Looking at Going Back to College
I've spent a bit of time thinking about what to do in my forced hiatus, and when I happened upon a posting at North Central College, I thought "Hey, maybe it's something I should do?" So I sent in an email inquiry, and talked to a friend that loves teaching as much as I do, and was getting excited about the thought of teaching, doing a little consulting, and enjoying life a while lot more.
So I found the citations for all my papers, and put them on my resumes, and started thinking about writing up the first of many essays they wanted as part of the application packet.
Then I thought - I wonder if the pay is good enough? I don't need to supplement my complete salary from coding, as the consulting will help out quite a bit, but I need it to be enough that I can afford to take the job. So I hit up the web to see if there were anything with typical, maybe even average, salaries for faculty positions on campus.
And there were.
And it wasn't great news.
The average for Assistant Professors that I could find was in the high-50's. Then I looked nationally, and again, it confirmed what I had known in my years at Auburn, and that's the simple fact that faculty members don't make a ton of cash from teaching, it's from the books, and the consulting. So it's not really a great deal for me. I'd need to have such an amazing consulting income that I'd likely just skip the teaching and do more consulting. Or coding.
I was a little disappointed, but not totally surprised. It's something that you can do after you make your money - or if you can live on a lot less than downtown Naperville housing prices. It's just not really feasible at this time.
I may still go through with it - just to see what the actual numbers may be, but I know it's not going to be something I'm able to count on as my primary income. That's going to have to be back to the finance world.
Darn. It would have been nice.