How tough is competition to become a perma faculty member at a third tier uni or better? Are there tons of brilliant postdocs to compete with? How many, 2, 5, 10, 50? How brilliant, just good or very good? Also, how much time in % do you estimate is spent on doing non-research as a postdoc? Such as lecturing, teaching grad studs, administration, grant writing? I imagine you get like 80% of the time to research, the rest goes to other stuff? Is math particularly different in this regard compared to other fields such as CS, theoretical physics, etc? Furthermore, it the academic landscape likely to change for the drastically worse in 5-10 years time? You know, increased competition from China and India, national budget deficits, faculty retiring... Reason for asking is I'm considering going into research.
I wish you good luck in getting someone who knows the answers to actually bother giving them to you. Perhaps like you, they achieved their position not because of curiosity, desire to develop something great for society or love of knowledge. It is perhaps more to do with getting into the Upper Class. The way to get in is to plow through years of liberal arts education that, supposedly, "teaches you how to think." When you have finished it, you have a sense of superiority and can from then on coast along with the academic elite and trample student required reports with the type of nit-picking comments often seen in the social science academic forums. My science speciality involves studying the academic professional good-boy network and their subjective rationalization. In my book, "The Last Civilization," I have a list of twenty-one of their rationalizing strategems in the Appendix. They are used by the Academic elite to make our secular world-view and way of thinking accommodate to not only Christianity but to all the world's old religions. brough civilization-overview dot com I hate nit-pickers!
I really only care for research for its own sake. But your book sounds interesting nonetheless. I highly recommend you make a topic on it somewhere on it on this site and get some indepth discussion going. Would be interesting to know what awaits one in academia. Anyways, anyone know anything about what I just asked?
