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[quote=Anonymous]I would not recommend that anyone plan on going into academia now -- certainly not in the humanities.

The short answer to your question is that an assistant professor and an associate professor are on different rungs of the tenure-track hierarchy. When you start, you are an assistant professor -- they are basically trying you out. If you survive that gauntlet, they will make you an associate professor, which means you are on your way to making tenure if you don't mess up. Hopefully you don't mess up and you get tenure and become a full professor.

How you climb these rungs has very little to do with teaching ability (although you are observed, so that is taken into account -- you can't be terrible), and everything to do with publishing/conferences/contributing to your field. You can also make yourself valuable by taking on a lot of admin grunt work as well (the big awful job at my school was reading applications/writing samples of people applying to the grad program); less awful was serving as an advisor, serving as thesis advisors for grad students (this involves a lot of reading in my field), and serving on various committees that do nothing of any value (very annoying). Much of this is mandatory, but you can endear yourself by taking on more than your fair share.

The main reason I wouldn't recommend looking at trying to become a professor is that you probably won't be able to get a tenure-track job at all; most teaching is done by adjuncts now, and the pay is terrible. I taught English Comp for NOVA and when I did the math including not only in-classroom-teaching time, but prep time, admin time, and paper grading -- I made less than min wage. You aren't paid hourly, you are paid a set fee per class that you teach. Adjunct jobs can be few and far between at universities, because they use their current grad students to teach the entry level classes. When adjunct jobs do become available at such places, there is a huge amount of competition for them, and again, the pay is abysmal. I don't know anyone who is able to live solely from adjunct pay--you need a second gig if you want to eat, and even then you probably need 4 roommates in order to afford rent, at least in this area.

My peers from grad school who have secured full time work at universities are not teaching -- one works in admissions, one works in communications (I think they write the brochures and stuff like that), and one is the grad coordinator for a program that isn't even our field. I do know one person who did secure a tenure-track teaching position, but they published two well-received books and they are teaching undergrads at a low-prestige college in a bad location. I have another friend -- who is brilliant and has published multiple critically acclaimed books -- and  they couldn't find a teaching job at all (they gave up trying and started their own catering company which is doing well).

It's just not a viable career option any more. Careers in STEM are a little different, but you mentioned humanities and that's my expertise. So. Yeah. Not a good idea at all to plan on being a professor as a career. [/quote]

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