Academic Breakdown: The other stuff
Ok, so I was lazy and just cropped my figure from last week’s entry, so sue me. Anyway, last week, I discussed a general breakdown of academic activities for faculty members, focusing mainly on research. Without reliving old glories, quality research at a top university doesn’t happen without money. A reasonable number to think of when you’re considering funding a project, it costs roughly $120k/year/student and that’s with minimal equipment. But finding research money isn’t the only part of it. A good prof has to find money, effectively mentor his/her students, write highly relevant papers, and still teach and perform academic service at their university and to the community at-large. Once again, we’re back to generically looking at the time breakdown: research = 50%, teaching = 30%, service = 20%. Towards the end of semesters or exam weeks, teaching will dominate. When it’s time for committee work or conference organization/reviewing,…
Academic Breakdown (No, Not that kind…)
Last week, I discussed my initial thoughts on submitting my first proposal. One of the comments I received was from Chris Gammell via twitter stating that most engineers never write proposals and certainly not large proposals. I was actually quite shocked for two reasons. The first reason was because I know there are some academic types that read this blog that probably see large proposals on a regular basis. The second reason was because my impression about industry is they have a lot more money to work with than academia and so large proposals should be fairly common. Since there was this misconception, I thought I would discuss and breakdown an academic position (in engineering) to show how each facet works together. The overall breakdown is shown in that nice little figure to your left. Roughly speaking, research topics should consume 50% of your time, teaching 30%, and service 20%. This…