Hello Readers !
Recently in ASTU class, we talked about academic writing and culture, and personally, I was surprise to discover new aspects of scholar writing. Therefore I would like to share my perspective on this subject based on class materials and also on personal research and experiences from aside.
During my first few months at UBC, I was exposed to the academic community for the first time in my life. Sure, I’d had teachers before but none of them were actively involved in cutting-edge research as part of their everyday life. My encounters with professors gradually caused a radical shift in my preconceived notions about academic culture.
What struck me as most surprising was the fact that academic papers were not expositions of fact, but often an opinionated interpretation of data. This interpretation was sometimes tainted with personal bias towards specific methods and literature. Another closely related surprise was that I found a significant number of papers that were written with a colloquial tone rather than a formal one. I noticed a difference of form of language the Chute’s essay and Sturken’s essay, as the second one seems to adopt more of a dialogue form than the first one.
However, the real blow from the blue would be when I learned that the peer review process for a single publication can take longer than one year!
What also caught my attention in academic culture is the formation of one’s profession, more specifically professor. One of the biggest misunderstandings I’d had was about the so-called “tenure track”, whose existence I’d learn of only after coming to UBC. Previously I’d believed that every candidate who just received a PhD was eligible for a professorship, and I had grossly underestimated the competitive nature of a professor’s job! After some encounters with my Teaching Assistants, I came to the understanding that the actual path is very different. After receiving a PhD, the candidate applies first to Post-Doctoral positions (I had not previously known that was even a job), where they are expected to be purely indulgent in research, and publishing papers. After an average length of 2 post-doc placements they can apply for tenure-track positions where they begin as associate professors and work their way up to assistant professor and finally, to full professor, a process that can easily take over 7-10 years.
A professor’s job involves a lot more than just teaching and research; they are expected to periodically fill out grant applications for funding their research, they have to possess managementskills (sometimes at the level of an MBA) to direct their research groups, and they must publish regularly, all of this whilst participating in university undertakings! The actual professorship job is as challenging as the road that leads up to it.
Finally, to end on a bright note, I was told that scientific research seldom relies on Eureka moments, namely research ideas that come to light in a moment of brilliance, a feat I had previously felt to be very intimidating. Rather, the questions on which research is to be performed are actually arrived at in a very systematic manner, based on aspirations of the respective communities and holes in the existing literature.