Academia vs academic medicine

[transitioning19230]

I currently work in academic medicine, 60 clinical/30 teaching/10 research. Teaching is the highlight of my work and I find myself occasionally looking on job sites to see openings. The appeal for me is primarily teaching, but also a better work-life balance and lower stress, but that comes with a lower salary. I'm concerned that I have a bit of a romantizied view of what academia will actually be as I have colleagues who love academia and others who find it quite stressful. I'm curious to hear from others who have made the transition from one to another. What was your experience like?

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[Ollie123]

Didn't make the transition, but considered it strongly to the point of applying for positions. Ultimately switched universities, but stayed within academic medicine. Partly because I'm research-focused and love heinously complex studies that are simply tougher pull off outside medical schools. Partly because the notion of a ~50% paycut was very tough to swallow.

My general take is that I think pre-tenure at an R1 is more stressful because you are normally piling teaching responsibilities on top of equal research expectations. Research is stressful just because so much of it is wildly outside your control - even once you get a grant (which is only somewhat in your control given the randomness of the process?) you are dependent on the whims of university bureaucracy, participant recruitment, etc. So you still get all that in research-heavy academia, but with lower pay and more teaching.

Places with low research output are much less stressful as long as you like teaching/service. Most of the folks I know stressed in those roles are folks who don't REALLY like teaching - the ones who live for teaching seem to love it. I do think its also a struggle for the folks who - there really isn't a nice way to say it - never really outgrew their high school drama phase. There are lots of opportunities to have endless agony around "So-and-so did 5 minutes less work than me for this committee, can you believe it?" "My student evals made fun of me for xyz I'm so deeply offended" etc. that you just don't have time to think about, let alone care about, in most gigs.

Long story short, academia means many things so it might help to explain what you mean. I certainly wouldn't take a tenure-track Assistant Professor gig at Harvard because you want low stress. Program director at a SLAC? Likely to be pretty chill, but the department chair might only make as much as a non-TT staff scientist.

 

[docloufan]

I currently work in academic medicine, 60 clinical/30 teaching/10 research. Teaching is the highlight of my work and I find myself occasionally looking on job sites to see openings. The appeal for me is primarily teaching, but also a better work-life balance and lower stress, but that comes with a lower salary. I'm concerned that I have a bit of a romantizied view of what academia will actually be as I have colleagues who love academia and others who find it quite stressful. I'm curious to hear from others who have made the transition from one to another. What was your experience like?

I am sincerely curious, what does "10% research time" really look like for a position like this?

That is just 4 to 5 hours (or less?) per week, unless you are significantly overperforming there. Is this paper writing time and edits? Meetings? Proposals? Grant stuff? Data integrity? How exactly does that work with your team(s)?

 

[Therapist4Chnge]

Anything less than at least 20% research is basically giving it away. It’s not the worst thing, but the RVU expectations for the clinical portion at AMCs can be tough. Many places use consulting numbers (2-3 main sources of proprietary info) and they set production expectations off of the inflated numbers. Most bean counters don’t know the difference btw a psychologist & neurologist, so their expectations about productivity usually reflect that. As neuropsych, I could bill differently and do marginally better compared to traditional 50/50 or 80/20, but jumping to new institutions was the far quicker path up the ladder.

My last place expected a 75%-tile for production, but only wanted to pay the 50%-tile in pay. I gained access to the reference data at my last place and the inequity was evident. I actually understood all of the bean-counter side, and finally bailed once I had a strong enough CV to feel comfortable. I warned my co-workers, but many were accustomed to the benefits (e.g. reduced/waived tuition costs for their kids, Cadillac coverage healthcare plans, etc), so they put up w the beatings until moral improved.

Pre-tenure paths at AMCs are basically a MLM scam. They keep promising your efforts will pay off during promotion review, but you just need to take on more. And more. And more. It’s by design and more accurately resembles a law firm’s structure bc the vast majority of productivity come from minions, but the top %-tile reap the majority of the rewards. Everyone above you benefits first, and the peons get to fight through the politics like Survivor & hope to be one of the chosen few that advance to Associate Prof, and then the even smaller group that get tenured. To no one’s surprise, there were clear gender & diversity differences across peer institutions, and most administrators didn’t care when it actually mattered, as long as they kept/gained more influence within the system.

I studied faculty attrition at AMCs, which gave me access to internal & external data that were eye-opening. Our research group met regularly with the c-suites (mostly bc certain sub-specialities were REALLY costly to replace, but even more expensive to not), but they regularly ignored the data. We had collected and produced mounds of data both at our institution & also through peer institutions, but most of the system-wide optics were more important than silo’d outcomes.