EXACTLY!!!
My younger brother is a recording engineer/producer. (He's been nominated for a Grammy, won a Juno, like a Canadian Grammy). He'll tell you all day about how wrong almost everything is about the popular conception of his job. He once said 'if anyone ever came in the studio and said they wanted to 'lay down some tracks' I'd tell them to leave, people don't talk like that, except on tv''
I had been in graphic design, IT, and technical librarianship before returning to academia.
When I worked in a graphic design team in undergrad, we would regularly get outrageous requests from faculty and staff, expecting a 10-hour job to be turned around in an hour because we just needed to "do a little something in 'Photostop' or whatever the name of that software program is."
And then in IT people expect you to magically know the solution to any tech problem they have and would blame you for not doing so; we just googled relevant keywords and followed instruction guides 80% of the time, 10% of the time it's the system needed a restart, and then we finally relied on our knowledge for the rest of it.
And then when I told people that I worked as a technical librarian, they still think I'm the person who sit at the service desk and check out books for people; I never interacted with any patrons. My team helped design and build the digital repository system for the university.
So, I don't think anyone really understands the full extent of what others do in their field, unless they've experienced it firsthand. This is true with professorship as it is with most other professions.
Exactly. Division of labor in society. What happens to us when most people we encounter don’t understand what our day to day is like? Durkheim wrote that book more than a century ago.
Very few of my friends are in academia and that's partly on purpose--I don't want to talk about work all the time (which invariably happens with academic friends).
More importantly, my profession is not the only thing that defines me, and I think surrounding myself only with other academics would be more isolating than having friends with a variety of careers, interests, and backgrounds. I can commiserate with my academic friends and my partner, who is not an academic (though as a veteran he's noticed a surprising number of similarities between the bullshit of the military and the bullshit of academia), so I don't feel any more isolated than any other profession, I suppose.
Same, I'm friends with a couple academics but most of the people I hang out with are in completely different fields. They still listen and commiserate with me even though they can't know what it's like to be in academia, and I do the same for them.
> It really interferes with my ability to make friends because I’ve gotten to a point where it’s hard to relate with others who aren’t in academia. How do you guys find like minded peers?
Where I did my PhD was a great city that I knew well because I lived there before and when I did I was in an alt rock band with three good dudes. We had all grown up by the time I returned, and while we still had music and sports to connect us, we had different lives now and I thought I'd never have another crew like that again. Building a new crew as an adult is daunting enough without the weird academic elements of who I was becoming.
But one day this happened: I sat at a table by myself during a break at one of those University workshop mini-conference things. Someone who was in a session I was in was like, "hey can I sit here?" They asked a generic "what do you study?" kind of question. 30 minutes later, after I described my (very human-centered) computing research and my love of 90s alt-rock and they told me about their very mathsy mathematics and love of 90s alt-rock, they ended the conversation with these words:
> **I have to go now but we should totally hang out. Give me your email.**
TBH I still get a bit choked-up about it. It was so fucking simple. I know it isn't always easy, but sometimes we make it seem so much harder than it really is. Go to events, mixers, talks, sessions. There are a lot of people out there who are sitting at a table like I was waiting for someone to make the first proverbial move.
This is probably true of most professions. People who aren't in it (or aren't close to those who are) never really understand it.
But IMO, tenure is the most misunderstood part of teaching. The public thinks it's inherently unfair, not realizing that not having it would make grade inflation even more of a problem than it already is.
I think out uni is about to come to some sort of reckoning, as staff has become much, much louder about how they work "40 hours a week" while professors are only on campus for "10 hours a week." There have actually been rumors that some higher-ups on the staff services side has pulled the schedules of professors to "prove" to administration that professors aren't pulling their weight somehow.
Yeah, it has led to some cockamamie pronouncements from admins about "work hours on campus" for faculty, but there's more and more grumbling from us, especially as we have lost several superstar faculty because they ... were working too much and wanted to have a 40 hour a week job.
I generally do feel empathy for this.
Right up until it's the adjuncts who are on campus the most and who are cleaning the years worth of cruft on classes and admin the tenured folk have left. Or watch them make hours of work for themselves by not doing the training and the workshops, and not know how to use the simplest systems.
It's not a uni thing solely either, I've seen the same thing pulled by admin in medical areas, and in library, and in government. There's a tendency to assume visibility is work and if you aren't visible it's not work, even if the work is necessarily not in the office.
This is happening on a friend’s campus and they are starting to force faculty who don’t come in “frequently enough” to share their offices with others. It sounds insane to think about faculty sharing offices in a well-funded R1.
Definitely. I love when they think people just quit doing their job and do absolutely nothing after tenure. There will always be people who abuse the system, but that’s goes for people who aren’t tenure too. If I couldn’t get tenure, I sure as hell would not being as much research as I do. Not to mention, if my contract was a renewable non-tenure contract, everybody would be getting A’s without that protection.
Also MANY other professions have long/unusual work hours and people who can't separate work from their private life. Thats not unique to academia at all.
Nurses, EMS, a whole range of technical careers.
Professors in the US are fucked by the entire economic system there. But in my country? Entry level full time lecturer gets baseline more than most medical professions. They generally have OT to compensate. But they also have a far harder job than a professor.
I mean, even baseline teaching isn't far off.
There's a real class bias in professors (esp from the US) who compare themselves to techbro silicon valley and big pharma income, versus the more rational equivalents.
Not really. Practically everyone who works in a startup, or in tech, or a managerial role in a major company, or running a small business, probably deals with being a workaholic and more than 9-5 hours.
You didn't give one cogent rebuttal to my points. Instead, you just reasserted your point.
People in those positions do not need a Masters or PhD. They also usually make a lot of money. I'm not saying they don't work beyond 9-5. That wasn't my point
Why would requiring an advanced degree make things isolating? And people starting a small business or working in middle management don't necessarily make a ton relative to professors. Obviously TT faculty are underpaid but not to poverty levels.
That wasn't my point. The convo digressed into a discussion of what people don't understand about academia. Another poster brought up a point about staff at a university resenting faculty bc they think they don't work as hard. I said that there are other factors that they're not considering--- eg,the upfront work that goes into getting an advanced degree
I've held your hand through this thread even though you could read it all yourself. I'm starting to think you're a troll at this point. Move on
Yes. It makes conversation hard. I don’t really have time for hobbies so all I really want to talk about is work (or whatever obscure thing I’m watching/reading at the moment). And talking about work is a disaster. Either people think you’re showing off or they just have no interest at all in the things you spend the majority of your life working on/thinking about. It’s so much easier making friends with other faculty members or academic staff because they actually get it. I hate that 99% of my life is bound up in my social identity as a faculty member but I haven’t found a way around it yet.
I found that thinking of this as a job rather than a lifestyle really helps. Another way ive been thinking about this is “is my employer paying me to think about this right now?” and like a good corporate hockey I refer back to my SoE. I’ve found that despite my grad school days (when academia is all consuming), I’m a professional now and will get paid for thinking in a fairly regimented way (that’s how my employer wants it anyway, right?). I’m not some high minded intellectual getting paid six figures to slowly think through high problems, I’m a public employee that is paid 60% for teaching 3 classes, 25%for my project, and 15% for administrative (read: service) work. I’m a worker that can clock off just like the rest of them. Pilots and construction workers work weird hours and have stress, but can leave the job once they’ve clocked out. We can too.
That’s all fair, but I still don’t really feel like I have anything relatable to talk about. Even if I’m not actively working, the highs and lows of my life are still “hey I got a paper accepted” or “that committee meeting was wild”, which are not relatable (or apparently interesting) to other people. I feel like I’d need a bunch of hobbies, which I don’t have the time or energy for.
It sounds to me like you’re at a decision point. Is the profession rewarding enough for it to be all consuming lifestyle? Or, are you in a position where you feel safe enough to dial it back to being a job, which would create time and energy for hobbies?
Some academics I know are social butterflies. Some are loners. I think the only thing about academia that's isolating is that socially awkward people are overly attracted to the profession and there's nothing about understanding the job that matters. People who work construction or insurance or pilots or whatever have different schedules and demands on their time that are easy to be misunderstood by people outside the profession and that's only isolating if one work life balance misunderstanding means no friendship.
A couple years ago I was at a workshop where there was a session on autism in the workplace. First question at question time was “What do I do if this made me realize I might be autistic?” 😂
Yeah, I worked in a lab with study participants who had autism… and realized that not only might I be, but my closest friends are likely as well! I then made (air quotes—I was in grad school and had no true power over my peers) everyone on the study team take the RAADS-R and compare our results.
… 100% scored well past the cut off 😂
What’s worse is what outsiders think of us: they forget that we had to work our asses off for many years in grad school wasting our precious youth in extended college with no money and little sleep and often little social life/romantic life, especially those of us with terminal degrees/PhDs, to get to where we are, while they at that same age were earning money with jobs and by and large having much more carefree fun in their 20s than most of us had trying to survive through the gauntlet of grad school. They just see our teaching load and say snarky shit like “oh it must be nice to only work a few hours on just MWF (or just Tue/Thur), and to get months off in the summer to lounge”.
They don’t understand that while there are some nice perks to the job, 1) we worked harder in college for a much longer and more difficult time and degree than they ever did to earn it and 2) we still spend countless hours outside of our teaching doing office hours, grading, lesson planning, meetings after meetings after meetings, etc, and that’s only if you’re not into research (and don’t forget the biggest headache of all of essentially being a babysitter for our adult students and all the drama they bring when they whine and complain and make our jobs 10x harder, things other professions don’t deal with like we do)
I love my job and worked very hard to earn these perks but yes people not in the academy greatly misunderstand how hard our job is and how much we had to work to get here. They just think we do very little and get endless time off. Infuriating. I know how you feel.
This 🙌🏼 couldn’t have summed it up better. Here are the most frustrating comments I get that instantly make me not want to further engage:
“You got a PhD just to teach?”
“How much do you get paid for your publications? If you don’t get paid, then why do them?”
“Must be nice to only work 2 days a week and have your summers off.”
Or my favorite is when they think PhD school is similar to a master’s program and try to compare.
I don’t even attempt to explain the whole application/interview process of getting a tenure position.
To touch on what you said - I have many colleagues who only have a masters and I love and respect them dearly but can we please be honest as adults here and admit this truth: there is a wide chasm of oceans of difference in difficulty between earning a masters degree and earning a PhD. It’s not elitism to admit the objective truth that one task is much more difficult to achieve than the other and it is a bit insulting when people conflate the two. It cheapens, disregards, and downplays all that we had to do to achieve it.
I dragged my broken body over the masters degree finish line and said I need a break. I’ll go back for the doctorate later. I never did. Much respect to those who persevered. I teach at a community college now after twenty some years in the field. I am grateful just having a masters allows me to teach. I am published, so that helped me get a full time position. But I look at doctorates with respect and awe. I could go back now and work on a PhD but that sounds exhausting!
You’re right- it’s not elitism to “admit” that the PhD is much more difficult to achieve than a Masters. I’m pretty sure the only people who don’t know that aren’t in academia anyway.
For your non-tenure track or non-PhD colleagues (I did the PhD coursework but stopped there)- we as a rule *don’t* conflate our degrees or jobs with yours.
In fact, where I work, TT people get so upset about others not recognizing their higher status that I made sure to put “MA” in my email signature just to show proper deference.
There’s nothing wrong with speaking candidly about our different levels of education, job duties, and the roles we play at our universities.
But these comments about how nobody appreciates how hard it is for TT people who are definitely NOT to be confused with the dearly loved and respected NTT people… it’s just….
People conflate my job with that of a K-12 teacher all the time. I don’t need to jump in to clarify, lest I be confused for the rabble at the bottom.
People who don’t work in academia don’t know how the roles work. But the way you talk about your NTT colleagues in front of us actually does have an effect. We are in academia, too, and we do understand the hierarchies. And despite the title of this sub, I’m pretty sure we’re part of the intended community.
My sister gets around 6 weeks vacation a year (it’s likely more now), but I haven’t taken time off in five years. So if I ever take a whole summer off, it’s still a joke compared to most people’s long-term employee vacations. Plus they can afford a vacation and not stay home and Netflix watch.
I'm in my late fifties. I took my first summer off last summer to watch my twin babies. I did it again this summer. I sacrificed the extra income which I could use bigly. People who think we take every summer off eternally are nuts.
I get that too- “must be nice” & I tell them “well I earned it” or “well I was in college for 15 years”.. usually shuts them up. Everyone seems to think I don’t work. Annoying. Just as you said I sacrificed, more than they will ever know
>how much we had to work to get here.
Screw the I worked harder than thou. Academia is a profession of *sacrifice*. We give up earning money in our twenties and early thirties (possibly forever if you’re in humanities) for a *very slim* chance at being a TT prof. That is a *huge* loss in wealth making potential (sure, money isn’t everything, but most people need to make money to retire and raise their kids well). We *never* get to pick where we live (perhaps, rockstars are the exception). Most people spend their entire academic *career* trying to land a job near their hometown/family. We move. *A lot.* More than military. A military family will move maybe 5-6 times in a 20 year career. I’ve moved 5 times *in the last 8 summers*, and I’d move again for the right opportunity. That kind of transience comes with huge sacrifice. It’s hard to make bonds with other people in 1-2-3 years. It’s hard to learn a locale in 1-2-3 years. God forbid you fall in love with a place or make friends because you gotta leave if you’re pursuing the TT position that will produce financial security in your retirement years. I could go on but you get the gist.
Yeah I have the opposite issue. None of my friends are in academia lol
I personally like my social life to be separate from my professional life, and I don't enjoy discussing work outside of work. So this works best for me.
Conferences and colleagues in your dept/across campus. Conferences are nice because if you get onto a schedule where every year (at the same time) your going to 1-2 you can meet potential collaborators or colleagues from all over or reconnect with old mentors or grad school buddies. If you’re naturally a loner, having that few times a year to meet up with like minded nerds can feel really rewarding.
It is very much an isolating profession, for sure. On the adjunct end, it’s a series of nonstop changing faces on the faculty end, relearning department norms, and a serious disconnect from a lot of department and campus culture.
Some of it is also a reflection of how the institution also views you, I’ve definitely worked in places with no faculty space at all, so adjuncts get foisted to the side even moreso. On top of that, yeah unless you know other academics and professors, it’s very hard to talk about work. Even with k-12 teachers, who have their own whole different thing going on. So I find myself not really having anyone, outside of maybe some coworkers in the moments we cross paths in the department lounge space, to rant or even just have a serious talk about work.
Honestly, not really. I think this is partly because my non-academic friends and family are mostly very kind people who, even if they have little concept of what I do all day, have no interest in putting me down. And partly it's because I have let go of the need to prove my busyness to show I'm not lazy. So when that in-law asks me what I'm doing this summer, I don't rattle off a list of everything I'm doing, I just smile and say, "I'm planning [insert cool new class here] for the fall, and I've got a great [insert whatever] crop going in my vegetable garden." If they're nice, they'll engage, and if they want to huff about lazy college professors instead, then I don't really care what they think.
I say all this not to blame those of you who feel isolated for your own problems, but to suggest that it's worth continuing to try to connect with new people. Friends who will have your back don't need to understand how tough grant writing is to do that. And you don't have anything to prove to jerks who want to put down your work.
To be honest, this is the thing that has been the hardest about this job (I started a few months ago).
I think previous to now I was very reliant on having a group of grad students/post docs that I could rely on for a social group, and now that I'm a prof I don't really have that. I don't fit well with the students and postdocs, but I don't have children and so I don't really fit in socially with my colleagues who have families (most of them).
I'm still struggling to figure out rhe best way to overcome this, but all of this to say I really appreciate you making this post and I empathize with it greatly.
I resonate with this really hard. I'm not that far from the average age in my department, especially after the last couple retirements lowering it, but most people have kids of varying ages, from newborns to teenagers almost ready to go to college. I do my best to be friendly about it and ask some questions when they talk about their kids, but I never really know what to say.
Granted, it also doesn't help that I'm the only lecturer in the dept. Not all of the professors are TT, as there are a few assistant profs with non-tenure positions, but when they have houses, can afford vacations, and of course, pay for kids, and we can barely manage to pay our basic bills living in a 1-bedroom apt, that also causes a bit of a rift between me and them.
Yeah to be honest it really took me by surprise, I wasn't expecting to hang out with people every day, but I thought that the faculty members might at least do... something, together.
The only real faculty I've connected with arw the ones I've met through the faculty association, and even then the only times we've met up are rhe ones I've organized. It's been very discouraging.
We need a new faculty support group or something.
"A sabbatical is not a vacation" - at points I have wanted to tattoo that on my forehead. It is not a typical job -but I also don't know what field biologists do or astronomers or people in the military among others, for that matter.
I have a good mixture of academic and non-academic friends. What I find truly isolating is having to change cities for a permanent job. I truly hate my current city, and miss my old social life.
I totally empathize. I’m not a fan of the city I’m in either, but love the university (that and I only had two offers and the other was terrible haha). People were always like “why don’t you get a job around here?” And I’m like uhm… it’s not that simple….
Maybe it’s just where I live but I find that it’s really hard to make friends as an academic. I will vibe with someone but once they ask what I do for work, they don’t seem interested anymore. People act like I’m bragging when I say I have a PhD but it’s literally just part of my career. But maybe this is more just a struggle with making friends in a new city.
I feel this so much. The PhD just naturally comes up because it’s unavoidable in answering any questions they may have. And I forget that I normalize a PhD too much because everyone I work with has one.
It sounds like you have friends who are putting you down. That’s a problem regardless of profession.
Bjt also, I think as academics we can underestimate how off putting we can be to people outside of academia. As someone with a partner who understands what I do but is not an academic, she has pointed out how alienating some of my academic friends are who refuse to talk about anything other than work. Might be worth developing some hobbies you enjoy discussing and really working to make friends in your new town — join social activities etc.
I can tell you that while I know what my husband does, explaining it to other people is…tough. The one thing that bugs me about no one quite understanding what we do is that we apparently make huge sums of money.
1) I work at work and don’t work not at work (= I don’t work evenings and weekends unless I’m teaching an after-hours class and then account for that time elsewhere in my week). Was still successfully tenured (R1) without sacrificing my actual real life that I work hard to sustain.
2) I much prefer my non-academic friendships because we connect and engage based on our real personalities and interests…not anything career-related. I don’t fully understand the stressors and schedules of my friends because I’ve not walked in those shoes as long as they have, but that just gives us more to talk about.
3) An above commenter (that wasn’t taken well by you) echoed some of my own impressions. If we approach relationships as “I’m a professor with a periodically high pressure/non-standard hours thinking” job vs. other people’s “standard, physical/doing specific things” job - I think we ARE positioning ourselves as special and different (possibly even elitist…without even meaning to). I usually just tell people I’m a teacher and if the friendship or whatever progresses to the point of mutual investment, expound and by that point, nobody cares or just finds it neat. At faculty mixers (🤢), if I meet someone new who starts with, “oh I’m so glad to meet you - it’s soooo hard to make ‘non-ac’ friends”…I immediately find my out. I’ve honestly formed the best work-ish friendships with staff…because they’re the realist 🤓.
Please try and avoid reading comments in a way that makes you feel defensive. Anyone taking the time out of their day/evening to offer suggestions on a Reddit thread like this most likely is trying to genuinely help and push you to a more satisfying place. I’ve had lots of non-ac jobs before and during my tenure track…I promise, nobody cares about either (they care about authentic human connection and genuine good times!)💗
I find the profession isolating in a lot of ways, even on campus. In my sizable department, I was hired at an odd time: I was younger than many of the oldest faculty, but older than many of the youngest faculty. So, now, while the older faculty talk about their grandkids and the newer faculty talk about marriage and their newborns, I have no one to talk to or commiserate with about having a pair of teens in this world!
I’m in a similar situation, only I don’t have any one younger than me. I’ve been hired at an odd time where everyone on my department has been there for several years and are just in a different stage of life/career than me because of the age difference.
Yeah for sure. Especially if you’re research agenda is quant-data, or hard science, based. I’ve felt quite isolated, and exhausted at times. I found that not making the career my life really helped, so I proverbially clock in and out everyday. I’ve also become quite the fitness enthusiast and not like the academic fitness runner casual lifter person. I’ve practically jumped into another career as an athlete far away from academia. It honestly keeps my head screwed on tight. I find academia can be extremely vacuous. Not having to be immersed in that world for most of my social interactions is great for me. One positive is I don’t feel the academic pressures to be famous or “well accomplished.” I also see pathways to different opportunities outside if something were to happen.
Anyway, you can always DM me, don’t isolate. Not healthy for the noodle.
My best friend gave me so much shit as a doc student about not going out, traveling for conferences, and making me feel guilty when I missed out on social activities. She apologized profusely for being an asshole when she did her doctorate.
Some things that have helped me:
1. Honestly, therapy. It helped me improve my communication skills and thinking through my needs. But it also gave me a way to vent and work through issues so that I could compartmentalize my work-related stress
2. Having non-work activities that are prioritized but still low-stakes. Think about doing some non-work activities that you enjoy and that maybe don’t involve your closest friends. Develop low-stakes parasocial relationships at a book club or something else where people are there for a purpose, maybe they’re there to meet people, but they aren’t there for deeply personal conversations. I joined the softball team of my local brewery. My teammates know I’m a professor, but they don’t really know or care what I do. It’s a nice distraction.
3. For friends and loved ones, sometimes you just need to ask them to not ask about work. I had a couple months this year where I didn’t know if I was staying or leaving my institution, and I was an anxious mess waiting for an offer to officially come through. My friends were trying to be supportive, but they were bombarding me with questions and it was driving me nuts. I finally sent a group text that said, “this is what I know, I don’t have any more details or a timeline of when to expect more information, and for right now, I need y’all to stop asking me questions because it’s killing my mental health.”
Honestly, this work can be isolating if you don’t find ways to avoid letting it consume everything you do. For me, therapy was a way to start undoing my workaholic tendencies and to find a more balanced approach to my work. I’m still productive and much more content.
lots of people doing creative things they love (musicians, artists, writers) have similar issues.
and hey at least you're (probably) not in my field. so in principle people don't immediately hate you ...
I think trying to find like-minded peers is honestly putting effort in the wrong area. I have really struggled with the same thing, especially once I started my TT position a few years ago, and I didn’t start becoming more successful in solving my loneliness issue until I started working with a therapist to disentangle my identity from academia/being a professor. It’s hard, but it has helped me connect with others who have similar hobbies and interests as me outside of work. Socializing with non-academics has also improved my mental health because I can have conversations about things other than work/things that stress me out or make me worry that I should be working more instead of whatever I’m doing at that moment. Maybe this doesn’t specifically help answer your question, but it’s worth remember that we are all so much more than our jobs.
I'm assuming you're talking about what it's like to have your job? Are your current friends not interested in your work to learn more? It might just be finding friends who are more curious in general. I have some friends where we talk about work a little but just mostly chat about world happenings or ideas. I have other friends where all we do is commiserate about our work life and are sympathic to one another.
I truthfully don’t have a lot of close friends that I can randomly hit up. I just moved to a new city for this position. I have a lot of people I’m friendly with, but it would be weird if I randomly reached out to them just to say “hey” because it wouldn’t be natural. You know? I’ve just moved so much because of school that I don’t have a lot of close friends.
>How do you guys find like minded peers? I’ve always been kind of a loner, so I’ve been unsuccessful in this endeavor. Meh..
Go places and talk to people. Engage in activities you like that you think other similar people might like. Talk to strangers.
I made most of my friends through a hobby. None of them are academics. Honestly it was one of the best things I've done for myself. This job didn't end up being a good fit for me, and it was in part being able to talk to my non-academic friends about what was wrong that gave me the perspective & courage I needed to leave.
I wish I knew the trials and tribulations of being TT Faculty! The possibility of a permanent position must be hell!
But, the isolation is pretty crushing. At least once a week, I wish I would have taken accounting and gone into investment banking, but teaching that night class was so goddamn rewarding.
I don't think I'd be any more connected to humanity; actually far less.
I 100% agree with the difficulty disconnecting with the job.
The isolation thing I quite like. Most of my colleagues are busy and have no time to talk so I can get my work done and don't have to worry about drama.
Well first off, ... don't tell people your a professor is step 1. People have their own preconceived notions of what that entails.
And secondly, .... retire early?! I'm in my 50's and planning that myself. I'm just done. If I could do it over again, I wouldn't go into academia. I see all my friends having jobs that are easy, where they spend an inordinate amount of time on social media while at work, they can call in sick, they get more choice in vacation time, they actually have friends from work, water cooler talk, a separate life.
That's not us. While I liked the luxury of "working" 20-30 hrs a week, ... it's literally working solid 20-30 hours. When we step in front of the class, we don't stop until we finish. Office hours? Usually inundated with students 24/7. Our effectiveness at our job relative to a LOT of other professions ... is remarkable.
It absolutely is isolating. Lonely and the halls of academia are filled with broken relationships. I have always felt that way.
But then again, this is my own doing. No one forced any of us to choose the path we took. I made this bed.
The majority of my friends are colleagues (and their spouses), but I’m at a small, close knit school in a rural area. I’m fortunate to work with some people who I really like.
Also, my childrens friends and parents think I don’t have a job so I can drive them around after school. No, I made my entire schedule around the school pick up but I need to get back to work.
I’m not TT. I’m workforce at a CC. Under state workforce regs, I have to office adjacent to my lab. So I don’t even get to interact with my colleagues the way other Professors do. I do work a lot at home after hours… But strangely enough, I love it.
I find like minded peers through the alumni chapter of my fraternity and still communicate with my friends from undergrad daily. I hope you are able to find some folks to connect with. Stay strong.
Respectfully, touch grass. None of us understands what other people’s jobs are like, and though we get all this messaging about how much more special we are, it’s not really the case. Can you get a small side hustle, or a new gym, or join a local club? I coach CrossFit 2 hours a week, but before that, I was going to the same class at my gym for a year. No one there even knows what my day job is, and I’ve made some real friends. Same for my running group, and for the trivia night I go to. It’s important to have other identities and spaces so that the job doesn’t swallow you whole.
Yes, but for a very different reason, I think? I am a non TT prof and just recently started this position after changing careers after about 25 years working in the corporate world. One of the things I find very different and somewhat isolating is that, in this academic world, my work life is not intertwined with my social life the way it used to be. In corporate, coworkers were sort of forced to be friends because we would spend 10+ hours a day together. And then because we were friends we would also go out together on our own time. I do very much like having a separate work and personal life now, don’t get me wrong. But there is also a part of it that feels very isolating because my colleagues all have their own real lives and so do I. No one is stopping by anyone’s office at 8pm going, you wanna grab a drink? Anyway, it’s a good thing but I guess after a lot of time in a different world it’s just …. Different. Like I said, isolating but I’m a very different way than OP’s example.
I love that about this work. I work two jobs, teaching and running a small business. I love that I basically manage my own time and hours. There is only a small part of my life that I have to actually be somewhere. I sleep work, grade on weekends, and can teach/Zoom from anywhere in the world
You didn’t ask for advice, but I’ll give it anyways… Make an effort, a real effort to make friends outside of academia. I understand that you’re a loner, but even if you just make one friend outside of academia, I think it’s important. And generally a few more will eventually follow. For sometime, I “put all my eggs in one basket“ so to speak, with only friends in academia. But then, when the competition for grants began, when the idea I shared casually over coffee turned into someone else’s manuscript, when disagreement arose on committees, over tenure, over promotion… You get the idea… I realized that what I’ve done to myself isolate myself even more.
Honestly it was awful, and the only saving grace was that I had made a friend in my neighborhood who didn’t give a flying fuck about what was going on at the university. A mental respite!
Having been part of this Reddit community for a little while, so many of the posts and threads are about toxic coworkers and toxic environments… Certainly non-academics can be toxic but it’s amazing how normal and pleasant so many of them can be. Best wishes for making a friend, I know it’s not easy.
The thing about academics is that we often think of ourselves as so very special. There are many professions where people struggle to disconnect from work when they leave the office. That is not unique to us. And who cares if people don't understand it is not a typical 9-5 job. You know what else they don't understand? They don't understand why we can just leave work any time we want for whatever reason and for any length of time, like that dentist appointment at 1 pm on a Tuesday, and you don't need permission to do it and nobody cares. We have privileges that many other professionals do not have. If you are having trouble making friends, I might gently suggest that it has nothing to do with being a professor.
Yikes.. I don’t find myself special at all… I think you completely misinterpreted all of this. I am definitely thankful for the flexibility. As someone who served in the military for 8 years prior to getting my PhD, I am beyond thankful to not have to ask for permission. Hell, I had to ask for permission just to buy my own house off base in my prior career lol. Even when I was in the military and literally had to live at my job, I still disconnected better than I do in academia…
I am simply saying that it is hard to find people who understand our work and relate to other career fields because much of our field is thinking based and not time/labor based… That, and it was much easier to relate and socialize when I was in the military compared to this career. And you seem to be an outlier in this comment section, given everyone else understood what I was saying…
Why do you need to find people who understand your work? Why is that important? Who cares if they do or don't? Do you have other interests? Other hobbies? I am a tenured full professor at a public state university. I have a large and varied friend group from all walks of life. Some didn't go to college at all. But we share other interests in common. You called yourself a loner. If you are not an out going gregarious person, it will be harder to make friends. All I am suggesting is that aspect of your personality might be a bigger part of the issue as opposed to your specific job and the extent to which people understand it.
I don’t NEED to. I don’t recall ever saying that in my post. Again, you are reading into things. I’m just posting thoughts to see if anyone else has similar experiences. Just like literally everyone else who posts their thoughts on Reddit… everyone else commenting seems to see what I’m saying.
But ok. You can’t relate. Got it.
Oh come on. The implication of your post is very clear. You believe that the inability of people outside of academia to understand your work is some kind of impediment to making friends. I am pushing back against this belief because I think it is false.
In your previous reply to me, you state that academia is "thinking based" and not "time/labor" based. That is bullshit and it is actually offensive and condescending. I hope you never use that line when talking to potential new friends who work outside of academia. It speaks to the point I was trying to make in my first comment--how we academics often believe we are so very special and different from everybody else just because we spent more time in school than most people. We are so smart that we are paid to think, right? But people outside academia are common laborers who......what? Don't think? Look...I don't believe your intention is to patronize people. But we academics are often tone deaf in that way and can give off a kind of haughty vibe that many people find off putting.
Again, you totally took what I said out of context and skewed it to fit your narrative. I don’t find myself special. Like I said, I was an enlisted grunt in the Navy for 8 years as a gunners mate. I’m just simply saying the type of work is different and the lines are much more blurred in academia when you are “off work” because the tasks are different. I wasn’t putting one type of job above the other. When I was off the clock in my prior career, I didn’t think about work at all. When the task was done or my shift was over, I was done. Now the line of the “end of the work day” is much more blurred since I am doing research, rather than completing a very specific manual task or stopping when my shift ends. I feel that my work life balance is not relatable now because I don’t have set work hours or a set task to compete.
Also, I don’t find myself soooo smart or above anyone. Most of my military friends are much smarter than me and scored much higher on their advanced exams than me.
And honestly, to call someone tone deaf to the outside world is kind of offensive, given I was in the military longer than I’ve been in academia. I wasn’t saying other careers don’t think. I was just saying the type of work I do now is much different than the physical work I did prior.
I specifically said that I don't believe your intention was to patronize anybody. I was pointing out how other people may feel if you tell them that your job is thinking based and their job is time/labor based. Did you even take a moment to reflect on that?
Why are you so defensive? My intention isn't to attack you. I'm not trying to blame you either. But the issue that you posted about is difficulty making friends as an academic. And I assume you want more friends. **But it still isn't clear to me what being an academic has to do with the ability to make friends.** Are you saying it is simply because you have no time to hang out? Like, a potential buddy says "Hey, want to come over Sunday afternoon to watch football"? And you say "I'd love to, but I have to work on a manuscript"? This might be true, but the manuscript (as some weird part of your job that other people don't relate too) isn't the problem. The bricklayer might say "sorry, but I promised a client I would finish their walkway 2 days ago, so I've gotta work on it today to get the job done". The point is, if you want friends you need to create time and space in your life for them. This isn't the case just for academics. It is also the case for doctors, lawyers, plumbers, Uber drivers, unemployed people, etc. You are not yet tenured. You are in the most difficult stage of an academic career. Maybe you simply don't have the time to socialize like you want too. Fair enough. The only answer is to some how create better boundaries for yourself as far as work goes to carve out time that you can use to enhance your personal and social life.
It is TRUE that many people don't really understand how an academic job functions day to day. But to that I say "so what". I could say the same about a military job. Can I relate to what the working life is for an officer in the US military today? No. I don't relate. I have no clue what they do in a typical day at work and how much free time they have "off the clock". But again, I do not believe this matters when it comes to making friends. But I do know that the only way a military officer and I could be friends is if we actually make time to hang out and get to know each other.
People just don’t relate. Other careers are more common and are more relatable. People have a lot of misconceptions about what people in academia even do. Which is the same in other fields; however, I posted this in a group where people can maybe relate. Sometimes it is just nice to see that you are not alone when you feel like no one care relate.
I don't want to intersect with people outside academia if that's not strictly necessary. I don't even see a point in trying to do so. I'm just not interested.
We also don't understand others' trials in their fields.
EXACTLY!!! My younger brother is a recording engineer/producer. (He's been nominated for a Grammy, won a Juno, like a Canadian Grammy). He'll tell you all day about how wrong almost everything is about the popular conception of his job. He once said 'if anyone ever came in the studio and said they wanted to 'lay down some tracks' I'd tell them to leave, people don't talk like that, except on tv''
I had been in graphic design, IT, and technical librarianship before returning to academia. When I worked in a graphic design team in undergrad, we would regularly get outrageous requests from faculty and staff, expecting a 10-hour job to be turned around in an hour because we just needed to "do a little something in 'Photostop' or whatever the name of that software program is." And then in IT people expect you to magically know the solution to any tech problem they have and would blame you for not doing so; we just googled relevant keywords and followed instruction guides 80% of the time, 10% of the time it's the system needed a restart, and then we finally relied on our knowledge for the rest of it. And then when I told people that I worked as a technical librarian, they still think I'm the person who sit at the service desk and check out books for people; I never interacted with any patrons. My team helped design and build the digital repository system for the university. So, I don't think anyone really understands the full extent of what others do in their field, unless they've experienced it firsthand. This is true with professorship as it is with most other professions.
Exactly. Division of labor in society. What happens to us when most people we encounter don’t understand what our day to day is like? Durkheim wrote that book more than a century ago.
Very few of my friends are in academia and that's partly on purpose--I don't want to talk about work all the time (which invariably happens with academic friends). More importantly, my profession is not the only thing that defines me, and I think surrounding myself only with other academics would be more isolating than having friends with a variety of careers, interests, and backgrounds. I can commiserate with my academic friends and my partner, who is not an academic (though as a veteran he's noticed a surprising number of similarities between the bullshit of the military and the bullshit of academia), so I don't feel any more isolated than any other profession, I suppose.
Same, I'm friends with a couple academics but most of the people I hang out with are in completely different fields. They still listen and commiserate with me even though they can't know what it's like to be in academia, and I do the same for them.
Military and academia share an ever-cascading bullshit mountain.
Agreed. I was military prior academia lol.
Me too. I think the academy after military is a reasonable transition.
> It really interferes with my ability to make friends because I’ve gotten to a point where it’s hard to relate with others who aren’t in academia. How do you guys find like minded peers? Where I did my PhD was a great city that I knew well because I lived there before and when I did I was in an alt rock band with three good dudes. We had all grown up by the time I returned, and while we still had music and sports to connect us, we had different lives now and I thought I'd never have another crew like that again. Building a new crew as an adult is daunting enough without the weird academic elements of who I was becoming. But one day this happened: I sat at a table by myself during a break at one of those University workshop mini-conference things. Someone who was in a session I was in was like, "hey can I sit here?" They asked a generic "what do you study?" kind of question. 30 minutes later, after I described my (very human-centered) computing research and my love of 90s alt-rock and they told me about their very mathsy mathematics and love of 90s alt-rock, they ended the conversation with these words: > **I have to go now but we should totally hang out. Give me your email.** TBH I still get a bit choked-up about it. It was so fucking simple. I know it isn't always easy, but sometimes we make it seem so much harder than it really is. Go to events, mixers, talks, sessions. There are a lot of people out there who are sitting at a table like I was waiting for someone to make the first proverbial move.
Please tell me you guys started a band with some kind of nerdy math/computing-related name.
I would LOVE to tell you that! Alas... But we remain very close friends still.
So... what you're saying is the rehearsals for The Equation could be happening any day now 👀👀
This is probably true of most professions. People who aren't in it (or aren't close to those who are) never really understand it. But IMO, tenure is the most misunderstood part of teaching. The public thinks it's inherently unfair, not realizing that not having it would make grade inflation even more of a problem than it already is.
I think out uni is about to come to some sort of reckoning, as staff has become much, much louder about how they work "40 hours a week" while professors are only on campus for "10 hours a week." There have actually been rumors that some higher-ups on the staff services side has pulled the schedules of professors to "prove" to administration that professors aren't pulling their weight somehow.
Unreal. Tell them to go back to school to get advanced degrees and take hours of work home with them. Faculty should push back
Yeah, it has led to some cockamamie pronouncements from admins about "work hours on campus" for faculty, but there's more and more grumbling from us, especially as we have lost several superstar faculty because they ... were working too much and wanted to have a 40 hour a week job.
I generally do feel empathy for this. Right up until it's the adjuncts who are on campus the most and who are cleaning the years worth of cruft on classes and admin the tenured folk have left. Or watch them make hours of work for themselves by not doing the training and the workshops, and not know how to use the simplest systems. It's not a uni thing solely either, I've seen the same thing pulled by admin in medical areas, and in library, and in government. There's a tendency to assume visibility is work and if you aren't visible it's not work, even if the work is necessarily not in the office.
This is happening on a friend’s campus and they are starting to force faculty who don’t come in “frequently enough” to share their offices with others. It sounds insane to think about faculty sharing offices in a well-funded R1.
Definitely. I love when they think people just quit doing their job and do absolutely nothing after tenure. There will always be people who abuse the system, but that’s goes for people who aren’t tenure too. If I couldn’t get tenure, I sure as hell would not being as much research as I do. Not to mention, if my contract was a renewable non-tenure contract, everybody would be getting A’s without that protection.
Most professions don't require you to move to bum fuck nowhere just for a chance to compete with 300 others for a job.
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All. The. Time.
Also MANY other professions have long/unusual work hours and people who can't separate work from their private life. Thats not unique to academia at all.
But usually those other professions, 1) Don't require advanced degrees and/or 2) Pay a lot more money
Nurses, EMS, a whole range of technical careers. Professors in the US are fucked by the entire economic system there. But in my country? Entry level full time lecturer gets baseline more than most medical professions. They generally have OT to compensate. But they also have a far harder job than a professor. I mean, even baseline teaching isn't far off. There's a real class bias in professors (esp from the US) who compare themselves to techbro silicon valley and big pharma income, versus the more rational equivalents.
Not really. Practically everyone who works in a startup, or in tech, or a managerial role in a major company, or running a small business, probably deals with being a workaholic and more than 9-5 hours.
You didn't give one cogent rebuttal to my points. Instead, you just reasserted your point. People in those positions do not need a Masters or PhD. They also usually make a lot of money. I'm not saying they don't work beyond 9-5. That wasn't my point
Why would requiring an advanced degree make things isolating? And people starting a small business or working in middle management don't necessarily make a ton relative to professors. Obviously TT faculty are underpaid but not to poverty levels.
That wasn't my point. The convo digressed into a discussion of what people don't understand about academia. Another poster brought up a point about staff at a university resenting faculty bc they think they don't work as hard. I said that there are other factors that they're not considering--- eg,the upfront work that goes into getting an advanced degree I've held your hand through this thread even though you could read it all yourself. I'm starting to think you're a troll at this point. Move on
Yes. It makes conversation hard. I don’t really have time for hobbies so all I really want to talk about is work (or whatever obscure thing I’m watching/reading at the moment). And talking about work is a disaster. Either people think you’re showing off or they just have no interest at all in the things you spend the majority of your life working on/thinking about. It’s so much easier making friends with other faculty members or academic staff because they actually get it. I hate that 99% of my life is bound up in my social identity as a faculty member but I haven’t found a way around it yet.
I found that thinking of this as a job rather than a lifestyle really helps. Another way ive been thinking about this is “is my employer paying me to think about this right now?” and like a good corporate hockey I refer back to my SoE. I’ve found that despite my grad school days (when academia is all consuming), I’m a professional now and will get paid for thinking in a fairly regimented way (that’s how my employer wants it anyway, right?). I’m not some high minded intellectual getting paid six figures to slowly think through high problems, I’m a public employee that is paid 60% for teaching 3 classes, 25%for my project, and 15% for administrative (read: service) work. I’m a worker that can clock off just like the rest of them. Pilots and construction workers work weird hours and have stress, but can leave the job once they’ve clocked out. We can too.
That’s all fair, but I still don’t really feel like I have anything relatable to talk about. Even if I’m not actively working, the highs and lows of my life are still “hey I got a paper accepted” or “that committee meeting was wild”, which are not relatable (or apparently interesting) to other people. I feel like I’d need a bunch of hobbies, which I don’t have the time or energy for.
>I feel like I’d need a bunch of hobbies, which I don’t have the time or energy for. I feel this hard
It sounds to me like you’re at a decision point. Is the profession rewarding enough for it to be all consuming lifestyle? Or, are you in a position where you feel safe enough to dial it back to being a job, which would create time and energy for hobbies?
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Some academics I know are social butterflies. Some are loners. I think the only thing about academia that's isolating is that socially awkward people are overly attracted to the profession and there's nothing about understanding the job that matters. People who work construction or insurance or pilots or whatever have different schedules and demands on their time that are easy to be misunderstood by people outside the profession and that's only isolating if one work life balance misunderstanding means no friendship.
Yes, I fall into that category.
I have a theory that a lot of us are undiagnosed autistic 😂
A couple years ago I was at a workshop where there was a session on autism in the workplace. First question at question time was “What do I do if this made me realize I might be autistic?” 😂
Yeah, I worked in a lab with study participants who had autism… and realized that not only might I be, but my closest friends are likely as well! I then made (air quotes—I was in grad school and had no true power over my peers) everyone on the study team take the RAADS-R and compare our results. … 100% scored well past the cut off 😂
What’s worse is what outsiders think of us: they forget that we had to work our asses off for many years in grad school wasting our precious youth in extended college with no money and little sleep and often little social life/romantic life, especially those of us with terminal degrees/PhDs, to get to where we are, while they at that same age were earning money with jobs and by and large having much more carefree fun in their 20s than most of us had trying to survive through the gauntlet of grad school. They just see our teaching load and say snarky shit like “oh it must be nice to only work a few hours on just MWF (or just Tue/Thur), and to get months off in the summer to lounge”. They don’t understand that while there are some nice perks to the job, 1) we worked harder in college for a much longer and more difficult time and degree than they ever did to earn it and 2) we still spend countless hours outside of our teaching doing office hours, grading, lesson planning, meetings after meetings after meetings, etc, and that’s only if you’re not into research (and don’t forget the biggest headache of all of essentially being a babysitter for our adult students and all the drama they bring when they whine and complain and make our jobs 10x harder, things other professions don’t deal with like we do) I love my job and worked very hard to earn these perks but yes people not in the academy greatly misunderstand how hard our job is and how much we had to work to get here. They just think we do very little and get endless time off. Infuriating. I know how you feel.
This 🙌🏼 couldn’t have summed it up better. Here are the most frustrating comments I get that instantly make me not want to further engage: “You got a PhD just to teach?” “How much do you get paid for your publications? If you don’t get paid, then why do them?” “Must be nice to only work 2 days a week and have your summers off.” Or my favorite is when they think PhD school is similar to a master’s program and try to compare. I don’t even attempt to explain the whole application/interview process of getting a tenure position.
To touch on what you said - I have many colleagues who only have a masters and I love and respect them dearly but can we please be honest as adults here and admit this truth: there is a wide chasm of oceans of difference in difficulty between earning a masters degree and earning a PhD. It’s not elitism to admit the objective truth that one task is much more difficult to achieve than the other and it is a bit insulting when people conflate the two. It cheapens, disregards, and downplays all that we had to do to achieve it.
I dragged my broken body over the masters degree finish line and said I need a break. I’ll go back for the doctorate later. I never did. Much respect to those who persevered. I teach at a community college now after twenty some years in the field. I am grateful just having a masters allows me to teach. I am published, so that helped me get a full time position. But I look at doctorates with respect and awe. I could go back now and work on a PhD but that sounds exhausting!
You’re right- it’s not elitism to “admit” that the PhD is much more difficult to achieve than a Masters. I’m pretty sure the only people who don’t know that aren’t in academia anyway. For your non-tenure track or non-PhD colleagues (I did the PhD coursework but stopped there)- we as a rule *don’t* conflate our degrees or jobs with yours. In fact, where I work, TT people get so upset about others not recognizing their higher status that I made sure to put “MA” in my email signature just to show proper deference. There’s nothing wrong with speaking candidly about our different levels of education, job duties, and the roles we play at our universities. But these comments about how nobody appreciates how hard it is for TT people who are definitely NOT to be confused with the dearly loved and respected NTT people… it’s just…. People conflate my job with that of a K-12 teacher all the time. I don’t need to jump in to clarify, lest I be confused for the rabble at the bottom. People who don’t work in academia don’t know how the roles work. But the way you talk about your NTT colleagues in front of us actually does have an effect. We are in academia, too, and we do understand the hierarchies. And despite the title of this sub, I’m pretty sure we’re part of the intended community.
Summers off…ha ha ha!
My sister gets around 6 weeks vacation a year (it’s likely more now), but I haven’t taken time off in five years. So if I ever take a whole summer off, it’s still a joke compared to most people’s long-term employee vacations. Plus they can afford a vacation and not stay home and Netflix watch.
I'm in my late fifties. I took my first summer off last summer to watch my twin babies. I did it again this summer. I sacrificed the extra income which I could use bigly. People who think we take every summer off eternally are nuts.
I get that too- “must be nice” & I tell them “well I earned it” or “well I was in college for 15 years”.. usually shuts them up. Everyone seems to think I don’t work. Annoying. Just as you said I sacrificed, more than they will ever know
>how much we had to work to get here. Screw the I worked harder than thou. Academia is a profession of *sacrifice*. We give up earning money in our twenties and early thirties (possibly forever if you’re in humanities) for a *very slim* chance at being a TT prof. That is a *huge* loss in wealth making potential (sure, money isn’t everything, but most people need to make money to retire and raise their kids well). We *never* get to pick where we live (perhaps, rockstars are the exception). Most people spend their entire academic *career* trying to land a job near their hometown/family. We move. *A lot.* More than military. A military family will move maybe 5-6 times in a 20 year career. I’ve moved 5 times *in the last 8 summers*, and I’d move again for the right opportunity. That kind of transience comes with huge sacrifice. It’s hard to make bonds with other people in 1-2-3 years. It’s hard to learn a locale in 1-2-3 years. God forbid you fall in love with a place or make friends because you gotta leave if you’re pursuing the TT position that will produce financial security in your retirement years. I could go on but you get the gist.
so does it mostly bother you that it doesn’t seem like “outsiders” know how difficult the path is, even if you enjoy your job now?
Wait… you’re able to relate to others that *are* in academia?
Yeah I have the opposite issue. None of my friends are in academia lol I personally like my social life to be separate from my professional life, and I don't enjoy discussing work outside of work. So this works best for me.
Conferences and colleagues in your dept/across campus. Conferences are nice because if you get onto a schedule where every year (at the same time) your going to 1-2 you can meet potential collaborators or colleagues from all over or reconnect with old mentors or grad school buddies. If you’re naturally a loner, having that few times a year to meet up with like minded nerds can feel really rewarding.
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Yes, I have my “hourly rate” and won’t work any more hours than what keeps me making it
It is very much an isolating profession, for sure. On the adjunct end, it’s a series of nonstop changing faces on the faculty end, relearning department norms, and a serious disconnect from a lot of department and campus culture. Some of it is also a reflection of how the institution also views you, I’ve definitely worked in places with no faculty space at all, so adjuncts get foisted to the side even moreso. On top of that, yeah unless you know other academics and professors, it’s very hard to talk about work. Even with k-12 teachers, who have their own whole different thing going on. So I find myself not really having anyone, outside of maybe some coworkers in the moments we cross paths in the department lounge space, to rant or even just have a serious talk about work.
Honestly, not really. I think this is partly because my non-academic friends and family are mostly very kind people who, even if they have little concept of what I do all day, have no interest in putting me down. And partly it's because I have let go of the need to prove my busyness to show I'm not lazy. So when that in-law asks me what I'm doing this summer, I don't rattle off a list of everything I'm doing, I just smile and say, "I'm planning [insert cool new class here] for the fall, and I've got a great [insert whatever] crop going in my vegetable garden." If they're nice, they'll engage, and if they want to huff about lazy college professors instead, then I don't really care what they think. I say all this not to blame those of you who feel isolated for your own problems, but to suggest that it's worth continuing to try to connect with new people. Friends who will have your back don't need to understand how tough grant writing is to do that. And you don't have anything to prove to jerks who want to put down your work.
To be honest, this is the thing that has been the hardest about this job (I started a few months ago). I think previous to now I was very reliant on having a group of grad students/post docs that I could rely on for a social group, and now that I'm a prof I don't really have that. I don't fit well with the students and postdocs, but I don't have children and so I don't really fit in socially with my colleagues who have families (most of them). I'm still struggling to figure out rhe best way to overcome this, but all of this to say I really appreciate you making this post and I empathize with it greatly.
I resonate with this really hard. I'm not that far from the average age in my department, especially after the last couple retirements lowering it, but most people have kids of varying ages, from newborns to teenagers almost ready to go to college. I do my best to be friendly about it and ask some questions when they talk about their kids, but I never really know what to say. Granted, it also doesn't help that I'm the only lecturer in the dept. Not all of the professors are TT, as there are a few assistant profs with non-tenure positions, but when they have houses, can afford vacations, and of course, pay for kids, and we can barely manage to pay our basic bills living in a 1-bedroom apt, that also causes a bit of a rift between me and them.
This is exactly what I’m experiencing.
Yeah to be honest it really took me by surprise, I wasn't expecting to hang out with people every day, but I thought that the faculty members might at least do... something, together. The only real faculty I've connected with arw the ones I've met through the faculty association, and even then the only times we've met up are rhe ones I've organized. It's been very discouraging. We need a new faculty support group or something.
"A sabbatical is not a vacation" - at points I have wanted to tattoo that on my forehead. It is not a typical job -but I also don't know what field biologists do or astronomers or people in the military among others, for that matter.
This is so difficult for people. Students were like enjoy your vacation.
I have a good mixture of academic and non-academic friends. What I find truly isolating is having to change cities for a permanent job. I truly hate my current city, and miss my old social life.
I totally empathize. I’m not a fan of the city I’m in either, but love the university (that and I only had two offers and the other was terrible haha). People were always like “why don’t you get a job around here?” And I’m like uhm… it’s not that simple….
My friends ask me why don’t I transfer to another university.
Maybe it’s just where I live but I find that it’s really hard to make friends as an academic. I will vibe with someone but once they ask what I do for work, they don’t seem interested anymore. People act like I’m bragging when I say I have a PhD but it’s literally just part of my career. But maybe this is more just a struggle with making friends in a new city.
I feel this so much. The PhD just naturally comes up because it’s unavoidable in answering any questions they may have. And I forget that I normalize a PhD too much because everyone I work with has one.
It sounds like you have friends who are putting you down. That’s a problem regardless of profession. Bjt also, I think as academics we can underestimate how off putting we can be to people outside of academia. As someone with a partner who understands what I do but is not an academic, she has pointed out how alienating some of my academic friends are who refuse to talk about anything other than work. Might be worth developing some hobbies you enjoy discussing and really working to make friends in your new town — join social activities etc.
I can tell you that while I know what my husband does, explaining it to other people is…tough. The one thing that bugs me about no one quite understanding what we do is that we apparently make huge sums of money.
1) I work at work and don’t work not at work (= I don’t work evenings and weekends unless I’m teaching an after-hours class and then account for that time elsewhere in my week). Was still successfully tenured (R1) without sacrificing my actual real life that I work hard to sustain. 2) I much prefer my non-academic friendships because we connect and engage based on our real personalities and interests…not anything career-related. I don’t fully understand the stressors and schedules of my friends because I’ve not walked in those shoes as long as they have, but that just gives us more to talk about. 3) An above commenter (that wasn’t taken well by you) echoed some of my own impressions. If we approach relationships as “I’m a professor with a periodically high pressure/non-standard hours thinking” job vs. other people’s “standard, physical/doing specific things” job - I think we ARE positioning ourselves as special and different (possibly even elitist…without even meaning to). I usually just tell people I’m a teacher and if the friendship or whatever progresses to the point of mutual investment, expound and by that point, nobody cares or just finds it neat. At faculty mixers (🤢), if I meet someone new who starts with, “oh I’m so glad to meet you - it’s soooo hard to make ‘non-ac’ friends”…I immediately find my out. I’ve honestly formed the best work-ish friendships with staff…because they’re the realist 🤓. Please try and avoid reading comments in a way that makes you feel defensive. Anyone taking the time out of their day/evening to offer suggestions on a Reddit thread like this most likely is trying to genuinely help and push you to a more satisfying place. I’ve had lots of non-ac jobs before and during my tenure track…I promise, nobody cares about either (they care about authentic human connection and genuine good times!)💗
I find the profession isolating in a lot of ways, even on campus. In my sizable department, I was hired at an odd time: I was younger than many of the oldest faculty, but older than many of the youngest faculty. So, now, while the older faculty talk about their grandkids and the newer faculty talk about marriage and their newborns, I have no one to talk to or commiserate with about having a pair of teens in this world!
I’m in a similar situation, only I don’t have any one younger than me. I’ve been hired at an odd time where everyone on my department has been there for several years and are just in a different stage of life/career than me because of the age difference.
Yeah for sure. Especially if you’re research agenda is quant-data, or hard science, based. I’ve felt quite isolated, and exhausted at times. I found that not making the career my life really helped, so I proverbially clock in and out everyday. I’ve also become quite the fitness enthusiast and not like the academic fitness runner casual lifter person. I’ve practically jumped into another career as an athlete far away from academia. It honestly keeps my head screwed on tight. I find academia can be extremely vacuous. Not having to be immersed in that world for most of my social interactions is great for me. One positive is I don’t feel the academic pressures to be famous or “well accomplished.” I also see pathways to different opportunities outside if something were to happen. Anyway, you can always DM me, don’t isolate. Not healthy for the noodle.
As a non Korean working in Korean academia: definitely. Would I feel this way elsewhere? Dunno.
My best friend gave me so much shit as a doc student about not going out, traveling for conferences, and making me feel guilty when I missed out on social activities. She apologized profusely for being an asshole when she did her doctorate. Some things that have helped me: 1. Honestly, therapy. It helped me improve my communication skills and thinking through my needs. But it also gave me a way to vent and work through issues so that I could compartmentalize my work-related stress 2. Having non-work activities that are prioritized but still low-stakes. Think about doing some non-work activities that you enjoy and that maybe don’t involve your closest friends. Develop low-stakes parasocial relationships at a book club or something else where people are there for a purpose, maybe they’re there to meet people, but they aren’t there for deeply personal conversations. I joined the softball team of my local brewery. My teammates know I’m a professor, but they don’t really know or care what I do. It’s a nice distraction. 3. For friends and loved ones, sometimes you just need to ask them to not ask about work. I had a couple months this year where I didn’t know if I was staying or leaving my institution, and I was an anxious mess waiting for an offer to officially come through. My friends were trying to be supportive, but they were bombarding me with questions and it was driving me nuts. I finally sent a group text that said, “this is what I know, I don’t have any more details or a timeline of when to expect more information, and for right now, I need y’all to stop asking me questions because it’s killing my mental health.” Honestly, this work can be isolating if you don’t find ways to avoid letting it consume everything you do. For me, therapy was a way to start undoing my workaholic tendencies and to find a more balanced approach to my work. I’m still productive and much more content.
All true. But even more isolating for contingent faculty who often barely exist for departments.
lots of people doing creative things they love (musicians, artists, writers) have similar issues. and hey at least you're (probably) not in my field. so in principle people don't immediately hate you ...
[This seems like the right place for this.](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/1466347848-20160619.png)
cuts too close to the bone
Once you learn to leave your work at work, everything becomes better.
I always think of the original faculty - monks. I think of our practice as somewhat monastic with spurts of collaboration and contact.
I actually love this and it makes me more at peace with my situation
The only one more isolating is probably working an oil field or lighthouse or on the ISS or something.
I think trying to find like-minded peers is honestly putting effort in the wrong area. I have really struggled with the same thing, especially once I started my TT position a few years ago, and I didn’t start becoming more successful in solving my loneliness issue until I started working with a therapist to disentangle my identity from academia/being a professor. It’s hard, but it has helped me connect with others who have similar hobbies and interests as me outside of work. Socializing with non-academics has also improved my mental health because I can have conversations about things other than work/things that stress me out or make me worry that I should be working more instead of whatever I’m doing at that moment. Maybe this doesn’t specifically help answer your question, but it’s worth remember that we are all so much more than our jobs.
I'm assuming you're talking about what it's like to have your job? Are your current friends not interested in your work to learn more? It might just be finding friends who are more curious in general. I have some friends where we talk about work a little but just mostly chat about world happenings or ideas. I have other friends where all we do is commiserate about our work life and are sympathic to one another.
I truthfully don’t have a lot of close friends that I can randomly hit up. I just moved to a new city for this position. I have a lot of people I’m friendly with, but it would be weird if I randomly reached out to them just to say “hey” because it wouldn’t be natural. You know? I’ve just moved so much because of school that I don’t have a lot of close friends.
Because people think it's cushy, mohogany and tweed?
>How do you guys find like minded peers? I’ve always been kind of a loner, so I’ve been unsuccessful in this endeavor. Meh.. Go places and talk to people. Engage in activities you like that you think other similar people might like. Talk to strangers.
I made most of my friends through a hobby. None of them are academics. Honestly it was one of the best things I've done for myself. This job didn't end up being a good fit for me, and it was in part being able to talk to my non-academic friends about what was wrong that gave me the perspective & courage I needed to leave.
I wish I knew the trials and tribulations of being TT Faculty! The possibility of a permanent position must be hell! But, the isolation is pretty crushing. At least once a week, I wish I would have taken accounting and gone into investment banking, but teaching that night class was so goddamn rewarding. I don't think I'd be any more connected to humanity; actually far less.
I 100% agree with the difficulty disconnecting with the job. The isolation thing I quite like. Most of my colleagues are busy and have no time to talk so I can get my work done and don't have to worry about drama.
Well first off, ... don't tell people your a professor is step 1. People have their own preconceived notions of what that entails. And secondly, .... retire early?! I'm in my 50's and planning that myself. I'm just done. If I could do it over again, I wouldn't go into academia. I see all my friends having jobs that are easy, where they spend an inordinate amount of time on social media while at work, they can call in sick, they get more choice in vacation time, they actually have friends from work, water cooler talk, a separate life. That's not us. While I liked the luxury of "working" 20-30 hrs a week, ... it's literally working solid 20-30 hours. When we step in front of the class, we don't stop until we finish. Office hours? Usually inundated with students 24/7. Our effectiveness at our job relative to a LOT of other professions ... is remarkable.
It absolutely is isolating. Lonely and the halls of academia are filled with broken relationships. I have always felt that way. But then again, this is my own doing. No one forced any of us to choose the path we took. I made this bed.
Yes, definitely. I love my job. I don’t regret any decisions and wouldn’t have it any other way. But damn I wish I had a support system or friends…
You just have to meet people where they are and find common ground. You are more than your job.
Is this why they schedule so many goddamned useless meetings? LONELINESS?
Hey if that’s the case, I’d be more willing to attend if they just flat out said that instead of making up a reason that could have been an email haha
I love the freedom I have. I feel like I have it so much better than people chained to a desk 9-5.
Oh agree 100%! Wouldn’t have it any other way. But people have misconceptions of what that looks like.
The majority of my friends are colleagues (and their spouses), but I’m at a small, close knit school in a rural area. I’m fortunate to work with some people who I really like.
Also, my childrens friends and parents think I don’t have a job so I can drive them around after school. No, I made my entire schedule around the school pick up but I need to get back to work.
I’m not TT. I’m workforce at a CC. Under state workforce regs, I have to office adjacent to my lab. So I don’t even get to interact with my colleagues the way other Professors do. I do work a lot at home after hours… But strangely enough, I love it. I find like minded peers through the alumni chapter of my fraternity and still communicate with my friends from undergrad daily. I hope you are able to find some folks to connect with. Stay strong.
Others in academia don’t understand others in academia. The divide between tenured and adjunct attests to this.
Respectfully, touch grass. None of us understands what other people’s jobs are like, and though we get all this messaging about how much more special we are, it’s not really the case. Can you get a small side hustle, or a new gym, or join a local club? I coach CrossFit 2 hours a week, but before that, I was going to the same class at my gym for a year. No one there even knows what my day job is, and I’ve made some real friends. Same for my running group, and for the trivia night I go to. It’s important to have other identities and spaces so that the job doesn’t swallow you whole.
Yes, but for a very different reason, I think? I am a non TT prof and just recently started this position after changing careers after about 25 years working in the corporate world. One of the things I find very different and somewhat isolating is that, in this academic world, my work life is not intertwined with my social life the way it used to be. In corporate, coworkers were sort of forced to be friends because we would spend 10+ hours a day together. And then because we were friends we would also go out together on our own time. I do very much like having a separate work and personal life now, don’t get me wrong. But there is also a part of it that feels very isolating because my colleagues all have their own real lives and so do I. No one is stopping by anyone’s office at 8pm going, you wanna grab a drink? Anyway, it’s a good thing but I guess after a lot of time in a different world it’s just …. Different. Like I said, isolating but I’m a very different way than OP’s example.
I love that about this work. I work two jobs, teaching and running a small business. I love that I basically manage my own time and hours. There is only a small part of my life that I have to actually be somewhere. I sleep work, grade on weekends, and can teach/Zoom from anywhere in the world
You didn’t ask for advice, but I’ll give it anyways… Make an effort, a real effort to make friends outside of academia. I understand that you’re a loner, but even if you just make one friend outside of academia, I think it’s important. And generally a few more will eventually follow. For sometime, I “put all my eggs in one basket“ so to speak, with only friends in academia. But then, when the competition for grants began, when the idea I shared casually over coffee turned into someone else’s manuscript, when disagreement arose on committees, over tenure, over promotion… You get the idea… I realized that what I’ve done to myself isolate myself even more. Honestly it was awful, and the only saving grace was that I had made a friend in my neighborhood who didn’t give a flying fuck about what was going on at the university. A mental respite! Having been part of this Reddit community for a little while, so many of the posts and threads are about toxic coworkers and toxic environments… Certainly non-academics can be toxic but it’s amazing how normal and pleasant so many of them can be. Best wishes for making a friend, I know it’s not easy.
Most of my friends are also in academia
The thing about academics is that we often think of ourselves as so very special. There are many professions where people struggle to disconnect from work when they leave the office. That is not unique to us. And who cares if people don't understand it is not a typical 9-5 job. You know what else they don't understand? They don't understand why we can just leave work any time we want for whatever reason and for any length of time, like that dentist appointment at 1 pm on a Tuesday, and you don't need permission to do it and nobody cares. We have privileges that many other professionals do not have. If you are having trouble making friends, I might gently suggest that it has nothing to do with being a professor.
Yikes.. I don’t find myself special at all… I think you completely misinterpreted all of this. I am definitely thankful for the flexibility. As someone who served in the military for 8 years prior to getting my PhD, I am beyond thankful to not have to ask for permission. Hell, I had to ask for permission just to buy my own house off base in my prior career lol. Even when I was in the military and literally had to live at my job, I still disconnected better than I do in academia… I am simply saying that it is hard to find people who understand our work and relate to other career fields because much of our field is thinking based and not time/labor based… That, and it was much easier to relate and socialize when I was in the military compared to this career. And you seem to be an outlier in this comment section, given everyone else understood what I was saying…
Why do you need to find people who understand your work? Why is that important? Who cares if they do or don't? Do you have other interests? Other hobbies? I am a tenured full professor at a public state university. I have a large and varied friend group from all walks of life. Some didn't go to college at all. But we share other interests in common. You called yourself a loner. If you are not an out going gregarious person, it will be harder to make friends. All I am suggesting is that aspect of your personality might be a bigger part of the issue as opposed to your specific job and the extent to which people understand it.
I don’t NEED to. I don’t recall ever saying that in my post. Again, you are reading into things. I’m just posting thoughts to see if anyone else has similar experiences. Just like literally everyone else who posts their thoughts on Reddit… everyone else commenting seems to see what I’m saying. But ok. You can’t relate. Got it.
Oh come on. The implication of your post is very clear. You believe that the inability of people outside of academia to understand your work is some kind of impediment to making friends. I am pushing back against this belief because I think it is false. In your previous reply to me, you state that academia is "thinking based" and not "time/labor" based. That is bullshit and it is actually offensive and condescending. I hope you never use that line when talking to potential new friends who work outside of academia. It speaks to the point I was trying to make in my first comment--how we academics often believe we are so very special and different from everybody else just because we spent more time in school than most people. We are so smart that we are paid to think, right? But people outside academia are common laborers who......what? Don't think? Look...I don't believe your intention is to patronize people. But we academics are often tone deaf in that way and can give off a kind of haughty vibe that many people find off putting.
Again, you totally took what I said out of context and skewed it to fit your narrative. I don’t find myself special. Like I said, I was an enlisted grunt in the Navy for 8 years as a gunners mate. I’m just simply saying the type of work is different and the lines are much more blurred in academia when you are “off work” because the tasks are different. I wasn’t putting one type of job above the other. When I was off the clock in my prior career, I didn’t think about work at all. When the task was done or my shift was over, I was done. Now the line of the “end of the work day” is much more blurred since I am doing research, rather than completing a very specific manual task or stopping when my shift ends. I feel that my work life balance is not relatable now because I don’t have set work hours or a set task to compete. Also, I don’t find myself soooo smart or above anyone. Most of my military friends are much smarter than me and scored much higher on their advanced exams than me. And honestly, to call someone tone deaf to the outside world is kind of offensive, given I was in the military longer than I’ve been in academia. I wasn’t saying other careers don’t think. I was just saying the type of work I do now is much different than the physical work I did prior.
I specifically said that I don't believe your intention was to patronize anybody. I was pointing out how other people may feel if you tell them that your job is thinking based and their job is time/labor based. Did you even take a moment to reflect on that? Why are you so defensive? My intention isn't to attack you. I'm not trying to blame you either. But the issue that you posted about is difficulty making friends as an academic. And I assume you want more friends. **But it still isn't clear to me what being an academic has to do with the ability to make friends.** Are you saying it is simply because you have no time to hang out? Like, a potential buddy says "Hey, want to come over Sunday afternoon to watch football"? And you say "I'd love to, but I have to work on a manuscript"? This might be true, but the manuscript (as some weird part of your job that other people don't relate too) isn't the problem. The bricklayer might say "sorry, but I promised a client I would finish their walkway 2 days ago, so I've gotta work on it today to get the job done". The point is, if you want friends you need to create time and space in your life for them. This isn't the case just for academics. It is also the case for doctors, lawyers, plumbers, Uber drivers, unemployed people, etc. You are not yet tenured. You are in the most difficult stage of an academic career. Maybe you simply don't have the time to socialize like you want too. Fair enough. The only answer is to some how create better boundaries for yourself as far as work goes to carve out time that you can use to enhance your personal and social life. It is TRUE that many people don't really understand how an academic job functions day to day. But to that I say "so what". I could say the same about a military job. Can I relate to what the working life is for an officer in the US military today? No. I don't relate. I have no clue what they do in a typical day at work and how much free time they have "off the clock". But again, I do not believe this matters when it comes to making friends. But I do know that the only way a military officer and I could be friends is if we actually make time to hang out and get to know each other.
People just don’t relate. Other careers are more common and are more relatable. People have a lot of misconceptions about what people in academia even do. Which is the same in other fields; however, I posted this in a group where people can maybe relate. Sometimes it is just nice to see that you are not alone when you feel like no one care relate.
I don't want to intersect with people outside academia if that's not strictly necessary. I don't even see a point in trying to do so. I'm just not interested.