The Informed Physics Student

The Food Chain

Say you're in college. You don't necessarily know, as a freshman, or even as an undergrad at all, what the real food chain that you're at the bottom of is. Let me give you some idea of what you've gotten yourself into.

You see, the collegiate, or university, food chain is actually quite large, and, contrary to popular belief, you should really know all of it.

Let's start at the bottom. Here you have undergrads. Freshmen are usually considered the lowest of the low due to their lack of seniority, but they have other things going for them. More on that later. Next up you have high school seniors who are interning or who are pre-frosh, there to check out the school. (This repeats itself higher up, but I'll get to that.) From there, you have grad students, of two kinds: acute and chronic. The acute ones usually only have the disease for 2-3 years, maximum, and are called Masters students (probably because they're still masters of their own fates), while the chronic cases can stay on sometimes in excess of 10 years. These are the Ph. D. students.

A side note here on undergraduate and graduate research. Research will increase your rank in this hierarchy. However, someone doing research is probably just as overworked as about ten of you, so the following rules apply:

- Do not pester.

- Approach only with something they'd like (like good experimental data, or a new shiny graphing calculator).

- Do NOT, on pain of DEATH, inquire how their most recent talk, thesis, paper, or other presentation or article is going. This adds to the feeling of depression that follows most research in its beginning stages by showing that there is, as always, ever so much more to do than what you've already done.

For more on the plight of the grad student, go to PHD comics. Next, post-docs. These are people who are continuing their research after having earned their Ph. D. Poor saps... think of them as the recovering form of the chronic grad student.

Now come the professors. They come in a number of flavors, as I'm certain you've noticed from those hard-earned name tags adorning their various office doors and web pages. First of all, you have the teaching assistant, who's normally just a grad student masquerading as a professor. Some of them do a darned good job of it, too, but they have little to no authority outside the classroom. Next come the assistant professors. They're hard working because they have to be in order to get tenure. Once they obtain this, they generally move on to associate professor. Full professors come after this, followed by [insert honorary title here] professors, research professors, and [insert name of major donor here] professors, who generally have powers in that order.

An aside here on two other kinds of professors: the little known adjuncts and emeriti. Adjunct professors are un-tenured, and are either visiting professors (another type about equivalent to associate professor) or are people who are taking time off from another job to teach (read this as "glorified assistant professor or TA"). A professor emeritus, on the other hand, is the best type that you can become friends with, as they are usually very kind to students, seeking to maintain a link to youth despite retirement, and do not demand much from you. Above all else, they usually have a great deal of informal influence and power, and a dread awesome capability to navigate the administrative and bureaucratic labyrinth that is your school. Make friends with one today!

For more on the species of professors, visit Wikipedia: Professor. Next up are those most put-upon of all academic parties, the department heads. These are normally full or honored professors who are given the administrative equivalent of a very very large hot tuber for however long they can keep it between their shoulder blades. Be nice to them, and they will be nice to you. A professor who is a department head (or chair) is probably not sleeping or eating properly, and is probably missing the best parts of their job (read that teaching or research, dependent on the professor in question). Another name for this particular species is "convener".

Now we come to the dean of a school or college. If you're in a college, then you're probably in a "school" or "program". You may even be in more than one, such as an honors program and the school of liberal arts and sciences. If you be, instead, in a university, chances are you are a member instead of a particular college, or more, i.e. the John Maser Smith Engineering College and the Jane Positron Jones College of Sciences. Either way, you have a dean, and this dean is who the department heads report to. In turn, there is a council of deans from the different programs, schools, or colleges, who all talk to each other about mid-level academic/administrative affairs.

Now here comes the hard part. From here on up, our organization chart develops different branches. The Provost takes care of academics from the top down, and the Registrar makes certain (under supervision of the Provost) that courses and grades run smoothly. Institutional Advancement usually has a deceptively named head, such as a "vice-president" who can be looked to for funds to do things that they can use to promote the school (particularly useful when you want to interact with the community outside your institution). The Bursar takes care of funds (and in Terry Pratchett's books, makes certain that the head of the institution is at least somewhat clueless as to what's going on... real life parallels should be discussed in your comments).

Finally, in the next-to-last tier of the now purely administrative parts, we have the President and his bosses. The President makes clear the course of the institution and more or less acts as the figurehead for the administration. His or her bosses, however, control the real power: the Board of Trustees. In some more progressive institutions, the Board may have a member at large among the student population; a student Trustee. Note the Capitalization. Trustees are not to be trifled with, as by mere whim alone they can turn on or off the funding of any department or project that the institution elects to undertake. If you can't avoid talking to them (and thereby taking direct responsibility for what they do to the people above and below you on the food chain), take an aggressive approach and either dazzle them with brilliance or baffle them with... Well, dazzle them.

The lesson for today:
We call them institutions because the inmates are running the asylum.

posted by Pete Marchetto @ 10:56 PM