They say some things are lifelong pursuits like martial arts, parenting, traveling, building towards retirement or building a dream house. The same can be said of a life dedicated to academia. With a masters or doctoral degree, a career in education can be rewarded with job security, solid pay and publications in respected journals. Teaching at the university level is a proven way to build a stable life and fulfill the noble need to touch the future.

They also say, “Those who can’t, teach.” But, for those who teach with tenure, it is a completely different story. According to one Vietnamese American Professor, the tenure track leaves little to complain about. Professor Viet Thanh Nguyen gives us the scoop on an academic’s life.

What and where are you teaching now?
I’m teaching in both the Department of English and the Program in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, where I’ve been for nine years.

What led you to your educational specialty?
I became passionate about Asian American literature because I felt that it told a body of stories that mattered by recording the experiences, hopes, passions and tragedies of people who were invisible and inaudible in mainstream American culture.

My specialty is Asian American literature but, like most professors, I teach outside of my specialty. In my case, I also teach American studies and American literature of all kinds, everything from the 18th century up to the present, and my students range from freshmen to Ph.D. candidates.

Have you taught at other institutions in the past?
I was a graduate student instructor at the University of California at Berkeley, and I tutored for the Upward Bound program at the National Hispanic University in Oakland.

What was your first job out of undergraduate school?
For better or worse, I’m a career academic; I went straight from undergraduate to graduate school, and from there to being a professor.

Have you always been interested in pursuing education as a career choice?
When I went to college, I majored in English because I loved to read literature, but I never thought I was going to be a teacher. I had no idea what it meant to be a teacher and I had vague plans to be a writer. But I never thought of doing English as a career because it seemed relevant only to myself and my own pleasure in the aesthetic, but irrelevant to the world.

Only after I added a second major in Ethnic Studies did I start making connections between literature and the world, between aesthetics and politics. Only then did I begin to think that literature matters because it was through literature that voiceless people could tell urgent, vital stories about histories, communities, and families that America would rather ignore. Without literature and other cultural work, these histories, communities and families—of the poor, the weak, the powerless—would vanish.

I was turned on to this idea that literature matters by my professors at Berkeley, pioneering intellectuals like the late Barbara Christian, who could lecture passionately for hours on the history and literature of African Americans, without a lectern, without notes. And by Elaine Kim, who wrote the first book on Asian American literature and showed that such a thing as Asian American literature existed, and had been written by authors decades before Amy Tan. My professors were my role models because they showed to me that teachers, educators, and scholars played a crucial role in transmitting knowledge, preserving memory and cultivating a tradition that students can build upon.

How many years of schooling did you endure?
I had a checkered undergraduate career, studying at UC Riverside, UCLA and UC Berkeley, which was, for me, the promise land. My life was transformed for the better because of the political and intellectual environment at Berkeley. I graduated from there with two bachelor’s degrees in English and Ethnic Studies. I didn’t want to go into the real world,

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