Pros and Cons of BEING A UNI LECTURER

[Music] hi everyone so welcome to this video it is going to be the pros and cons of being a university lecturer um but before we jump in with the actual video content and hi i'm caroline i'm a university lecturer if this is the first time we've met on youtube but i've noticed in the comments that we tend to either chat about being a university lecturer or becoming a university lecturer so i have a plan on mondays i'm going to start to post videos about life as a uni lecturer so things i get up to my top five favorites things that happen in the academic semester student tips that'll all be in the monday video and the thursday video i'm going to start a bit of a series about tips and things to think about if you want to become a lecturer or if once you are a lecturer how you can progress your career so i'm going to talk from my own experiences obviously but we'll be covering things like you know how to know you're ready to become a lecturer when to put your application in how to find jobs which universities to target how to get ready your cv how to get ready for your actual job interview what is an academic presentation in an interview how much knowledge do you need to have in order to become a lecturer all of that will be coming up now on thursdays and on mondays i'll be sticking very much to things that are going on at university my day-to-day life as a lecturer activities that are happening around campus and basically what it's like day to day to be a university academic so mondays life as a lecturer thursdays becoming a lecturer today it's a thursday which means it's going to be a video linked to becoming a lecturer and i thought let's start with the pros and cons of being a lecturer so number one pro so the number one best thing i think about being a lecturer now i was torn here between you know getting to teach or pursuing research and i think really it's the academic freedom so as a university lecturer i'm able to pursue research lines of scientific study that interest me and when i was a scientist in industry i got to look at loads of interesting scientific topics and areas and i got to direct and shape research portfolios but ultimately i was working on projects that had an industrial customer now i'm in university land i can explore projects and ideas that maybe don't necessarily have a customer right at the start so i guess it's slightly more maybe scientific curiosity driven research but anyway academic freedom is definitely one of the big positives i think about being a lecturer but that goes hand in hand with one of the cons i guess and that is as a lecturer you are responsible for winning your own funding i need to put in applications and research grants to win my own money and that's money to fund the research of my students and also to fund the research of myself so yes my salary is paid for by the university but in order to actually do research i need to be effective at winning pots of money so i guess that's a bit of a con although maybe it's also a bit of a positive because it makes you very focused and structured when you're thinking about your future research direction you want to only put time and effort really into applying for research grants and pots of money that you think you might have a good chance of winning so it does make you think about your forward strategy a bit okay another positive about being a lecturer is the work life balance now this may be counterintuitive because i know a lot of media and press talks about the very long hours that lectures work and i'm not going to sit here and say that lecturers don't work long hours because we do but being a lecturer has the great benefit that i can structure my own time so yes there are obligations in the semester when i'm required for teaching or meetings or departmental duties but i also have quite a degree of flexibility into structuring my own week allocating when i'm going to have certain meetings allocating what i'm going to take on certain projects so i think the work-life balance is definitely a positive as an academic and i think when i compare my job as a university lecturer to working industry i definitely have more freedom as an academic to make my own balance of hours and to allocate when i do my research tasks i guess the the con though is that yes academics do work a lot of hours and that's because we tend to be juggling many things at the same time so i might be teaching i might be doing my own research i might be writing research grants i could be doing administration duties i'm the admissions tutor i could be writing papers there's there's a lot of activities that tend to happen simultaneously and that can drive up the number of hours that you spend working um and i think colleagues treat this in different ways i think my industry background makes me actually quite strict um i am quite protective of my own personal time i'm quite protective of having some time to go and do sport have some free time so i i think that definitely there are points in the calendar where i am working long hours but equally there's points when i'm not working long hours and overall for me the positive of being a lecturer is that i can make my own work-life balance and i can make the schedule work for me so that for me is a good thing okay another positive and it's a huge positive about being a lecturer is the fact that you get to teach students it's fantastic when you get to share a subject that you're interested in or share something that you're particularly passionate about or a new idea and you can share it with a group of really engaged students you have brilliant conversations they ask great questions they can make you think about the topic in a slightly different way that student interaction can be fantastic the con of that though of course is with all those wonderful interactions comes marking duties so as an academic lecturer i have quite a fair amount of marking to get through i'm sometimes going to have timetabled 9 o'clock classes i may have to teach particular derivations that maybe i don't want to teach at 9 o'clock in the morning but are timetabled for me to have to teach so yeah on the one hand teaching is a wonderful positive of the job um because you get such brilliant student interactions on the other hand don't forget it's going to come along with its share of marking um and kind of teaching duties that you will have to fulfill but that is my quick guide to pros and cons of being a lecturer it's the first then in this official series of becoming elektra my official youtube series please let me know in the comments if you are happy with that where we're going with the channel do like and subscribe it's great to have this academic space on youtube look after yourselves i'll be back on monday and monday's video will be something about life as a university lecturer so i hope to see you for that take care and i'll see you soon bye [Music] you

Channel: Dr CST

Views: 15,707

Keywords: becoming a uni lecturer, becoming a university lecturer, pros and cons of being a lecturer, dr cst, dr_cst, univeristy, lecturer, college professor

Id: GNUHPqY7x1k

Length: 7min 25sec (445 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2020