I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world.

So I'm here in my deep work HQ joined as always by my producer Jesse. Just a little bit of personal news I don't know if I mentioned this to you or not.

This would only make sense to people who understand the American academic system.

This is all nonsense to everyone else. But my promotion the full professor came through.

I didn't know you weren't a full professor. This is why we sweat over these things and no

one understands. What were you before?

Associate Professor.

Ah.

So the American system, okay, this is not that interesting.

The American system, when you get hired as a 10-year track professor, you start as an assistant professor and that's without

tenure. The next rank is associate professor. Typically though not always that goes

hand-in-hand with 10-year. So you get promoted to associate professor with tenure. So if you see an

American professor, a professor at American University, say they're an associate

professor. That means they've gotten tenure, which is sort of the hard hurdle.

Later in your career, you can go up for full professor, which is the of the hard hurdle. Later in your career you can go up for full professor which is the final rank you can get to.

So if you can think of it as going to associate professor is based in part on what you've done

but also like you're still your potential academically okay you know I've done good stuff and I'm on a trajectory to do

important stuff in my field full professor is almost almost all retrospective. You have to, you're

saying here's what I have done as an academic and that's being judged to see if it's sufficient

to move to the full rank. So they don't, it's confusing because in the American system you don't use the word full in the title you just use professor

So in America if someone is in an academic context called you know know, Professor Miller.

That means they're a full professor.

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