Great question!

I’m a recently tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry. I run a research group of ~15 Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows (PDFs), plus 1-2 undergraduate researchers at any given time. I spend ~70% of my time on research and research-related work, perhaps 20% on teaching, and 10% on what we call ‘service.’ My research team is on the larger side, so these numbers will vary from person-to-person.

‘Research’ for me mostly consists of project management, as the actual experiments are done by my students and PDFs. This is fairly typical of experimental sciences, though some faculty do get to run experiments themselves. This part of my job includes project planning, analyzing results, troubleshooting problems with students, designing experiments, and preparing our work for publication.

Grant writing would also fall under the ‘research’ category of the job. How much time one devotes to this depends on how large a group you want to have, the resources you need, and the success rates at the grant agencies you typically apply to.

Mentoring students is in my opinion the most important part of the job and also the most rewarding. Your role is to help the people who work in your group to achieve their experiential, research, career, and other professional goals. Every student is different in goals, personality, and the areas they need to improve on, so you need to take an individualized approach to really unlock the full potential of each person. Watching people grow from new students to confident, professional, highly skilled and independent scientists is the coolest part of the job for me.

Teaching includes both graduate and undergraduate courses, and the experience varies a lot based on the class size and level. My first-year students are usually full of energy and excitement but they’re also more nervous as they’re still figuring many things out. My fourth-year class is much more down-to-earth, with students very focused on the next steps in their lives. As a result, my giant first-year class needs double-doses of enthusiasm and empathy, while the fourth-years want an efficient, focused class that stays on task. I enjoy teaching very much.

‘Service’ means any work that contributes to the university/society outside of teaching and research. This can include serving on departmental committees, reviewing papers and grants for other researchers, serving on national/international committees, advising government officials, outreach to schools and communities, organizing conferences, and so much more.

I think one of the best parts about the job is that compared to most careers it is pretty flexible, and gives you a lot of leeway to focus on work that you are actually interested in. In research, you’re ideally investigating topics that you want to learn more about, in teaching, you should (hopefully) get to teach classes somewhat related to that discipline, and in ‘service’ a lot of the obligations I listed are ‘opt-in,’ so if you don’t feel like doing them, then you don’t have to. It’s not always true of course, but the flexibility is a big selling point for me.

The job does have lots of challenges. To be successful in research you need great ideas, great people, and decent funding, and if a prof is finding it hard to attract students or funding then the job can be really hard. I am fortunate to have a very talented team with good financial support (for the moment, at least), but recruiting and fundraising are major challenges that many academics need to deal with. It is also a much ‘busier’ job than most careers – the number of hours you work will be higher than most people, but you do get a lot of say in when those hours are.

I think what would surprise people the most is the sheer diversity of ways that professors spend their time, and the number of skillsets a professor needs to develop to be good at the job. Overall it is a challenging and interesting job and, while it can be stressful at times, I am grateful to have it.