Đây chủ yếu là bài của các bạn tây đã tốt nghiệp Phd và ra làm assistant professor ở Mỹ, nhưng có lẽ cũng có ích đối với các bạn đang và sẽ làm Phd trong việc định hướng tương lai sau này. Các bạn này than thở thảm quá. Mới hay, lấy chồng giáo sư cũng khổ chả kém gì lấy chồng bộ đội.

Nhân đây em cũng xin gửi lời cám ơn chân thành đến các chị (đa phần là chị, mặc dù cũng có một số anh), vợ (chồng) của các giáo sư các trường uy tín ở nước ngoài. Nhờ có các chị mà Việt nam ta mới có được nhiều professor vẻ vang, sánh vai với các cường quốc năm châu.

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Thought I should share this with you guys; specially those particularly worried about going to a second-tier department. I got an assistant professor (AP) position in a 150-200 department in 2005. My pub output is not going very well. I do not think I'll get tenure. I feel like I made a mistake. I lost my wife because she was too worried that I would not get tenured. I was not focused on my work enough. So if you want to have a happy marital life, be careful when choosing where to go.

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I don't know of anybody whose spouse left due to not getting tenure. I know tons of relationships where the spouse left (or separated for a long time) due to the stress of grad school, being an AP, no longer being an AP but still having the shitty all-demanding work habits of grad school/AP (i.e. no work-life balance).

If this sounds like you or like it could be you, my advice is to go see a marriage counselor ASAP. Grad school tends to accentuate insecurities about whether or not you are intelligent; and, the "antidote" of working harder is not healthy for a relationship. Start fixing that now rather than later (after tenure, after full prof, after emeritus, ...). It would make you and your spouse (and your kids) much happier and will greatly reduce the likelihood of your spouse leaving you.

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From my experience, lots of guys who are married and in grad school always put the burden of running the household on the wife (even if the wife holds a full-time job!), telling them how stressful grad school is. Then they get a job and tell her how stressful the tenure track is. No doubt both are stressful, but not as stressful as a job outside academia IMHO. There's always another hurdle (full professor, international acclaim, etc) and she's probably just looking ahead and not liking what she's seeing. So, quit blaming academia for stress and start contributing more at home.

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^ In our experience (my wife and I), there was a lot of uncertainty and changing preferences. When I started grad school, she and I both had a certain vision of what a professor's life was. It never occurred to us, though, that we'd have virtually no control over our geographic appointment. If you talk to your parents or friends outside of academia, you'll often get a sense of that too - my parents still cannot understand why I am unable to get a job in their city at the local university. Even if I wanted that job, it's not that simple. Hardly anyone outside academia appreciates or understands that this is a two-sided matching problem. For a lot of people, they have far more control over their geography than academics have. Had we known that - and genuinely understood it - I'm not sure if she or I would've chosen this route, as being near our family is important. That has been a source of significant marital problems, as well as individual problems, like depression and loneliness, as we live somewhere far from friends and family.

The second thing was changing preferences, though. As time progressed, both of us began to better understand the differences between research and teaching schools. The former had the better money and the better longterm lifestyle, as well as the better reputation and the better intellectual experience. But before we began, we had no idea about those kinds of differences. It's the former that seems to create significant duress at times for she and I. I end up working all the time, for instance, because I'm focused on not getting fired. But if I were at a teaching school, I'd be making less money, but at the same time, I could theoretically turn off the job. That's much more difficult for a researcher, though, who feels guilty sometimes even for sleeping.

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My problem as an AP: little research output and the fact that at most five minutes into a given conversation my attention switches off and my mind goes back to some research-related minutiae. A number of times during office hours, I must have come across as completely retarded because I'd have to ask the student repeat their question simply because I didn't hear it. Wife was less tolerant of this because she knew exactly was was going on and even being able to catch the last 3-4 words before the inevitable "What are you thinking about?" didn't always help. Solution: If tenure doesn't work out at the current institution, I'm not staying in academia. It seems that people with less education can afford to have similar or higher incomes and comparable or better lifestyles. All of our non-academic neighbors go on 1-2 vacations per year, we had 1 in 4 years. The truth is that not everyone will hang in an academic position--some people come in with the wrong qualifications/expectations/etc + there's a fair amount of randomness with research. My only regret in hindsight is not enough accurate information about the whole process. I wish someone could compile better statistics and anecdotal evidence on people's experience on the tenure track.

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Thực ra thì tôi cũng không chắc, thế giới xung quanh tôi có tồn tại thật hay không.