A university is like three different families living in the same house...

1. Undergraduate Education family: students taking undergraduate courses, people who teach those courses (instructors), and employees who run the undergraduate student services.

2. Research and Graduate School family: professors who have Doctorate degrees (such as a PhD) doing research and publishing their results to create new knowledge, along with their assistants (research and teaching assistants, lab staff). For many professors, their most important job is to train their assistants, typically graduate students, to be the next generation of researchers and scholars.

3. Administration family: people who run universities and find money for them. Some are professors, including chairs and deans. Some are administrative staff. Most money comes from either the state government (for public, land-grant, or state universities) or private donors, plus financial awards (called grants) to do research paid for by government agencies or private companies.

Community colleges are in the Undergraduate Education family. Universities are in all three. A university is not mainly focused on undergraduates, the way a community college is. Universities are more focused on research and graduate education.

This means that universities have more opportunities, but they are more complicated. The main job of a community college professor is to teach and mentor students starting college. Most university professors are part of all three families, so they have three jobs at once: applying for grants to do research, doing it, and training new researchers, plus helping to run the university, plus teaching undergraduate courses. They often have less time for undergraduates.

Community colleges are limited by the degrees they can grant - Associate degrees and technical certifications. Community colleges can be a great place to start your education, but if you want a Bachelors, Masters, or Doctorate degree, you need to attend a university.

Academia is also a culture. It is no better or worse than any other culture.

As an undergraduate student, your exposure to this culture may be limited, but it impacts you. The amount of funding secured by the Administrative family may impact tuition rates. The Research family affects what professors teach in their courses, and how much time they have for you as a student.

If you do research as an undergraduate, you get to see how the Research family works, and get connected to jobs in research. Doing research will connect you to most of what a university does and cares about.

University is the name of the place; academia is the name of the culture. People who make their careers in research and scholarship in universities are called academics.

In a university, when you say you are interested in an advanced/graduate degree (Masters or Doctorate degree), you are telling academics you want to join their culture: join the Research family.

For academics, this is a very positive thing. Often, they can give you more time and attention. Some academics assume that everyone who wants an advanced degree, or to do research, wants to be a university professor.

You can be a professor, have a PhD, and do research in a university. You don't have to. There are many other places where people are paid to do research.

However, to have a career in research you usually need an advanced degree. That means spending some years in academic culture, and learning how it works. Some people go straight from an undergraduate degree to graduate or professional school. Many people take breaks (gap years) between degrees to get more experience. You can get a full-time job in research without an advanced degree, start your career, and then get more education. Do what works for you.

Everyone has other identities and cultures too (Samoan, dad, Catholic, queer, Muslim woman, Euro-American, soccer player...). It helps to see academics as people, not just professors.

Academics who see you as a scientist or researcher in training will want you to learn how to speak, write, and act in your role(s) in academia--not because that culture is better, but because you need to know its rules to work there. But cultural rules are rarely written down.

In any culture, people may live by rules they have a hard time naming or explaining. It is easier to learn cultural rules by practicing in places and with people who know them but don't expect you to already know.

That is one reason why it helps to apply to an academic training or mentoring program. Programs also help you build other skills you will need to get an advanced degree and do research.

When we belong to more than one culture (or have more than one identity), we have to deal with tension points: places where two cultures we belong to, or two identities we have, don't expect the same things from us.

But we also have more choices about how to speak and act. We gain the power to translate--to share knowledge from one of our cultures or identities with another.

The power to translate comes with the responsibility to set personal boundaries: when I can do it, and when I can't.

It's important to have friends and allies in universities, so you have people to talk with about what you need to do well in academic culture and how to do it. It's important to recognize where your other culture(s) or identities are important, and say what you need and value.

To do this, you need places where it's safe to talk about identity and culture. One way is to join social clubs and identity groups on campus. Another is to find a mentor who "looks like you" or shares your experience, so you can talk about situations around that experience: race, color, culture, gender, language, queerness, disability, class, etc.

You are unique. You don't have to be alone.

Where your cultures and identities have not been represented in academia, their knowledge and wisdom is less familiar, but more important: it is new knowledge.

Academic culture values new knowledge a lot. But it may not recognize new knowledge until someone puts it into a language it knows. It really helps to learn technical terms that academic fields use to name issues you know from experience.

Many fields study the same issues and populations. But each field has its own way to name, look at, and act on those issues. (This is sometimes called their lens: what you see depends on the lens you look through.)

In other words, what you want to study doesn't decide what your major or advanced degree should be; what's important is how you want to work on it. Finding a comfortable place for yourself in academic culture is all about finding your allies, and finding a field or area of study whose lens fits your own vision.