The academic life

Over the weekend I had a conversation with one of my good friends about work in general. We both grew up in the same church and went to the same high school; after that he went the technical trade route and me the university route. He now works in industry on trucks and I work in academia on equations. Academic life is not for everybody, and here I will list the main pro's in con's in my opinion

Pro's: The main benefit of academics life if the unstructured work schedule. There are two main components to my life in academia: Research and Teaching. There tends to be a lot of flexibility in pursuing your own research interests on your own time; also you pretty much prepare your own lectures and agenda for a class semester. Now I have never done this nor would I, but I could probably leave un-announced from work right now, travel the world or do whatever for a month, and come back without my boss asking me where I have been and still receive my bi-weekly pay-check. Nobody is really breathing down your back to see what you are doing

Con's: From the moment I got here, I had 5 years to take a certain number of classes, pass my qualifying exams, and write a dissertation. There is really not set pace or order in which this need to be done, but you have 5 years to get it done. The hardest things to do is properly pace your progress. Those that pace it too slow are often slammed with massive amounts of work at one times; it's the equivalent of having to run twice as fast the second half of a race because you walk the first half. The other extreme is taking on too many things and not being able to stop running when your supposed to be walking. You end up thinking about your work constantly, asking yourself if you have done enough or if you can improve something. Even on vacation, you must bring your laptop for research along with several journal paper to read. It is hard and very annoying when you cannot stop running.

The con's often makes a 9 to 5 job look very appealing, because you know once 5 o'clock hit's, you don't think about your work until 9am the next day. However, I can imagine it might be hard to give up the freedoms that academia brings. In industry every decision made is to make the company more profitable; this can cause employers to be very demanding of employees while they are on the company's dime. So there is no doubt when it comes to freedom from the corporate structure, academic life is a haven like no other.

From our conversation I concluded that there are days when we really do not like what we are doing, but overall we find satisfaction from our work.