Professors have least stressful jobs

UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS hold the least stress­ful jobs, new research finds.

A recent study has found that university pro­fessors are amongst the least stressed employ­ees in the country. The research, completed by CareerCast.com, came to its conclusion after considering almost a dozen factors including deadlines, working in the public eye, physical demands and hazards encountered within the workplace.

The study found that the substantial sal­ary most professors enjoy contributes greatly to their low levels of stress: the Times Higher Education statistics for 2011 show that the aver­age annual salary for a full time professor was £75,790. Average annual earnings for UK work­ers overall are £26,500, meaning that university professors enjoy an income almost three times higher than that of the average worker.

As well as this, the research states that uni­versity professors are also lucky in that, unlike primary and secondary school teachers, they are educating people who have chosen to study the subject they teach and are in general more enjoyable and rewarding to work with.

First year physicist Danny Johnson, speaking of his tutor, quipped, “He obviously derived stress from first principles, and worked out that it wasn’t optimal.”

However there has been some protest from university professors at the findings of the re­search. A comment left on the Career Cast web­site said, “Hmmm…so what is it to lecture to 300 students? (or 30 or 70, for that matter)? And they say public speaking is ranked among the most feared, stressful things persons can imag­ine, not even preferable to threat of death…”

There have also been arguments raised about the fact that pressure is put on professors to continue to ensure their students perform aca­demically well, even if it would not necessar­ily reflect badly on them if their students did poorly.

PPEist Sean Thomas said, “I can see that hav­ing the ability to involve yourself in your sub­ject professionally must be a hugely rewarding prospect. But then at the same time it must be utterly soul-destroying to have to read the same garbage handed in every week by your fresher philosophy students each year, for the rest of your working life.”

A first year Keble student looked at the find­ings on a much more personal level, saying, “If this is true, it explains why our tutor has so much time to think up new ways to punish us.”