Is aiming for a job in academia a bad idea?

>>18090677
asking 4chan is a bad sign

I'd say so. Very few people end up teaching, and apparently there are a LOT of office politics. Plus a lot of people scrutinise your behaviour, which affects your integrity and trustworthiness

>>18090683
my grades are good

>>18090709
Are you in college or hs?

>>18090841
college

>>18090677
If you are very smart, very motivated, and very interested in research on a particular subject then yes, academia can be a good choice. That's probably the easiest path to get access to the tools you need, support with funding, and other smart people who are interested in what you're interested in.

For researchers, having to teach is often a pain in the ass that you have to accept as part of the deal.

If you're going into this because you just want to teach and you have no interest in research or publishing academic papers, your career opportunities at a university are going to be limited.

>>18090700
Yes, there can be some nasty office politics in academia. Part of it is big egos, but part of it depends on what sort of area of interest you go into. In some fields, "research" is just peddling opinions, and having those opinions be taken seriously is a matter of appearance and reputation. This makes ruthlessly stomping on potential competitors a valid or necessary strategy to obtaining and maintaining success. It's not just stomping on people who are proposing competing ideas, it's also preemptively stomping on people who MIGHT propose competing ideas. It's an obvious logical fallacy in deciding the merit of an idea, but academics are people. People are not logical, especially not ones involved in sciences with dubious merit to begin with.

Avoiding soft sciences (or non-sciences) vastly improves your chances to avoid getting caught up in that sort of bullshit.

If you're a real researcher and you're doing interesting stuff that is bringing in grant money, people mostly won't fuck with you because the academic organization is going to get seriously pissed at whoever is making you unhappy if you decide to take your grant money and good ideas somewhere else.