Jamie Tayar describes her assistant professorship in the University of Florida’s department of astronomy as akin to running a small business. “You have to bid on contracts or grants, hire and manage personnel or students, deal with the finances, and communicate results to stakeholders in the form of grant reports, papers, and colloquia,” she says. “Then on the side, you have a gig teaching classes and doing committee work.”
Even getting a faculty position in the first place is competitive.1 (For more on academia as a career path, see “Stepping off the tenure track,” by Lisa Balbes, Physics Today online, 10 August 2022; for advice on applying for faculty positions, see the article by Omar Magaña-Loaiza, Physics Today, October 2020, page 30.) And once employed, an academic faces a ballooning number of duties. At a large research university, faculty are expected to secure grant funding,...
