It's my birthday! I typically haven't enjoyed celebrating my birthday, but this year I'm trying more. Trying to celebrate myself more.
We're entering the "desperate exhaustion" part of the semester. While I do feel this way, I've also been trying to invest more consciously in my mental health and take the time I need to do things. Trying to give myself the time I need, invest in mechanisms to help me focus, and just get enough damn sleep.
I'm seriously pursuing some PhD opportunities right now. If I view a PhD as an opportunity to invest, full-time, in developing my conceptual models, my ability to ask pointed questions, and my network of people and ideas, it excites me a lot. PhDs can be stable (but low-paying) periods of life to develop your work and yourself.
At their worst, PhDs put people in precarious positions, working under the thumbs of their advisors or labs, caught up in the machinery of asking questions irrelevant to society while dealing with a lot of egos. I am trying to avoid this.
The typical mechanism for PhDs is to ask deep, specific questions, to chip away at some little corner of thought. I often think about Freeman Dyson's essay about how mathematicians fall into two types: birds (who bring a broad view and seek conceptual unity) and frogs (who look deeply and seek solid grounding). It is, of course, a false dichotomy but somewhat useful for discussion.
I definitely fall in the "birds" category; few things excite me more than finding a moment of synchrony between ideas, or connecting the application of various types of study. Unfortunately, broad and interdisciplinary work is not often how PhDs get funded—typical mechanisms have preferred the frog. In seeking funding, it's not enough that I'm interested in estuarine sedimentation processes and flood risk infrastructure and management: I need to ask a specific question, about a specific place, that can be addressed in a specific way. I feel that some of this narrowness is truly necessary to make meaningful results, and some of it is unrealistic expectations of how the work will actually play out.
Dyson was famously anti-PhD, his reasons being the power politics of it as well as the typical slow timeline—too many years on one problem, when it fits more typical attention spans to keep moving.
This is all to say: I'm thankful to be in a field where there are plentiful decent-paying jobs outside of PhDs: I really get to choose. If I can find a grad school setup with good people and opportunities to think broadly, I think I'll go for it.
In the clouds,
Lukas
We're entering the "desperate exhaustion" part of the semester. While I do feel this way, I've also been trying to invest more consciously in my mental health and take the time I need to do things. Trying to give myself the time I need, invest in mechanisms to help me focus, and just get enough damn sleep.
I'm seriously pursuing some PhD opportunities right now. If I view a PhD as an opportunity to invest, full-time, in developing my conceptual models, my ability to ask pointed questions, and my network of people and ideas, it excites me a lot. PhDs can be stable (but low-paying) periods of life to develop your work and yourself.
At their worst, PhDs put people in precarious positions, working under the thumbs of their advisors or labs, caught up in the machinery of asking questions irrelevant to society while dealing with a lot of egos. I am trying to avoid this.
The typical mechanism for PhDs is to ask deep, specific questions, to chip away at some little corner of thought. I often think about Freeman Dyson's essay about how mathematicians fall into two types: birds (who bring a broad view and seek conceptual unity) and frogs (who look deeply and seek solid grounding). It is, of course, a false dichotomy but somewhat useful for discussion.
I definitely fall in the "birds" category; few things excite me more than finding a moment of synchrony between ideas, or connecting the application of various types of study. Unfortunately, broad and interdisciplinary work is not often how PhDs get funded—typical mechanisms have preferred the frog. In seeking funding, it's not enough that I'm interested in estuarine sedimentation processes and flood risk infrastructure and management: I need to ask a specific question, about a specific place, that can be addressed in a specific way. I feel that some of this narrowness is truly necessary to make meaningful results, and some of it is unrealistic expectations of how the work will actually play out.
Dyson was famously anti-PhD, his reasons being the power politics of it as well as the typical slow timeline—too many years on one problem, when it fits more typical attention spans to keep moving.
This is all to say: I'm thankful to be in a field where there are plentiful decent-paying jobs outside of PhDs: I really get to choose. If I can find a grad school setup with good people and opportunities to think broadly, I think I'll go for it.
In the clouds,
Lukas