I appreciate all of the comments and encourage you to read them.
The piece also says professors are expected to attend 2-4 conferences a year, and points out that universities rarely pay the full expense. I agree that doesn’t sound like a relaxing schedule.Ī commenter named Gwen Schug sent along a link to a well-written piece responding to the study I cited, detailing the hours it takes to do every aspect of a professor’s job, including the three hours preparation required per lecture, the fact that most professors have up to 55 advisees, each of whom requires at least an hour per semester, and grading, which can take a half hour per assignment. He also worked on an annotated bibliography and helped a struggling student.
19 which included writing a 12,600-word book chapter and a 1,000-word book review, peer reviewing a manuscript for an editor, reviewing manuscripts for a professional journal and one for Oxford University Press. One commenter, Jonathan Reynolds, sent me an itemized list of tasks he’d performed since Dec. Many of the comments are detailed, with time breakdowns laying out exactly how many hours the writers spend doing their jobs.
Most everyone says they never take the summer off, barely get a single day’s break for Christmas or New Year’s and work almost every night into the wee hours. While I characterize their lives as full of unrestricted time, few deadlines and frequent, extended breaks, the commenters insist that most professors work upwards of 60 hours a week preparing lectures, correcting papers and doing research for required publications in journals and books.
Since writing the above piece I have received more than 150 comments, many of them outraged, from professors who say their jobs are terribly stressful. “With a lot of these jobs, you’re getting warm fuzzies as you work,” he notes. Their colleagues and clients tend to become friends and they get lots of positive feedback and thanks for their work. Though hair stylists make the lowest salary on the list, they are among the happiest, says Lee. But compensation was just one of the things CareerCast measured.
None of the salaries for these professions top $100,000 and some are quite low, like seamstress/tailor with a median salary of just $26,000 and hair stylist, at $22,500, according to BLS numbers. The other thing most of the least stressful jobs have in common: At the end of the day, people in these professions can leave their work behind, and their hours tend to be the traditional nine to five. The same goes for jewelers, number four on the list, audiologists, dieticians and hair stylists. The people who do them tend to work on their own, without much supervision. That’s the case for medical records and medical laboratory technicians, ranked numbers three and five on the list.
“In these jobs, you’re doing something for which you are highly qualified and you’re the expert in how to get things done,” he adds. “They are basically kings of their own fiefdoms.” The same is true for the other jobs on the least stressful list, including seamstress/tailor, which ranks second.
University professors answer to themselves, he points out. “These jobs tend not to have someone standing over their shoulder putting pressure on them to get things done,” he says. To gauge which jobs are the least stressful, CareerCast considered the 200 professions in its database and focused on 11 different job demands that it deemed likely to provoke stress, including travel, growth potential, competitiveness, physical demands, hazards, environmental conditions and risk to one’s own life or to others’.Īccording to Tony Lee, CareerCast’s publisher, the least stressful jobs have one thing in common: autonomy. This is the third year CareerCast has released a list of least and most stressful jobs, derived from its best and worst lists. The best and worst jobs listing, which ranks 200 jobs according to more than 100 criteria, comes out in April. In 2009 the Journal dropped the ranking, which then moved over to, a career and job listing website based in Carlsbad, Calif. The ranking comes from an annual best and worst jobs list that began in 1995 under the auspices of the Wall Street Journal. All of those attributes land university professor in the number one slot on ’s list of the least stressful jobs of 2013. Another boon for professors: Universities are expected to add 305,700 adjunct and tenure-track professors by 2020, according to the BLS.