What a life!
Well, I'm here to tell you that the above picture is completely and utterly wrong. I'm a real professor, and I work on my tan in the winter, too.
To be fair, there are a few minor drawbacks to the job—the parents who threaten to sue over a grade, the committees formed to decide what color to paint the restrooms, the frosh who is certain World War II started in 1927 because he read it on a blog—but it has its perks, too. Outside the NFL, how many people suffer from grass stains as an occupational hazard? How many factories are so pretty that people walk their dogs there every evening? (Oh wait...ewwwwwwwww...maybe that's not so great after all.)
To give you an idea of how wonderful your life would be if only you had answered one of those “Ph.D. for life experience!” ads in your inbox instead of wasting your time browsing blogs, here's a typical day in the life of a typical professor:
6:15 AM. The alarm goes off. The professor, having been up until 3 the night before, rolls over and ignores it. His wife gets up and takes the kids to school.
9:00 AM. The professor wakes with a start. Quickly doing the arithmetic in his head, he calculates that he has had 7 hours of sleep and is ready for another exciting day of critical thinking. Full of new ideas, he rushes into the bathroom and brushes his teeth with shaving soap left over from the one and only time he decided to go without a beard. (This professor never discards anything. Ever.)
9:05 AM. Suddenly, he remembers that he has a 9:15 meeting this morning. With his boss. And it takes 15 minutes to get to campus. Fortunately, nobody cares if professors smell bad, because the students smell worse. Besides, his boss is elected by the other professors. And he can't actually do anything if our hero is late.
The professor makes coffee.
9:30 AM. The prof arrives at the meeting with an insincere apology in hand. His boss isn't there yet. He memorizes the apology for future use.
10:30 AM. With the meeting over and nothing actually accomplished, the prof returns to his office to hold scheduled office hours. Wise and experienced, he always schedules office hours at times when students are unlikely to be available. He whiles away the time by grading a few quizzes. The worst answers will be e-mailed to other faculty so they can laugh at the students behind their backs. The best ones get saved as the answer key.
What, you thought he knew the answers?
11:00 AM. The “office hours” were only half an hour; now it's time for the first class. Preparing a good lecture takes a lot of time (usually two to five hours per in-class hour). But this guy has a system: a quiz will take 15 minutes, which he can stretch to 20 by generously allowing a bit of extra time for latecomers. Then he'll discuss the upcoming test (“Will we be allowed to use pencils?” is good for a five-minute explanation of why only ink is acceptable) and take a brief side journey into last night's episode of “American Idol.”
Some lecture slides downloaded from the Internet will fill the rest of the time, especially because he'll spend a lot of it trying to figure out what the equations mean. But who cares? It's a private college; these kids must be rich. They probably all have trust funds. They should give him a cut. Or at least donate an endowed chair to the college in his name. Who do they think they are, anyway? Damn snotnoses.
12:00 PM. Lunch is an important committee meeting. Every college has a few committees that do real work, such as deciding which students are doing so badly that they should flunk out. But the professor in charge of the dartboard forgot to bring it, and the administrator in charge of bribes left her list in the office. So everybody spends the hour arguing whether the cafeteria food is even worse than last year.
2:00 PM. Returning to his office, the professor spots a student heading his way. He quickly decides that it's the perfect time to wander through campus and think deep thoughts, and ducks back outside before he has to answer a question.
Close call!
3:30 PM. The afternoon class is a seminar on the applied biology of psychological linear algebra, with applications to the ideological niceties of quantum physics in Bollywood films. This is a perfect course because nobody understands what the hell the title means, so the prof can just let the students argue about whether World of Warcraft is more fun than Modern Warfare II. He soon falls asleep and gets one hour closer to the rest he thought he had had all along.
5:00 PM. Returning to his office, the professor realizes that he has forgotten the research paper that he had promised to send to a journal editor by today. Cutting and pasting from random files on his computer, he produces something that looks coherent and sends it off. Hopefully, the guy won't notice.
6:30 PM. The prof heads home and settles down to study the latest discoveries in his field. The tome he is wading through today is destined to become a classic: G. Larson's “Beyond the Far Side.”
8:00 PM. Time for some relaxation. Our hero channel-surfs for 90 minutes, driving his wife crazy, before putting the kids to bed.
He doesn't notice that he actually tucked them away under the bed, but that's OK. The Larson treatise has convinced him there aren't any monsters there.
10:00 PM. Back to work. This is the quiet time when the professor can get a lot done and be ready for the upcoming day. He begins by checking his e-mail, then spends an hour on YouTube. That leads him to an insightful Dave Barry satire and some important thoughts from Jon Stewart.
2:00 AM. OK, now we really have to buckle down. The professor spends an hour refining the equation he came up with last night at about this same time. Unfortunately, he hasn't yet noticed that he's actually working on the receipt from his wife's last trip to the grocery store.
3:00 AM. Exhausted but proud of the day's accomplishments, the professor decides he had better get some sleep, since he has an appointment tomorrow at 8 AM. A quick mental calculation reveals that if he goes to bed right now, he can sleep a full eight hours, get up at 7:30, and still make it on time.
He sets the alarm for noon.
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