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mmcirvinIt seems as if lots of people whose LJs or blogs I read have been musing lately about their past choices, whether those choices were wise, and what could have been. For me, a trigger was reading Total Drek's Unhelpful Hints About Grad School. If you are in grad school, this is an excellent article to read, though you may find it unhelpful.
I heard advice roughly similar to this throughout my grad school career, and if I'd taken it to heart (I didn't), I'd probably have been a successful academic. As it was, in retrospect, I'm not sure that in my twenties I actually had the courage or emotional maturity to succeed in grad school, beyond eking out a sort of terminal Ph.D. and cutting my losses. I was one of those people who go to grad school because they know they're very good at going to school, and they want to do more of it. But grad school, especially in physics, is a sort of bait-and-switch: it starts out like school, but to do well you really need to treat it as an apprenticeship, as the Drek says; it's not school, it's the beginning of your job.
In spite of it all, I've never been able to work up a lot of regret over the whole thing. I got the extra schooling I wanted (became a "guy who knows about physics", as I said earlier), and I was fairly successful as a teaching assistant and eventually ended up with a successful career. I'd probably have had a more successful corporate career if I'd dropped out earlier, or not gone at all; but then we're getting into divergences of history that turn me into a different person, with different knowledge, who develops different interests. It's hard for me to wish I'd done that when the me that does that is really a different guy.
If I may get soppy, I think love has a lot to do with this. If I'd taken a more rational path through life, I wouldn't have met Sam and built our life together and had Jorie. I'd possibly have met someone else and had a perfectly happy life anyway--I don't believe in destined soulmates. But then that other me grows into a different person, not the Matt McIrvin who grew together with Samantha Wilkinson. I can't map myself hypothetically onto him with much fidelity. I'm sure he's an all-right guy but it's hard to formulate what it would mean to wish to be him. I suppose this is part of the way that becoming attached to people keeps you from thinking of yourself as a completely unconstrained decision-making entity.
Reading Drek's advice, though, does make me feel a little guilty that by being a less than wholly successful grad student, I might have been wasting other people's money and time--the investments they were making on the off chance that I would become a significant contributor to human knowledge. My education was largely subsidized for me; after getting a cheap undergrad education, I didn't have to pay for grad school at all, except through the sweat of teaching assistantships.
I can console myself partially by knowing that a lot of the time-wasting stuff I did on the Internet that probably kept me from being a successful academic--the writing of Usenet posts and FAQs--actually ended up being helpful and entertaining to a lot of people, and maybe getting greater public exposure than an academic publication career would have. That stuff probably would not have happened if I hadn't gone to grad school.
I heard advice roughly similar to this throughout my grad school career, and if I'd taken it to heart (I didn't), I'd probably have been a successful academic. As it was, in retrospect, I'm not sure that in my twenties I actually had the courage or emotional maturity to succeed in grad school, beyond eking out a sort of terminal Ph.D. and cutting my losses. I was one of those people who go to grad school because they know they're very good at going to school, and they want to do more of it. But grad school, especially in physics, is a sort of bait-and-switch: it starts out like school, but to do well you really need to treat it as an apprenticeship, as the Drek says; it's not school, it's the beginning of your job.
In spite of it all, I've never been able to work up a lot of regret over the whole thing. I got the extra schooling I wanted (became a "guy who knows about physics", as I said earlier), and I was fairly successful as a teaching assistant and eventually ended up with a successful career. I'd probably have had a more successful corporate career if I'd dropped out earlier, or not gone at all; but then we're getting into divergences of history that turn me into a different person, with different knowledge, who develops different interests. It's hard for me to wish I'd done that when the me that does that is really a different guy.
If I may get soppy, I think love has a lot to do with this. If I'd taken a more rational path through life, I wouldn't have met Sam and built our life together and had Jorie. I'd possibly have met someone else and had a perfectly happy life anyway--I don't believe in destined soulmates. But then that other me grows into a different person, not the Matt McIrvin who grew together with Samantha Wilkinson. I can't map myself hypothetically onto him with much fidelity. I'm sure he's an all-right guy but it's hard to formulate what it would mean to wish to be him. I suppose this is part of the way that becoming attached to people keeps you from thinking of yourself as a completely unconstrained decision-making entity.
Reading Drek's advice, though, does make me feel a little guilty that by being a less than wholly successful grad student, I might have been wasting other people's money and time--the investments they were making on the off chance that I would become a significant contributor to human knowledge. My education was largely subsidized for me; after getting a cheap undergrad education, I didn't have to pay for grad school at all, except through the sweat of teaching assistantships.
I can console myself partially by knowing that a lot of the time-wasting stuff I did on the Internet that probably kept me from being a successful academic--the writing of Usenet posts and FAQs--actually ended up being helpful and entertaining to a lot of people, and maybe getting greater public exposure than an academic publication career would have. That stuff probably would not have happened if I hadn't gone to grad school.
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no subject
Date: 2007-09-16 11:15 pm (UTC)At the same time, I'm very glad I did my M.A.; it's opened some very interesting doors.
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Date: 2007-09-17 12:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-17 12:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-17 01:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-17 05:25 am (UTC)