Do professors get the summer off?

I get that question a lot.  Like pretty much everyday between May and August.  The short answer is no, but I thought I’d post a brief explainer.

I work at a primarily undergraduate Canadian university (e.g. we have lots of students doing Bachelor’s degrees, but fewer MSc/MA and PhD students).  At Canadian institutions large and small, full-time professors usually work 12 months/year (the situation is different for instructors and sessional profs – e.g. those that are paid by the course).

When people hear you’re a prof, they often assume that your primary job is teaching.  And it is.  But our primary job is also research.

My work falls into 3 general categories:

1. Teaching – teaching courses, and also mentoring Honour’s and Graduate students
2. Research – collecting and analysing data, writing up data, presenting/publishing data
3. Service – sitting on committees for the university (Research Ethics, Biosafety, etc) or professional organizations, student thesis committees, and doing work with/for community groups.

At institutions like mine, the general expectation is that we spend roughly 40% of our time in activities related to teaching, 40% of our time doing research, and 20% doing service (the relative focus on research is likely higher at a more research intensive university, and someone working at a non-university research institution is likely expected to only do research).  No one is counting the minutes spent on each, and there is some overlap between these activities (e.g. I met with my MSc student today, which is both teaching and research) but that’s the general idea.

Let’s assume that a prof is teaching 4 courses/year – 2 in the fall, and 2 in the winter.  Designing courses, preparing/giving lectures and labs, meeting with students, grading, etc, for those 2 courses can easily fill up 25-30 hours/week in the fall and winter.  That doesn’t leave a tremendous amount of time for research or service, so in the fall and winter you tend to do the essential work, and to try to get data collected (at least that’s been my focus).  But you don’t get 3-4 consecutive days to work on a project non-stop, which some research projects require.

When summer rolls around, the relative amount of focus on teaching and research flips for me.  I’m still doing course planning (debriefing last year’s courses, tweaking things for the coming year, ordering textbooks and prepping early lectures/assignments, etc), but trying to spend as much time as possible writing papers.  For example, earlier this summer I went to Ottawa to work on a paper with colleagues for 3 days.  That was necessary for that specific project, but wouldn’t have been possible in the fall or winter.

Summer is also (for me) the time when you collect pilot data, apply for research ethics for upcoming student projects, and buy equipment for the coming year’s data collection.  Hopefully you take some vacation time as well. Service tends to go in ebbs and flows – a lot of meetings for student committees in September, non-stop Honour’s thesis defenses in April – although it does get a bit lighter in the summer.

The end result is that I’m just as busy in the summer as I am in the fall and winter, but my day-to-day work life looks very different.

Travis