The positives of an academic career – there are many!
Work when you want…I mean flexibility!
Don’t go to work — no one cares. In academia you don’t have to deal with customers or tight deadlines or anything external that demands you physically be at work all of the time. Yes you might have some demanding cell cultures or meetings but outside of that you’re time is yours. This means you can collect kids from school or work from home or even not actually do any work at all (think mental health day rather than lazy day)! Academic projects never really end, a paper is just a launch point to another paper. This means things move slowly with often ill-defined goals and objectives. But this also means that there (can be) less pressure, certainly with regards to delivery.
This is a genuine benefit that is very difficult to find in other jobs, in fact the only others who probably get to do this to the same level are those who work for themselves.
Freedom
Very much related to “work when you want” is freedom. That’s freedom to perform research on the topics that interest you. There are some constraints such as funding, jobs etc but generally this is your choice.
You also have the freedom to work with whomever you wish. You can choose brilliant (and lovely; never underestimate a good person) people to work with through collaborations. This gives you a global community of passionate experts. You see this community whenever there are institutional seminar series where the organisers mates are invited around the world to catch up…erm give scientific talks and network. Few other careers are quite as global (at the employee level).
Now don’t get me wrong, this is one of the most touted benefits of an academic career but often without the caveat that it’s only at its truest when you reach the PI-level. But as a postdoc you can choose which lab you work in and therefore the topic you work on. You can direct your research down avenues that interest you. You can learn techniques that you want to learn.
Travel
Speaking of that global community, you also get to travel. That may be seminar invitations (again, largely PIs only) or it could be to learn a new skill or to attend a conference. There is a degree of travel in academia that isn’t common to many alternative careers. And that’s nice travel too. Not regular travelling to see clients with lots of flights. This is once or twice a year travel to (usually) beautiful parts of the world, all paid for through grants and travel awards. And as you move up you get more travel opportunities and invitations — hell there are some “big name” profs who have conference seasons where they just travel around giving the same talk for large chunks of the year; I’m sure I’ll comment on my distaste of that eventually.
Job for life
Now I really struggled to include this one as it is not at all as true as it may have once been. But for the very lucky few, academia is a rare career that can give you a job for life. Certainly, it is exceedingly difficult to fire an academic who is producing papers (even, apparently no matter what incredibly unacceptable things they may also be doing). This is heavily restricted to PI-level and above however and so, although a benefit, I won’t linger on this one.
Yearly cycle
There’s a certain amount of structure to an academic year. Much like the seasons, the academic year has clearly defined structural periods. There are teaching periods, followed by space for pure research with undergraduate students coming in at set periods each year. It can be nice to have that varied structure over the course of each year.
The thrill of discovery
One of the best parts! My favourite part of academia is that feeling you get when you first discover something new. Maybe you’ve spent hours on a confocal and see some amazing cell behaviour. Until you excitedly run down the corridor telling everyone, you are the first and only person across the entire existance of humanity to have that nugget of knowledge. And that is a pretty good, and addictive, feeling.
That feeling is then followed by the fun of communicating your findings (and not just in a paper). This is perhaps my favourite of those “7+” jobs we have to do each day. Personally, I think it is also the most important role we play. Good communication is often overlooked in academic appointments but it is such a crucial skill and it is through communication that, ultimately, we further humanity and our collective knowledge.
Teaching/training/mentoring others
When asked what they most enjoy about academia, many people answer with “mentoring and teaching the next generation”. Second only to good communication, good training is vital to our overall goal of advancing knowledge.
Although often a source of stress (just look at the current climate in the UK), teaching has huge rewards for academic staff and society. So much so that I don’t believe that I really need to write much here.
Contributing to something meaningful
Full disclosure. I was rather hesitant to include this one as so much of the literature just doesn’t fall under this. Most research has very little real world impact, if any. But our work *can* have a real and tangible impact on people, systems and humanity. A small step fowards in understanding how a biological process works is a small contribution to something that will one day result in saving lives and lessening the burden of disease. If we’re real lucky, then our work has a more immediate impact — just look at the vaccine response to COVID-19.
So there we have it, some of what I think are the best bits of an academic career. What did I miss, what is your favourite part of the job?
Rippling Ideas 