“It must be nice to have your summers off” – and other things we don’t know about each other
If you’re an academic, I bet you’re like me: thoroughly tired, if not driven to hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing, by the well-intentioned comments you get about your summers. If I had 10p for every time I’ve heard “Oh, it must be nice to have your summers off”, I’d be a rich man. If I’d never heard it, I’d be a happier one.
When someone offers me these rather uninformed thoughts about my summer, and doesn’t run away quickly, they get to hear what I actually do in the summer. I’m a tenured professor at a mid-sized Canadian university (or at least I was, until I recently retired), and why that bit of information matters will become clear shortly. In the summer, there’s exactly one piece of my job that I don’t need to do: teach undergraduate classes. That’s not a small part of my job (in principle, 40%), but of course, letting that go doesn’t mean I’m sitting on my porch with a cold drink in hand. Instead, it means there’s a bit more time for all the rest.
What might “all the rest” be? For me, and no doubt for you, it’s a large and jumbled basket. To start with, classroom teaching the rest of the year doesn’t just happen; it takes summer prep work, and lots of it. Then there’s research – another big chunk of my job. While research continues year-round, summers offer a chance for the kind of sustained focus that’s elusive the rest of the year. In my own case, the summer focus on research is sharpened: I study insect-plant interactions, and insects and plants do little interacting during the Canadian winter! That research, by the way, is at the same time a teaching activity; I spend time in summer working with both graduate and undergraduate students who join my research program to further their training as scientists. So-called “academic service” is another sizeable section of the basket. I spend time in summer doing peer reviews of colleagues’ manuscripts, handling those manuscripts and reviews as an editor, writing assessments of candidates for promotion or tenure, and much more. And of course, there’s writing – there’s always writing. The research I do is no use to anyone unless it’s published, so I spend enormous amounts of time – in summer and out of it – drafting and revising scientific papers. I’ve also written and published two books (so far), hundreds (no exaggeration!) of blog posts, and other essays like the one you’re reading now. I might have spent more time, over my career, writing than doing anything else, and it could never have happened if I had my summers “off”!
Now, that last paragraph might sound a bit like complaining about the burden: “Oh, woe is me, I’m so busy with everything my terrible job makes me do!”. Not one tiny bit. I’ve been lucky to be an academic, because a job focused on adding to and sharing human knowledge of the world is just about the best job I can imagine having. If I’m complaining (and to be honest, I am a little bit), it’s not about the job keeping me busy; it’s about nobody understanding what the job is.
Which brings me to a bigger point. As an academic, I complain sometimes that non-academics don’t understand my job. But the same thing happens within academia, because academic jobs aren’t all the same. I’ve described some of my job responsibilities and how they shape my summers, but yours may be quite different. There are major differences in how academia operates among countries; within countries, research-focused universities may be quite different from undergraduate-focused ones. There are academics with lifetime tenure, academics with medium-term contracts, and academics with precarious year-to-year or even semester-to-semester employment. There are academics who do no research and others who do nothing but; academics who’ll never write a book and those for whom books are bread and butter; academics who – well, you get the picture. The world abounds with academic advice (indeed, I’ve written my share and offered some of it on this very platform). It’s one important way we support each other in our shared journey in academia. But both givers and takers of academic advice need to exercise a little bit of caution. If you’re giving advice, ask yourself: “Am I making a ‘summers off’ error?”. If you’re reading advice, ask yourself: “Does the writer understand my particular situation, or must I adapt this advice?”. The next time you’re nettled because someone’s told you how nice it must be to have your summers off, see it as a good reminder that we all have blind spots. We often don’t know what we don’t know, and a bit of work to understand a colleague’s actual situation, not our own situation pasted over our image of that colleague, can pay off in spades.
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