It seems like there is no end to the Hustle in academia. Is it always going to be this way? Does it end after tenure? Or does it even really end then?
I’m starting to be tired of working my butt off but never feeling like I’ve got something to keep for all the effort. There’s always another thing to apply for and achieve. PhD to postdoc(s) to hopefully land a TT job — but you may not get tenure in the end actually. Maybe it’s because I’m older (took time working in the “real world” before getting my PhD) and all the hustle has gone out of me, but I’m just wondering if there ever is actually an end to it.
I’m exhausted!
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Welcome to academia! Many academics work twice or more the amount of paid time. It is a marathon. Depending on your goal, there may not be an end. Enjoy the little successes!
Academics work hard. The profession self-selects for those who are able to keep up a steady, rigorous pace (in R1s at least). After tenure it does not slow down for most people who have gotten used to the validation of published papers, grant awards, committee positions, keynote invitations, the next hurdle of full professor, and so on. Again, self-selection. Merit raises are based on productivity but they often don’t amount to much so they are not a huge incentive.
I’m not sure what OP wants to “keep from all the effort.” Little in life has as much longevity as published articles/books which become part of an archive.
If you don’t have hustle, it’s kind of pointless to be an academic. You choose the game you want to actually play.
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yes
My PhD advisor was in her 60s and still chasing tenure. She did nothing but work from sunup to sundown. She spend her evenings reading papers and weekends writing grants. In the years I was there she was told multiple times that if she applied for tenure she likely would not get it. As far as I know nothing has changed many years later.
I left academia for the clinical world.
My P.I. literally complained that he cannot work anymore as much as before because of his child. He is still writing on late evening and during every weekend, but he has to stop sometimes to cuddle the child, and this puts him out of his comfort zone.
Had he said something insane like this before hiring me I would have never accepted to join his lab. Unfortunately, maybe because of selection bias, his network has similar ideas.
I’m an associate professor in the humanities so YMMV but the best advice I got from a full professor was: After tenure, you finally lose that constant tummy ache. But it’s replaced by the constant dunning of your time.
In short, it DOES get less crisis-feeling post-tenure, but it still is a lot of work bc you have to figure out a different form of intrinsic motivation, and how to balance it with service. But I still think on balance it’s a lot more fun post-tenure
If this is a problem, then maybe academia is not what you should,pursue.
Yeah, I work 14 hours per day at times and Just get to the office at 10 and leave at 15 other times. I got major depression during my PhD and now I burn out super frequently and struggle with motivation.
A bit untenable, I would love to go into industry, but let’s be frank, in academia if you want to sleep one hour more one day (unless you have to teach and yada yada yada), you can, if you want to work from home because you don’t want to get into traffic, you can, and if you want to take two days after a conference to tour the location, you can. In industry there is no way you can do that. Clearly it depends on the field, I am in engineering and have worked in industry for several years before pursuing my PhD (and now postdocs) and it’s like that, no wetwork for me.
Tenure lightens the stress a bit, but the workload increases in some ways. You just finally don’t feel the near-constant dread and feeling of “not doing enough.” If you’re competent, you’ll be assigned or asked to be on every damn committee, panel, etc. because you’re “supposed” to protect junior faculty and you’re now established. You will also end up carrying the dead weight of the tenured faculty who decide to just coast. You can be part of the dead weight group if you want, but that would also fill me with a different sense of dread.
How important is research to you? I have found a great work-life balance teaching and researching at a community college. Research still does exist here, it’s just often done more in collaboration with well-funded labs at universities. Over your career you might make less of an impact in terms of published resarch, but you will make an out-sized impact on the lives of students. Not saying one is better than the other, just something to consider!
You have to enjoy the process, the grind. It’s like being a professional athlete who trains non-stop to compete.
Last week I was offered a promotion close to tenure and I didn’t accept it because I’m thinking about quitting…
Post tenure reviews still exist and in some states, tenure is pretty much non existent.
In terms of the tenure uncertainty question: when search committees choose TT candidates, one of the questions they always ask is, “do we think this person will earn tenure?” If they are skeptical, they won’t offer the position. So, if you get a TT position, the department assumes you’re good enough and that should bolster your confidence. No one would hire you if they thought you couldn’t do it.
As you progress in your career you get more opportunities to do the fun things and more validation. For many getting tenure is just the start of the next challenge and phase of life. You also compare yourself to others less, etc. I support what others have said that the pressure dies down.
Drugs help 👍
Learn to be content.
Not if you love it or have a good work ethic.
Yes.
It’s normal to feel overwhelmed and overworked during your PhD. But academia is a lot of work, just like a lot of worthwhile things. It just depends on whether for you it’s worth it.
So, the things about academia is that you can always work more – there’s always another paper to write, another email to answer, another administrative project to pick up, another lecture slide to improve etc. So, you need a conscious decision to stop at ny given day. If you can manage that, academia is pretty good in terms of work life balance. It rarely matters what you do on a given day (only what you’ve done in a month/year) so in principle you can almost always go to your kid’s school plays etc. But figuring out where you need to be in terms of productivity vs work life balance takes time, so this can be very stressful at the beginning of your career in particular (and some people never learn it). When I was starting out, it was extremely useful to (a) have a very disciplined supervisor who without fail would drop whatever he was doing at 4pm every day (although he would start at 6am) to go home to his kid and (b) some good colleagues when I started my first job who I could talk to about things like “is this enough teaching prep or now”.
First, it’s totally normal to have these feelings. It’s also not universally true that academia is a hustle. Anecdotally, I’ve certainly had bouts of extreme work, but I have kept approximately a 9-to-5 since starting a PhD (and all in R1s). I’ve always presumed this is a mix of bullheaded work-life-balance of my part, and circumstance (i.e., I’ve had jobs and the support of a spouse that allow me to keep a 9-5). It’s certainly not as simple as just choosing to not hustle yourself to death — so don’t feel bad about how you feel.
But, also, being exhausted is a pretty normal part of working, for just about everyone, academic or no. What you need to come to terms with isn’t the exhaustion, ’cause it’s unlikely to be better anywhere else. Instead, you should come to terms with the fact that you’re vastly underpaid for it in academia. If you can’t accept that, academia isn’t for you.
Yes.
Yes. It is. I’ve decide to go into other adult studies. Pick your hard.
If you don’t like the level of work, then academia, may not be your career path. It doesn’t end, it just changes forms.
You bust your butt trying to get meaningful results as a graduate student, just to get one paper out of it and then you do that again and hopefully can have a good list of papers by the end.
As a postdoc, you’re trying to demonstrate productivity, the amount of effort per paper goes down, but the expectations for number of papers goes up. Oh, and you should be learning to grant write at the same time.
Assistant professor, now you have to manage a lab of grad students all struggling to get meaningful data, you try to scrap together their results and communicate it in as many papers as you can before you have to go up for tenure. You have to do that all while constantly applying (and getting rejected) for grants and teaching on top of that (remember, you haven’t done that before, so you’re learning a completely new skill). Oh, you should also being on half a dozen committees, because that wasn’t enough work. You’ll often be told that your productivity is so far below everybody else at your stage of assistant professorship and that you’re not going to get tenure at this rate.
But you got tenure, congrats you are an associate professor! Because you’re not completely numb to how silly this system is you continue on and try to accelerate research even more (you are getting better at it, so it doesn’t feel like “more” work, even though it definitely is!) But now you have to do dozen plus committees because you don’t have the “stress” of being pre-tenure.
By the time you can relax, they will have built you into a work machine. I remember staring down the barrel of a decade struggling for tenure. I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep up the pace. Research allows for a lot of personal freedom, but I was happy to exchange a flexible schedule for a regular schedule. Now I get to have every evening and weekend for myself 🙂
I think after tenure it’s however much work you make it to be… I had the blessing (in hindsight anyway) of being burned out extremely early (during my PhD/postdoc years as well as early tenure-track years) so I really struggled then, on top of major depression.
But for whatever reason I got it together in my head and now (tenured) I actually enjoy working. Like I want nothing more than a peaceful weekend morning where I sit in front of my desk with a cup of tea and write papers.
Some of my peers seem to have never burned out and they just keep going at their research, and some burned out immediately after tenure and now they just teach the minimum amount that’s required and don’t care about the rest.
So I guess it really depends on you…
It is almost always this much work, yes. You find some way to live with it or you get out