Yesterday we examined Pirates and First World War Message Runners with edutaining results. Whether you’re on vacation today or not, you’ll love the next installment of this award-worthy series. Enjoy!
Best. Job. Ever. Number 4!
Welcome to my dream job: University Professor. They’ve been around – more or less – for about 150 years; however, it’s been in the last half-century that this profession has come to occupy coveted status in the education business. Depending on your university’s primary focus (research or teaching), the work you do will be different. Researchers are positioned as thought-leaders. They write about what they find and get their grad students to do the rest. Teachers take the big ideas (the good ones continue reading new things even after they have tenure) and explain the concepts to undergraduate students in, hopefully, semi-engaging ways. Everyone wears tweed and/or corduroy and it is frickin’ Heaven.
Summary of Academically Sound Findings and Analysis:
UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR
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LOW |
MEDIUM |
HIGH |
TOTAL: |
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| Level of Hardship | Unless 500-person classes and a lingering sense of guilt for all the trees killed by your printing then, well, you have little hardship, my professorial friend. Especially if you have tenure! | 4/5 | ||
| Opportunity for Advancement | Even though a tenured professor in a Canadian University is pretty much at the pinnacle of the Ivory Tower career trajectory, | 3/5 | ||
| Meaningful Nature of Work | Even though all but nine other people on the planet have ever read anything you’ve written, your work is still meaningful to you. Sometimes you even get interviewed by the CBC or BBC because of your knowledgeable insights into the 17th century Venetian salt trade. If you’re a good/great lecturer, you will most likely derive meaning from the video screens that project your image to a three classrooms of 1,500 students, too. Or you teach at a small Liberal Arts college and you’re actually part of a small-is-better community that gives you meaning on top of all the other stuff! |
4/5 | ||
Worst. Job. Ever. Number 4!
The Potentiality’s Grandfather, Brent Reid, sent along this gem. The job of Fact Checker at Fox News might possibly be made up, but it was just too funny not to include! So, the profession of fact-checking is pretty straightforward: review publications before they go to print and make sure that the claims made in said publications can be verified by primary and/or secondary sources. Now. How this translates into a role at Fox News is a difficult process, because some of the things that gentlemen such as Bill O’Reilly, Shawn Hannity and Glenn Beck say are a bit, um, unreal. Verifying facts in a Fox News story is like analyzing team chemistry on the Calgary Flames or the Toronto Maple Leafs: there just isn’t anything there.
Summary of Academically Sound Findings and Analysis:
FACT-CHECKER AT FOX NEWS
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LOW |
MEDIUM |
HIGH |
TOTAL: |
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| Level of Hardship | It’s pretty easy to be a Fact-checker at Fox News. Observe: “Did you finish the fact-check for today’s Talking Points?”
“Yessir, I did.” “Did you find any facts?” “Not one, sir.” “That’s great work.” |
2/5 | ||
| Opportunity for Advancement | Fact-checkers aren’t going far in Rupert Murdoch’s empire. Maybe you should’ve been a History Professor… | Fox News is expanding like crazy and Sarah Palin is just crazy might be the next POTUS. So, your soul will burn for all eternity, but your perusal of fear-inspiring-facts will guarantee your future in the Murdoch/Palin Empire! |
2/5 | |
| Meaningful Nature of Work | There is no meaning to your work because non of it is ever published, presented or spoken about. In fact, if you actually happen to produce “facts” you are most likely asked to burn them and then “get back to work” on writing hateful things about immigrants, minorities, poor people, FEAR, Obama, and fearing Obama because he will back the country with poor immigrants who believe in climate change! | 1/5 | ||
Reflections on these Jobs
GODFREY: To live in a perpetual, oxymoronic prison of ridiculousness is hardly the way I’d choose to spend my nine to five. At Fox News, “facts” are embellished or are outright faleshoods. Checking facts would entail, packaging lies as truth. Being a slave to falsehood would crush my soul. Lastly being a propaghanda slave at Fox may only work if I stood on the right of the spectrum. Even then I’d have to check my morals at the door as well.
University Profs have it totally made – it’s one of my top picks. They gets paid to becoming knowledgeable and share that knowledge. And pretty handsomely at that. A philosophy professor at University of Toronto can earn up to $160k /year, according to Macleans – and that’s just to THINK . I think what makes her job so in incredible that she reinvents it all the time, constantly pursuing new lines of inquiry and exploration. Sure, her contract requires a certain degree of publishing output, sometimes a slog, but that’s what sabbaticals (travel, time off…) are for. And if inspiration doesn’t strike, well, smoking a pipe, wearing tweed and reading books is also all in a day’s work. After all – tenure is tenure.
JOHN: I think that there are two reasons we didn’t rank University Professors as Number 1: first, we would be branded as nerds or nerd-lovers and/or pinko-communist-elitist-intellectuals; second, it’s actually harder and harder to get tenure today, as modestly-compensated sessional instructors continue to be the teaching backbone of the North American university system. Also, could you imagine being a Fact-Checker at Fox News?! Like, imagine if the random and offensive things that Glenn Beck writes down on his chalk-board are actually researched. The sheer incongruency of it all makes my head spin.
Just another example of the right-wing perspective that I have come to expect from this blog: portraying university professors as highly-paid dreamers who don’t have to do anything because they have tenure. Just the sort of perspective used to justify funding cuts to higher education. The fact checker at Fox “news” may have a soul destroying job, but the selective-fact-finder at Macleans who found a philosophy professor making $160k /year isn’t much further ahead.
Seriously though… really? You think profs have it made? I mean, it’s alright, but #4? And where is porn star on your list?
Julian.
At least three people (one of whom was a prof) listed this job as the best ever. I kinda have to agree. Don’t act like you’re not doing what you love, you big nerd, you.
Also, Porn Stars didn’t even crack the Top 20. Recent findings show that most of them are, like most Fact Checkers at Fox News, dead inside.
When we made this list we weren’t trying to make friends. We were trying to make a difference. Mission:accomplished.
So you had one person who actually knows what they’re talking about say that being a prof is great? The Fox Fact Checker would be proud.
It is true that as part of my work, I do get to do a couple of the many things that I love to do, but unfortunately I am required to do them to the exclusion of a lot of other things I like doing.
As for making friends, I’ll grant you that this series is more friendly than that divisive neo-con advert by Heinrich.
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