John Champaign

In her book, “The Professor Is In“, author Karen Kelsky makes the assertion “Do not take out new debt to attend graduate school.”  I would go further than this and say do not pay for graduate school.  What I mean by this is, only attend graduate school if, after tuition and living expenses are deducted […]

There’s a myth in academia that all successful academics work insanely hard for an ungodly number of hours.  This is likely true at the upper echelons of the profession but certainly is not true everywhere for everyone. This post was inspired by a posting on Dynamic Ecology, which was inspired by a couple of comments readers of their blog had […]

I previously wrote some general advice on negotiating once you’ve gotten a job offer from a company.  While I believe almost everything I wrote there holds for negotiating junior, tenure-track positions, this post is intended as an extension to that one – focusing on negotiating your first assistant professor position. Go read that post!  I’ll wait for […]

When I started my Masters I remember being floored at the first few academic meetings I went to where people in my group seemed to be speaking a different language.  I couldn’t even follow the conversation, let alone contribute.  No one ever told me how to get up to speed, but I couldn’t believe all the […]

Some Ph.Ds. graduate and start their first tenure track position.  Others do exceptionally well and line up a tenure-track position before they’ve actually defended.  Some give up on academia and get a job in industry (or as a post-ac or alt-ac – I’m lumping these all in as non-academic careers).  Others end up in a purgatory […]

Years ago I used to blog on a personal finance blog called Money Smarts as Mr. Cheap.  One of the posts there that I was particularly proud of was called “Ideas Are Cheap“.  I’ve long felt that this is an important concept that many people have a misunderstanding of.  This post is my attempt to articulate this idea […]

Back when I was in graduate school we used to talk about academic incest.  The idea behind this was that you would be less competitive on the job market if you did all of your degrees at the same institution.  This is different from academic inbreeding, which refers to institutions hiring their own students as […]

Quite often when students have to apply for a position requiring a letter of recommendation they don’t know how to proceed.  I was very uncomfortable asking professors for what felt like a favor.  My viewpoint, which is shared by most faculty members, is that providing letters of recommendation is part of our job and if […]

I was out to brunch over the weekend and had an interesting discussion with a friend about why many faculty members are unhappy.  We bounced around a number of ideas, each of which I suspect is part of the problem, but I think we might have hit on the core of it:  many Ph.D. candidates […]

I’ve written before that wanting to become a professor is the only worthwhile reason for getting a Ph.D.  While I believe this, it *DOESN’T* mean that once you’ve got a Ph.D. being a professor is the only thing you can ever do.  It isn’t a great route into other careers, but Ph.D. training develops a number of […]