because all the little jobs I’d had in school were mind-numbing, and I didn’t need a real job to tell me that I would hate the 9-to-5 life. So I went straight into graduate school, staying at Berkeley for my Ph.D. in English. I finished in five years because my parents kept asking me when I was going to get a job and reminding me that my brother did his M.D. in four years.

What is your advice for students who may be interested in pursuing teaching as a career?
Teaching is incredibly rewarding, regardless if you’re teaching kindergarteners or graduate students. My advice for those who think they want to teach but never have done so is to try it out first, through tutoring and outreach programs. Not everyone should be a teacher, so it’s important to find out whether you have the aptitude and personality for it.

What are the pros of being a professor and working for a college/university?
For the most part, I love being a professor. Unlike just about anybody else you know, you get your summers off, and all the vacations the students have. Your friends will be jealous. You have opportunities to travel the nation and the world, attending conferences and meeting interesting people in the intellectual fields, or spending your sabbaticals living for extended periods of time in wonderful locations. You live a relatively sheltered life where all you do is work with ideas and with smart, idealistic people.

Teaching is one of those occupations where you will see the immediate consequences of your work in the classroom or as a mentor. It’s also one of those occupations where you can see these consequences years later, as students who keep in touch will tell you what has happened to them, and you can see the shy high school student you once tutored, who came from a family where no one had gone to college, become an intellectual property lawyer. Most of the pros in academic life come from the fact that being in academia is a vocation, a calling, and a passion.

What are the chief complaints about your job?
The major drawback to the academic life is that there’s no guarantee you’ll get a job after your Ph.D., and there’s certainly no guarantee that even if you got a job, it would be in a place you would want to live. Among the stressful aspects of being an academic are getting into the school of your choice, writing a dissertation, finding a tenure-track job and getting tenure.

Although you’ll never make as much money as your friends who became lawyers or doctors or engineers, you’ll make more money than high school teachers or police officers or truck drivers. You’ll be distinctly middle-class. The university is your boss, and academic petty politics can be a misery, and grading is a chore, but for the most part, you are left alone to do the research you want and the teaching that you want.

What are some of the highlights from your own career?
I was tenured, which is the academic equivalent of getting permanent job security, and I had a book published through Oxford University Press in 2002. After tenure, I was able to take a two-year sabbatical and lived for seven months in Paris and another seven months in Viet Nam, which were magical experiences. I spent an additional seven months on fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, where I struggled with a short story collection, the first piece of which is forthcoming soon in Best New American Voices 2007.

What makes a student stand out today?
As a professor, you’re always encountering new generations of students who are full of hope and promise, even as you yourself get older and older. This difference between myself and students leads me to think that students as a rule are always impressive, because as a group they’re young, energetic, and looking forward to their entire lives. Even among all of these exciting students, there’s always an elite that stands out because of their dedication to something outside of the immediate demands of your classroom.

They could be leaders and organizers of student groups, or they could be outstanding intellectuals in terms of their major, or they could be emerging artists with lots of talent, or they could be student-athletes. The common denominator is their high degree of passion and commitment to what they believe in.

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Buon Me Thuot, came to the United States in 1975, and grew up in San Jose, California. He was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, and is an associate professor of English and American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America, and has fiction forthcoming in Best New American Voices 2007.

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