Sangmin Simon Oh

In Praise of the Academic Gig

June 2025

Very few people are born to be a finance professor. Or a dentist. Or any particular profession, for that matter. "We are what we pretend to be," Kurt Vonnegut observed, "so we must be careful what we pretend to be." After completing my first year as an assistant professor of finance, I've come to see this not as a warning but as an invitation — a reminder that identity emerges through sustained performance, and that the roles we grow into often surprise us with their richness.

The path here was hardly linear. As a child, I dutifully announced my intention to become a dentist, following my parents' footsteps. When that lost its appeal (I remember telling them that a dentist's life seemed "too predictable") I pivoted to electrical engineering in college. Somewhere in my Google Photos are pictures of me struggling with my senior project: a water sample collecting drone that refused to cooperate. I have vivid memories of overnight sessions fixing a digital catheter that kept breaking, methodically checking every connection to locate a stubborn short circuit. The satisfaction of finally solving these technical puzzles was definitely real.

The decisive shift came through an investment management class at Wharton with Rob Stambaugh. Here was someone who could make math feel like storytelling, showing how equations captured something essential about why people make terrible financial decisions. An internship at a hedge fund in India and another in Greenwich showed me finance in the wild, but it was my first research collaboration with Jessica Wachter that completed the conversion. The process of turning a half-formed idea into something rigorous and testable felt quite appealing. I also realized that academic research was less about having all the answers and more about asking better questions.

My PhD years at Chicago perhaps brought the most profound transformation. The place has a way of making you feel simultaneously brilliant and completely inadequate. I developed reverence for the field's history while constantly comparing myself to faculty who seemed to operate on a different intellectual plane. But somehow this environment pushed me to think bigger, to see how individual papers might actually matter beyond just getting published.

Columbia has been a perfect place for me. I cherish the fact that my colleagues are friendly, curious, and experts in their respective topics. They are highly intelligent, and I can always find someone willing to discuss ideas across different fields. The collaborative atmosphere makes the intellectual isolation that can characterize academic work feel much more manageable and less daunting.

During my first semester of teaching at Columbia, a student asked me what finance professors actually do. The question caught me off guard because the answer is genuinely complex. I would say that academics are most like filmmakers — though admittedly, filmmakers with smaller budgets and longer production cycles. We spend months or years developing projects that may or may not find an audience. We also pitch ideas to funders (who rarely seem as enthusiastic as we are) and work within institutional and artistic constraints while trying to create something meaningful.

In fact, there's a specific dynamic that defines academic work: everyone wants narratives. Colleagues, journal editors, conference attendees — they all ask the same questions: "Why is this new? Why is this interesting?" It's like being a storyteller who must constantly justify why their story deserves to exist. You learn to craft compelling narratives around your findings, to situate your work within existing literature while highlighting its novel contributions.

Unlike the immediate feedback of teaching where you know within minutes whether a concept landed, research operates on geological time scales. You might spend six months pursuing what feels like a brilliant insight, only to discover it's been thoroughly explored in a 1987 paper you somehow missed. The research process humbles you quickly and teaches you that patience and persistence matter more than initial brilliance. Most "breakthroughs" emerge not from sudden inspiration but from the academic equivalent of showing up to the gym every day for two years.

But academic life encompasses far more than research, however central that remains. It is akin to wearing multiple hats, sometimes simultaneously, which creates an interesting cognitive challenge. There's the researcher hat, the teacher hat, the mentor hat, the administrator hat, the occasional diplomat hat (when faculty politics get particularly baroque), the therapist hat (for students undergoing existential crises) and the salesperson hat (for convincing anyone that your research is actually interesting).

The research findings, if you're lucky, eventually get disseminated to policy circles. There's also contributing to the academic community through advising PhD students, attending seminars, and reviewing manuscripts. Perhaps most importantly, there's creating the community itself: recruiting new faculty, evaluating doctoral candidates, and participating in the complex social infrastructure that sustains intellectual life.

This diversity initially can feel quite overwhelming. Each responsibility requires different skills and operates on different timescales. Research projects unfold over years, while teaching demands daily preparation. Administrative work involves immediate decisions that somehow shape long-term institutional direction.

I've learned in my short career so far that success requires developing two complementary strategies. First is discipline in time management and priority setting, as the freedom of academic life can become paralyzing without clear structure. It turns out that when you can work on anything at any time, the paradox of choice becomes real. Second is cultivating what I call "micro-pleasures" — small achievements that provide satisfaction even when major projects stall. These might be work-related: successfully explaining a difficult concept to students, organizing a productive seminar, making progress on a stubborn empirical problem. Or completely mundane: making your bed, sending a short newsletter, finishing your daily exercise. These daily wins sustain momentum during the inevitable periods when research progress feels like watching grass grow.

The need for micro-pleasures reflects a deeper truth about knowledge work. Unlike manufacturing, where you can count widgets and track revenue, academic progress often occurs in fits and starts. Months of apparent stagnation might precede sudden breakthroughs. You need internal metrics of progress that don't depend entirely on external validation; otherwise you'd spend most of your time questioning your life choices.

Reflecting on this first year, I often consider my counterfactuals. I might have become a hardware engineer, or a quantitative researcher at a hedge fund, or perhaps a banker on Wall Street. Each would have offered different satisfactions. But none would have provided the intellectual freedom that defines academic life: the ability to pursue questions simply because they seem important.

But stepping back from the mechanics of daily academic life, the first year has taught me several broader lessons.

First, the nature of academic competition is genuinely unique. We compete both across time and globally. Modern academia operates as a truly global marketplace where a breakthrough in Bangalore immediately challenges assumptions in Boston. Perhaps more unusually, we also compete across time: not just with our contemporaries but with the accumulated wisdom of every economist who came before us. Your clever insight about market efficiency needs to reckon with decades of prior work, and sometimes you discover that Arrow already figured it out in 1965.

Second, the transition from PhD student to faculty required abandoning tools that had served me well in graduate school. As a student, advisors provide structure and guidance, essentially serving as your intellectual GPS. As faculty, you must create your own agenda while managing teaching, service, and administrative duties. The optimization problem changes entirely. What worked for producing one major project under supervision doesn't scale to juggling multiple concurrent responsibilities independently. It's reminiscent of Wittgenstein's observation about his philosophical arguments being like a ladder to be discarded once you've climbed it — the strategies that get you to one level become obsolete for the next.

Third, I've discovered the importance of what I call "travel limbo" time, those stretches of forced idleness on delayed trains or in airport terminals. Having deliberate analog practices for these moments creates islands of focus amid collective restlessness. Whether sketching in a notebook, working through analytical problems, or drafting ideas in longhand, these disconnected periods become surprisingly fertile ground for thought. The key is preparation: anticipating these liminal spaces and positioning yourself to harness rather than merely endure them. Some of my best productivity sessions have emerged not from office hours but from being trapped on a delayed Amtrak train with nothing but a notebook and a stubborn problem.

Fourth, academia proves more forgiving of perceived "weirdness" than many other professions. Intellectual obsessions that might seem antisocial in corporate settings become badges of expertise in academic contexts. The capacity for sustained focus on narrow problems is actually valued as scholarly depth. You can spend months obsessing over a particular econometric specification, and instead of being told to "get a life," colleagues nod appreciatively and ask detailed questions about your identification strategy. Though I suspect this tolerance may diminish as artificial intelligence makes certain forms of specialized knowledge more accessible.

Fifth, perhaps the most important trait for academic success is capacity for sustained effort. High achievers across fields share this thread: extraordinary reserves for maintaining momentum across years and decades. While we often mistake raw talent for the key ingredient of success, the reality shows it's about persistence through inevitable setbacks and slow periods. While we can't all be prodigies, stamina is something we can cultivate through conscious effort and proper pacing. Sustainable success isn't about sporadic bursts of brilliance but about showing up day after day with enough energy to push boundaries. It's the academic equivalent of compound interest — small, consistent efforts that accumulate into something substantial over time.

Sixth, one psychological tool I've found valuable is the magic of mental accounting, flexibly switching between viewing academic work as investment versus consumption. Life's most meaningful projects often span years, demanding sustained effort with uncertain outcomes. We typically frame these endeavors as investments, carefully weighing time costs against potential future returns. This keeps us focused but can breed anxiety when progress feels slow.

The mental shift involves viewing projects as consumption when the journey feels tough: the daily reading becomes intellectual exploration, the data analysis becomes puzzle-solving. This perspective helps find joy in the process rather than fixating on distant goals. Conversely, when immediate costs loom large, the investment lens proves useful. That expensive conference or software license becomes an investment spread across future applications, making the per-use cost feel more reasonable.

The real leverage comes from flexibly switching between these perspectives based on what the moment requires. When motivation flags, we can find immediate enjoyment. When costs feel daunting, we can focus on long-term value.

After one year, I find myself more confident about this profession I never explicitly planned to enter. The variety of roles has proved more engaging than I anticipated, and the intellectual freedom compensates for the uncertainty. Academic life offers the rare opportunity to pursue questions simply because they interest you and gives you space to do work that might actually matter. In learning to wear all these different hats, I've discovered that the specific role matters less than your willingness to grow into whatever the job demands. Vonnegut was right about being careful what we pretend to be — but he might have also meant we should be bold enough to pretend to be something interesting.