Professor University · April 2026

Introduction: You’re Not Too Early

It’s not too soon to think about becoming a professor and is something worth exploring early.

What Does a Professor Actually Do?

Explains the core responsibilities of professors—teaching, research, and publishing—so students understand what the career truly involves beyond the classroom.

Why Starting in High School Matters

Highlights the advantage of beginning early, emphasizing how curiosity, habits, and small actions now can shape long-term academic success.

Discovering Your Academic Interests

Encourages students to explore subjects they genuinely enjoy and begin identifying potential fields of study through reading, classes, and activities.

Building Strong Academic Habits

Focuses on developing skills like critical thinking, writing, discipline, and time management that are essential for future academic success.

Getting Involved: Clubs, Projects, and Early Research

Introduces ways students can take action now—joining clubs, entering competitions, or starting small research projects—to build experience early.

Finding Mentors and Guidance

Explains the importance of connecting with teachers and mentors, which is widely recognized as a key factor in student success and career development (courses.cit.cornell.edu).

Understanding the Long-Term Path (College → PhD → Professor)

Breaks down the academic journey step-by-step so students understand the timeline and expectations of becoming a professor.

What You Can Do Right Now

Provides practical, immediate steps high school students like you can take today to begin exploring an academic career path.

Final Encouragement: Stay Curious and Keep Exploring

Remember to reinforce your curiosity, consistency, and early exploration which are the foundation of a future academic career.

There is a moment that many professors remember clearly when asked about it — not the day they received their PhD, not the morning they walked into their first lecture hall as faculty, but something quieter and much earlier than either of those things. A conversation with a teacher who took them seriously. A book that made a problem feel alive. A question that arrived in the middle of an ordinary class and refused to leave.

For a significant number of the professors whose interviews live in our archive, that moment happened in high school.

This post is for the students who are having that moment right now.

This Is a Serious Goal — and High School Is the Right Time to Take It Seriously

Let’s be clear about something upfront: wanting to become a professor is not a naïve ambition. It is not the academic equivalent of wanting to be an astronaut — a dream you hold loosely because you know the odds are long. It is a specific, achievable professional goal, one that hundreds of thousands of people around the world have accomplished, and one that begins — for the students who fare best — considerably earlier than most people assume.

We have written before about what first-year college students should know before deciding to become a professor, and that post is honest about the timelines and challenges ahead. But here is something that post assumes rather than states: the students who arrive at their first year of college already thinking carefully about this path have a meaningful head start over those who encounter these questions for the first time at twenty.

You are not too young to think about this seriously. You are, in fact, at exactly the right age to begin.

What Professors Actually Do (And Why It Matters That You Understand This Now)

Before you can prepare for a career, you have to understand what that career actually involves — not the idealized version, not the stereotype, but the real thing.

A professor’s professional life has three main components:

Teaching. This is the part most students imagine: standing at the front of a room, explaining ideas, helping people understand something they did not understand before. It is real, and for many professors, it is the most immediately rewarding part of the work.

Research. This is the part that is harder to see from the outside. Professors are not just transmitters of existing knowledge — they are producers of new knowledge. They spend significant portions of their time reading, investigating, experimenting, writing, and contributing original ideas to their fields. A biologist is running experiments. A historian is reading archival documents that nobody has read in a century. A philosopher is working through an argument that has never been made in quite that form before.

Service. Professors also sit on committees, advise students, contribute to the governance of their institutions, and participate in the professional communities of their disciplines. It is the least glamorous part of the job, but it is real and it matters.

Understanding all three is important because the path to becoming a professor is largely about demonstrating, over many years of education and training, that you are capable of excelling in all three. The research component, in particular, surprises many students who discover late that a serious academic career requires far more than the ability to absorb and transmit what others have discovered — it requires the ability to push the boundaries of what anyone knows.

High school is not too early to start thinking about whether that challenge genuinely excites you.

The Question That Changes Everything

In every interview in the Professor University archive, we ask professors: What question in your field keeps you awake at night?

Not what subject they teach. Not what their research is called. The question — the specific, living, stubborn intellectual problem that does not let them go.

The professors who give the most compelling answers to this question are not always the ones who chose their fields for strategic reasons or followed obvious paths. Many of them discovered their question in a place they did not expect: a class that took an unexpected turn, a conversation with a teacher who pushed back on an easy assumption, a book read for no particular reason that turned out to be the right book at exactly the right time.

Your question — the one that will eventually shape your scholarly life — may already be forming. You may not have the vocabulary for it yet. You may not even recognize it as the seed of a research agenda. But there is probably something: a subject that holds your attention differently from the others, a problem that seems more important or more interesting or more unresolved than the way your textbooks treat it.

Pay attention to that thing. Write it down. Ask your teachers about it. Chase it into books that were not assigned and conversations that were not required.

That is where it starts.

What You Can Actually Do Right Now

Here is the part of the post that earns its keep: specific, actionable steps you can take in high school that will matter to the person you become ten years from now.

Take your academic work seriously — genuinely, not performatively

There is a version of high school success that is entirely strategic: figure out what the teacher wants, give them that, accumulate the GPA. There is nothing wrong with good grades. But the students who eventually become strong scholars develop something different alongside the grades: a habit of genuine intellectual engagement with the material.

This means going a little further than the assignment requires. It means reading something you were not told to read because the assigned reading opened a question you wanted to follow. It means writing papers you actually care about, not just papers you know will be well-received. It means being willing to raise your hand when you are confused rather than when you are sure.

These habits sound simple. They are harder to build than they look, and the students who build them early carry a significant advantage into college and beyond.

Find the subject that holds you — and go deeper into it

Our post on how to choose a PhD program makes a distinction that is worth introducing early: the difference between a subject and a question. A subject is a broad area — history, chemistry, literature, economics. A question is what drives you into that subject and keeps you there: a specific, unresolved problem that makes the subject feel alive rather than inert.

In high school, the goal is not to identify your question yet — that is almost certainly too much to ask at this stage. The goal is to identify the subject, or the cluster of subjects, that genuinely holds your attention. Not the one you are best at. Not the one your parents think is most practical. The one that makes you want to know more even when no one is asking you to.

Once you find that subject, go deeper into it than your school requires. Read popular books written for general audiences about the scholarly debates in that field. Watch lectures. Follow researchers on academic blogs or podcasts. Look up what professors at nearby universities actually work on. The landscape of a discipline — its ongoing debates, its open questions, its living arguments — becomes visible with very little effort if you are willing to look.

Seek out a teacher who takes you seriously

One of the most consistent findings across the Professor University archive — across every discipline, every career trajectory, every kind of institution — is the outsized role that individual mentors play in the formation of a scholar. Almost every professor we have interviewed names a specific person who saw something in them early and took the time to nurture it.

You are in high school. You have teachers. Some of them are genuinely expert in their subjects, genuinely curious about ideas, and genuinely interested in students who share that curiosity. Find one. Not strategically — not because you need a letter of recommendation — but because you have real questions and you have noticed that they seem to have real answers.

Go to office hours if your school has them. Ask follow-up questions after class. Tell a teacher honestly that you are thinking about pursuing their subject seriously and you want to understand it more deeply. Most teachers who went into teaching because they loved a subject will respond to that kind of genuine engagement with more time and attention than you might expect.

That relationship is the beginning of the mentorship chain that runs, as we wrote in our post on how to ask a professor to be your mentor, through your entire academic life. The earlier you start building it, the more natural the skill becomes.

Look for research experiences — even modest ones

Research experience in high school sounds more intimidating than it is. You do not need to be running experiments in a university laboratory or publishing papers in academic journals. What you need is some experience of the process: choosing a question, gathering information, making an argument, and presenting it to someone who will push back on it.

Some high schools offer independent study programs, science research courses, or opportunities to partner with local universities. Some regions have summer programs — Research Science Institute, Research Apprenticeship Programs, various university pre-college initiatives — that place high school students in genuine research environments. These are worth seeking out and applying to.

But even without formal programs, you can practice the intellectual habits of research in ordinary settings: by writing papers that go beyond the assignment, by presenting ideas to teachers or peers who will question them, by investigating a problem you care about and following the investigation wherever it leads. The habit of sustained, independent inquiry — which is fundamentally what research is — is something you can begin to build anywhere.

Read widely, including things that are difficult

One of the most common refrains in our archive, when professors answer the question about what they wish they had done differently, is some version of: I wish I had read more, and more broadly, when I was young.

The ability to read difficult, demanding texts — scholarly articles, serious nonfiction, primary sources, works of philosophy or science or history written for an educated adult audience rather than a student — is a skill that takes time to develop and pays compounding returns for the rest of your life. High school is an excellent time to start building it, because you have more time than you will ever have again, and because each difficult book you read makes the next one slightly less difficult.

This does not mean abandoning the books you love or forcing yourself through material that bores you. It means occasionally reaching for something slightly above where you are — the next level of challenge, the book your teacher mentioned as a serious treatment of the subject — and building the patience to sit with it until it opens up.

The Honest Picture (Because We Do Not Do Cheerleading)

If you have spent any time on this blog, you know that we do not specialize in easy encouragement. We write honestly about the financial realities of the academic path, about how competitive the job market is, about what the years before tenure actually cost, and about the professors who almost quit before finding their way through. That honesty is the whole point of this archive.

So here is the honest version for high school students: the path to becoming a professor is long. It requires a PhD, which takes five to seven years after your undergraduate degree. It often requires postdoctoral work after that. The job market is competitive in most fields, and the road involves uncertainty — sometimes years of it — that is genuinely difficult to prepare for in advance.

None of that makes the goal wrong. None of it makes the path not worth taking. It makes the path one that rewards exactly the qualities you can start building right now: intellectual seriousness, genuine curiosity, the habit of asking better questions, the resilience that comes from doing hard things because they matter rather than because they are easy.

The professors in our archive did not arrive at their careers by accident or by genius. They arrived by making good decisions, by finding the right people, by doing the work with enough consistency over enough years that the path eventually opened. That process starts earlier than most people think — and it starts with exactly the things we have described here.

Where to Go From Here

If you are a high school student who wants to become a professor, the single most useful thing you can do right now — today, this week — is listen to the Professor University archive.

Not because it will give you a checklist or a roadmap. But because it will let you hear, in their own words, from the professors you might one day become. You will hear when they first knew this was the path. You will hear what shaped them intellectually, what nearly broke them, what they wish they had done differently. You will hear the full recording — not the highlight reel that professional biographies produce, but the honest, human account of what a scholarly life is actually made of.

That kind of knowledge is rare. It circulates, as we have written before, through informal networks — through the students who happen to know the right people at the right time. Professor University exists to make it available to everyone who is serious enough to seek it out, regardless of where they are studying or how connected their professional network already is.

You are in high school. You are thinking about this seriously. That makes you exactly the kind of person this archive was built for.

Start listening here.

Professor University is a free archive of recorded conversations with working professors across every discipline. Every interview is structured around the same seven foundational questions — and every recording is freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection. If you are a working professor who would like to contribute your voice to the archive, write to us at mail@professor.university.

Path to Becoming a Professor: Timeline Roadmap

Total Timeline: ~16–21 Years

This is a general roadmap meant to provide a broad overview of the path to becoming a professor. The exact timeline, steps, and expectations can vary significantly depending on your chosen subject area, institution, country, and individual career goals.

Phase 1: Curiosity (High School: Freshman–Sophomore)

Duration: 2 years

Explore subjects that interest you
Read beyond class material
Build strong study habits
Join academic clubs and activities

Phase 2: Exploration (High School: Junior–Senior)