For those at RI schools, how time-consuming is it to have grad students? And how much service is required?
I will address this part of the question based on my experience. I'm at an R-1 school, I have 3 grants currently which means I teach one course each semester. I also have 4 doctoral students, a new one starting in the fall, and I work closely with 3-4 doctoral students (this is because our students must complete two research rotations one with their primary advisor and one with another faculty member). I support 6 of these students on my grants. I also have 3 MA or Ph.D. level research associates who work on my projects full time. I also have a small army of undergrad and master's level students who work on projects for one semester at a time (usually 4-6 of these every semester). There's a lot of time spent in meetings, running a journal group, and planning the next part of a study, working on preparing results for presentation or publication (in collaboration with doctoral students). All this I think of as one-on-one instruction/mentoring. This is the part of the job I love the most so it's fortunate that I can spend about 3 days/week on it. When I have to do other things it sometimes comes out of these three days (NIH grant review, conferences, working on writing new grants so that I can keep people employed/funded, travel). Sometimes tho' the administrative part of this seems too heavy.
Committee work isn't so heavy really but I run the doctoral program and admissions for the department, because of the NIH experience I serve on the University internal grants committee, and I am routinely asked to review grants for my professional association as well (so, I spend a lot of time reviewing grants). Other committees in my department are short-lived but get to be time-consuming. This is the first year in which we had a search that I didn't serve on a search committee (yeah!). We have faculty meetings once a month. For committees I chair, I try to run them as working meetings-- progress is sometimes slow but we make progress.
Oh yeah, teaching-- I do spend some time on this too. Luckily I have been teaching for more than 10 years now and so while I revise each year it's not so difficult and of course I teach in the area of my expertise.
I spend a full 40-hour week on campus and try not to work at home. But this weekend I'm on vacation and have been reading through a student paper on and off because we're trying to get it out for publication.
