Reasons for an academic to need administrator rights on work computer

So far, I have only come across one reason for needing something close to administrator rights on a fixed department machine: using scientific software.

When you start using a new scientific piece of software, you often have its source code, and need to build it first. Typically, there is no documentation of what exact packages in your Linux distribution are needed (as this changes over time, and there are many Linux distributions as well). So the process is:

1. Try to build
2. Identify the cause of error (installing new software, updating the compiler, ...)
3. Fixing the cause of error (requires administrator rights
4. Repeat steps 1-3 many times until done.

You can only move towards the respective next issue when one has been resolved. It is unrealistic to assume that you can give an admin a list of required packages upfront,

Without admin rights and an admin reaction time of, say, ~6 hours, this process may easily take a week. With admin rights, the process will be much faster.

BTW: When you start using scientific software professionally, there may be more packages that you need to install (LaTeX, screen, ...), so the process continues.

If you tell the IT people that this is the (unavoidable) process with most scientific software, and you will need to work with ~10 such tools during your PhD, then you should have a good point. On a technical level, there may also be the possibility for "admin light" access, namely by whitelisting your username for "sudo"ing a package installation request. Perhaps that is an option as well in your case.

Actually, I don't think the most important thing to convey to the powers that be is that you have a valid reason to have admin rights. More important is to convince them that you will handle the admin rights in a responsible way.

The trick is to convey the latter while ostensibly writing about the former.

Think about it from their point of view. They are tired of distracted professors causing security risks and decided to draw a clear line in the sand.

In your one or two paragraph request, you need to come across very knowledgeable and with excellent judgment. Also indicate you would ask for help if in ANY doubt about anything.

It would be ideal if you could find an ally on the inside to support your request.

The following makes excessive assumptions about what your work entails, but...

1. Get computing time on an external HPC resource (in the UK that would be Archer or a field specific resource such as DiRAC), as you need compute resource beyond that which your university can provide.
2. Say to the university that, as HPC systems run on Linux and they update software on their own release cycles, it's necessary for you to have your own Linux-based system that you can update to match so you can effectively develop and maintain the code to run on the HPC system.

This argument is much more convincing if you've already got point 1, or a history of using HPC or similar computing resource, of course.