#9 Becoming A Professor
Written by SAPL on July 23rd, 2008 in Careers, Hobbies and Special Interests.
stjohns.edu
Many Asperger people obtain careers in academia. Often, the academic area of interest is something that was a special interest growing up. For this reason, becoming a professor is much like a “Revenge of the Asperger nerds,” experience.
In the old pre-PhD days, the Aspie had to find someone willing to put up with their endless hours of “drosophila fly mating” facts. When the Aspie becomes a professor, she finds joy in knowing not only will she be able to discuss the sexual behavior of flies, but people are willing to pay thousands of dollars and go into debt to hear her speak as well.
Great pleasure is taken in giving 2-hour speeches where students are now at the Aspie’s mercy-forced to take notes, maybe even pretend they are interested and ask questions if participation points are included in the grading system. The Aspie Professor loves giving telephone book sized notes and telling her students, “No cherry picking will take place,” as any ridiculous fact may be thrown in on a test.
The Asperger Professor will eventually become tenured after publishing dozens of papers about his fly voyeuristic experiences and being given lots of money by people like National Institutes of Health and various organizations he has convinced through careful con-artist intellectualizing (otherwise known as grant writing) studying fly sex will save the world. Or the children. Or the whales. It really just depends on the organization and how much money they’re willing to give him.
Finally, the tentured professor job is the opportunity for the Aspie to prove (at least to himself) why he really was put on the earth and that descriptions used to label him years ago by professionals that were obviously not as bright as he is (Pedantic, little professor syndrome) seem perfectly befitting and not abnormal at all. “Pedantic is good,” he thinks. “People are inherently stupid and it is my job to teach them. Or at least make them have sleepless nights memorizing fly sex facts.”
July 24th, 2008 at 3:06 am
Fly sex sounds hot. Where do I sign up?
July 24th, 2008 at 4:08 am
i am soooo glad you are writing this blog! this is just hysterical. and the photos are right on the money, too! having graduated from Ga. Tech, this is bringing back a flood of memories of my bizarre classmates, my best friend jim the aspie and myself.
July 24th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Nice blog; my friend has a son w/ Asperger /syndrome and they are really big in the autism community. He gave a me a statistic one day that a huge percent of Autistic Cildren stay w/ their paents forever.
August 13th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
[…] up there with Becoming A Professor, the career choice for many Aspergers is engineering. People who are engineers are more likely to […]
October 5th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
[…] topic in research and will soon generate millions of money that intellectual con-artists known as PhD grant writers with snatch. That area, responsible for the center of worrying in Asperger People, is called the […]
June 20th, 2010 at 6:45 pm
Aspies can NOT be professors any more. Corruption has reached the ivory tower. I was working in biomedical research until I caught my boss fabricating data, and also doing some less egregious misconduct. I refused to go along with that ended up losing my career over it. Scientists now need to be able to lie, cheat and steal, or at least tolerate those who do, or they will be shot down by their peersé