff teaching. I went to a tech collage, the term was not used. Whether I'd bother doing that myself? Ehhhh, not my calling. Though, most of my areas of interest and/or expertise are more aptitude-oriented then academically oriented (I took computer programming and networks. A gifted non-grad who's got work in the field will be the first hired. Mainly because they can pay 'em less)
sheesh...I want to be a professor and do research on the side but this is such an arduous process, I don’t know how they do it. I always wondered why I have some professors that are in their late 70’s still teaching and now I know why - it takes forever to just earn the title of professor!
Great inspiration to aspiring academics. had the pleasure of interacting with Pete Licence during his India visit. He is bound to contribute to science in a big way in times to come. best wishes Dr.Ramasawmy Gopalan CChem FRSC , India
I've had Lecturers in economics courses who were still PhD students, due to there being a shortage of Econ professors at my university. But is it common for PhD students to teach a class of 100 people elsewhere?
Hey, 3 Years later I’m about to graduate with a bachelors in biochemistry. I’m about to pursue a Master’s in bioinformatics. I don’t want to be a chemistry professor anymore
from what I know, this step is not that bad actually. You just cut and paste the results that you have been working on for the past 4 years. The rest is just a motivation for the reader in the form of a historical introduction and possible applications, so writing the thesis isn't that bad. The hard part, and it depends mostly on the level of assholeness/professionalism of your advisor, is coming up with the results.
This applies to scientists. The Postdoc scenario is less common in Humanities....thought that also means the PhD takes longer...as you're expected to publish a significant amount of original research on your own without corporate authorship...by the time you go out on the job market.
What does everything think about your highschool records affecting your chances at a professorship? Should your pre-undergraduate academic record be impressive?
The longest essay I've had to write is 500 words, and I'm going into grade 12 this September. I certainly can write a fairly long thesis, but I do agree that the schools are not properly preparing us for university.
Some people think you must have a phd to be a professor and some are asking do you need a phd to be a professor. First of all, between these two, getting a phd is the easy part. Secondly, no, actually you don't need a phd to become a professor even at a prestigious university, but those appointments are quite rare. You need to have a very distinguished career. To get a famous director to teach film studies, a former president to teach politics, a former Fortune 500 CEO to teach business, etc, a university would appoint them as full professors. For eg, Tim Berners-Lee is apparent a professor of computer science at both Oxford and MIT and as far as I can find he doesn't have an earned phd.
research fellowship is typically a position where you sign up to a university as an employee working on research as part of a group with a specific focus. post doc and fellowship are not mandatory in my experience but they help a lot if you are looking to become a lecturer. with some luck and if your PhD is in a field that a university is interested in, you may jump to lectureship immediately.
In many universities, you can become a teaching assistant or research assistant which brings in a stipend that funds your education and living expenses. The funding comes either from the department or from the professor's grant of whom you are doing research for. A fellowship is money from a different source, and usually the stipulations for a fellowship doesn't nearly involve the type of time commitment as a research assistantship. This would allow you to not have to be a TA and not have to draw money from the professor's grant, which could potentially free up time on your end, and the professor's grant money - that would have been used to pay for your RA stipend - could be used for other purposes (i.e. purchasing lab equipment). A fellowship is essentially free money with some minor stipulations. Of course, you would have to be 1) eligible for it 2) apply and be selected for it. There are different fellowships for different purposes, like fellowships that support people in specific fields, fellowships that support people of certain demographics, fellowships that support people in certain stages of their education, fellowships that support people with specific career interests. The application process involves writing a personal statement and getting letters of recommendations (usually 3).
Ya i know that, that's what i said. You said that the universities must open their doors to the ordinary public, which implied that they were shutting ordinary people out. In fact the problem lies in the secondary schools, universities are just as open, if not more so, as they used to be.
i stand corrected then. I always thought I saw job postings from small colleges looking for "professor" positions and only needing a masters, but I guess I'm just remembering wrong.
What I think people in the comments are missing is that yes, it's a long road with a lot of steps, but if you're passionate about it then all the steps in between should be worthwhile to you. If you view the road to professor as the longest internship ever then it's not the right work for you.
I want to be like Prof Poliakoff (especially his hair). Unfortunately, I began to lose my hair in my first year. Now in my second year, more hair fell down. I still love chemistry, even though i don't and won't have that buckyball hair... -.-
Live long and make it yourself hard. I'm professor of anything walking the sweeping machine here while keeping updated via RU-vid because i can :D To me being is like being Dr who? Lots of fun and leaving most people who ask can't grab it.
If student learning skills have not been developed by high school then it is unlikely that they can survive academic testing system at university level. To be successful at university level students must possess following s skills: Writing & Language Skills, Mathematical skills, IT Skills and interest and experience of the subject area.
