I was pretty shocked when my boss recently came to the conclusion that I do not like teaching students.  That is actually one of the things I like most about my job.  In the end I think she took my dislike for advising to mean I dislike teaching.  I can understand the connection but it forced me to think about the differences between teaching and advising students and how someone could enjoy one but dislike the other.

It basically comes down to the fact that I utterly hate managing people, and while advising consists of a great deal of teaching it also requires a great deal of managing.  Thus, the thing I enjoy most is actually teaching/helping other people’s students (or co-advising students).  I think this is also why post-docs are attractive.  They usually do not require much less teaching than graduate students (since their background does not usually match their current project) but they seem to require a whole lot less managing.

Loathing managing is not something I discovered later in my life; I remember feeling this way in high school. In fact, a big reason I decided to go to graduate school was to be able to have a job in which promotions did not mean managing more and more people.  (Although I realize now that is not necessarily the case in academia.)  The structure I saw at a Ford plastics plant (where everyone had a BS) and an IBM research lab (where everyone had a PhD) made me realize I needed an advanced degree to avoid the managerial track.

I am not sure why I hate managing so much.  Part of it is obviously that I am not very good at it.  However, that is more of a result of disliking it so much, i.e. I loathed managing before I realized I am terrible at it.  It is likely just a personality trait and similar to why many great athletes do not make good coaches.  While I enjoy helping people and giving them advice, I dislike telling them what they should do.  Everyone should just think for themselves.

This personality trait is also probably why I am a terrible recruiter and promoter.  I recall reading an article about the, so called, Fab Five who began their college basketball careers at Michigan while I was there.  In the article they mentioned how Juwan Howard and Chris Weber had very different personalities when it came to helping recruit new players.  The coaches would always have recruits spend a lot of time with Juwan because he thought Michigan was the best place in the world and would tell them they should play at Michigan.  Recruits spent very little time with Chris even though he was the best player because he was not a good recruiter.  He would basically tell them they should make up their own minds and go to college wherever they wanted.  I am much more like Chris in this regard.  While I never tell students they should not come to Penn State, I also do not pretend to think it is the greatest university.  There are a lot of reason students should want to come here, but I could say that about almost any university.

This seems to have a lot to do with ‘sales’, another thing I hate and am terrible at.  Managing is essentially very much like sales in that you are selling people tasks.  My terrible ability to sell myself and my research will the the topic of a future post.