I am older.
Archive for October, 2010
Went to three interviews including one full-round of interviews (for which I had to prepare and give a 1 hour long technical presentation) before someone told me that nobody without a PhD has ever been hired into a technical position before at this company. FML
Graduate schools would do better to skip the psychoanalysis and just stick to evaluating credentials.
The problem is there’s simply no way to predict whether one student more than another will be a “psychological fit” for academia. The proof is that graduate students are not, on a whole, happy. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think they’re any less happy than the average person who has bills to pay, who works for a living, who is getting older, who has to strain to get noticed, whose success is no longer well defined or so… inevitable, as it once seemed. They’re no less happy but, for all their prestige, they are no happier. So it would seem that this current rubric for finding, among those who are qualified, the select few who are “right” for graduate school (that is, defined as focused, idealistic, persistent, unwavering…) does no better than random in accomplishing its goal.
Yet every year, students are starting to define their “research track” earlier and earlier, and graduate schools reward them for their “focus”. I don’t really know at what point, between making an arbitrary college choice, an arbitrary major choice within this college, navigating a core curriculum which is meant to establish a broad and general knowledge base, starting a thesis with the first or second lab you ever worked in, you’re supposed to have found your life’s calling definitively in some subfield of some subfield of some field of science. I didn’t find it by the end of junior year (which is when the decision must be made), so I took some extra time to find out, to think carefully about whether this is for me.
I don’t get how that might make me a weaker candidate.
