When I got out, I'd basically reconciled myself to a number of facts:
1. I had, all along, been harboring fairly specific ideas of a backup career. 2. My advisor (and everyone else I knew) liked to tell people that if you were harboring ideas of a backup career, it was an excellent time to go do that and get the hell out of physics. 3. There was a tech boom going on, associated with the Internet bubble, and it seemed terribly odd to be mucking around in this straitened environment while it was supposedly raining gravy. 4. The successful young physicists were terrifyingly driven, much more than I was. They loved doing physics so much that they simply could not imagine anything other than doing physics, and would give up every comfort and fight to their last breath to do physics. That wasn't me. 5. Toward the end of graduate school, I'd unexpectedly met the right woman and fallen in love. She lived in the Boston area, had a job there, and said she was willing to follow me if I went somewhere else, but was I going to tell her to make that sacrifice? (Especially considering that at the time, she had much more income than I did, or was likely to have if I got a postdoc.) 6. Fundamentally, I liked it here and would hate moving to some random place just to follow the work.
With all those things in mind, it was still kind of hard to swallow my pride and get out.
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Date: 2006-03-04 06:07 am (UTC)1. I had, all along, been harboring fairly specific ideas of a backup career.
2. My advisor (and everyone else I knew) liked to tell people that if you were harboring ideas of a backup career, it was an excellent time to go do that and get the hell out of physics.
3. There was a tech boom going on, associated with the Internet bubble, and it seemed terribly odd to be mucking around in this straitened environment while it was supposedly raining gravy.
4. The successful young physicists were terrifyingly driven, much more than I was. They loved doing physics so much that they simply could not imagine anything other than doing physics, and would give up every comfort and fight to their last breath to do physics. That wasn't me.
5. Toward the end of graduate school, I'd unexpectedly met the right woman and fallen in love. She lived in the Boston area, had a job there, and said she was willing to follow me if I went somewhere else, but was I going to tell her to make that sacrifice? (Especially considering that at the time, she had much more income than I did, or was likely to have if I got a postdoc.)
6. Fundamentally, I liked it here and would hate moving to some random place just to follow the work.
With all those things in mind, it was still kind of hard to swallow my pride and get out.