Speaker 1: What is an assistant professor? So an assistant professor is the rank below an associate professor in the university system. So generally this is, so within North America, so Canadian and as well as, you know, American, United States of America institutions, they have sort of this ranking system, assistant, associate and full professor. There's also in Europe, they kind of have, depending on which country you're at depending on which institution you're at, they might have this, but they might also have sort of systems that are sort of that fit within their particular country, right? So Germany has a different system. The UK has a different system. Australia kind of has this system as well. But generally, most universities now are moving towards a sort of tenure based system like this. And generally, so what does it mean? Assistant professor means that you haven't gotten tenure yet. And so you can get the rank of associate professor once you get tenure. Now, it depends, depending, some institutions will bump you up and make you an associate professor, and it's usually at very good institutions. So they'll do that without tenure. So you can become an associate professor without tenure. But generally at the vast majority of the institutions, so universities, they give you tenure once you, or you become an associate professor to the same time you become a, at the same time you get tenure. So what does that mean? You know, what is tenure? Tenure just really means you belong to the club. And you can imagine each university is its own club. And there's different sort of ranks of clubs that are out there. Some clubs are very highly ranked and they're difficult to get into, right? And you can imagine, so just like any other club, right? It's like a club, golf club or soccer club or, you know, football club, depending on where you are in the world. You know, any sort of club, some of them are much more difficult to get into, some of them are easier to get into, but basically it just means when you get tenure, it means that you belong to that particular club. And that's really all it means. And really, so how it happens, the whole tenure process happens is that there is the group of tenured faculty at the particular university system, they will vote. And there's all sorts of different sort of styles and what might happen. It might be sort of majority rules, which means that half, you know, at least half the other tenure faculty have to vote on and say, we like what you're doing. Or it could be, you know, absolutely everybody has to give the sign off on it. And it just depends on the institution. And there's all sorts of differences on that. But basically it just means you belong, once you become tenured, you belong to this very prestigious club at whatever institution you're at. And, you know, you're welcome to work there for the rest of your life. Tenure is very difficult to get at a lot of institutions. And it's not so difficult to get at some other institutions. But, you know, really what it depends on is a particular supply and demand for the people that are wanting to get into that particular institution. So you can imagine, you know, the world's best universities, you know, I'm sure you're well aware of them, like Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, all of those elite private universities, those are really, really hard to get tenure at. University of Pennsylvania, Ivy League schools, they're very hard to get tenure at. And the requirements to get tenure are quite high. And what they're looking for is, you know, are you on your way or are you already recognized internationally for the thing that you do? Are you like the world's expert in that thing? And that's really what they're looking for at any of these particular institutions. And, you know, it could be classified in different ways. Sometimes they might look for at very low level institutions. You might be just kind of, you know, moderately sort of internationally recognized and at the world's best institutions. You are the best person in the whole world within a very broad category of the particular whatever it is that you're looking at, right? So, and that's really the general gist of it. And then depending on, you know, at the different university levels. So for example, there might be the top 25 universities. Those people in any of those top 25 universities are all basically equivalent. They can be sort of interchanged and they kind of move back and forth and all that. You know, the people that are from, you know, the top 100 universities, they can be all kind of interchanged and then so on and so forth, right? So it was kind of like a pecking order and the university doesn't necessarily matter in terms of where you're at and whatnot. And the people can sort of be interchangeably. And sometimes you get at different universities, people that are absolutely outstanding that could be tenured at the world's best university, but they aren't there because, you know, for all sorts of other reasons, personal reasons, maybe they live in a particular country or they're from a particular country, or, you know, their family, their, you know, wife or husband is from a particular country and they wanna stay in that region or they just love, maybe they love skiing, for example, and they live close to the mountains. And, you know, there's all sorts of reasons like that, that people just sort of decide, you know, why they want, don't want to go. Some amazing people don't decide why they don't wanna get tenure at a particular university. Oftentimes, one thing to think about is that oftentimes it might be in a really, you know, these prestigious universities are in a very large city. And so if you're not like into the large city thing, then you might sort of think about, well, I'm not gonna do that, right? So how do you actually, how do you become an assistant professor? So how do you become an assistant professor? And it's different depending on what sort of, you know, what's your field of study? I'm in business. So the thing, the general requirement is you need a PhD and you need publications or, you know, on your way to get very good publications, meaning you have what are called revise and resmits. There's all sorts of things to think about with it, but that's generally what you're there looking for. Are you actually research active and publishing and trying to be research active? And do you have a PhD to become an assistant professor? Now the requirements sort of, and again, and this is why it's kind of loosey goosey, right? But the requirements, depending on the particular university that you're at, and some of them are much more harder and you might need like, in my field, maybe you need three publications or four publications or one that's single authored or whatever, you know, there's all sorts of requirements. And then the ones that are at the lower level, maybe you just need to go to a couple of conferences or something along those lines. But in general, there's a trend across the world that there's many people that are going online and like going, there's countries that are becoming, you know, that they're moving out of poverty. And that means that those people are getting better educations, which means that there's more pressure on the system and there's more universities. And so everything's kind of ratcheting up, right? So that's generally what's happening, right? So there's more supply of able-bodied skilled labor and sort of less demand for them in the sense that, or the demand is fixed. It's not necessarily changing too much. Although it is changing definitely in terms of people wanting more university education, but the supply is slightly outpacing the demand, right? So that's really why there's this ratcheting up sort of thing that's happening in terms of requirements to become an assistant professor. And then finally to get tenure, there is this ratcheting up. So what do you do as an assistant professor? Mostly you do research. So the vast majority of your time is gonna be spent doing research and that really is universal across most universities. And then a small portion, you know, if it's on the high end, 50% of your time is gonna be doing teaching. And if it's like, you're at a really research-focused university at the low end, you might be only spending about, you know, 20% of your time doing teaching. And then an even smaller amount, what is called service. So this is belonging to different committees and things like that, you know, that generally you want to, not a lot of service. So this could be, these YouTube videos right now could be considered service, sort of. I don't think so, but you know, it's more of me just giving back to you, but you know, some people might sort of consider this as service to the college. And the college is not, when I say college or academia, it's not talking about a particular university. So it's not my institution, but it's to the university system as a whole. So everybody around the world can actually watch these videos and they might think it's really cool, right? So it's me just giving back. There's a lot of that that happens. If you didn't know that, that's the whole university system is based on sort of building, you know, reciprocity and as well as giving back as much as you possibly can. And that's just the whole process. It's a really, in a lot of ways, sort of altruistic, but you know, people do this kind of altruistically to be sort of self-interested in a lot of different ways. And I can get into all that kind of stuff later on if you're at all interested, but generally, so that's what an assistant professor is and that's what this whole video is about. So hopefully you learned something. It is the rank before you become an associate professor in a university system and you need to get tenure to become an associate professor. So it's the stage between when you graduated from a PhD or did a couple of postdocs or whatever it is, depending on what sort of where you're at and when you actually get tenure at a university. And an assistant professor is pretty competitive, pretty tough sort of thing to do, but at the same time, it's doable. People actually do do it. And hopefully you did learn something from this. If there's anything else that I'm missing, please do let me know. Anyways, take care.