Daily life as a college professor?

Question

I want to know if this career path is right for me. I am considering becoming a professor, but I am still in high school and therefore have no idea what the job of a professor entails. Can someone describe the daily tasks, and responsibilites of a professor for me? I'm assuming they grade a lot of research papers, but what is their daily routine in class like?? (I want to teach a foreign language: French or Spanish or Italian)

Answer 1

First of all, you will have to have a PhD to get a teaching job in a college or university. It depends on the size of your school and how long you have taught if you will be given a teaching assistant. Generally, a professor will have between 4-5 classes. The size varies, you can have large lecture style classes or smaller ones, depending again on what you are teaching. Newer teachers are usually assigned the intro classes, which are the lecture hall style. So you have to prepare lesson plans, give assignments, grade papers, mentor students and hold office hours. You also have to be part of your college community which means being on committees, in addition to maintaining your own scholarship, this is researching so you can publish articles or books.  There is a lot of internal pressure to produce original material and obtain grants. College professors work hard but are also not subject to a lot of the problems a k-12 teacher experiences due to the older age of the students.  

Answer 2

That very much depends on the type of college or university you work for.  If you are at a major research institution, for example, your life will be very different than if you work at a small liberal arts college or a community college.  Generally, decisions are made by the university or college about how the faculty's time will be allocated, usually between research, teaching, and "service".  You could be spending up to 70% on research, 20% on teaching, and 10% on service, 80% on teaching, 20% on service with no research, or 40% on research, 40% on teaching, and 20% on service, and so on.  

Research involves working on things like papers for journal publication or books (in areas like the arts it can involve very different activities), including designing the project, finding out what has been done in the past, gathering data, and writing the actual papers or books.  

Teaching involves preparing for classes, grading, writing exams, meeting with students during office hours, supervising student projects, and actually teaching the classes.  At some schools, it also involves doing academic advising of students, supervising theses, and various other activities.

Service includes serving on committees, preparing reports requested by the university, administrative responsibilities like serving as department chair or running a center, advising student groups, speaking to prospective students, participating in things like freshman orientation, etc.