EXPOSED
Lecture slides, syllabi, problem sets, rubric-based grading of lab reports, and literature reviews for grant proposals are all things current models draft at usable quality, and enrollment pressure in a small field (6,690 jobs) makes course consolidation into shared or asynchronous sections a real threat. What holds is the embodied and accountable part: running field sampling trips and wet labs, mentoring graduate researchers, sitting on IRB/thesis committees, and signing off on data and publications under your own name. The modal worker here is a tenure-track or contingent faculty member whose survival depends more on institutional budgets and enrollment than on model capability.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Roughly half the job — building slide decks on biogeochemical cycles, writing exam banks, grading lab reports against a rubric, and summarizing recent literature for a seminar — is already draftable, but supervising a stream gauging exercise, calibrating a YSI sonde with twenty undergrads in waders, and reading a struggling thesis student's raw data for what they actually did wrong are not, which is what puts this at 11 rather than 6.
Some physical or field component. Field methods courses, watershed sampling trips, GC/ICP-MS and wet-chem lab supervision, and the safety judgment calls that go with cold water, ticks, and hazardous reagents are genuinely physical, but the majority of contact hours are still lecture, office hours, and committee rooms — an 11 reflects a real field component that does not dominate the teaching load.
No licence, no signature requirement. There is no licence to teach environmental science; a PhD is a hiring credential, not a statutory gate, and while tenure and accreditation reviews create institutional friction, no board can strip your right to practice, so the 4 comes from the accreditation/HR layer rather than any personal licensure.
The human relationship is the product. Graduate advising is the product here — students choose a lab for the advisor, recommendation letters carry your name and reputation with hiring committees, and co-authorship relationships run a decade — which puts this at 14; it is not higher because the large intro-level enrollment that funds the department is largely anonymous seat-time.
Meaningful discretion. You decide whether a thesis defends, whether a student's field data are clean enough to publish, whether a site is safe to sample, and how to handle authorship disputes and academic-integrity cases — high-stakes, ambiguous, and yours to own — with 13 rather than 16 because departmental curriculum committees, IRB, and deans formally share the heaviest of those calls.
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