in some corner of my mind I still think of my decision to quit upon getting the Ph.D. as washing out rather than selling out.
Hard words. I regard my departure from philosophy in a similar light. Even though I realize that picking a city, meeting a woman, making an above-subsistence salary - in short, having a life - was worth more to me than pursuing an academic career, I still sometimes feel in the small hours of the night that I failed.
But you'd have to be an idiot to want to be a philosophy professor. An extremely intelligent, driven, committed idiot.
And then I fell into my current career, which is kind of like having my cake and eating it too - an opportunity I would never have stumbled upon if I was a junior associate lecturer with a 2% chance of tenure in North Dakota or wherever.
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Date: 2006-03-03 09:49 pm (UTC)Hard words. I regard my departure from philosophy in a similar light. Even though I realize that picking a city, meeting a woman, making an above-subsistence salary - in short, having a life - was worth more to me than pursuing an academic career, I still sometimes feel in the small hours of the night that I failed.
But you'd have to be an idiot to want to be a philosophy professor. An extremely intelligent, driven, committed idiot.
And then I fell into my current career, which is kind of like having my cake and eating it too - an opportunity I would never have stumbled upon if I was a junior associate lecturer with a 2% chance of tenure in North Dakota or wherever.