Stress and academia

It's the time of year for LISTS and surveys and the like, and as so often our profession features.

A US article here ranked 'professor' as one of the top ten least stressful jobs - although they did clarify down in the comments that the 'study' considered only tenured, Full Professor, ignoring everyone else in the hierarchy and the difficulties of getting to that position... for soldier or nurse they didn't pick only the highest, most secure version of the profession for their analysis, as far as I could tell.  Anyway, it sparked off the usual spate of "I'm so stressed so we are all so stressed" and "shut up you're so lucky and it's all your own fault anyway" posts around the academic blogosphere... two of the more considered positions are here and here, where two bloggers try and take a more nuanced approach to identifying stress within the job. 

A UK report found a rather different picture; this one considered all kinds of academics and universities, and found that the self-reported experiences of stress made the sector a very difficult one.

The contrast between these two reports struck me.  The US article looked from the outside - that is, it compared things like the responsibility of the role (so that a medical role which works directly with people's lives is innately considered more stressful than an academic role) in some kind of scaled, semi-objective way.  The UK report drew on the opinions of people within the professions being compared.  It seems to me that in this difference lies the true issue. 

Stress is about individual responses to sets of circumstances - a situation which one person finds dull can be high-pressured to another.  A friend from college is a medic who likes to work in intensive care or emergency sections - she says geriatrics is depressing, orthopedics is boring etc. etc.  Boredom is stressful - she likes the buzz of being needed, thrives on emergencies, and was frankly pretty wearing to be around as an undergrad when all that thrill-seeking focus was looking for something to operate on.  Another moved from academia to accountancy, because he was sick of the vagueness of the outcomes and moving goals of academic work - he loves the tidiness of accounts which are right or wrong, the structure of commuting and working standard hours and ticking things off neatly.  People choose a profession partly because it suits them and their needs, right?  But my feeling is that there is a big flaw in academia; the selection process requires a different set of skills than the job-as-experienced-today, especially in the UK setting.  The selection process - the years of study and research and post-docing, the teaching training, developing your own teaching philosophies and research plans etc. etc. - selects for independence, for self-management, for the ability to go off alone into your own head and into the depths of a subject.  It selects for the ability to think outside the box, long term, and to work towards big goals.

Being an academic, however, you lose most of the nexus of control.  Your research is now mostly controlled by your ability to get funding, or the work of your students or post-docs - so you are now responsible for more e.g. people's work and careers (which you are probably stressed by, if you are both conscientious and used to working alone) and have much less control over how things actually get done (my fingers still ITCH to sieze some labwork off students and say "just let me do it" because I KNOW why stuff is going wrong and it's driving me NUTS waiting for them to follow through on my advice or even better/worse learn for themselves how to fix it).  When my first post-doc project went seriously off the rails due to some fieldwork problems in the first few months, yes, I was stressed, I was anxious - but I was also able to throw myself into the reading, thinking, talking, writing needed to find an alternative route, to implement it, to put in the hours needed to find the new track and push the work onto it.  And if I failed it was MY failure, not my FAULT but not in my control and affecting others.  Your teaching is controlled at the least by departmental and programmatic structures - curricula are communal things, which modules you are assigned, modes of assessment, length of and number of classes, types of location - all these things are not fully in your control.  I'm in a team-teaching-loving environment, with all sorts of extra layers of approvals and rules such as no more than three assessment items, no two assessment items can assess the same set of learning outcomes, all assessment items must total this number of hours of exam or this many words, all items must be set by the week before the semester starts for approval by a committee etc. etc., so I feel that only the time I'm in the classroom is in my control... and since my preference is to NOT be in total control of the classroom, since learning happens whilst doing rather than whilst listening, perhaps the only thing I really do control is the words on the handouts and powerpoints, and whether those get copied on time (which also depends on things like whether there is any paper or toner in the copier or a queue, and those things are not mine to control).  Then there's the bureaucracy and changing priorities and firefighting...

And my point is, these things may not be very stressful on some absolute scale of stressful life events, but for the kind of person who typically makes it into an academic job in a middling institution, they are very stressful indeed.  I mean, I was really good at science, right?  Predicted great grades at A level.  The school just assumed I'd apply for pre-med or vet school, because I had the academic skills.  But I knew myself, and I knew I'd crumble under the people-handling demands of those jobs.  Some people get good stress from life and death situations, a joyous surge of energy and sense of being alive and valuable that they thrive on.  Me?  I get the toxic kind of stress from even the smallest emergency situations like dealing with a cut finger in a laboratory.  But the thrive-on-stress people would probably get the toxic stuff from carrying out thousands of identical measurements, or meeting with ten different groups of students to explain correlation analysis ten times for the second time this year and doing that every year.

Academia IS stressful, these days, for the majority of those involved in it.  Partly because of the changing culture, the poor economy, changes in society, etc. etc.  Partly because we are whiners, maybe - certainly we do like to articulate and critique everything we encounter and feel, it's what we're trained to do.  But partly because many of us aren't really in the right situation to do our best work, or even to do OK work - we're awkward hand-carved pegs of all sorts of special shapes, mostly being managed by people who are the same as us and therefore no good at it or who have no patience for the boring necessities of good management and leadership because they are expected to ALSO teach and research and so on as well as manage with minimal training or support, and it's STRESSFUL for US.

Maybe that's because many of us wouldn't do great in the 'real world'.  I've done my share of 'minimum wage' type jobs, and I wasn't great at bag packing or dealing with shop customers or receptioning - couldn't manage the 'look cheerful all the time' bit for a start.  Shelf-stacking was OK if it was overnight when there weren't customers around, but I was a bit too prone to daydream and to 'making inappropriate comments' (such as saying 'oooh it's like a build your own cow kit' after spending an hour sorting all the different cuts of beef and organs and stuff in the big freezer, apparently that traumatised the girl I was working with).  Bar work - I was good at the sums, and eventually learnt to both pull a decent pint and to mix the bizarre cocktail preferences of the darts team, but lacked the ability to build a rapport with people needed to be really good at it, and didn't enjoy the need to be 'in public' all the time.  I liked my really boring data job (I checked paper forms to make sure that all the boxes had been filled out and that some numbers added up before someone more senior entered them into a computer) - clear goals, clear outcomes, a nice quiet desk in a corner of a busy room, and permission to read a book in the lulls as long as I worked like the clappers in the busy times.  I liked working in the sorting room at the post-office, the teasing of the students was good-natured and the work was mostly repetitive and came in flurries with the odd bit of interest and the odd bit of sitting around.  I've done contract work, depended on clients, written tenders, written reports in different corporate styles - not much, but enough to have an idea what's involved, and to appreciate the challenges it presents.  I'm also a first-generation-to-university type, so no-one in my family had an academic job, so I know what different kinds of work are generally like. 

I'm not totally ivory towered.  And yes, I'm a delicate little flower with a sense of entitlement I expect.  But I continue to find my work stressful, both in the lack of control and in the conflicts between the stated purposes and aims and the actions that are required or rewarded, and at the same time struggle to find an alternative which would suit me and my talents and my weaknesses, especially now I have these various health issues... Anastasia, for example, writes a really interesting blog about her transition from academia to high school teaching which is clearly going well for her.  I am totally in awe, because no way could I handle the people-work she describes, clearly relishes and seems to excel at.  That sort of thing - I can do it, if I'm honest, I do do with some of my students, but I can do it for an hour for one or two people and then I'm wrung out and have to find somewhere to hide and recuperate.  I would not consider classroom teaching as a possible role for me in a school during the compulsory school years.  Nu-uh.  Just... no.  Horses for courses.