From School to Work to Working at School?

torgosan asks: "After years of school and many years of toiling in the corporate world and being laid-off in one of the seemingly perpetual down-sizings [my former company was employee-owned until a corporate buyout a few years back, after which point it all went downhill - a mini-Enron, as it were, including crooked execs, cooked books, SEC investigations, the whole mess], it appears my days of joblessness may possibly be coming to an end. A small university near my hometown has an opening that has my name written all over it. This is all still early in the process and the offer hasn't come yet but that's not stopping me from researching the target city, moving expenses, cost-of-living comparisons, living arrangements, etc. Taking the position would mean a sizable pay-cut but I need to get back to doing what I love to do and this seems to be 'it'. What I haven't been able to find, though, are the insights into university employment and how it compares to working in the 'real world'. This would be a staff position working with other staff and professionals and with some interaction with the student body. So my question for you uni workers out there is: What sort of adjustment should be expected? Is the uni workplace as structured as the corporate world? Pet peeves? What are the politics like? I ask as I attended a commuter-school with little campus life and have little to draw on for perspective."

I work at a university...

[Jim Morash]

... as a Research Engineer, building robots and helping out grad students with their thesis work. It's a pretty cool job. I get to travel a fair amount, spend a little time at sea for field testing, it's not all desk work. There are other nice things - I get a good amount of vacation time, the benefits are decent.

Downsides: low pay, not very well organized, always chasing money (i.e., writing proposals). Definitely less structured than the corporate world. Students can be fun or infuriating to work with (sometimes both). University politics can be among the ugliest in the world, it's best to try and stay out of the way.

my .2c

[Anonymous Coward]

The politics are much, much worse. People have 'ownership' of things and places, and this can make your life difficult. Policing the network is harder, because anything you try is 'affecting peoples education'. People with Masters degrees in english think that their education means more than your knowledge and experience.... otherwise, there are advantages. I'm sure the guy who said co-eds will get marked as a troll, but don't knock it till you've tried it...

Re:Unless you're teaching or lab monitoring ...

[jhoffoss]

You've never worked in a University, have you.

Yes, it's a job. Yes, you have some sort of schedule. yes, you have a boss, co-workers, etc. That's probably about where the differences stop. As another poster stated, politics are huge around a University. Gossipers tend to run rampant, where, while they're present in the corporate world, they can't be so blatant about it all the time (from my experience.) Budgets are extremely important, and you may have to be there for awhile and make friends before you're ever able to acquire extra finances for a project you'd like to pursue. This, of course, depends on what you'll be doing, and how much your boss wants to take care of you (he probably already has the swing to get some extra funding for you.)

All in all, it's a trip. The thing I wasn't prepared for was the amount of laziness all around me. Granted, I worked in the Facilities Mgmt department, so not faculty or directly involved with the academics, and we had almost all of the union employees at the school. But still, the amount of maintenances guys I found napping, the difficulty in reaching half of the managers (most of which have since been fired, thankfully) was rediculous. And infuriating, considering I was a student employee making $10/hr doing helpdesk with four others making $50k, and I did more than any one of them, and usually more than any two of them combined. Now THAT would have been a nice gig. $50k, 40 hours, work stays at work when I walk out the door.

Anyway, I have since left and stepped into the corporate world, so I'm working backwords from where the poster is headed, but it's amazing the differences I've seen. Where I work now, the politics are there, but seem much more elusive, where in the University, the politics are right there in front of you, every day of every week.

Now that I am "staff", and I have a desk and chair designated for staff, and my manager has a desk and chair designated for a manager, and my principal a desk and chair for a principal, I kind of yearn for that laid-back and more enjoyable atmosphere.

Re:my .2c

[jmlyle]

But in the corporate world

The politics are much, much worse. People have 'ownership' of things and places, and this can make your life difficult. Policing the network is harder, because anything you try is 'affecting the bottom line'. People with Masters degrees in Business think that their education means more than your knowledge and experience.... otherwise, there are advantages.

ugh. I did this once.

[/dev/trash]

This is all still early in the process and the offer hasn't come yet but that's not stopping me from researching the target city, moving expenses, cost-of-living comparisons, living arrangements, etc.

I was all set to move. Two weeks later when I got the form letter, I was quite disappointed. Save your time and energy until you actually have the job.

Re:Unless you're teaching or lab monitoring ...

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing I wasn't prepared for was the amount of laziness all around me. Granted, I worked in the Facilities Mgmt department

I also worked for the facilities management department at my school (full time after I graduated). I haven't yet met a group of more dedicated or competent people.

With three other things, I shared your experience:

1. Politics are quite important. Fortunately, my manager did an excellent job shielding me from most of this.
2. Budgets are very tight. This means that IT personnel end up doing more since technology is an excellent way to stretch a budget. We ended up writing a lot of systems to automate various tasks, some of which were eventually adopted by other departments.
3. The atomosphere is fairly laid-back. I would move from desk to desk. In addition to development and administration (ostensibly my job), I would do helpdesk when it was needed. If I had an idea for making some process more efficient, I would tell my manager, present a prototype and we would have a working system with a minimum of committee meetings, vendor proposals, etc. If I needed to get a project finished quickly, I could work from home to avoid people interrupting me for help.

So you might expect a similar experience when you work for a university, but I apparently the dedication of the people you work with can vary.

Re:Rules to live by

[AuMatar]

Bullshit. A made up asserion by those without the talent (and yes, it takes talent) to teach. I agree with Feyman- anyone who can't explain what they're doing to a relatively intelligent 3 year old doesn't really know their stuff.

Community college IT

[DuckDuckBOOM!]

Don't know torgosan, & a quick search didn't turn up his/her line of work. On the assumption it's IT, here's a few hints based upon 5 years on a facilities mgmt. contract at a SE Mich. community college:

• The environment was low-key, relaxed, relative to corporate IT. Deadlines tended to be looser and less arbitrary. Minds tend to be more open (with the occasional hellish exception, see below); if you're an OSS advocate you'll have a MUCH easier time getting support for introducing or expanding its use.
• As with any non-profit org, budgets are tight. The budget model may not be what you're used to. xxCC had separate funding pools for operations (revenue mostly from tuition and local millage) that was usually hurting, and for capital acquisitions (revenue mostly from bonds and fed/state grants) that was usually bulging. We didn't get new toys often, but when we did we got GOOD ones, and lots of them, with tons of software and long-term maintenance bundled in to shift those costs out of the ops fund.
• Job security is much better than average, IF you stay on the right side of the political game. See below.
• Politics are vicious, even by corporate standards. Our situation was aggravated by a board of trustees with delusions of godhood - long, entertaining story in itself - but the main source of grief here is professors, especially tenured ones. Expect a caste system based on level and number of degrees you hold, minus about two caste levels' handicap because you will be lowly staff, not lordly faculty. Plus pecking-order infighting within each caste. You will make friends among staff, but you will need friends among faculty. Do favors for faculty members above and beyond what your job requires. And keep in mind that some faculty will view you as sub-scum no matter how friendly and helpful you are. Be cordial and professional with these people, but avoid them otherwise, and never turn your back to them. (We had one business prof who was utterly convinced that the job scheduler on our mainframe was racially biased. Really. We had to prepare more than one report for mgmt and trustees detailing the way jobs were prioritized because he kept raising the issue in meetings. I was more than a bit curious as to how he thought the VT220s we used distinguished caucasian from african-american input, but I never worked up the cojones to ask him.)
• Management will probably be much the same as mgmt. anywhere else. We had good ones and bad ones.
• Bureaucracy will probably be about the same as anywhere else. Pluses are that college admin tends to be relatively small and centralized; minuses are that the purchasing pipeline can be extremely long, slow, and politicized. You will have incentive to build all but the most complex solutions in-house. See above re OSS.
• If staffing is in any way adequate, you can expect to work more than a few projects on tight deadlines, esp. around enrollment time. . .but you can also expect to have more than a few slack periods to clean up loose ends, refactor code you rushed through earlier, and engage in whatever loosely-work-related intellectual pursuits you might enjoy. At least where I was, mgmt didn't have a problem with this as long as you weren't running a warez distro hub or cranking out CGI pr0n on the lab servers or such.

• HTH.

Re:Rules to live by

[Anonymous Coward]

I do agree with you in theory, however, I found that most of my professors' inability to teach well and communicate the material was due to their complete and total lack of communication skills period. its not that they were too stupid to teach, its that they were just unable to bring any idea into a coherent thought. I literally think that some of them spent so much time with their noses in papers and dissertations that they literally forgot how to speak in normal terms.

Its kind of like when my tells me their printer isnt working. I tell them to go into the control panel to the printers applet and try and print a test page from there. That is chinese to them, though I think I am using the most basic primitive terminology there is.

Re:the old cliche

[Trillian_1138]

Having two parents who teach, I'm gonna have to take offense at that. The cliche is, occasionally, true but is more often used to make people feel better about bad profs or to feel good about not being a teacher. Good teachers (and quite honestly I've had more good than bad) are "doing" and anyone who says otherwise obviously has never taught, or had someone close to them who is a teacher.

In addition, college and university teaching gives profs amazing opportunities to teach AND "do." My father is both a law professor and one of the highest rated defense lawyers in the City of Chicago, having been integrally involved in former Gov. Ryan's choice to put a moratorium on the death penalty. He would not have had the resources (grad students, freedom given by his university to persue his own goals, etc) to persue such lofty goals as aboloshing the death penalty and guaranteeing the rights of the accused (I'll play the Slashdot 'Civil Liberties Card' and say he's probably doing more to protect them that _you_ are) were he not at a university.

Likewise, my mother works with special ed. kids and makes each and every one of their lives better. She may not be changing the world in dramatic or historically significant ways, but I know each child and their family values her and she values them.

You go and contradict yourself, saying that those who work in universities "actually know what your talking about," implying maybe they can "do," but I still dislike your use of the (dead wrong) cliche.

To the origonal poster who is asking the question: I'm a student at an "institution of higher learning", and have no experience working in education. However, having spoken to both my parents I know they both love working in education. Specifically my dad, who works at a university teaching and also is able to practice law through the university loves being able to work with students and shape their futures, as well as actually get down and dirty and do "real" work. As many other posters have indicated, I do know he complains about the political aspects and dislikes the occasional stupidity. Specifically, he says their are profs who haven't actually practiced law in years and instead are satisfied with 'intellectually' persuing law by reading and writing about it. My understanding is there are such people in every branch of education, who find the study of their subject of choice to be more important than the actual practice. This may be where the cliche "Those who can do, those who can't teach" came from, so it may have a grain of truth in it.

But if you're interested in working in at a university, and what other posters have said sounds enjoyable (and from my limited understand, what other posters have said about lower pay but more flexible hours and nice benifits is true) then I'd say go for it. It won't be the rest of your life, and it may be something you enjoy beyond measure.

My two cents.

-Trillian

Re:Unless you're teaching or lab monitoring ...

[3.2.3]

You've never worked in a University, have you.

Have you worked in the corporate world?

Last year I went from 24 years in the corporate sphere to academic work. I am so happy now I don't know what to do with myself, even though I'm making about $30,000 per year less than I was.

When I interviewed at the university, I was told how laid back everything was, how 9-5 it would be, and how I would be pretty much my own boss. Most of that turned out to be a total crock. Most things about university work are pretty much the same as in the corporate world, except with less money.

Everything operates pretty much in crisis mode all the time. I pull all nighters monthly and work lots of unpaid overtime. Managers are still simultaneously out to lunch and egotistical as a rule. Requirements come from ever expanding committees instead of just a team of five or six pseudo-technical project managers.

Being funded by grant money is about as stable as working in an overheated IT economy where bean counters can't offshore work fast enough. I still feel like the bottom could drop out at any moment. And just like the corporate world, there's still not enough money for that protocol analyzer that would save a couple month's worth of work. You still never get the resources up front you are promised.

However, we're not working to some imagined market demand that might evaporate if we don't get there first. We actually get projects not just done, but sometimes done right. We might be working furiously and pushed hard. But we will take the time to get it right. It's greatly satisfying knowing I am working on things that are going to be good.

We use great technology. And lots of it. I don't have to say I work in a Java shop or a C++ shop or a Microsoft shop or a Unix shop. I can concentrate on one set of skills if I want. But if they aren't working for me, I can do things some other way. Python is making me happy.

I'm working for the good of society. Work I am doing will help make the world a better place. It isn't manufacturing hype to steer demand for some product which will be here today and gone tomorrow. It isn't listening to some manager's near criminal schemes to fleece money from an unsuspecting public. It isn't a company trying to get something for nothing, either from their employees or their customers. It's saving lives and advancing science.

Science is far more interesting than markets. Making something in a lab and then going and taking it outdoors, maybe up on the roof, maybe out in the ocean, and collecting data from it that can tell you something nobody knew before... that's just cool.

I work with a distinctly better crowd of people than ever before. Are there politics? Sure. Any set of social relations evolves politics. But the overarching reach is cooperation for the good of humanity rather than competition for individual survival. People who work for less money to be in such an environment are not only just plain nicer to be with on a day to day basis, but they are generally a whole lot smarter and more interesting. We like being together after work. People are doing all kinds of different things in close proximity to each other, with lot of cross pollinating results. It's intellectually stimulating. And I just GPL'd code I got paid to write. That was a strangely exhilarating feeling.

Campuses are beautiful places. At least the one I'm on. You have to get out and walk from building to building a lot. And thereby subject yourself to the flowering of spring and be immersed in youth. This has an effect that may sound trivial from its description, but I can't put a price on it. It's like being alive instead of being a Dilbert zombie. I highly recommend this being alive stuff.

The perks are unbelievable. I traveled a lot, and to exotic places, in my corporate jobs. But traveling to academic conferences is a whole lot more enjoyable than traveling to go set up an experimental server on some unknown network with a deadline and havi

Re:Here's an old document I found in my humor file

[dubl-u]

Department Secretary:
Lifts tall buildings and walks under them,
kicks locomotives off the track,
catches speeding bullets in her teeth and eats them,
freezes water with a single glare,
she is God.

You might mistake this for humor. I used to work for a university, and this is dead on. From day 1, be extremely nice and helpful to the secretaries and other admin people; you'll be amazed how much easier it makes your work.