Today in Water Jobs we
discuss fishing and writing with Dr. James Garvey, who is the director of the Center for Fisheries, Aquaculture,
and Aquatic Sciences, as well as a professor of zoology, at Southern
Illinois University Carbondale. Dr. Garvey is a graduate of Miami University
(Ohio) and completed his MS and PhD at Ohio State University. His interest in
fish was inspired by “spending summer vacations on a houseboat in Kentucky,
sweating, swimming, and fishing” where he said always felt “more comfortable on
a boat or scurrying around underwater than hanging out on land.”
You’re the first professor we’ve featured on Water Jobs. Would you
please tell us what being a professor looks like in the day-to-day?
What I like most about being a professor is that every day
is different. I get to hang out with the
brightest people and learn new things all the time. So, it is a bit tough to map out a typical
day.
My hypothetical day starts with me coming into the office
and feeding the fish, anemones, and corals in our three aquaria. While doing that, a couple of my graduate
students pop in and ask for advice about how to ship off some of our fish
specimens from our ichthyology collection to a researcher at another
university. After chatting with them
about that task and telling them to finish their proposals, I work on a
textbook I am writing and then, when I’m finally getting somewhere with the
text, I have to run off to teach my class.
I miss lunch as usual, finding myself in a meeting talking about
university politics with colleagues. In
the afternoon, I run over to our lab and hitch a ride with one of our research
crews going into the field to collect water samples from a local lake. When I get home, I eat dinner with the
family, and then settle into the evening by reviewing a research proposal,
while watching some episode of Dr. Who.
I might remember to take a shower and wash off the fish smell, if my
family is lucky.
We’ve observed that most professors work a lot more than 40 hours a
week. How much time do you spend on your work, and how do you divide it into
teaching, research, and service?
Being a professor is an honor and a gift. Most of us consider it a lifestyle rather
than a profession. For me, a trip with
the family to the beach is more than sunscreen and straw hats. It’s an opportunity to contemplate the
complex biological processes occurring in the ocean. I can’t turn it off!
So, I guess I work all day, every day, because that’s what I
was made do. The distinctions among
teaching, research, and service are fuzzier than many folks outside of
universities might realize. Teaching is
going on all the time. I may spend only
a few hours a week in the lecture hall, but I interact with students at all
levels throughout each day, whether to talk about class stuff, research
progress, or career goals. My days of
collecting my own research data are largely over, although this is by choice -
many faculty still do lab and field work.
My students conduct most of the research, which I help guide through
conversations and the occasional field trip.
The students cringe when I go into the field with them, because I’m a
disaster (very accident prone).
Something expensive on the boat is going to get broken if Garvey’s in
the field. Service is a weird category
for faculty. Technically, none of us
faculty get hired to “serve” the university or our profession, but heck, yeah
we do a lot of it. An example of service
is sitting on a committee to decide how much service faculty should be doing –
really. I try to avoid doing service,
but we senior faculty seem to end up doing more of this to spare the
newbies. All I can say to that is
“yawn”.
What is your favorite aspect of your job, and does it correspond with
any good stories you’re willing to share?
Traveling to meet with colleagues and talk about research is
probably my favorite job-related activity.
I had the opportunity to visit China a couple of years ago, which was
illuminating in a variety of ways. I
work with Asian carp, an invader here in the US, but a native delicacy in
China. My first night was in
Shanghai. After getting off the plane, I
had a total of an hour to relax before my first dinner meeting. In a blink, the
phone in my room rang and I realized I had passed out. Jet-lagged and exhausted, I shuffled down to
the private room where a lavish feast was laid out before my companions and
me. The very first course was fish-head
soup made from a bighead carp – one of the invaders here in the US. My study organism was floating in broth in
its home country, staring me down. And
it was absolutely delicious.
When did you decide you wanted to go to graduate school?
When I was in fifth grade, I wanted to be an
astronomer. That was Carl Sagan’s
fault. Does that count?
Actually, I had no clue about graduate school until I was a
junior in college. I had an opportunity
to conduct individual research in a lab and met some great graduate students
and post docs. I decided that I liked
what they were doing – conducting research, writing, and talking science. The alternative – a real job – was not
looking as desirable. I worked in a
lumberyard during college and knew what real labor was like. Exercising my mind was more of my style.
