Balancing Act

Research, teaching, and service are the three components of professorial work. The teaching part everyone is quite familiar with. The research part less so, but people know about it and have some sort of vague idea of what it might be (usually involved benchwork and beakers and copious amounts of dry ice -- I think the dry ice is what makes it all science-y). The service part is something that people outside of academia have no idea about. Even as a grad student, I only had a vague notion of what service was. I just understood it as my advisor went to (mysterious) college-wide committee meetings and was a committee member for different grad students as they were going through qualifying exams and their dissertation.

How these three components are balanced depends upon the institution that the professor is at. My friends at research institutions are expected to have a 45% (research) - 45% (teaching) - 10% (service) load. I haven't asked my friends at SLACs what their load is expected to be like, but it would definitely be less on the research and more on the service.

No one ever told me at my institution what the expected break down to be, but looking roughly at the hours that I put in in a typical week, it's 50% (teaching) - 40% (service) - and 10% (research). Actually, I would very reluctantly say that the 10% for research is probably an overstatement. I can recall plenty of weeks where research was simply not possible given my teaching load.